4 Takeaways From ‘Lorne,’ the Movie About Lorne Michaels and ‘S.N.L.’ | UNW

The schedule is all Michaels.

With its all-nighter writing sessions, “S.N.L.” is a pressure-cooker countdown to its 11:30 p.m. airtime; afterward the cast heads to an exclusive party that lasts until the wee hours. Michaels maintains a night owl’s rhythms: He rises around noon and goes to bed about 4 a.m. Anyone who needs his attention must be on his clock. “Suddenly you’re shooting an interview at 1:15 in the morning,” Neville said, “just thinking, how am I even doing this?”

Broadcast aside, punctuality is not Michaels’s strong suit. A regular 4:30 Monday meeting, the movie notes, took place at 6:37 p.m. His lateness, he explains in the documentary, is not a power play — he is just always busy putting out the fires that erupt on a live weekly series.

Beyond the show, Michaels maintains an almost militaristic routine, eating the same meals at the same restaurants on the same schedule, in New York and Los Angeles, and keeping the same retinue of drivers and barbers forever. The guy who services his aquarium has been doing so for 40 years. (And he’s in the movie.)

Michaels is outdoorsy.

Between his ever-present sports jacket and his half-century roaming the halls of Rockefeller Center, where “S.N.L.” is produced, it’s hard to imagine Michaels as a nature lover. “Most people, including most people on the show, have never seen him outside,” Neville noted. And yet, as the documentary explains, Michaels has always been recharged by wide expanses and wilderness. It “absolutely comes from his Canadian childhood,” Neville said.

When Michaels was 14, his father died suddenly. Shortly after, Michaels told Neville, “he was looking at a puddle that had tiny little tadpoles in it, and just thinking, oh, even there in this puddle, there’s new life. And that somehow made him feel better.”

On breaks from “S.N.L.” — and in the five-year period when he walked away from the show, in the early ’80s — Michaels retreated to his Maine home, a near-legendary place among the show’s staff: Only a few have visited (Fred Armisen among them). On a tour in the documentary, Michaels points out daffodils he had someone plant and describes the trees: “This is arborvitae, you make a tea out of it and it stops scurvy.”