S5E1: SNL 50: Leadership Lessons from Lorne

Transcript:

Jason Dressel 0:11

Today on the History Factory podcast. Susan Morrison, author of the new book Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live.

I’m Jason Dressel, and welcome to the History Factory Podcast, the podcast at the intersection of business and history. It’s good to be back. We have a new season with a co host, my History Factory colleague, Erin Narloch, and I will have guests from many brands, including Adidas, Delta, Dickies and the amazing brewery Dogfish Head, Erin and I are going to do an upcoming show together about heritage and consumer brands. Our colleague Chris Juhasz from History Factory will join a show to talk about the role of corporate archives in the age of AI. So we have lots of interesting shows in the hopper for this season, and on today’s show, we’re going to talk about Lorne Michaels, the founder of Saturday Night Live, which has its 50th anniversary season finale this weekend. And coincidentally, this year marks two iconic milestones in American cultural history. We have the 50th anniversary of Saturday Night Live, and the centennial of the New Yorker. So it’s only fitting that my guest today is Susan Morrison, the articles editor of the New Yorker, and the author of the brand new biography called Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live. This is Susan’s first book, but she’s certainly no newcomer to shaping stories. Before joining the New Yorker, she was editor in chief of the New York Observer, and she was an original editor at SPY magazine. And what drew me to this conversation beyond the subject matter and the occasion of SNL 50th, was something that Susan had said in a conversation on Bill Simmons Podcast, she said this book could have just as easily have been published by Harvard Business School. And I think she’s really right about that, because Lorne Michaels isn’t just the creator of a sketch comedy institution, he’s also a master builder of teams talent and culture, and he really is a compelling case study in creative leadership. So whether you’re a fan of SNL or just interested in how visionary leaders shape enduring institutions, I think you’ll find this conversation really insightful. So here’s my conversation with Susan Morrison.

Susan Morrison, thank you so much for joining us on the History Factory podcast.

Susan Morrison 2:45

So happy to be here. Thanks.

Jason Dressel 2:47

Well, first congratulations on, on the book about Lorne Michaels. It’s a great read. You know, the first thing I wanted to ask you was, as a long time editor, you know what was kind of the inspiration for, kind of making that transition from, I guess, kind of long time listener to first time caller. You know what, what gave you, gave you the inspiration to to write your first, your first book?

Susan Morrison 3:15

Well, I’ve been a career editor. I’ve been an editor since the early 80s, and about 10 years ago, I was a new empty nester, and I had this preposterous idea that, that meant that I was going to have a lot of free time. Didn’t really turn out that way, but I thought, okay, maybe I’ll write a book. And my attention turned to Lorne, because the 40th anniversary of SNL had just happened. They did that amazing live show. And I just found myself thinking about how remarkable it was that this one guy from Canada had so much influence over what has made so many generations of Americans laugh. You know, what we all think is funny, and it goes beyond a kind of Monday morning water cooler topic of conversation. You know that the language of SNL has sort of hard wired people’s brains, you know, you see it people’s wedding vows. You know, you see it in ads in the subway for life insurance. It’s just really in the water. And I knew Lorne very, very slightly. I had worked for him briefly in 1984 so I had, you know, was friends with a lot of the people on the show and a lot of the writers through the years. And had basically been hearing for decades writers kind of complaining and about this guy, Lorne Michaels, and how impossible he was, and so I knew he was a sort of like a fetish object among the comedy elite. And I just thought, wow, he’s just been hiding in plain sight for 40 years. You know, if I could really try to dig in and explain what makes him tick and what gives him this longevity, that would be a really interesting story.

Jason Dressel 5:02

Well, and one of the things that you’ve said, which is candidly, what really inspired me to invite you to this conversation, and thank you again for having it, is, I heard an interview you describe the biography as something that could have been published by Harvard Business School as a management Bible. And I was curious to get more of your thoughts on that. In terms of what specific qualities do you think make Lorne a powerful case study on leadership? You know? How would you summarize his, his leadership and management style?

Susan Morrison 5:37

Yeah. I mean, I, I have never written a biography, or really, much of anything. It’s one of the things that was so wonderful about researching Lorne’s life is he turned out to be this character who, you know, almost like the protagonist in a Dickens novel. Everything in his life, especially his early life, he learned a lesson from, you know, nothing was, there’s a line in Henry James about his character in Portrait of a Lady where he says “she was one on whom nothing was wasted”. And I kept thinking about that with young Lorne as he worked his way through these cruddy Hollywood jobs, and always learn something. And I think he’s that kind of manager. It’s, it’s purely intuitive, you know, he would never, I mean, I remember Judd Apatow once told me that when he was in his 20s and being the showrunner for The Ben Stiller Show, he was terrified of being the people’s boss, and he would hide away in the office reading big books like management for dummies. Lorne never did anything like that. He had an intuitive sense of how to get what he wanted out of people, an intuitive sort of EQ. And it was, I think he did. It did stress him out in the beginning, because he was the same age as everybody you know, and he would, he would worry about whether they were going to listen to him. But I think over time, you know, he’s, he’s honed a management technique that is, it’s, it’s a, if I had to summarize it, it’s, you know, there’s a certain remoteness. He keeps them a little bit off kilter. He’s, he’s a little bit stinting with praise. You know, one of the things that he routinely does is he, Conan O’Brien talks about how, if you were, you know, on the show, a rookie at the show, and he passed Lorne in the office, he would say, ah, still with the show, you know. But so he keeps them wanting to please him. And He cultivates enough of an air of mystery that they become very preoccupied with pleasing him. Another thing that he does is he really lets them own their own material. You know, number of different people said to me that Lorne philosophy was, you pick the horse, you let him run the race. You know, he doesn’t micromanage. He you are let into his wonderful magic kingdom, and then you’re kind of let loose, to do your thing. Now, for some people, that doesn’t work because, you know, there’s no such thing as orientation. Nobody shows you the rules. Nobody tells you what to do. It’s very much a sink or swim approach. And I think he feels that if you’re talented enough and mature enough, you’ll look around and crack how to make the best of this situation. There are casualties, you know, there are people who just say, “well, I don’t know how to do this, or who am I supposed to write with, or when am I supposed to you know, don’t, are they going to issue me yellow legal pads?” And you know, he really does set it up so that the most resourceful, attentive people are the ones who succeed. I mean, I could go on, but come back to me.

Jason Dressel 8:46

No, that’s great. And, and one thing I wanted to ask you, kind of building on that, is, and knowing, to your point, this is your first, your first biography. But I’m sure, in your experience with the New Yorker and just being a consumer of media, you know, did you get a sense as you got closer to him over the course of the project? You know, did you see comparisons? Or did he remind you of other leaders in in business or media or entertainment? You know? How did you see sort of interesting kind of comparisons or distinctions?

Susan Morrison 9:20

Well, yeah, I’ve certainly edited a lot of stories about all different kinds of leaders, but it’s the one person that he does kind of remind me of is someone who I, you know, had a bit of a personal connection with, which is Si Newhouse, you know, the owner of Conde Nast, I guess, about 10 years ago. And Si, you know, who grew up in a kind of a with a sort of a business background. You know, his family ran all these newspapers. I mean, he, he definitely had that pick the horse, let them run the race mentality. He did not micromanage. I mean, David Remnick always tells a story about, you know, when Newhouse bought the New Yorker. It to join Conde Nast. He really, you know, we did all kinds of super risky things. I mean, David tells a story about, in his first months as the editor of the New Yorker, calling Newhouse on the phone one morning to say we were about to publish some real bombshell by Sy Hersch, by Seymour Hersh about the Iraq war or something. And it was going to be really inflammatory. And David just figured he should let the owner know, you know, because there could be real blowback. And Si just like, great. That sounds great. I look forward to reading it Monday. You know, had no interest in kind of diving in and making showing it to lawyers or anything like that. So, I mean, he does remind me of Si that way, that the thing that strikes me more is how different Lorne is from the other corporate moguls of his generation. You know, when I was starting out, there was a magazine called Manhattan Inc that some of your listeners might know about. It was a sort of magazine about business leaders in the 80s. And there were a lot of them, you know, a lot of my milk and profiles and stuff. And, you know, Tina Fey just said something very illuminating to me about Lorne. She said he never caught that 80s disease that that made you feel that you needed to show the world that you were like a crazy workaholic. All through the 80s, I would read or edit profiles of people like Jeffrey Katzenberg or, you know, Michael Eisner, Barry Diller, and they would all say, you know, I sleep four hours a day. I get up at 5am spend an hour and a half with my trainer. Then, you know, do my stocks. And they’re just this, this insistence on being a kind of crazy workaholic and Lorne always, I mean, his approach to his lifestyle is very similar to his approach to comedy. He would never want it to look sweaty, you know? He, he’s very low key, very kind of underpowered speaking voice. He takes his leisure very seriously, which nobody did in the 80s and 90s. You know, he, it’s not an accident that

Jason Dressel 12:06

They may have taken their recreational leisure very seriously.

Susan Morrison 12:10

Yes, that’s what I mean. Right, and you know, I don’t think any of those other, you know, captains of the universe from the 80s would have thought to have their business schedule, schedules aligned with the vacation schedules of the New York City private school system. You know, he’s always prioritized taking, you know, going to St Barts with his family. And, you know, I say in the book, I think he kind of invented work life balance decades before it came on any of our radars. So that’s something that I think really distinguishes him. He, he makes fun of other business leaders who you know, he once rolled his eyes talking to me about how you know such and such a CEO says that they fly commercial or even sit in coach to be in touch with the common man. I mean, Lorne thinks that’s a lot of baloney. He’ll, he’ll price. He flies private, you know.

Jason Dressel 13:09

So, yeah, right. He’s like, I’m good. You know, it’s funny too, because one of the things I wanted to ask that also struck me, that has to be a reflection of his personality and disposition and discipline. So now is probably a good time as any to ask it, as you talk about sort of his just sort of algorithm. Is one of the things that’s amazing about the show is it’s been on the air for 50 years. It has obviously had its ups and downs, but it is remained relevant, and has been this incredible sort of mirror for culture to look at. And it really is, me. I think one of the things we’ll look back on with Saturday Night Live is how it is incredible. You know? It’ll, it’ll be an incredible historical artifact, right? And one of the things that’s just so striking about the show is the format has hardly changed. I mean, it’s hardly changed at all. And I’m just curious again, from sort of a business perspective, you know, you know, has he been, has he ever wanted to change it? Has he always been the person who’s held the standard of it’s not going to change? Has there been pressure to change it? Or is there always been this kind of a line sense among both his stakeholders and his internal leaders that, you know, no, this is this, is this, is this is always the template.

Susan Morrison 14:30

Yeah, that’s, that’s a really good question. I, I think, you know, as a young man, he was really interested, you know, he grew up watching your show of shows and Sid Caesar, and even when he was in Hollywood in the late 60s and 70s, he worked at these hokey variety shows, you know, The Perry Como show and Phyllis Diller show. And he always he liked the format of the variety show, but it was the content that lagged behind the rest of the culture. You know, in the movies, you know, you had Scorsese and Terrence Malick, but these variety shows were kind of stuck in the 50s. So his idea was always new wine and old bottles. You know, the bottle being the format. And I think that it’s no accident that the format of SNL has stayed the same. He often, you know, as a business principle, it’s sort of about meeting expectations, I guess, right? He, he often compares the format to a Snickers bar. He says, you know, viewers know what to expect, certain amount of chocolate, certain amount of peanuts, certain amount of caramel, and if you don’t mess with that, you know, you’re never going to disappoint. Now, the content of the show, because it’s so mixed. I mean, it will be uneven. That is a constant, you know, it will always be uneven. But if there are one or two things in an episode that somebody likes, it will have succeeded, you know, he, he, he says, you know, the show is, it’s like the Yankees or the Dow, it’s going to go up, it’s going to go down, but it’s always going to be there. And I think that, you know, I think that has really served him. The thing that has changed is, you know, it also, it’s, it’s self renewing. It’s like a sports friendship franchise. You know, he’s got work, he’s on the bench, he’s got old timers showing them the way. And his particular genius, I think, is, is, is sort of having this seismic sense of who to hire and who where that where the talent, where the talent is, and what the next, you know, tranche of comedy is going to feel like, and the one area where he’s ever encountered, you know, meddling from the higher ups. And it only happened once, because I think they recognize their mistake. Is in the early 90s. You know, the people, Lorne experienced this, this really bad bump where he almost was fired. You know, NBC almost fired him. And that was because, as he puts it, it was the first time in the show’s life that the critics and the network executives were aligned in their dislike of the show. And what that was about is that, you know, the show began in 1975 baby boomers loved it, and baby boomers expected a certain kind of tone. Now, in the in the early 90s, the critics and the network, network executives were still baby boomers. They were still in power. They, they didn’t like, you know, Lorne was kind of hire staffing the show with these young people who had a slightly different sensibility. Adam Sandler, David Spade, you know, Chris Farley, and it’s more kind of pointed, aggressive, frat boyish kind of humor than what you got from the sort of Bill Murray or even the Phil Hartman sort of comedy. And they just didn’t like it, you know, they thought there were too many sketches about anal probes. And at that time, NBC ordered Lorne to fire Chris Farley, fire Adam Sandler. And, you know, a different kind of producer would have just said, I’m not doing that. You know, he would have thrown himself in front of the truck. He might have been fired. You know, they had interviewed young Judd Apatow and other people to potentially be in the pipeline to succeed Lorne. But one thing he learned as a younger man in Hollywood is that you don’t get anything by martyring yourself. You know, like the Smothers Brothers refused to cut back on anti Vietnam material on their show when Nixon called Bill Paley at CBS and they got taken off the air. And, you know, yeah, they’re really cool, but they didn’t have a show anymore. And one of Lorne’s tenant says, you know, you can’t do anything if you’re off the air. So, you know, he held firm there. He kind of kept his head down. Went along with it. And of course, within 18 months, Don Ohlmeyer, that same executive who forced him to fire those guys, called him up and said, Could you get me a print of Adam Sandler’s movie? You know? Why am I blanking on the name of it? Whatever you know, for my kids birthday party? I was wrong about that guy. He’s really funny. So Lorne, I mean, another one of his management techniques is just, he sort of keeps his head down. He waits it out. You know, one of the writers, the show runner of 30 rock, told me that watching he was an SNL writer for years. Robert Carlock said that watching Lorne manage always reminded him of something from his high school Latin class, which is the Roman General Fabius Maximus, whose whole strategy was, you win by never going into battle. You know, it’s like you win by attrition. You avoid the big fights, you just retreat, retreat retreat. And they wrote that into 30 rock, you know, as a strategy of the Alec Baldwin character, who’s kind of modeled on Lorne. So that’s, you know, that’s sort of what Lorne has always been able to do. And if you think about, you know, not only has this guy run the show through so many different presidential administrations, but you know, through so many owners of NBC, through so many slates of executives, and particularly if you think about all the years when NBC was owned by GE, you know, one of his writers, Mike, Schur, who’s now a showrunner, said a thing on the pot on a podcast once that I thought really typified, you know, sort of what Lorne was up against. He was quoting like a GE executive fancy, you know, pretending to say, you know, how come our laser guided missile department is doing so much better than our fart joke division, you know? I mean, these were the people that Lorne had to answer to, and he did it just by kind of keeping quiet, just going about his business, not engaging in the fights that they wanted to engage in with him.

Jason Dressel 21:09

Yeah, the ultimate lose every battle and win the war.

Susan Morrison 21:13

Right? That’s a really good way awesome.

Jason Dressel 21:16

Yeah, I love that saying.

I, one thing I wanted to ask you, but I feel like you may have just, I don’t want to assume that you may have just answered it, Susan, but one of the things I did want to ask is, as you think about his career thus far, you know, what are some of the biggest decisions that he has made that you think were really pivotal, or either change the trajectory of the show, or, I think, based on the story you just shared, protected the integrity and sustainability of the show. Well,

Susan Morrison 21:48

I think, I think that episode in the 90s is a big one. I mean, he really could have lost the show if he had come out swinging. I think that might have happened, you know, if he had gone head to head with these guys. But I think he just knew, you know, they’ll be gone. I mean, a couple of years later, Don Ohlmeyer was in the Betty Ford Center, and then gone. He has outlasted them as Conan O’Brien, you know, told me he in the Game of Thrones of show business, Lorne will be the last one standing. And also, you know, he said, you know, in the, you know, post nuclear holocaust, everyone will be dead, but Lorne will be in his office, you know, feeding the fish in his aquarium. The cockroaches will come in, who have taken over the world and and Lorne will say, like, I see you as a kind of Chevy cockroach, you know, but, um, I mean, one, one small thing is, I know that in the 90s, he did consider kind of a big later in the 90s, like a big style change. He thought of changing the band like getting, you know, the sound of SNL has always been that kind of stacks inflected blues, you know, saxophone, heavy blues. His original music director and summer camp friend Howard Shore wrote that music, and it’s always what you think of when you think of SNL, but he did think of changing it out to some sort of more new wave rock band. And Robert Smigel, a long time SNL writer, told me that he said, Lorne, no, no, don’t change it. Don’t change it. And and that has been his approach to many things, you know, the set has been tweaked a little bit, but it still has always had that kind of faded glamor, you know, DECO, kind of New York City. It’s, you know, very redolent of Rockefeller Center, you know, where the show broadcast from. And I think over the decades, that’s hardened into a belief system, like he has a sort of a, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, kind of approach he’s it’s almost become superstition. You know, when they renovated the offices a few years ago, he made sure that nothing really changed. You know, it got cleaned. But he, he, he likes everything you know, to be done the same way. It’s one of the reasons they still use cue cards instead of teleprompters. He just doesn’t want to mess with the magic.

Jason Dressel 24:13

Yeah, and I think, you know, one of the things that has really crystallized for me, as I’ve thought about SNL, particularly this year, of course, with the 50th and I won’t take our conversation this direction, because it’s a whole rabbit hole that History Factory spends a lot of time in. But one of the things that’s really interesting and apparent about SNL is it is a nostalgia play now, and the nostalgia of the show. And you know, the memories that it evokes for multiple generations of people who have grown up with the show, particularly for baby boomers, probably in Generation X, especially, you know, at this point not changing, it is really critical, because it is such a nostalgic moment, experience. And of course, now I’m sure so many people that are experiencing the show, it’s not they’re sitting down and watching it on a, you know, Saturday night at 11:30 necessarily, they’re either watching it later, or, more likely, they’re watching they’re watching it in clips, which is kind of too bad, because it does sort of take away from the nostalgia of the sort of narrative arc and structure of the show, but that’s one something that’s really resonated and really sunk home for me is how much of the show now is a really nostalgic experience for the people that watch it.

Susan Morrison 25:35

Yeah no, I think it’s kind of extraordinary that, I mean, it does sort of, you know, people will watch it with their parents or their grandparents, you know, it’s, it’s this thing that has its own propulsive vitality and yet is so rich as nostalgia. I thought that was brilliantly captured in the opening segment of the 50th anniversary show when Lorne had and again, this is such a Lorne move to think about this, to have his best friend from the first season of the show, Paul Simon, come out and sing with Sabrina Carpenter. You know, the hottest, youngest, new singer out there. And I think they sang Homeward Bound, right? And it was not just optically, like such a cool thing, but it was beautiful. You know? It was, it just was such brilliant showmanship. I think it was an incredible move, I think. And one of the things that he’s done that’s so unusual, you know, this is about the longevity is, you know, he’s kind of created this, this whole culture. Sometimes it reminds me of the old studio system, you know, it’s a culture with walls around it and everybody in it. You know, he’s like a godfather figure. You’re in the family, and then you stay in the family, and so all these people from the varying generations come back into this playpen, into this sandbox, and collaborate with each other, and they’re all part of this same family. You know, Fred Armisen told me that when he meets an SNL person, he thinks there’s something actually even biological, that connects them. He says it. He hears it in their voices. It’s like blood harmony, you know, the way sisters and brothers can sing in this particular harmony. And, I mean, that’s kind of spooky, but, I mean, Fred really believes that. But I think that the way Lorne has set it up so that all these people have a kind of a kinship, and they have a natural affinity, and they, you know, they put each other in each other’s projects, movies and television shows. It’s like this big, big family.

Jason Dressel 27:51

t’s a community, yeah? It’s a huge community, yeah? So I’ll ask the question that probably everyone loves to ask you, right, which is, what does Lorne think about in terms of the future? I mean, when you think about great leaders, succession planning and transitions is one of the greatest challenges. And do you think that he wants the show to live beyond him, or is it so strongly associated with him that is there kind of an inherent sense that whenever he exits the stage, the show will go with him. I’m curious on your thoughts on that.

Susan Morrison 28:32

Yeah, well, he did save the show once, you know, in ’85 they were going to cancel the show. He had stepped away for five years, and they said, unless you come back, we’re going to pull the plug. And the, you know, he felt it was his baby. It was his creation. He did want to save it. I think that he, I think, I think that he, well, the short answer is, I don’t think he’s going anywhere. I mean, I think he’s going to keep doing it, probably in his 90s. That’s, he’s 80 now. I think he has set it up in such a way that he has this great team of deputies, Erin Doyle, Steve Higgins, Eric Kenward, Caroline Maroney, and they really have absorbed his values, his taste. My theory is, you know, there are all these names floated to people who could replace him, but it’s his personality, it’s his authority, his taste, that keeps it together, because they all want to please him. What I think could or should happen is that if it gets to be too much for him, I think he could step back a little bit and just come in there two days a week when he’s completely essential, and that’s Wednesday, when they do the read through, they read four hours worth of sketches, and then they call 10 or 12 to put into production afterward, and that his taste is very important there. And then Saturday, after a dress rehearsal, when they, he, you know, goes into his kind of generalist mode and changes everything around and cuts and changes things and but I could see him just.

Jason Dressel 30:12

And you don’t think that could be replicated? You think that that’s his secret sauce, the campaign?

Susan Morrison 30:15

I think that is a secret sauce, and it could be replicated, but I don’t know that it would have the impact. I mean, he has, people hold him in such there’s, it’s such a strange cocktail of feelings that all these people have with him. They’re, they owe him everything. They, they’re sort of afraid of him. They’re enormously affectionate toward him. Sometimes they, you know, there’s a little bit of derision toward him because he’s such a sort of a poobah, but it is a very powerful cocktail of feelings and affection is part of it. But they really respect him. I mean, he’s been doing this for so long, you know, they, he has a lot of rules. It’s part of his management technique that I didn’t mention earlier. He’s, you know, not only God, his comedy rules, but he has his lifestyle rules. You know, every one of them comes and asks him, you know, what kind of car should I buy? How can I get my kid into private school? You know, just they, he helps them out. And he’s Henry Higgins, you know. So I think, I think it is him and his personality and his taste. You know, he was great friends with William Shawn, the longtime editor of the New Yorker, who famously bungled his own succession in the 80s. Mr. Shawn, as he was known, had singled out numerous staff people at the New Yorker to be his successor, and then kind of kept changing his mind and ended up getting to be a big mess, and finally, he just was fired and had no, no say in who succeeded him. And I think Lorne saw that as a cautionary tale, but, you know, I don’t think he’s, he’s not, you know, I don’t believe he’s done anything like secretly named or thought about a successor, but I think what he’s done is he set up the place so that he can kind of run it with his pinky from afar, if he needs to. And we saw that in action that first COVID show. You know, it was called SNL at Home. He was on in lockdown in St Barts, couldn’t leave the country.

Jason Dressel 32:22

Nice.

Susan Morrison 32:51

His deputies were in New York, and of course, they filmed it all remotely. But you know, Lorne wasn’t going to get on Zoom. It’s just he’s not interested in learning a new technology, so mostly his deputies did it. You know, they checked in with him by phone. I thought that was a really great pilot exercise for how it could work in the future.

Jason Dressel 32:56

That’s really, that’s really cool. So you had the opportunity, and I know this project ended up going for more years than you had anticipated when it started, but you had this incredible opportunity to be a fly on the wall for a lot of the sausage making of the show. What are some of your favorite kind of behind the scenes stories from that, from that experience?

Susan Morrison 33:24

Well, one thing, you know, I’ve been talking to Lorne for a couple of years before I said to him, Hey, how about if I just come into the show for a week and just stay at your elbow and watch like every single thing that you do. I did not think he’d say yes to that, because these meetings, you know, the are really confidential and high charge. But he did, and that was, I really, I got a whole different perspective on how he works by doing that. And I guess there are two things I’ll say. One thing is, and again, this is a really interesting management technique all, each day of the week at SNL has its own set of tasks and its own flavor, its own anxiety level, and all week long, at various meetings, one of the things I saw him do was to make sure, in any gathering that everyone in the room had spoken, you know, he would go around and say, you know, Erin, what do you think? What do you think? He really wanted to hear what everybody thought of things. And I, you know, he’d ask PAs in the hallway what they thought of things, you know, ask pages. And so he’s really listening. And he wants everyone to feel that they have a voice, that they have some sense of ownership. And then after dress rehearsal on Saturday, which he watches from a tiny little cubicle underneath where the audience sits, so he can hear the audience reaction to things. He walks up this little internal staircase between the eighth floor studio and his ninth floor office. It’s like a little cinder block studio, and at that point. It, you know, he’s figured out what he wants to do, and at that point, all the input stops. And my daughter Nancy, works on the show Severance, which a lot of your listeners probably have watched. And I realized that when he’s going up in that staircase, it’s almost like the Severance elevator, you know, like it gets up there, and he’s just a different guy. He’s a different person. And he stands in his office, you know, stands up straight with his pad of notes, and he just barks orders. He’s the only person then, whose opinion really matters, you know, and he’s, he’s changed everything around, and he’s saying, cut two minutes from this. We’re going to lead with this joke. Get rid of this hat. And it’s amazing to see this transformation. You know, Paul McCartney, one of Lorne’s close friends, told me he loves to sit in that meeting because he loves to see Lorne in that mode. So that, that’s part of the secret. You know, it’s just the pure authority of having done it for 50 years, and he’s never missed a show. And another thing that I saw, you know, being in that office on Saturdays is again he, you know, he’s made up his mind. But just to see the how he expertly, you know, he reminded me of an orchestra conductor, and like he’d have a room full of people, all of whom were sort of pushing for their own thing. And he just had this very quiet way of pushing this one down, pulling this one forward, like I saw, there’s an exchange, I think this is in the book, a very small, a subtle interaction with Colin Jost, who’s one of his favorites. And also, you know, he does Weekend Update, and Jost had really wanted a joke in the Weekend Update, update segment about George Soros. And it was this visual of Soros as a vampire, a Jewish vampire with payus and the whole, you know, Hasidic hat, everything was, it was supposed to be a Fox News take on George Soros. And I think Lorne just thought that’s really not going to play. And, you know, it could come off as anti semitic. It just was kind of a very heavy handed joke, and but he would not say that, like, that’s not the way he is. He wouldn’t say that’s a bad joke, or that’s not going to work. Or the way he got his way is that then Alec Baldwin had been arrested that week while I was at the show, not for the gun thing, but it was for punching somebody over a parking place. So the lot of chatter that whole week of are we going to deal with Alec arrest on the show? Because people would expect that. And so there had been a Baldwin joke written into into Weekend Update is a Fox News anchor calling him disgraced former actor Alec Baldwin. And so what Lorne did, instead of saying you can’t do the Soros joke, he turned it into a well, maybe we should lose the Baldwin thing. Maybe we should lose that Alec joke. And that was so important to Colin Jost that he immediately focuses attention on that. No, no, we have to do that. And so, in a way, he just kind of quietly pushed the forest the Soros joke out of the discussion, right?

Jason Dressel 38:10

Yes, like a five year old who’s gotten distracted by another toy.

Susan Morrison 38:17

Again and again., like, just get people a little bit off kilter, but just sort of so it flowed into the outcome that Lorne wanted. And, I mean, I don’t know, I thought it was genius,

Jason Dressel 38:32

Awesome. Well, Susan, this has been such a fun conversation. One last question for you. So what is your next book?

Susan Morrison 38:38

Oh boy, I don’t know. I mean, I, yeah, as you pointed out in the beginning, I, I never, I was never one of those editors who thought I wanted to be a writer, but this was very hard to do, but now that it’s done, I am so glad I did it, and I learned so much, and I realized I learned how to do this just by osmosis from all the brilliant people I work with, you know, and have worked with over the years. For right now, I want to get back into enjoying my very demanding day job without having this other huge obligation on top of it. But I have enjoyed this, and I do feel different about myself. I feel like I can think of myself as a writer, so I think I will probably do something else, but I’m going to give it a little time.

Jason Dressel 39:25

Well, you definitely earned the title of author, so congratulations again. It was a really great conversation, and really appreciate your time.

Susan Morrison 39:34

Thank you. Now this was fun. It’s always fun to talk about Lorne.

Jason Dressel 39:38

Definitely lessons in leadership from Lorne. Thank you.

That was Susan Morrison discussing her new book, Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live. Thanks again to Susan for joining us and thank you for listening. If you enjoyed today’s episode, be sure to subscribe and leave us a review. I’m Jason Dressel and until next time, keep making history.