Susan Morrison
Appearances
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
It goes on because it's 1130. And, you know, he needs that deadline. He needs a deadline. And that's when he gets into his kind of superpower mode, you know, the meeting between the dress rehearsal and air. But if you think about it, so the new show, we would be taping And he would yell, cut. And then they'd start a sketch over. And sometimes these tapings would last for five hours.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
I do. I actually can't even show it to you. It's coming out.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
And I remember the audience trying to leave in droves and Tom Gamble coming out and going like, you quitters. Sure.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
And then they'd be up all night in the editing room, like splicing the takes together so that it leached all of the magic out of it. I mean, you guys know, because you've done it, the adrenaline of live really adds something. But imagine these comedy sketches pieced together. They had to add laugh tracks, right?
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
I remember knowing that it wasn't going well. And then I guess Brandon Tartikoff said to Lauren after, I can't remember, maybe eight shows, like, why don't you just not make the rest of them? And instead, and here's the novel idea, let's make Best Of the new show ours. Best Of.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
That's right. Invented Saturday Night Live. We decided that Lorne has monomial status, you know, like Fidel or Madonna. You know, one name does it, Lorne.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
That's popped in my head. That was my only time in television. I switched to journalism after that. But I stayed friends with all those writers, and a lot of them, including Steve Martin and Jack, have written for me at The New Yorker and other places I've worked. So I was always kind of in the... I would run into Lauren every five years and say hi. I think our daughters knew each other in school.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
But... after the 40th anniversary, I just, well, I was an empty nester. I had this crazy idea. I was going to have a lot of time. And I just realized it really hit me how Lauren is like single-handedly responsible for what America thinks is funny, you know, across so many generations. And I thought he'd be a great subject for a book. So I, I sold a book first. I did a proposal.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
There was a bidding war. I chose Random House. And then I went to see him in his office. And I said, because I know, you guys know Lauren, he likes to be out of the frame. He likes to be behind the curtain. He's not a very public facing guy. So I said, Lauren, I just signed a contract to write a book about you and the show. I don't need anything from you.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
You know, I know your people and I'm kind of around, but if you wanted to talk to me and participate in it, it'll be a better and a richer book. And, you know, your legacy deserves that. And at first he looked like he was going to have a heart attack, you know, and then, you know, he said, you think about it. And we had a drink a couple of days later and he,
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
And he just started telling those stories. He just started talking. And so he was in. We didn't have any kind of agreement. He liked the fact that it was my book. It's not a vanity project that he had any approval over or anything. But he's smart enough to know that that's better, to have a real work of journalism about you and not some silly sort of puff book.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
were benign i mean the book's coming out uh did he bury people what did he say about me oh dana you know what he said about you is it's a fucking show pony i mean you both of you um both of you are really knows me really up there in his pantheon No, I think that he, I think one of his reservations in the beginning, and this is very smart of him, he knows that people have very selective memory.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
I don't know that he read deeply in those, like the oral history by Tom Shales and Jim Miller, but he certainly knew that over the years, people had put out versions of things that were wildly exaggerated. And he also knew that comedians, like to kind of embellish a story to make it right. That's a human thing.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
So I think he, he was a little worried about that, but he, uh, you know, you know, he, I asked him lots of questions. He told me lots of stories. Uh, I'd say in the final two years of the reporting, what I was doing was I'd go over there on a Friday night and I'd say, okay, now what we're going to do is try to do some fact-checking.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
Because a lot of times I'd have three or four different versions of an event. And I wanted him to try to be a tiebreaker. Like, what do you think actually happened here? And he was very honest. A lot of times he just said, God, I don't know. It was the 70s. Yeah. But I, but again, because I, you know, work at the New Yorker and we're fact checking and accuracy are important.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
I worked really hard to try to get, get it, get to the bottom of things. And there were definitely things. And I brought all these things to him. There were definitely things that maybe stung a little bit or that he would have preferred not be in the book, but he never said like, Oh God, don't put that in the book. You know, he, he, he understood that. Yeah.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
And God, I really respect the hell out of him for that. I mean, he knew I was going to write a real book. But the response among his world and his publicists and the people around him has been really positive. People think that I've really got him.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
But, you know, I mean, going into something like this with a character as mysterious and feared as Lorne is, I always knew that there would be a contingent of people who said, like, oh, God, this is just a blowjob. And then there'd be other people who would say, this is a hatchet job, you know, right? So, I think, I mean, I really...
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
I'm in awe of Lorne and I really admire him and I admire and like him even more at the end of this process than I did at the beginning. I think what he's done is incredible. But you guys worked there when people would be bitching about this or that or, you know, it's a tough place, right?
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
It's like the people who say skits instead of sketches. It's an immediate disqualifier, right?
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
Huh.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
Did you hang up with someone and go, wow, they were very... One person who blew my mind was Dan Aykroyd because he talks in these sentences. Have you guys ever talked to him?
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
You know what I mean? He talks in perfect paragraphs.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
And he's so, I just would never have thought that he, you know, he's somebody who, and, and he's so thoughtful and uses such interesting words.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
Well, it makes you realize that, you know, Beldar Conehead and Van Aykroyd are very similar, aren't they? Very close.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
Well, you know, it is funny. One of the things that is so interesting about Lauren is that even though people would early in the show, as the show started getting successful and Lauren started getting richer with fancier friends, you know, people would bitch and moan about that. You know, Belushi referred to Lauren's fancy friends as the dead, you know, all those socialites and everything.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
But I think that it was kind of interesting the way Lauren managed to parlay that into kind of a, comic character on the show. You know, like the Lorne that you see in the Smigel's TV Funhouse.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
Get me back my show.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
You know, he kind of... I feel like he almost... the Lorne Pasha producer character became a character on the show as much as Church Lady did.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
And I remember, actually, I hope we hear more of your Lorne, David, today, but I remember asking Alec Baldwin at one point, who do you think does the best Lorne impersonation? And Alec just said, Lorne.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
I think you're going to get your $38 worth. But no, everyone I talk to about Lorne, it's the same. They're all kind of trying to unriddle him. Conan says everybody thinks that Lorne has the secret. Part of that is that he isn't Unlike a lot of guys who got rich and famous in the 80s, you know, Barry Diller, Michael Milken or people like that. He's never been like a show-off workaholic.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
You know, he's not one of those people who says, I get up at 4 a.m. and work out with a trainer. And then, you know, he does seem to know how to live. You know, he kind of invented work-life balance, you know.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
But in terms of, you say, the marshmallow inside, I don't want to be too psychobabbly or too much of an easy answer, but a lot really does take you back to Lorne suddenly losing his father when he's 14 years old. He was completely... at sea. And his father collapsed one night after having a big argument with Lorne. He had a big fight. Father collapses, disappears into the hospital.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
Lorne never sees him again. This gives you some indication of why you never see Lorne having a yelling match with anybody. He keeps it very low. I think at one point I say in the book that he speaks in the register of a man announcing a golf tournament. But I think that his whole world got smashed when he was 14. Then he had a bad year.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
His mother thought he was going to be a juvenile delinquent, to use the term popular in the juvia. And he had to kind of He had to put it all together. I think it gave him a kind of resilience that helped him throughout his whole career. Just when I was starting the book, I interviewed Judd Apatow for the New Yorker Radio Hour. And he said something that really resonated with me.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
When Judd was 14, his parents had a really bad divorce. And I think there were financial problems. His whole world kind of fell apart. And he told me that he definitely, because of that, like that's why he kind of early in his life abandoned his dreams of being a performer and instead became a director and producer.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
Because, you know, when you're that guy, you've got the clipboard, you've got the call sheet, you're making sure that everything works. You're making sure that it's not going to be chaos. You're taking care of everything, right? As opposed to, you're a performer, you're just kind of strutting your own stuff.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
I think, no, I think that's right. And Dana, I remember that when I interviewed you, you told me that when you showed up there, you thought you were probably going to be in the last cast of SNL. You thought it was on its way out and it was kind of a Hail Mary pass. And, you know, it's interesting because I met Lorne when he was perhaps at an even lower point. Even lower?
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
And I thought that that reminded me so much of Lorne, because he also was a performer early in his life. But he's determined to not let anything fall apart, because his own world fell apart when he was 14. That'll be $350 for that. Yeah.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
I didn't know that until I started reporting this book. So every, you know, think about all the people who were just writers, Mulaney, Odenkirk, you know, those guys never got on stage.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
Oh, well, there's definitely some people who are angry because, you know, it's one of the things I would say that maybe Lauren's biggest achievement was just creating this kind of culture with walls around it. You know, it's a tribe and you're in it or you're out of it. You know, it's like the Godfather kind of.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
Who, you know, I mean, I think that's one of the reasons it was so painful for Conan when he lost The Tonight Show and went to TBS. He was kind of, you know, he had spent his whole career at NBC. And for a while, he had a little bit of a frosty rupture with Lauren. I think, you know, he was off the t-shirt list, you know. Stopped getting the Broadway video. You guys still get those?
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
The Broadway video t-shirts?
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
told Conan and his producer, Jeff Ross, oh, you don't need Lauren to be your EP. But I think that was a misstep. I think it probably would have been a good... Yeah.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
Well, I worked for him when he did the new show, which was his one public spectacular flop. And I don't think people thought he was going to be coming back from that. And he also lost his own money in that show. It's strange it was such a flop because it was packed with talent. You know, the writer's room was incredible. Jim Downey, Jack Handy, George Meyer. Wow.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
Yeah, I think that for Lauren, it's a relationship business, you know, and he really does. For that, yes. One of his old Canadian friends told me that even from the very beginning, you could tell he likes rabbit's feet. You know, he likes to have these familiar people around. Sure. I think one time he was kind of half joking, but he compared himself to, he said, I'm like Prometheus.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
I'm the bringer of fire to these young people, the people he hires and whose life he changes. And he is aware that, he's very aware that you want to stay tight with the people who were there for you at the beginning. It's why he kept Bernie. I'm sure he was paying Bernie Brillstein 15%.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
I don't think they were. Weren't they?
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
No, they weren't on it.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
No, they weren't. They weren't.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
But weren't they on Dana's show?
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
It could have been on a bad episode of SNL.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
That's right out of Ed Sullivan.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
That reminds me of when Lorne directed his show in college, UC Follies, which was very much like a proto-SNL thing. There was a Shakespeare parody in it that Lorne wrote about This is actually one of the first funny joke that I've ever, that Lorne Michaels wrote to my mind. There was a character in it named Hand in Brawl.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
Instead of Fortinbra. Yeah. Handinbra. You get it?
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
It's pretty good.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
It was the 50s, people.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
John Candy did amazing work on that show. It's worth looking up Food Repair Man.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
Belushi was on Newsweek.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
for animal house and chevy was on new york magazine at the end of uh season one they called him the heir apparent to johnny carson and that's basically what started all kinds of splintering in that first cast because yeah you know the idea wasn't for one person to emerge as a star that kind of screwed everything up immediate problems that's always been there since then yeah yeah
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
You were asking about the new show. I just remembered one funny little conflict that happened there. I remember Gamelin Pross wrote a sketch called Time Truck. It was a time traveling truck. And it was for a show Kevin Kline was hosting. And the idea was Kevin Kline was supposed to play Abe Lincoln. They were supposed to go back in time to prevent Lincoln from getting shot.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
But Lorne thought that it would be much funnier to have his close personal friend, Paul Simon, play Lincoln, just as a side gag. The writers are like, Paul Simon is not a comic actor.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
It was Paul.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
Yeah, well, you know, Jim Downey had a really smart way of describing this. He said, Lorne is a guy bad at term papers, great at tests. So if you give him an open-ended thing that he has to sit down and fiddle with, he's just never going to finish it. But when there's a deadline, when there's an alarm bell that goes off, that's... I think someone said the deadline is Lauren's cocaine.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
It's the thing that gets him galvanized. Can you imagine if that show was taped? You would never have that moment at 10.30 where he's saying... But... Yeah, I think that he definitely has said to me a bunch of different times that he he was always his whole life reluctant to burn a bridge or to close a door. You know, he always felt like, Oh, if I do this, then I won't ever be able to do this.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
I mean, he's, he, and he also told me a story, this kind of related. He told me it's a real memory of once his father taking him to a diner when he was a little boy and saying, just order anything you want off the menu. So he ordered a hot dog and a hamburger and a grilled cheese and onion rings and French fries. And, You know, couldn't eat at all.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
And then his father said, let this be a lesson to you. You know, your eyes are bigger than your stomach. Now, I don't know how Lauren converted that into a lesson about comedy.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
But he did. And I think that if you think about that plate full of junk food at the diner, it's not unlike what the show is like Saturday going into, you know, they still have way more than they can use.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
And it's chopping it down.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
Right, right, right, right.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
Well, I thought it was, you know, a lot of people talk about these different rules that Lorne has about comedy, these Lorne-isms. And I think all the comedy ones are interesting, but it was also really interesting for me to hear how many of them were just about like how to live your life.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
You know, so many people talked about how Lorne would say, buy yourself an apartment that you think you can't afford. Because, you know, then you'll come home after a hard day at work and you'll go, wow, who lives here? And you'll go, wow, I live here.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
No, he said that to me too, and I totally get it. I like it. Yeah. But it was also, I spent so much time hanging out there that it was really interesting for me to see, he's so patient kind of with the millennials and some of the snowflakey sensibilities. But one day he said something that really cracked me up. This is in the book.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
I mean, I have a theory.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
We were walking in the theater district and we walked past the Mean Girls marquee. And he had just got tickets for his friend Margaret Trudeau to go. But he was really mad because one of the leads had called in sick because she had to take her dog to the vet. The dog had eaten glue or something. And he just said, if it was Patti LuPone, the dog would be dead. Yeah.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
I'm going to press record. He loved, oh, sure.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
Lauren loved variety TV. You know, he grew up watching, you know, Sid Caesar and your show shows and all that stuff. And when he went to LA in the sixties and seventies, he just bounced around from one karate variety show to the next, you know, Perry Como, Burns and Schreiber. What about Burns and Schreiber where he met his wife? But, but, um,
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
Yeah. No, he has a lot of things like that that can kind of close off discussion. Like he'll say, it'll get there, you know, or he'll say it knows what it is. Stuff like that. Yeah. Really good, good things. Yeah.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
I thought it was also interesting that even though, you know, in that meeting between dress and air, he really is like a general, you know, and that's, that's the time at which he famously yelled at Bob Odenkirk once. Odenkirk, if you talk again, I'll break your fucking legs, you know, but mostly that's when he's most confrontational because there's no time left.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
Right, but even though that is his moment, he rarely forces somebody to change something. I mean, writers are always telling me.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
Yes, he'll give you the note. He'll say maybe this, maybe that, but he isn't going to say you have to change the ending. He lets it belong to the writers, which is so unusual.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
Yeah.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
But he might say, as David was just saying, he might say, well, do you think it's working? Yeah, stuff like that.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
Do you think it's working? But Dana, this is reminding me, what David just said is the story you told me about the time he thought church lady got too dirty with the football players. Yeah.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
You know, that superior dance thing. I mean, I didn't know he didn't like that because, boy, I think that's so funny.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
The thing is, he liked the form, but he thought that it was like stuck in the 50s. You know, the people writing those shows were guys who had written for radio. And his big idea was to take that format and bring it into the modern world, you know. Movies were cool. You had Terrence Malick and Robert Altman. Music was cool. But television was like a really weird backwater.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
Yes, she became a signature. Because I know Conan told me that Or maybe Lorne told me, maybe they both told me, rare instance of everybody agreeing that Lorne was always telling Conan to get rid of that string dance thing that he did, you know, where he would touch his nipples and go, yeah, Lorne hated that. But Conan stuck with it and it worked.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
You know, there are people, you know, people, I guess.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
Right. Well, Mark McKinney told me that at the original, at the initial read through of the kids in the hall series, uh, The one thing that Lauren just didn't like, didn't understand was the, I'm crushing your head guy. And that when Mark, and you know that sketch.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
When Mark first read it, Lauren said like, oh, so it's a funny voice thing, you know, but he didn't.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
Dana, you can say that better than me. But then when he saw it, when he saw that it was a visual, you know, like that, then he got it and he liked it. So again, you have to have, you really have to have a sense of yourself, I guess, right? Because a more of a fading violet kind of performer would have just said, okay, we'll cut that sketch.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
So many people told me about how they would come off stage and just feeling like they really killed. And, you know, then in the Monday meeting, he wouldn't talk about that, but he would say, you know, like. Nora, you were breathtaking as the fourth waitress. That kind of thing.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
The Cowbell one is great. We've got to watch that. It's a whole documentary.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
You were great in it, Dana.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
Well, it took me so long to write it. Only 10 years. This wasn't part of the plan.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
It really worked. And I'd say, I mean, it definitely works. And especially because so much of the hoopla, so much of the other stuff, it's like snippets of sketches. But my hope is that people really don't know that much about Lorne. The comedy cognoscenti know that he's Obi-Wan Kenobi and everything else. But I think that the greater world doesn't know
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
So he was the first person who said, let's make variety TV something that has something to do with what people in their 20s are like. Let's put drugs on screen.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
how complicated and fascinating and strange and brilliant he is. And, you know, I hope, as you were saying, Dan, I hope I'm kind of able to explain that a little bit.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
Yeah, I think that's a really good question because I know there was a time in the 90s when he was trying to do the changeover between the Hartman cast to the Sandler cast. He was hiring a lot of people. I thought it was maybe just a
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
ease the you know create a buffer um and then there was like some big budget cut back and he had to get rid of a bunch of them but yeah i i don't know the answer to that unless and i'm speculating here unless it's in a diversity effort you know to just try to get a more diverse cast but i don't think it serves the show because i think that there's so many people you're kind of who's that you don't know for sure you don't know for sure it's too hard people
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
What was yours, David? What was the thing that made you feel like... God, it took a long time.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
And the assistants, yeah.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
You know, the thing about the huge cast... It's even harder now, Dana. And when I was hanging around there a few years back, the cast would also, they would let you know. I mean, of course, it's thrilling for them when geniuses like you and Alec and everybody come in to play these cameos. But during the first Trump administration, you have all these stars coming in. Yeah.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
And if you were in the cast, you might be pissed.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
Well, I firmly believe... I don't think he's going to just say, over and out. You know, he's never missed a show. He's never missed a show. I think they'd have to carry him out of there in a stretcher. But I don't think that any of... I don't buy any of the replacement theories. I don't think Tina or Seth or I can't see any of them doing it.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
What I think is the likelier idea, and I hope this doesn't sound too McKinsey, you know, but the way I see it, Lauren is completely essential two days of the week. He has to be there during read through because he really pays attention to the room.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
And then he picks the show after that with his deputy's help. And then Saturday, when he's sitting there under the bleachers.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
And so I think he has this great team of people who could do the other stuff. And if he came in, was wheeled in on Wednesday afternoon and on Friday and on Saturday evening.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
Yeah, I think that's right. And all those people, Doyle and Kenward and Higgins, they really know him, so they can give a pretty good approximation.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
But there's no one could do what he does under the bleachers. I mean, when I'm sitting there under the bleachers with him, and you guys, I'm sure you've done this, right? And he's I mean, the funniest one, I was there for the Jonah Hill show and Maggie Rogers, who was then just starting out as a singer, comes out on stage at dress wearing this big red caftan and no shoes.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
And Lauren just goes, barefoot? Where's she from? A place with roads? He was so mad. Yeah.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
He seems very, you know, he's very with it and alert. And I've never seen him sick. You know, he's taking good care of himself.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
Well, one thing he did tell me when the Reitman movie came out, you know, that was sort of the beginning of you know, like his anonymity being blown in a way. I mean, he, he told me he didn't see it. I mean, who knows, who knows if he did.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
But he said, he said, I just feel like I've lost control of my life. It's like as a 50th approach, I think he's really excited about the show and he's excited about seeing everybody. He loves everybody. But he does feel, I mean, even to some extent with a book, it's just like he's kind of stepping out. The Reitman movie put him center stage. This book puts him center stage. It's a shift for him.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
I mean, the other thing that Lorne will say is that when he was pitching a show like SNL for years and nobody wanted it. And what happened is that they needed something in late night on SN, you know, on NBC to replace Carson's reruns. And Lauren had never thought of late night.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
And he's funny. He's a funny person, which a lot of people don't know.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
February 18th. Thank you so much.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
This was really, really fun, you guys.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
Call back anytime, okay?
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
Bye.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
You too.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
And, but the thing, it ended up being what made the show work because the way he put it, you know, the network thought of late night as like a vacant lot on the edge of town. They weren't going to pay attention to what was going on there. They weren't going to meddle. You know, he just got to do whatever the hell it felt like. And, and, But no notes, you know, no interference.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
Yeah, I think he thought they were probably not even watching.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
Well, I guess I had several simultaneous reactions. You know, the journalist in me was watching and my head exploding because there were so many things that were fictionalized or, you know, five years worth of events were kind of crammed into one night.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
But I did think that it captured some of, as you guys know, you've lived this, just some of the nail-biting, knife-edge chaos that I think gives the show, continues to fuel the show. It's funny, I talked to some of the current People at the show now, some of the writers and cast, and they were indignant about it.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
They said that it was sort of like watching somebody screw up your song at a karaoke bar or something. They were feeling proprietary about it. What did you guys think?
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
I mean, I found it enjoyable to watch. It kind of, you know, it felt like the Poseidon adventure or something. It was almost like an adventure flick.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
Other people I know told me they had similar reaction to mine at the very end when it comes off and they do the Wolverine sketch and Chevy comes out and says, live from New York, it's Saturday night. I mean, I kind of teared up a little bit because it made you realize... How improbable the whole show was and how close it came to not happening. It could easily have not happened.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
That was real.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
They were hammering those bricks in the day of the first show. And of course, the old timers on the crew
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
looked at eugene lee the designer you know who wanted brought in old oak doors and bricks and they said what the fuck are you doing you know we just use cyclorama walls and you know the way it used to be in old variety shows where instead of a set you'd have like you know a window frame or a tree in a pot yeah suggests a park but lauren's idea was that you wanted this hard wall reality and um
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
Well, one thing I was just going to say to, you know, we were talking about the improbability of it and how those people weren't famous. It's one of the things that was fascinating for me to learn is Lauren had trouble hiring people. Like who wanted to be on this late night show with this weird Canadian guy no one had never heard of. had ever heard of.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
And, you know, Chevy almost didn't come on because he was doing a play like a dinner theater with Paul Lind, you know, I like Broadway.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
And I love that Paul Lind stood in the way of another hire. Alan Zweibel almost didn't come to work because he had been offered a job in primetime writing the questions for Paul Lynde in the center square of Hollywood Squares.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
Anything about Paul Lynde.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
Yeah, I was brought into the Brill Building in 83 by Tom Gammill, Gammill and Pross, who I'd gone to college with. And I met Jim Downey for the first time. And Jim hired me.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
And I sort of forgot, I had forgotten until recently the wonderful accent thing that everybody says, the eagles.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
So Jim, in a rare act of decisiveness, hired me that day. A rare act of decisiveness.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
To be his assistant.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
I was 23 years old. My job chiefly consisted of ordering shitloads of food from the Carnegie Deli. I mean, if I didn't know what chicken in the pot was then, I knew it.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
And, you know, it was a great thing for me. I was really young. My mom had just died suddenly and I was kind of at sea. And so I got to go to this place with all these funny people every day. And they were so kind to me, you know, and think about it. I you know, it was really, it was fun.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
So I didn't have a lot of one-on-one time with Lorne, but it was a, it was a pretty small operation and we were all just in this little, on the ninth floor of the, of the Brill building. So, yeah, I mean, I, I knew him a little bit. And again, I didn't realize that what I was witnessing was this soul crushing failure on his part. Yeah.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
Yeah, yeah.
Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
No, it wasn't, there were, I think we did like eight shows. And this is the thing that was really weird about it. Lauren had been used to working live, but the new show was taped on Thursday to air on Friday. So it brought out all of Lauren's you know, less genius impulses. I mean, people always say that, Lauren always says that the show doesn't go on because it's ready.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
A Cooper Flaggasm, NBA Trends, Lorne Michaels Stories, and a Celtics Pyramid With J. Kyle Mann and Susan Morrison
Last week.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
A Cooper Flaggasm, NBA Trends, Lorne Michaels Stories, and a Celtics Pyramid With J. Kyle Mann and Susan Morrison
It was just about a decade. Yeah, just about a decade.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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I did, and I recognize how unusual that was, and I think it's worked for me. Well, basically, after the 40th anniversary 10 years ago, I started thinking about the show and the enormous impact of Lorne himself. Nobody has been more responsible for what makes generations of Americans laugh, what we all think is funny. And, you know, it was a huge legacy.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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And I knew Lorne a little bit because I worked for him briefly in 1984 on The New Show, which was his one spectacular public failure, his attempt to do SNL in primetime. And I was just a kid. I was a munchkin then, you know, but I had a front row seat to this interesting situation. And I made a lot of friends there, even though I switched to journalism, I kept in touch with all those people.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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So I would see Lorne maybe every eight or 10 years. And We always said hi. And so I decided, I knew Lorne wouldn't say yes to having a book written about him. So what I did is I wrote a proposal, sent it around. I was surprised by the interest it generated. There was a big bidding war. I signed a deal with Random House. I had not promised them Lorne's involvement.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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And then I wrote a note to Lorne and I said, I'd love to come see you in your office next So I went to see him and I said, Lauren, I've just signed a deal to write a book about you and the show. I don't need anything from you because, you know, I'm connected in your world. But if you would like to talk to me, it'll be a bigger and better and richer book, you know, which your legacy deserves.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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And, you know, the truth is he looked like he was going to faint. Yeah. He was surprised and he doesn't like to be surprised, as you know, if you've read the book. But he was incredibly polite, as he always is. And we chatted about this and that for a while. And he said, let me give it some thought. And so a few days later, I followed up and we met for a drink at a bar in a hotel.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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I thought we were gonna be negotiating. That's that it would maybe be like, well, this and that. But as often happens with Lorne, people say that sometimes you sit down with Lorne and he starts a conversation and you're like, wait a minute, did I miss the previous conversation? Like you'll just kind of leap ahead. And that's what happened. We sat there. He was drinking his Belvedere on the rocks.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
A Cooper Flaggasm, NBA Trends, Lorne Michaels Stories, and a Celtics Pyramid With J. Kyle Mann and Susan Morrison
And he just started telling stories about his childhood, about his parents. And I realized, oh, he's going to do this. You know, I didn't have a notepad or a tape recorder. So I would run to the ladies room and write stuff down so I didn't forget it. And, you know, he asked nothing of me. There were no terms. There was no deal. He just... I think, you know, he liked me. He respected the magazine.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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I think he knew there was going to be a book written about him. Better it be written by me than, you know, some kind of entertainment business hack who was going to turn something around really fast. And so then I just started visiting him in his office, you know, a couple Friday nights a month. And we would have these leisurely talks. And it was very civilized and really fun.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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And, you know, talked to everyone else in his world. And The real charm of it for me was that I didn't have to deal with any publicists. That can really be the back-breaking part of a project like this. I think that once word went out that Lorne was talking to me, all these people just said, sure. Everyone loves to talk about Lorne.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
A Cooper Flaggasm, NBA Trends, Lorne Michaels Stories, and a Celtics Pyramid With J. Kyle Mann and Susan Morrison
So after we had done that for a year or so, then I realized, okay, if I'm gonna write this guy's biography, you want to avoid it being like a death march through the years. 1986 turned to 1987, turned to 1988. I'm a magazine editor, so I wanted some of that up close in the room material like you have in a magazine profile.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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I said, how about if I just come to the show one week and just stay at your elbow and watch everything so I can convey to people the magic and the insanity of how this show comes together every week. And I kind of related to it a little bit because it's not completely unlike the way we put together an issue of The New Yorker. We have a weekly deadline, a lot of crazy egomaniacs. And he liked me.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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And so I was able to sit there through all these very intense, usually confidential meetings and got to see all the complicated levers that he has to push and the egos that he has to solve. And it was... I sometimes said to my editor, this book could be published by Harvard Business School. I mean, it's a funny, interesting book, but it's a real management Bible, too. So...
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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Well, the first thing I'll say is certainly Lauren, neither Lauren nor I knew that it was going to take that much longer. Oh, interesting.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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I mean, I, you know, I, I, I, I, I, the book took this long just because it took this long. You know, I interviewed hundreds of people. I have a demanding day job. You know, I did that on the weekends, but still, I don't think, I don't think Lauren's that strategic. I don't, I don't think he's thinking like, oh, this will be some years. Yeah.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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I think he just felt like he, again, it was a great honor for me that he just trusted me. And I did say to him at the beginning of that week, I said, I know how this goes. If somebody blurts something out that's really controversial or disgraces themselves or some confidential thing happens that you would like to be off the record, let's check in at the end of each day and you can tell me.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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That's the way at the magazine we would maybe deal with it if we had a journalist visiting at a meeting or something. But he never did. He never said, oh, you know, when so and so blurted out, blah, blah, blah. Let's let's erase that. Oh, interesting. He never did.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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And, you know, but again, I think it's that, you know, he respected me as a journalist and and knew that I wasn't going to, you know, I wasn't out to hang anybody or burn the place down. And so. And I'll tell you the truth. I mean, there were a handful of things, particularly the Saturday night, the party after the show where people were wandering around, you know, a little blitz.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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You know, I mean, just because I'm a, you know, I'm a good journalist, but I'm also not out to nail anybody. And I think I probably protected a couple of people here and there. But but the book is really true to what happened and to my experience. And I, as I said, I felt honored by being trusted that way.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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Yes, it's true that he has always had a policy that there isn't much to be gained by talking to the press. You can be quoted out of context, you know, all these things can happen. And they did feel burned by Belushi, I'm sorry, by Wired. A lot of people, including Jim Belushi, told me that they felt that they had been misquoted in the Woodward book and that things were taken out of context.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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You know, I mean, that kind of, that happens a lot in this business. I, um, I'm not in a position to fact-check Woodward's book, but I was really careful. I've been working at The New Yorker for 30 years. I was really careful in the research. I had a fact-checker check everything. I think that there was a level of comfort with how I was going to be doing it. But you're right.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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I think that the only reason that he kind of went against his usual dictum, which is nothing to be gained by talking to the press, is that it was right after the 40th, the 40th anniversary, as you remember. It was a beautiful show. It was very emotional. I think Lorne was a little softened by it.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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And I think he felt it, that they were celebrating the 40th and Phil Hartman was gone and Belushi and Gilda and so many people and Tom Davis and And I think he thought, God, it's going to be even a smaller group at the 50th. I think he was, for the first time, really thinking about his legacy. And I just happened to kind of get him at the right time.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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And I definitely felt that he was reflective in a way that isn't maybe his norm. I mean, you've interviewed him, you've talked to him. He's not naturally that interior person. So I think that it was just good timing. He also, you know, I'll say he's, I think he's a little bit superstitious, which I love. And when we met that first time in his office,
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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You know, I told you he knew me from the 80s, but I told him something he didn't know, which is that when I was 16 in the during the first season of the show, I took the Metro North train in from Connecticut and was in the audience for one of the Elliot Gould shows, which was magic. And it was one of his favorite shows from that season.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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And I think there is something that kind of that sparked something in his brain. It felt right to him.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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Yeah, I mean, one of the things, Chris Rock was a great source, very smart guy. And he said, think about it, this guy has been hundreds, if not thousands of people's boss. And if that doesn't make you an expert on human behavior, you know, what does? I mean, he's almost like a shrink. He's seen so many people go through this weird crucible right, of change.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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You think about Bill Hader comes from Oklahoma in his early 20s. His only job had been working, you know, as an assistant on Iron Chef, right? And you see these people working And then they become famous overnight. You know, Lauren says he's the world's expert on watching people get famous. And very often he's fully aware there's like an asshole phase. You know, you become a big jerk for a while.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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Yeah, so he knows how to shepherd people through this. But in terms of like the management approach, I think that, I think it's largely intuitive. Like I, you know, I remember Judd Apatow hearing once about how when he was a 25 year old or 26 year old, young show runner working on Ben Stiller's Fox variety show in the 80s, which is a great show that got canceled right away. He was terrified.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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He didn't know how to manage people. He was holed up in his office reading, you know, management for dummies, like trying to learn how to do it. Laura never did anything like that. I think he, a lot of it is intuitive. He's got great EQ, but also, and this was the fun part about researching the book, I mean, sometimes I think he's almost like a young character out of Dickens or something.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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Like every stop along the way, every bad job that he had, he nonetheless learned something important from it. Like you can see him going through the first 30 years of his life, gathering the little individual skills to becoming a producer. And especially his interactions with stars.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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Exactly. Yeah. And the other thing that's unusual about him is that not only is he good at dealing with those kinds of incandescent creative egos or narcissists, but at the same time, he's a guy who has the mellow confidence to be able to deal with the suits.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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You know, a lot of Conan O'Brien said to me, you know, in the Game of Thrones of show business, you know, Lauren will be the last one standing. And if you think about the number of, uh, administrations of NBC ownership he has outlived. Mike Schur, the SNL writer who's now created a lot of different shows, I quote him talking on a podcast once about what it's like to work for GE.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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GE owned the network for a long time. He quotes the network or pretends to quote a network saying something like, gee, how come our laser guided missile department is doing so much better than our fart joke division? Right. So you're working for people who are basically making toaster ovens, you know? Right. And he knows how to kind of ride it out when those people turn into pests.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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Yes, yes.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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It's kind of held before what happened, what Conan did, you know, with the tonight show when, when he made this social movement out of team, which Lauren hated. Yeah. That, that to me, that Lauren, that was like exactly what you don't do. You know, what you do do is you just keep your head down and, and ride it out.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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And then stay on the air thing again, to look at the lessons that he garnered along the way in the, in the, in the sixties and seventies, when he was working in LA on variety shows, uh, You know, he was on Laugh-In, but he knew that the cooler show was the Smothers Brothers. That's where Steve Martin wrote and Rob Reiner. And he kind of wished he were on the Smothers Brothers.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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But then the Smothers Brothers basically allowed themselves to become martyrs. They wouldn't let up on their Vietnam stuff. You know, they had Pete Seeger on singing Waste Deep in the Big Muddy. And the president called Bill Paley and got them taken off the air. And Lauren, I think always felt like, yeah, they did great material, but they didn't, you know, they didn't get to stay on the air.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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And if you're not on the air, you're nowhere.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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Yeah, and he thought his TV life was over then. He thought, oh, I did my TV thing. Now I'm going to have my Mike Nichols moment. He always wanted to make a film like The Graduate, and he thought that was his destiny. His grandparents owned a movie theater. He grew up besotted with the movies. And what's interesting is that he was working on an adaptation of Pride and Prejudice.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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He had bought the rights to Don DeLillo's oh gosh, you know, the one that Noah Baumbach just made, White Noise. And, you know, these are really highbrow pictures. They weren't like Animal House, which is what you might have expected him to do, you know, go in a bit of boffo comedy direction. So that didn't work out. And, um,
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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The thing, the only thing he did during those years that brought him pleasure is he wrote Three Amigos with two of his best friends, you know, Steve Martin and Randy Newman.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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And he described that to me as like the one time where he just felt like, this is what I always pictured it to be like, you know, like George S. Kaufman staying up all night with the Marx Brothers, drinking too much coffee and fixing the third act. And I think he realized that, you know, he doesn't, He doesn't want to sit alone in a room with a typewriter.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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He wants to be brainstorming with his friends. He likes a clubhouse. His whole life he's been looking for a tribe. And so that's what made him go back to SNL in 1985.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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Oh, yeah.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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Oh, he was horribly in debt. He'd lost his own money on the new show. He had a mortgage, his apartment. I mean, the idea of Lorne...
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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And financial distress was something that he, it almost reminds me of Scarlett O'Hara, I'll never be poor again, because when he was 14, his father died suddenly, and his whole life changed, and there was financial uncertainty, his mother was depressed, and he's one of those guys with catastrophic thinking who kind of lived his whole adult life to make sure that never happened to him again.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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So when he was presented with the offer to come back and save SNL after five years away, First, he didn't know what to do. His pride felt a little wounded. Like, oh, is that just going backwards?
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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So it was, save your baby or we're going to kill it. And so he asked... for advice from two mentors. And he always had a lot of mentors in his life in the same way that he would go on to be everybody else's mentor. So the first one he asked was David Geffen, who was his first agent way back in the day. And Geffen said, you know, Lauren, you should not go back and take that job in New York.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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You know, you've done that. Someone who wants to be you should do that. And I love Lauren's response to that because it's very honest. He said to me, he said, well, you know, I always kind of liked being me. So then the second person he asked, much more sage, an older man, Mo Austin, who was the chairman of Warner Brothers Records. Mo was much more clear-eyed.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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He said, look, you're great at that job. You love New York City. There are very few big entertainment jobs in New York City. It's a perfect fit. You should go back. And I think that the penny dropped and Lorne realized, yeah, I'm good at live television.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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And Jim Downey, one of the longest serving head writers on the show, has a great way of summing up what he thinks Lorne's strengths are that make him so good at live TV. He said, Lorne's a guy, not that great at term papers, really good at tests. In other words, the hard deadline is necessary for him.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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With movies, he could kind of noodle around with rewrites and never actually get to the end of it.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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As he always says, the show goes on because it's 1130, no matter what.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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People have told me, and I'm pleased, but people have told me that when they're reading that section of the book, their heart starts pounding. And when you're in that room, and think about it, it's not a big room. This is the ninth floor office. Every square inch of the carpet, I mean, people are kneeling on their knees because there isn't even room to sit down, Indian style.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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Everyone's crammed in there. It really is like a scene, they're about to go into battle, and And you can feel the tension. It's thrilling. And that's obviously what drives the adrenaline and the magic in the show, that tension. Because many people have critiqued it over the years and said, wait a minute, why don't we just pick the actual seven sketches on Wednesday?
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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And then we don't have to have this whole Hunger Games rigmarole.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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But I think Lauren knows that keeping that creative tension and the competition and the, that that is good for creativity.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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yeah it's it's steve higgins calls it like five-dimensional chess he's thinking yeah do i keep the host happy do i make sure like the show i was at you know i think one of the reasons that you know one of the sketches got canned it's just because it was these huge movie theater seats they were just too damn hard to get in and out of the doors so like next you know and um and it's like twenty thousand twenty thousand dollars down the drain the moment they say no thanks someone
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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have time to get the prosthetic head on, you know? And there's so many things that, you know, All week, I mean, this probably is a decisive management choice. One of the things that's so cool is that all week long, Lorne is soliciting opinions from everybody. And not just the writers and the cast, but the costume assistants, the pages. He wants to hear from everybody.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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He likes to think of it as an egalitarian enterprise, that everyone is as necessary as everybody else. And I know that sometimes in meetings even, he has a sheet of paper and he'll jot down every time someone has spoken because he wants to make sure everybody in the room says something. And then, so he's metabolizing all those points of view all week.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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And then there's a moment after the dress rehearsal When he walks up this little cinder block staircase, it's like the least glamorous place in the building, up to his office. And I just thought of this now. It's almost like, do you watch Severance?
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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You know how they go in the elevator and then they go... It's like he goes up the staircase and he becomes the other guy. So then he's in his office and suddenly... he's not thinking about what everybody else says. It's just him.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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And then he goes upstairs, becomes Superman. And then he is the decider and everything that comes out of his mouth, like it's him, it's him, it's him, it's him. And so to see that transformation, like it is really, it's really interesting.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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I know, I know. And I remember thinking, you know, Louisa, Louisa Carey and the amazing makeup and prosthetics guy, he worked all week on those heads.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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And Lorne wasn't completely getting it. First, he said, oh, I feel like it's just kind of Conehead's redux. And then he also didn't understand why Jonah kept being in profile, which he thought looked really awkward. And then somebody had to say, no, no, in Beavis and Butthead, you always see him in profile. But it just wasn't really gelling.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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But yes, I mean, kudos to the writing staff that they hung on to that.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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Well, I saw it in dress and I'll tell you, it was a whole lot better when Gosling did it.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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But you know, another thing that was fun to learn, like I didn't know that the cowbell sketch existed before Walken and that they did it. They tried to do it when Norm MacDonald hosted. And yet you can see like, can you imagine anyone but Walken doing that now? No.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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I think Phil Hartman. Definitely. I mean, and all of these people you've just mentioned, like they're, they're actors, you know, I mean, they're really in it. They can, yeah. You know, somebody described Ackroyd as the kind of guy who kind of zipped himself into a character and disappear into it.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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You know, very different from like the way Belushi performed, which is he's always a Belushi-esque character, you know.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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That's right. I think that among the women, I think... Kristen Wiig has to be, right? Kristen Wiig, definitely. And one of the things that's amazing about Kristen Wiig, and when I started re-watching the shows more carefully, you see that what she does that's different from a lot of comedy performers is... Her acting, everything she does is so small.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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You know, she does so much with less, like just little movements of her eyes or even like if you look at her Denise character with the forehead, like it's so subtle.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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Yeah, yeah, no, no, I think definitely. I mean, I think Kate McKinnon is a great actor. I think Jan Hooks was just incredible. And she also tends to, I mean, of course... She gets shoved under the rug.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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Well, one of the things that I loved getting, because I hadn't really gotten it until I spent a whole lot of time there, is that the thing is that all of them, at the end of the day, they're just theater kids. They're all people who did Guys and Dolls in high school. Even like Lorne, there's a bit in the book where Lorraine Newman described how
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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once she was with him in the seventies and she had just had a bad breakup and he, and Lauren launched into that song from West side story. Forget that boy. Yeah.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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Like the idea, you know, I mean, I, my, I have two daughters who were theater kids, so I'm very familiar with this type, but all of them, you know, I remember seeing Colin Firth interviewed once about how much he loved doing, you know, the scene in ABBA where he's in the jumpsuit and the, and the platform shoes, because everybody was an actor. They just want to do that, you know? And, um,
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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It was also very interesting to hear Lorne talk about, just to see with all of them how, you know, the audience is always projecting onto SNL. You know, they want it to be a political show or an anarchist collective or whatever, but it's really show business. It's just show business. And that's why
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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often when you see these scenes shot backstage, you'll look down the hall and you'll see a couple of showgirls, a man dressed as Abe Lincoln and a llama. You know, it's like that scene. I don't know if you're as much of a Beatles nut as I am, but like in Hard Day's Night, there's that scene in the theater where John Lennon's going down the stairs and he runs into a showgirl with a headdress.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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And like, yeah, even the Beatles, it's just showbiz. There's something I kind of love about that.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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Well, I think that I think he really likes and respects the ones who come in there and survey the scene and figure out, OK, this is how I can be effective here. Like plenty of them. And again, they're young. You know, there's no orientation. There's no instruction packet like it's sink or swim. You know, you have to figure out, OK, who can write for me? Who can I write with?
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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How am I going to get on the air? And And the ones who can sort that out are the ones who are really going to make it.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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There are a few shortcuts. And this began with Bailey Murray when he started on the show in the second season. He had a good first show and then he just kind of disappeared. Yeah. People didn't like him. Audience didn't like him because they thought he was a Chevy replacement and he wasn't so cute as Chevy. But, you know, he was playing like second cop parts.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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So Lorne and he devised this idea that Billy would come on the show behind a desk and just address the audience and just say, hey, I'm not cutting it here. I don't know what's the matter, people. Don't you like me? And he talked about his dead father and everything. But that did it. You know, he connected with the audience. They really liked him and he was in.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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And that kind of began this tradition of, One of the time-honored ways that new cast members kind of get their footing is to go on Weekend Update as themselves and say their name into the camera. I mean, think of Adam Sandler when he did his first Thanksgiving song. He was not really thriving so much on the show, but then he came in. He was himself. He looked like himself.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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He did his funny little song. Everybody knew, oh, I know that guy now.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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He took off. So that works, you know. And the week I was there, Melissa Villasenor had one on update and that she broke through. So, you know, there are a lot of different kind of shortcuts. Some people are just so good at it. You know, look at Kenan Thompson. He's been there forever. He just...
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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you know i think he recognizes it as a good thing lauren will often say that you know agents people's agents and managers are the menace because they'll suddenly start getting like movie offers and they'll say hey get out of this place you got to leave you know it's a it's time to leave and and lauren you know does a lot of sidebar conversations with these people and what he what he says another one of his co-ends is you know make them
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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let them build a bridge that's strong enough so they can walk across it and walk away.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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Yeah. And there are so many of them. And some of them, what I love is some of them actually can't figure out what the hell I mean. And writers and casts spend years talking about them. And one that a lot of people mentioned to me, it's something he would say, well, you know, there's people who build the house and there's people who buy the house and you have to figure out which one you are.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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And everyone is like, what the hell does that mean?
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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And you have to walk away. Yeah. And I think it was, you know, when he started the show and had the original Not Ready for Primetime players, they were just kind of supposed to be in the background. Nobody was supposed to become a star. You know, no one was supposed to become famous.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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So when suddenly Chevy was famous and he was on the cover of New York Magazine, that totally messed up the ecosystem. It created... you know, it was a loss of innocence to use one of Lauren's favorite terms. And everyone got jealous.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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And so it was very painful for him to see this tribe, this family fractured. And then, but when Chevy did go, as painful as it was, again, this was one of these lessons that he had to internalize. He realized, okay, this is going to happen again and again and again. And so he sort of inured himself to it. But he also realized that, you know, like George Steinbrenner or like any sports...
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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You have to keep bringing in rookies. You have to seed the team. And that's something he learned the hard way. But that's how he's kept it going for 50 years. They're always new people.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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Yes.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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I mean, he says, I think somewhere in the, at least one place he says in the book, agents are morons, you know?
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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And the thing they all hate more than anything is when agents get tickets to the show and they're in the audience. I mean, people have told me, but, Because they're so jaded. I mean, you want the real fans. You don't want an agent. So you'll look up at the balcony and you'll see a bunch of CAA agents and their dates asleep.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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But about the Steinbrenner thing.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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And this I found myself wondering if this had something to do with your affinity for the show. You know, Lorne, he is a sports guy. I mean, loves the Yankees, goes to the Knicks, is a big hockey guy. And he uses a lot of sports metaphors all the time. You know, he uses a lot of baseball metaphors. Yeah.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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When Will Ferrell was talking to me about Lauren's style, he said, you know, Lauren's like, he's like a baseball manager. He knows you got to keep the highs not too high and the lows not too low because it's a long season. And a lot of people, you know, use sports talk to talk about how the show works.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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And the other thing people say is that the closest thing to SNL on television, because it's live, is sports.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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I know. Wow, that's a great marketing idea. Yeah.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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I think it's so much his whole life and his whole personality. I don't think he's going to leave there unless it's on a stretcher. And he always says that if producing is done well, you leave no fingerprints. And that's true. And that's sort of why he's been behind the curtain all these years. But at the same time, his fingerprints are on everything.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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Every one of them has absorbed his gospel and his sense of values about the show, and not just about the show, but about how to live their lives. In addition to all of his comedy rules and axioms, he teaches them how to live, how to live in New York, how to order in a restaurant,
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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He's paying for like new teeth for cast members and all kinds of gifts he gives are so like you get the people have told me, oh, he gave me this really great luggage or Simon Pierce glassware. And you sort of feel like he's ushering them into the good life. I was with Jim Downey once when he opened this box. It was an Hermes box. big orange box. It was an Hermes sweater for his birthday.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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And he was so intimidated by, you know, he Googled it and saw how expensive it was. And he said, I have to get a safety deposit box for this.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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Yeah, I mean, again, that's the sort of keep the highs not too high, the lows not too low. I mean, there's a way in which all these people, they are his family members. He's recreated the family that, you know, he lost when his father suddenly died when he was a child. But there's also, you know, it's also business. I mean, he walks this very fine line.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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I did feel that, and I thought there was so much regret surrounding it. On both sides? I think so. I think there was real pain. I mean, Conan is always the first to say that if Lorne Michaels hadn't looked at him at one point and said, you, he would never have had this. And think about it, Conan wasn't even a performer. You know, he was a writer.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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He could get a writer like this and give him this huge platform. And the thing that's so sort of sweet about it is, you know, I think there was a sort of a bit of a road not taken aspect of that for Lorne, because he started out as a comedy writer who maybe wanted to perform. But, you know, and Lorne exalts writers.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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Right. I mean, I think the Lorne character is as big a character as Church Lady. So, yeah, he gave the keys to the kingdom to Conan. And I think Conan, you know, I think it's most people in the business feel that Conan and his camp made a tactical error when they did not insist that Lorne be made executive producer of The Tonight Show.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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And I know those guys. I know, you know, went to college with Conan. I know Jeff Ross's manager. And I do think they have some regret about it. They were very young. They were very caught up in it. these big shots at NBC were saying to them, no, no, no, you don't need Lorne Michaels. You don't, you know. Yeah, you're going to do it in LA. You don't need Lorne, he's in New York.
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It was this activist NBC management at that time who didn't really, you know, they kind of wanted to elbow Lorne off the stage. So, but as Jeff told me, and I quote him in the book saying, you know what? We didn't jump in front of the truck for Lorne. So why should Lorne have jumped in front of the truck for us? And Lorne would never have admitted like,
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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you know, having his feelings hurt or that they should have done it differently. But everyone in his camp feels like it was a faux pas.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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But the thing, the kind of beautiful thing at this point is Conan is now king of podcasts. He's doing so great. I'm so happy that Conan has landed where he has. And he and Lorne are on very, very good terms. It was great to see Conan at the anniversary show. And I think there's a lot of real, real honest, ongoing affection between the two of them.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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Like who else would think like that? Absolutely right. It's true. Who would have thought of that? No, because that was right after the sex tape. Rob Lowe was in disgrace.
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I think so too, but I think also it's that Lorne has unconsciously or not cultivated this mystery and power that makes everybody want his good opinion, want to do good work for him. And that is the secret. It's this power that he holds over these people.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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Yeah, I mean, Jon Hamm told me that there isn't a day that goes by where he doesn't think, what would Lorne do? And he curbs the impulse to pick up the phone and call Lorne and ask him over when it's really important. But a lot of these people live their lives that way.
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Well, one of the funny things Lauren said about it to me, he goes, he said, yeah, you know, it's the most American thing there is, making fun of the boss. And then he said, of course, they don't really do it much in Canada because nobody's that successful there. But yeah, I mean, see, that is consistent with
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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another one of his many theorems, which is the infinite monkey theorem, which is how he views the essence of comedy writing. It's that old joke about you put a thousand monkeys in a room with a bunch of typewriters, and eventually one of them will write Hamlet. There was a 60s comic named Stanley Myron Handelman who changed that joke to say, put the monkeys in the room with the typewriters.
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I went back a couple hours later, and they were just fooling around. Lauren thinks that there's this incredible wisdom in that and that that's what you do with comedy writers. That's why you have them writing all night long when their defenses are down, when maybe they're drunk. Their guard is down. Fatigue is your friend, he'll say, because you want them to be at their goofiest.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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You don't want to be too self-conscious when you're writing comedy. It's like pure id, I guess. And I think he recognizes that all that time they spend making fun of him, it's like lubrication for comedy, you know, loosens them up. And Paul Appel even said it kind of helps you deal with the fear, you know, the fear of Lorne and the fear that you're not going to get on the air.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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It makes you just sort of loosen up. And again, he's a smart enough manager of people to know that if that works for them, fine, you know. And he also told me, and I wish I'd kind of pushed harder on this. He said that he does this too, that he's a really good mimic of the people at the show. He just does it at home.
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I guess. That's volume two.
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Well, I think a real turning point came after 9-11, you know, because the whole 90s, the mid 90s were a terrible time for him with almost getting fired by Don Ulmeier. And then the show picked up steam with all the great, you know, political debate stuff that Jim Downey wrote and everything.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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And then 9-11, it was the moment that I think the show emerged as a kind of an important American institution.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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Yeah, I mean, it brought it back to its roots. This was a, you know, it was the first time in my life that America seemed to like New York, right?
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And New York suddenly was kind of buffed up again.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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So, you know, the way he conceived of that moment with the firefighters and Mayor Giuliani, pre-disgrace, you know, and had Paul Simon sing that song, like he just had this producer's knack for navigating that moment, doing something that was so beautiful and profound and also funny. I mean, as he says in the latter part of my book when he's talking about doing the COVID show,
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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And, you know, you just always have to the show has to show up and you have to demonstrate, remind viewers that there's a decency to the show. And I think that it was that moment that the show and Lorne himself just kind of were, you know, it was kind of a Hall of Fame moment. They weren't going anywhere. He's never really been under threat since then.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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Some people told me, oh, I love Kate McKinnon singing that song. But I mean, I thought it was kind of wet. You know, I thought it just didn't work. Some people liked it. But again, I thought the reason I thought that was interesting is because it showed how finely calibrated his ability to kind of deal with the sort of millennial sensibilities on his staff are.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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He knew he had to give them something. They wanted to do this. He didn't like it, but he let them have it. And it reminded me of a funny anecdote that I love in the book is I'm walking with him through the theater district. We passed the Mean Girls marquee. That's the show he produced with Tina Fey.
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And he was disappointed because his friend Margaret Trudeau was in town and he got her tickets for that night. And he was angry because the lead actress had called in sick that day because her dog had eaten glue and she had to take the dog to the vet. So she wasn't going to be in the show. And Lauren just shook his head and he said, if it was Patti LuPone's dog, it would be dead. You know.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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The idea that, you know, because he's a real showbiz guy. The show must go on. And the fact that his friend Mark Trudeau was going to have to see an understudy. I don't like that.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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That's just what, yeah, I mean, he learned that after the first five years. And so again, he's just like this guy. He's got this lesson book that he, and he remembers. Think about the rest of us. And so many people we know, we repeat our mistakes. We do the same thing over and over. He doesn't. He somehow learns from his mistakes.
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Of him?
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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Gee, let me think. You know, I think that there are people who just feel that sometimes his aloofness can actually be cruel and cold. You know, there are definitely people who feel that way. There's the same number of people who say like, oh, you know, when my wife got sick, he called and fixed the insurance. And, you know, so it's both.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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But I do think that that sort of icy management thing, which you, you know, there's the book deals in it. I think mostly that kind of peaked in the 90s. You know, you have Bob Odenkirk moaning about how, why the hell is this guy in charge and everything? But at the same time, you know, Odenkirk and Lorne are now good friends. I mean...
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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And what there's a lot of in Lauren's life, it's, you know, the way people, you know, in 12 step programs and like make amends, you know, Lauren gets a lot of letters from people 30 years later saying, I can't believe I was such a jerk when I worked for you. Now I know how hard your job is because I've had to, you know, be a director or manage people.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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I think that's true. I think these anniversary shows mean a lot to him, but he isn't on a nostalgia trip. He is really in the moment. He's never like, oh, those were the days, it was better then. I think he probably thinks... The utility of all the fanfare over the 50th is to get more, get more viewers for the 51st and 52nd season. He's always charging ahead. He's thinking about the next cast.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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Earlier this season, you know, I was talking to him about how this current cast is really big. It's a big cast again.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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And he said something like, yeah, well, you know, it always takes like two or three years for the kind of new cast to sort of settle. And it just struck me that as he's about to settle 50th, he's thinking about he's thinking ahead. He's thinking about making the cast work. And I think that's part of the secret of it. You know, he doesn't he doesn't look back.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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And again, why it was all the more special that when I talked to him right after the 40th, he was in the sort of rare sweet spot of thinking about 50th. the past and the future and his legacy. And I mean, I think there's a lot of warmth in him that he's letting come to the surface a little bit more now. And that is kind of lovely.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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Yeah. Sarandos is one of those guys who sends him a father's day greeting, you know? Yeah, yeah. But it'll be interesting to see, right? Sarandos is behind this new, you know, Netflix's first foray into late night television with the John Mulaney show coming.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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Yeah, I think that's right. I think at this point, there's so much, so many issues of respect and karma that nobody's going to try to, you know, nudge them off the stage that way.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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It was really fun.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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Well, and once I got to really know all those personalities, just to see, you know, somebody, Larry, I just did Lawrence O'Donnell's show and he said it was sort of like The Office, you know, like a workplace comedy.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
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I mean, just seeing like the way he would manipulate Colin Jost this way and the way he would get Jonah Hill to not to shut up and the way he was just like, it's really interesting to watch.