Lorne Michaels Donates His Personal Archives to the University of Texas

Saturday Night Live may broadcast live from New York, but a trove of artifacts from the show will now live in Texas.

Lorne Michaels has donated his personal archives to the University of Texas.

UT’s Harry Ransom Center—whose extensive collection of cultural artifacts include the archives of creatives like Robert De Niro, David O. Selznick, and Nicholas Ray—will house “hundreds of boxes” of artifacts related to SNL and Michaels’ other projects.

Speaking with The New York Times, which first reported on the donation earlier today, Ransom Center director Stephen Ennis stated that the “lion’s share” of the archive consists of Michaels’ material from SNL, most of which is paper material.

That includes index cards from Michaels’ infamous bulletin board, promotional materials, storyboards, and other documentation that traces the evolution of SNL, including staples like “Wayne’s World,” “Coneheads,” and the Blues Brothers. Tapes, cassettes, photos, and digital artifacts also round out the collection.

Outside of SNL, the collection also includes material from Michaels’ late-1960s days as a writer on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In and The Beautiful Phyllis Diller Show, as well as more recent projects he’s produced like 30 Rock and Portlandia.

It even includes materials from projects that never came to fruition, including 1985, a parody of George Orwell’s 1984 written by Al Franken and Tom Davis, which Michaels had planned as part of his three-picture deal with MGM in the early 1980s.

“It’s from his perspective, as a producer,” Jenny Romero, the Ransom Center’s curator of film and television, told the Times. “You’re not going to see things you would see in a director’s or writer’s or actor’s collection.”

The Ransom Center is set to curate Michaels’ archival material into an exhibition this fall, titled Live from New York!: The Making of Lorne Michaels, promising visitors “a closer view of the production process through drafts, correspondence, audiovisual materials, photographs, artifacts, and more.”

Michaels is reported to have approached UT over a year ago about donating his archives, which date back to his early comedy career in Toronto, Canada. The donation comes as a spike in attention is being paid to Michaels’ long career at the helm of Saturday Night Live. as the show celebrates its 50th anniversary. The SNL creator was recently immortalized in Jason Reitman’s biopic Saturday Night and agreed to participate in an upcoming biography, Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live.

The Ransom Center’s exhibition Live from New York!: The Making of Lorne Michaels is scheduled to run from September 20, 2025 through March 15, 2026. The full archive is expected to be available for research use in January 2026.

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