‘Lorne’ shares almost nothing new, but it’s a joy to watch, anyway
Morgan Neville gives us yet another SNL-focused documentary, this time focused on the man in charge.
The 50th anniversary of Saturday Night Live last year occasioned a seemingly endless series of documentaries, including very good ones, focusing on the show’s music, veteran writer Jim Downey, the “More Cowbell” sketch, and the “weird year” of 1985. I’m already at the point where I feel I know the entire backstage layout of Studio 8-H, even though I’ve never been there.
Now, while not officially connected to the 50th anniversary of the series, we have one more doc, this time focused on the show’s creator, Lorne Michaels, and, unlike all the others, it got an actual theatrical release. Although, since it’s a Focus Features release, it’s going to end up on Peacock with all the others. Also, it was filmed entirely during the 49th season, before the start of any of the SNL 50 festivities.
Directed by the Oscar-winning Morgan Neville, who just had the Paul McCartney 1970s doc Man on the Run come out last month, Lorne admits right off the bat that Michaels isn’t much interested in being profiled for a documentary. And indeed, the film is very short on details about Lorne Michaels’ background and life that haven’t already been explored by previous documentaries or biographies. (Lorne was also the title of a biography, published in 2025, subtitled “The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live”; its author, Susan Morrison, appears as a talking head, too.)
The film goes through all the stuff you probably already knew about Michaels growing up in Canada and having limited early-career success, before he created SNL in 1975. (That factoid about him being born on a Kibbutz in Mandatory Palestine is NOT true, even though it was in his Wikipedia profile for a long time.)
We hear about how he quit the show in 1980, came back five years later, and has never left since. There’s also plenty about how he’s an exacting boss, that people who’ve worked with him for years still crave his approval, and that female SNLers (led by Tina Fey) don’t feel they’ve been allowed to get as close to Michaels as their male counterparts have.
What the film does have is access to an unlimited roster of A-listers, telling their favorite SNL and Lorne stories. There’s Fey, Conan O’Brien, Maya Rudolph, and various people glimpsed over the course of the weeks the crew spent shadowing SNL during a season. Robert Smigel, meanwhile, contributes some TV Funhouse-style cartoons.
John Mulaney, meanwhile, tells a dynamite story about Charles Manson and why Michaels always accepts unsolicited scripts from strangers. We see Mulaney sitting at a table with Fred Armisen, Bill Hader, and Andy Samberg, and it was a clear Gene Siskel’s Test moment: I was thinking a movie with 100 minutes of those guys sitting at a table telling SNL stories might be more enjoyable than the movie I just watched.
Lorne is in theaters now.