Focus Features held a star-studded screening of Morgan Neville‘s new documentary Lorne on Tuesday night at the Steven Spielberg Theater on the Universal lot, an event that drew the documentary’s subject, Saturday Night Live boss Lorne Michaels, and the theater’s namesake Spielberg. They were joined by Owen Wilson, Seth Rogen, Steven Weber and SNL alums John Mulaney, who introduced the screening; Chris Parnell, who narrated the doc; Laraine Newman; John Hamm; Vanessa Bayer; Kyle Mooney; and Kevin Nealon among others.
Following the screening, Lorne sat down with Donna Langley, Chairman of NBCUniversal, the parent company of Focus and NBC, which Michaels has called home for the past 51 (with a short break) years.
“I think SNL brings culture, it brings politics, it brings a way to make sense in the world,” Langley said during the conversation.
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Michaels addressed SNL‘s strong political bent as the sketch comedy traditionally kicks off its episodes with a pointed cold open commenting on current events.
“I like being around funny people – there’s not that many of them. When you recognize them, and when you see them come into their own and they realize that there’s this group of people who understand them and get them and who will make them better, it’s an exciting place to be,” he said. “And also to be able to comment on what’s going on from that perspective, particularly in a time which is almost always serious. At this point, because we’ve been on for 51 years, I think we’re almost a branch of government. We’re allowed to say things, somehow we earned it, and whoever the President is so far has allowed it to go on. No one’s thinking, we can’t do it or we shouldn’t do it.”
Michaels addressed the reaction to the most recent Weekend Update, in which anchors Colin Jost skewered President Donald Trump’s claim that Iran doesn’t “seem to realize they have no cards” with the punchline, “They’re literally holding a strait,” and First Lady Melania Trump’s surprise press statement denying any connection to Jeffrey Epstein, including that he had introduced the Slovenian-born former model to her husband “because they actually met when Trump cracked open her shipping container.”
“I think in the face of totalitarian government, I don’t think comedy really does much good; I think the totalitarians win every single time. But there is something as a safety valve in a culture which comedy is a really important part, and being able to even think those thoughts,” Michaels said. “Last week on Update, Jost and Che really went after things but it was what was bubbling up in the air, with the war, with all of that, and people go, ‘No!’ They know what they do.”
Michaels also spoke about the recent launch of Saturday Night Live UK.
“The mandate there is, it had to be British,” he said. “My design for it was that it would be the cooler of the two shows, and it would be the thing they beat us up with that. It’s smarter, funnier, more original. And it had to be that. It had to be its own thing. It couldn’t be an imitation of what we do.”
He pointed to SNL UK’s Prince Andrew cold open, noting that he would’ve done it differently.
“The way I would have done it is an austere room with the right sort of looking people in an MI5 meeting. And then I would have had an entrance for Andrew, and then I would have explained the plan, which would be logical to me,” Michael said.
The UK team “found a way that it’s working for them, and the audience is taken to it … There is no better way, there’s only what works.”
Michaels also revealed that the recent SNL U.S. pairing of host Jack Black and Jack White “took about two years to put together because I just thought, What a great ticket. They’re complimentary, and it was the joy that they were having with each other, musician to musician, and also comedian to comedian.”
The SNL honcho also pulled the curtain on last week’s viral U.S. sketch of host Colman Domingo, joined by cast members Mikey Day, Marcello Hernandez and Sarah Sherman, recreating NASA’s recent Artemis II space mission to the moon.
“It was funny this week with Colman, because he’s a very trained actor and brilliant in almost everything he does,” Michaels said. “We’re doing that astronaut sketch, and he said, ‘Tell me what to do.’ And I said, ‘Well, you do your part, you’re playing straight out, you have to be convincing. You’re describing historic things, and behind you there are three or four chimpanzees. They’re going to be doing stuff and floating through, and you can’t be aware of it. You have to just plow through. And the comedy is going to come from them, but it comes from them in reaction to you, right? And so you’re a part of it, but you don’t get to be what they’re getting there. And so he went, ‘I gotta do that.’”