Biggest Bombshells from the Lorne Michaels Documentary

Morgan Neville is pulling back the curtain on who Lorne Michaels truly is.

While very few can claim to truly know the enigmatic creator of Saturday Night Live, 81, Neville’s latest documentary, Lorne, offers a rare glimpse into what makes the popcorn-obsessed executive producer tick — from his strict routines to finding refuge on a blueberry farm in Maine.

Through interviews and roundtables with both old and new cast members — including Tina Fey, John Mulaney, Andy Samberg, Conan O’Brien, Chris Rock and more — the film revisits decades of memories, shedding light on the complexities of who Michaels really is and how he positioned himself at the center of such a beloved show. 

Here are a few of the biggest revelations in the Lorne documentary: 

Nobody really knows him — not even people who have worked with him for years

While SNL alum Kristen Wiig describes her former boss as having a “man behind the curtain Wizard of Oz mystique,” Maya Rudolph says in the documentary that he’s got a “folkloric quality” to him. Indeed, Michaels has built quite the reputation around the fact that no one actually knows much about him. 

Longtime SNL writer and producer Steve Higgins, who has worked alongside Michaels since 1995, also notes that you’d have to be “with” Michaels for a long time to get him to open up. 

Despite Michaels’ quiet and calm demeanor, John Mulaney recalls quickly realizing that he was often “f—ing with” him during rehearsals, while Adam Sandler adds that Michaels will never “go too long without saying a joke.”

As Michaels says in the documentary, “People have this idea that they know me.… I don’t even know myself.”

NBC execs hated the Bee Hospital sketch in the 1975 debut episode… and then later changed their minds

In the first-ever episode of SNL, four of the original cast members — Chevy Chase, John Belushi, Gilda Radner and Dan Aykroyd — stepped onto the studio floor dressed as bees for a Bee Hospital sketch that the network would later advise Michaels to remove from the show completely. 

However, Michaels’ love for the sketch concept’s “absurdist potential” inspired him to continue featuring the bees in subsequent episodes — until the network reversed their request and began asking him for “more bees.”

Michaels was convinced he had to “blow up” SNL after five seasons

While looking back at the first five years of Saturday Night Live, Michaels had an epiphany. He decided that the manner in which he and his team were attempting to build something so risky from the ground up was “thrilling but unsustainable.”

He remembers thinking that the show “had to be reinvented” and that it had to be completely “blown up” in order to do so. But since SNL wasn’t his intellectual property, Michaels ultimately made the decision to leave before returning as executive producer five years after his departure. 

His years away from SNL were “confusing” and “lonely”

From 1980 to 1985, Michaels left Saturday Night Live to pursue other projects. He admits in the documentary that it was a “confusing” and “lonely” time that was much like a painful “breakup.”

Although he took on new projects like NBC’s The New Show, which only aired for nine episodes, Michaels says it felt like he was “trying to recapture something that happened naturally” with SNL.

Paul Simon contributed to the Lorne Michaels mystique with his 2012 Vanity Fair profile of his close friend

When it comes to the evolution of Michaels, his longtime friend and neighbor, Paul Simon, 84, jokes in the documentary that the only thing that has changed about him over the years is that “he’s richer.” 

In his 2012 Vanity Fair portrait of Michaels, “a personality larger-than-life, both witty and caustic,” Simon offered up a bio that began: “Born on a kibbutz on land donated by Palestinians who were leaving anyway…” He also wrote about Michael’s early attempt at writing fiction, something titled “To Whom It May Concern.”

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Chevy Chase would have stayed on SNL longer than he did if Michaels had just asked him to

One of the original Not Ready for Prime Time players, Chevy Chase left SNL halfway through its second season to go to Hollywood and make movies. In the doc, Chase, 82, says he probably would have stayed on the show if Michaels had told him, “Please don’t leave.” After leaving, he returned to guest host SNL multiple times.

Although he’s closely identified with New York City, Michaels is a nature boy at heart

While Saturday Night Live typically films a few weeks at a time with a week or two off in between, Neville’s documentary offers a rare glimpse into how Michaels spends his time away from Studio 8H: enjoying the serenity of his blueberry farm in Maine. 

As it turns out, the SNL creator is a big fan of nature and finds the time he spends on his blueberry farm to be a “restorative” escape from the “stimulation capital of America.”

“I wanted animals but not the ones that I would have to kill,” he says in the documentary. “It makes me very happy when I’m here.”

While very few people have gotten to see Michaels in such a serene environment, former cast member Bowen Yang recalls that Michaels would occasionally bring back some preserves to gift cast members for Christmas. 

Michaels brought back Shane Gillis as SNL host after firing him for using racist and homophobic slurs because he thinks Gillis is funny

As Mulaney says in the documentary, Michaels has always loved being “controversial.” Indeed, the SNL creator has invited Shane Gillis to host the sketch comedy show twice since he was fired from the show in 2019 due to the resurfacing of past videos where he used racist and homophobic slurs. 

While reflecting on the “velocity of what happened” and the “zero tolerance” culture that led to Gillis getting fired, Michaels says he brought Gillis back as a host simply because he was “the number one comedian.”

After all, he says, “Hard laughs generally mean you’re breaking some taboo.”

Lorne is currently playing in theaters. Ticket information is available on the Focus Features website.