“Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live,” is a wonderful biography of Lorne Michaels by Susan Morrison, a longtime editor at The New Yorker who had extraordinary access during her 10-year researching and writing of the book.
Michaels was born Lorne Lipowitz in Toronto in 1944, and the book chronicles his longtime fascination with comedy, as he learned over time that he was more curator of what is funny than comedy writer. From Toronto to Hollywood toi New York, his story is a fascinating one – there was no reason, 50 years ago, to think that he would be someone who would not just invent SNL, but also would largely shape the nation’s comic sensibilities over a half-century.
And go figure – in a book populated by the likes of John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Dan Ackroyd, Tina Fey, Steve Martin and a host of wildly popular and successful comedians and writers, Lorne Michaels ends up being the most compelling figure.
“Lorne” is a great business book – he is an idiosyncratic mentor, manager and leader, but he has an instinctive sense of what works and what doesn’t. Not that he’s always right (and the book details failures both big and small), but he’s also guided by a single immutable fact: “The show doesn’t go on because it’s ready; it goes on because it’s 11:30.”
“Lorne” is a long book, some 650 pages. But it is hugely entertaining and briskly paced, cutting back and forth between the biographical segments and a day-by-day description of one week in SNL’s life.
Check it out.
That’s it for now. I’ll see you next week.
Sláinte!!
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