Over the fifty years that Lorne Michaels has been at the helm of Saturday Night Live, he has become a revered and inimitable presence in the entertainment world. He’s a tastemaker, a mogul, a withholding father figure, a genius spotter of talent, a shrewd businessman, a name-dropper, a raconteur, the inspiration for Dr. Evil, the winner of more than a hundred Emmys—and, essentially, a mystery. Lorne will introduce you to him, in full, for the first time. With unprecedented access to Michaels and the entire SNL apparatus, Susan Morrison takes readers behind the curtain for the lively, up-and-down, definitive story of how Michaels created and maintained the institution that changed comedy forever.
Weirdly barren of laughs. Across 600 extremely interesting pages, I LOLed exactly once ... Fascinating ... But somehow no one is quite as fascinating as Michaels himself.
An encyclopedic doorstop ... A compendium richer than even Mr. Michaels’s most fervent admirers could ask for. That can be a problem for readers insufficiently smitten by the Michaels mystique or the SNL brand of topical humor.
Morrison...has built Michaels the kind of biographical monument usually consecrated to founding fathers, canonical authors and world-historical scientific geniuses. A fair question might be whether the progenitor and supervisor of a long-running sketch-comedy show...merits such treatment ... That the answer turns out to be yes is largely a tribute to Morrison’s journalistic chops. Briskly written and solidly sourced, Lorne is in essence a nearly 650-page magazine profile — something I mean almost entirely as praise.
