Live From New York - James H. Miller [297]
ROSIE SHUSTER:
I’m Canadian, and apologies are like mother’s milk to us. They just roll off the tongue. “I’m sorry I caught my hand in your car trunk,” that kind of thing. I don’t think Lorne ever apologized to people for keeping them waiting for a long, long time. Instead, he would drop some names, which was a big soother, and you’d have a tidbit to run back and tell your friends afterwards.
You can’t explain Lorne by Canada, that’s for sure. There’s an adopted British thing happening there. But there are some other elements that got internalized along the way and inside his psyche beside that.
ANDY BRECKMAN:
Some executives at Paramount have asked me — because they have that big deal with Lorne where the overhead is quite high — if I know why cast members, once they graduate from SNL, don’t want to work with Lorne. I’m sure Paramount’s idea when they signed Lorne was that he would be able to deliver the Adam Sandlers of the world and be able to feed them that talent, and he hasn’t delivered it. I really don’t know the answer.
MIKE MYERS, Cast Member:
As far as not having Lorne produce the Austin Powers films, Austin Powers came out of tremendous grief at the loss of my father; it was an homage to my father and all the fun sort of British culture that my father forced all of us, me and my brothers, to watch. I wrote it, I didn’t think anybody would make it, I didn’t think necessarily it was something Lorne would want to do. There was never a conscious effort not to work with Lorne. I just met different producers out in L.A. because we were living there, and Lorne was in New York. It just happens to be that some people who showed interest in it in its very nascent form are the people I produced it with. It was never a conscious effort to break away from Lorne. I have seen Lorne socially thousands of times. I consider him one of my friends, and certainly one of my teachers. I just met somebody different in L.A. And I actually didn’t think necessarily that Austin was Lorne’s cup of tea.
I am happy to go on record that the character of Dr. Evil in the Austin Powers films has really very little to do with Lorne Michaels. It has more to do with a composite of all the bad guys in the James Bond films and the Matt Helm films and In Like Flint films. I happen to have a Canadian accent, as does Lorne. It’s some vocal quirk which we actually share, being, you know, two guys from Toronto. But for the most part, it really isn’t Lorne. It wasn’t enough Lorne when I made the first one that I felt it necessary to say anything to him about it in advance. Having said that, Dr. Evil is my favorite character that I’ve ever done. The only similarity to Lorne is vocally. It’s not anything to do with Lorne’s character. If anything, he should be honored by it. I would be happy to state very clearly that I do not feel Lorne Michaels is evil. That’s a for-the-record type statement.
I have nothing but the utmost respect for Lorne Michaels. He’s a Canadian hero to me, to be honest with you. I am in awe of him. I did a project on him in grade eight — or the eighth grade, and I would have said “proe-ject.” I was shaking when I met him, and shaking with pride that he’s a Canadian. I was never disappointed with how incredibly smart he is. There isn’t a day that I don’t quote Lorne about some aspect of trying to make sense of show business. It’s a situation for which there is no glossary of terms, but Lorne has created a glossary of terms, and I’ve used it frequently. He’s one of the few bosses I’ve ever worked for who is funnier than I am.
TERRY TURNER, Writer:
We didn’t have a whole lot of contact with Lorne early on. He would sort of go through the halls on, I guess it was Tuesday night, and wander through and say, “What are you writing, what are you doing?” He was a hard man to reach sometimes. But the signals would be out there. You just had to interpret like he was speaking a foreign language.