It probably isn’t a good sign for a documentary to open up with the subject’s best friend of half a century advising the filmmaker, “I would advise you not try to capture Lorne” and another interviewee, who has worked with him for two decades, describe him as “undocumentable.”
They’re not wrong. Lorne, a look at the creator and long-time showrunner of Saturday Night Live, remains as elusive a figure at the end of the film’s one hundred minute run time as he is at the beginning. It would seem that having produced hundreds of ours of live television and having sat for uncounted promotional press interviews has given him the preternatural ability to known when a camera is around and to slip into the persona he has been projecting for decades now.
But for Saturday Night Live fans, the real treasure in the documentary is the footage shot across the various production weeks the filmmakers had access to. It offers some glimpses at parts of the show’s weekly production cycle that have usually only been discussed but not seen before such as Michaels’ traditional Tuesday night dinner out with that week’s guest host or the closed door meeting in his office when the final shape of the show is determined in that slim amount of time between the end of the dress rehearsal and the actual live broadcast.
One great moment captured is during the season fifty episode in which Ryan Gosling hosted. Michaels is known for really not liking when cast members break into giggles or laughter during a sketch, and the documentary does give us his in-the-moment reaction to that infamous moment during the Gosling episode with cast member Heidi Gardner’s uncontrolled reaction to Gosling and cast member Mikey Day as Beavis and Butthead.
Director Morgan Neville sure gives digging into Michaels as a person a good try though. The film does go through the prerequisite biographical documentary beats, showing us his upbringing in Canada and his move from working in television there in the late 1960s, to his move to shows in Los Angeles and then eventually New York.
With unprecedented access to shoot backstage during eleven show weeks over the course of two years, Neville has compiled a film that may not fully plumb the depths of Michaels’s character, but does illuminate how his stewardship of SNL for nearly all of its fifty-year run has impacted the careers of many who have cycled through its cast.
Neville has assembled a veritable who’s who of talent from both in front of and behind the camera from the show’s history. Dana Carvey, Kenan Thompson, Martin Short, Bill Hader, Jimmy Fallon, Seth Myers, Colin Jost, Michael Che, writers Paula Pell, Conan O’Brien and John Mulaney, production designer Lee Yoshimura and producers Steve Higgins and Caroline Maroney all opine on their time working with Michaels and how hard it was for any of them to really get to know the man.
But given that Neville also oversaw the four episode docuseries SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night that debuted on Peacock last year during the show’s fiftieth anniversary and served as director of other showbiz docs such as 20 Feet From Stardom (2013) and Won’t You Be My Neighbor? (2018), the result here is a little disappointing.
