Morgan Neville‘s Lorne documentary features a wealth of archival footage and photos of the man who would create and lord over NBC’s Saturday Night Live. Even so, there are seminal moments in Lorne Michaels‘ career that could not be chronicled with actual images.
To fill that narrative gap, filmmaker Neville invited Robert Smigel to re-open the doors to TV Funhouse, the cartoon shorts he memorably produced for SNL.
A total of 101 TV Funhouse segments aired on SNL between 1996 and 2008, plus one more in 2011. Recurring installments included “The X-Presidents” (which envisioned Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush as superheroes), “Fun with Real Audio” (animation set to real-life audio tracks), “The Ambiguously Gay Duo” (in which Stephen Colbert and Steve Carell voiced the titular crimefighting couple of Ace and Gary), and Disney spoofs such as “Bambi 2002” (Mom’s alive, and mad!).
The SNL segments even spawned a Comedy Central series of the same name hosted by Doug Dale.
So how are the new animated sequences—produced again by Smigel, Robert Marianetti and David Wachtenheim—woven into Lorne‘s otherwise very real look at SNL’s ever elusive creator?
When archival material is unavailable to provide visuals for certain stretches of Michaels’ arc, Lorne casually switches over to cartoon approximations of what transpired. The animated and often-fanciful segments include Michaels’ regimented morning wake-up routine; the recurring gag that an army of servants are at his beck and call to pick up and hand him the telephone; banquet table confrontations with assorted NBC execs; and a dream sequence in which Michaels debates between returning to the SNL helm after a five-year absence… or vacationing with Mick Jagger.
As Neville explains, “I was thinking, ‘Well, how do I tell some of these things’? Do we do recreations?”
“I wanted to do something funny, and I was always a huge fan of TV Funhouse segments,” he says. “I called Smigel and said, ‘How would you feel about getting the old team back together and doing TV Funhouse’? And he was into it. They were all into it.”
Not only did Smigel reunite members of his TV Funhouse team, he himself voiced Michaels and various other assorted characters—save for onetime NBC bigwig Irwin Segelstein (who is voiced by former SNL head writer Jim Downey).
“There was some point where I was recording Smigel’s voice session, and he’s doing the sound of Lorne snoring in his sleep, and it was so funny,” Neville recalls. “I just said, ‘Did you ever think 40 years ago that you would be getting paid to imitate Lorne’s snoring?’”
Opening in theaters this Friday, Lorne features interviews with past and present SNL cast members and writers including Tina Fey, Colin Jost and Michael Che, Mike Meyers, Chris Rock, Maya Rudolph, John Mulaney, Andy Samberg, and Conan O’Brien.
Neville’s credits include last year’s SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night four-part docuseries for Peacock, as well as the Academy Award-winning 2013 doc 20 Feet from Stardom, 2018’s Won’t You Be My Neighbor? (about Mister Rogers Neighborhood‘s Fred Rogers), and 2024’s Steve! (Martin): A Documentary in 2 Pieces (for Apple TV).
