Lorne
“Saturday Night Live” has emerged through the decades as one of television’s greatest works, if only by dint of how many decades it has been on the air. Eddie Murphy, Chris Rock, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, John Belushi, Bill Murray, Jimmy Fallon, Adam Sandler, Will Ferrell, “Wayne’s World,” and “The Blues Brothers” all pretty much began at SNL.
You could fill a shelf with books that tell the SNL story. Dave Itzkoff listed eight standouts in a recent New York Times article. The best-known is probably Live From New York, an oral history by James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales. The best actual history is still Saturday Night, a mid-1980s work by Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad.
Now comes Lorne, a 600-page biography of Lorne Michaels, the man who created SNL, per the book’s subtitle. The claim is probably more or less true, although Michaels had many early collaborators, from NBC executive Dick Ebersol to founding writer-performers Chevy Chase and Michael O’Donoghue.
Lorne is not a memoir. It is a biography, reported and written by Susan Morrison, an editor at the New Yorker. It’s her first book, and she apparently spent a decade preparing it. A 2016 Times article, also penned by Itzkoff, noted that it was already under way.
Notwithstanding the New Yorker pedigree, Lorne reads more like a very good, book-length Vanity Fair profile. In it, Morrison tells us what makes Michaels tick, and that is no small feat: the likes of Murphy and Chase had been trying to figure that out for half a century.
Read on:
https://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/bookreview/lorne
