Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade
Susan Morrison - Author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
Wed, 19 Feb 2025
Hours of conversations with SNL icons, the best Lorneisms, and working for Downey with Susan Morrison, author of LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: Who is Susan Morrison and why is her book about Lorne Michaels important?
Dana, today we have Susan Morrison, a writer. We don't always have writers. We have SNL writers, but she's a writer of SNL. Yes, yes.
She wrote a big fat book about Lorne. And it's the 50th anniversary of SNL. It's a good time to have it out. Lorne, the man who invented SNL.
And she covers a lot. She's telling things to you, listeners, that even we don't know.
You're going to hear something that's a little shocking, a little surprising. How's that for a tease? But if we do a deep dive... The man, the moment, Lorne Michaels, based on the book and what she learned by interviewing. I got interviewed. My quotes are probably silly. I got interviewed, yeah. Got interviewed. Everyone got interviewed. Everyone talked.
And it's just sort of a comprehensive look at Lorne Michaels through his childhood, all the way through his travails, seasons that were rougher than others, and on and on. So it's a very interesting conversation.
oh yeah and they got you know tina fey and steve martin and john mulaney there's all these quotes up front and everywhere you turn you know they're talking about so very in-depth took years to put this together years to put it together and it was very interesting talk we went on and on so uh yeah here she is and you're gonna learn a lot who's in morrison
And I sort of forgot, I had forgotten until recently the wonderful accent thing that everybody says, the eagles.
Oh, the eagles. That's right. The eagles. So you claim to have a book.
I do. I actually can't even show it to you. It's coming out.
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Chapter 2: What insights does Susan Morrison's book provide about Lorne Michaels and SNL history?
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.
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.
Right. And you can be a little dirt, like even TV shows on an eight versus nine when I was a sitcom, you can say a little more at nine because kids are asleep. You can say way more at 10. And when you're way up there at 1130, they don't worry so much about content as much.
Yeah, I think he thought they were probably not even watching.
Well, they didn't care. It was anti-slick and late, so right out of the bat. I'm just a little curious. Sorry, David, did you have something to say? Not at all. I don't like to interrupt him. Did you see the movie Saturday Night? And what was your reaction to it? I mean, obviously it's trying to get a feeling rather than a linear story. Yeah. But how did you feel about that?
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.
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.
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?
Well, I went into it with kind eyes because I knew it was an impossible thing to really capture. So we interviewed Jason, the director. Yeah. And there were things that I really liked. You know, in real time that there probably wasn't a bulletin board on 8H with like 80 sketches on it right before air or that Lorne Michaels was the update guy until right before air.
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