With Morgan Neville’s new documentary about Lorne Michaels now in theaters, Mark Malkoff welcomes Michaels’ biographer Susan Morrison back to LateNighter’s Inside Late Night podcast, where she offers fresh revelations and perspective on late night’s most storied producer.
Among them: Michaels didn’t initially secure any ownership stake in Saturday Night Live when it launched in 1975. As Morrison explains, it wasn’t until his 1985 return—and the guidance of savvy business partners—that he began clawing back rights from NBC, leading to a lucrative sale years later.
Morrison also describes a producer whose early instincts didn’t always align with what SNL would become. At the outset, Michaels saw film as high art—not a vehicle for star-driven comedies—helping explain why he passed on projects like Adam Sandler’s Billy Madison.
The conversation also explores some of Michaels’ more complicated relationships, including his fraught history with Chevy Chase and his sense of betrayal after finding out that Jean Doumanian had jockeyed to succeed him at SNL while working with him on other projects.
Morrison paints Michaels as both exacting and deeply instinctual—someone fixated on details as small as how a host walks onstage, and as large as maintaining control over the ecosystem he built, including his interest in the show’s new UK iteration—an unusually hands-on international effort from Michaels.
Click the embed above to listen to Susan Morrison’s full conversation with Mark Malkoff now, or find Inside Late Night on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
