Lorne Michaels Addresses “Aloof” Leadership Style and ‘SNL’ Drug Culture in Never-Before-Heard ’60 Minutes’ Interview
As Saturday Night Live readies its 50th season, which launches Sept. 28, 60 Minutes is releasing never-heard-before audio from a 20-year-old interview with its famously private maestro Lorne Michaels and his talent from the period.
Running as part of the news magazine’s newly launched podcast series, 60 Minutes: A Second Look, the episode weaves together interviews that Lesley Stahl conducted in 2004, when the show was granted full access to a week at SNL — one that happened to coincide with the Ashlee Simpson lip-syncing fiasco — but only aired some three minutes of the interviews. Left on the cutting room floor was material from Michaels, who recently spoke to THR at length for a cover story, as well as former SNL writer Conan O’Brien and then cast members likes Seth Meyers, Amy Poehler, Tina Fey and Darrell Hammond.
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The episode, which is titled “From Saturday Night Live to Sunday with 60 Minutes,” centers largely on the lore around Michaels and his management approach. At one point, Stahl can be heard asking him if he was, as she’d heard, “aloof” and “sometimes tyrannical.” Michaels confirms the former (“definitely”), but denies the latter, noting: “Tyrannical I can’t respond to because I’d have to have a big outburst and be tyrannical to either prove or disprove it.” When asked if he was prone to such outbursts, he says, simply, no.
Stahl then presses his cast at the time to open up about Michaels and his leadership style. When they seem unwilling or at least uninterested in doing so, she asks: “Are you guys afraid to talk about Lorne on 60 Minutes?” At that, Hammond took the bait. “He never talks to me. I’ve never really talked to him, hardly at all. I mean, he hands down notes to me,” Hammond can be heard saying. “I’ve always felt it was a good boss-employee relationship. What he does for me is when I get ready to do a cold open, he shakes my hand and that’s some kind of strange communication between us – as if he’s saying, ‘You know that I’m really expecting you to do this.’ And I sort of say, ‘I will. I’m gonna do, I’m gonna do it.’” Stahl wonders aloud what happens when Hammond ultimately nails it, to which Hammond replies: Wink.
60 Minutes‘ Denise Cetta, who produced the 2004 segment and is interviewed 20 years later for the podcast, recalls Stahl’s time with Michaels growing “awkward” as she began probing him about SNL’s original cast and the drug culture at the show. But after shutting down the notion that drugs were somehow a part of the show, as opposed to simply a fixture at the after party, Michaels had this to say: “There was a period which ended abruptly for me when [original cast member] John Belushi died [of an overdose], but there was something, a value system that was much more fraternal, in the sense of whatever gets you through the night or who might have judged what somebody else does as long as people show up on time, can do their job, whatever. Clearly a bogus value system and it didn’t work. And I think people felt that people’s privacy and what they did was their own thing.”
Michaels was then asked slightly more directly whether he’d ignored the drug use with a “live and let live” attitude, a moment during which Cetta says “pressure filled the room.” But Michaels rejected that out of hand, suggesting instead that his attitude was “incredibly paternal.” To this day, he prides himself and the show on never having anyone die during their time on the show. In both Belushi’s and, later, Chris Farley’s case, their overdoses were years after leaving the show. As the episode mentions, Michaels did send Farley to rehab during his SNL run, just as later cast members like Pete Davidson did stints during their runs.
Stahl, like director Jason Reitman, who has devoted an entire movie to the subject, seemed particularly interested in the original cast. While cameras were still being set up, the two can be heard talking about that initial group, which also included Chevy Chase, Gilda Radner and Dan Aykroyd. “Everybody that I chose had gone through some screw up in adolescence, in that original group. Either death of a parent, divorce, something, some upheaval … and got stuck in adolescence,” he says. She then asks if Michaels himself was still stuck in adolescence as he’d lost his father at 14, to which he responds: “I’m considerably less since being a father, but I think there was a long period of time in which I thought it was all right to challenge authority.”
Towards the end of the 40-minute episode, the show turns its attention to the future, wondering what a Michaels-less SNL might look like and how soon it might happen. While Michael Che told THR in that same cover story that he can’t imagine that job would or could ever again be done by just one person, 79-year-old Michaels also weighed in on his future. “So as long as it’s important and I can be useful, I’ll stay,” he told THR, adding: “It’s more about keeping it on course than anything else, and, obviously, I really love it. And every year there are more and more people that I rely on for other things, but, in the end, you really need someone to say, ‘This is what we’re doing.’ So, I don’t really have an answer; I just know that this is kind of what I do and as long as I can keep doing it, I’ll keep doing it.”
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