Live From New York - James H. Miller [280]
LORNE MICHAELS:
I feel old almost every day. I used to remember everything; now I don’t. It’s also getting harder in the morning to remember my grudges. I have a much harder time holding on to anger other than in the moment. I just lose interest in it. I don’t chew over negative things anymore to such a large extent. I’m not great with anger.
It’s an interesting period for me generationally. I feel like the Pacino character dealing with the young quarterback in Any Given Sunday.
There are an enormous number of things that went wrong in my life, a lot of things that were unfair. I’m always going to put a better face on it. That’s just the way I was brought up and who I am. People want to believe that I’m someone who at this moment is drinking champagne from a slipper somewhere and on my way into a hot tub with seventy-two virgins or whatever. Fine. I’d much rather my life be perceived as glamorous or stylish than as one of an enormous amount of work that is unceasing. It’s a choice: Either you try to make it look easy or you emphasize how hard it is.
My dad never complained — and I admired that.
Nearly three decades of, literally, blood, toil, tears, and sweat have made Saturday Night Live a television program whose audience, even though ever-changing, remains peculiarly protective and possessive of it. Its crises and triumphs are chronicled in newspapers and magazines as if the show itself were a celebrity, a public personality, a star. Virtually everyone who has passed through the show and is still alive to talk about it has an opinion about how it’s doing and what should be done to it, and those in the audience have their opinions too. In the nineties it became a hoary cliché to complain about the show never having been worse and no longer being funny — and then saying, contradictorily enough, that you just never watched it anymore.
At a memorial service for the great film critic Pauline Kael in 2001, her daughter recalled Kael’s enthusiasm for Saturday Night Live. She would invite friends over to watch it, and if they complained about the quality of the show, Kael would say to them dismissively, “Oh well, they’re just having a bad night.” Everybody has a bad night now and then. It’s having had so many good ones that’s important, and astonishing.
People will continue to argue, bicker, debate, and fulminate over whether the show is fully faithful to its mission and its history and its heritage — one of the few entertainment shows in the more than fifty-year span of commercial network television to be considered worthy of such worries. Saturday Night Live lives — a part of us, a reflection of us, a microcosm of us. National roundtable, national sounding board, national jester, and inarguably after all these years, national treasure.
Even now, Saturday Night Live performers of the future may be limbering up — at a junior high school in the Midwest or an inner city kindergarten or a college humor magazine — watching the show each week, trashing it with their friends the next morning, irked and lonely on the occasional Saturday night when it fails to show up. This is a country that demands perpetual amusement and relishes spoofs of itself. When Saturday Night Live is at its best, it not only amuses us, it reflects well on us. One nation, under God, with liberty and laughter for all. Live. From New York.
7
Lorne
TOM DAVIS, Writer:
I think Lorne’s happy as a pig in shit. He’s doing exactly what he wants to do, and he makes tremendous amounts of money doing it. Lorne has a circle of friends