Long-buried 60 Minutes interview pulls back the curtain (just a bit) on Lorne Michaels' mystique

Ahead of Saturday Night Live‘s landmark 50th season, another long-running program, 60 Minutes, has unearthed some 20-year-old interviews with the cast and Lone Michaels. The feature (from the new podcast 60 Minutes: A Second Look) has a lot to do with the SNL boss’s “sphinx”-like status, and how his aloof nature permeates the show; producer Denise Cetta recalls even the cast (Amy Poehler, Seth Meyers, Tina Fey, and Darrell Hammond) being hesitant to speak on Michaels and his leadership style. As for Michaels himself, he was “suspicious of Leslie’s intentions and wanting to make sure that he got every answer exactly the way he wanted it.”

Turns out, the SNL crew had reason to be guarded; the week 60 Minutes was there happened to be the week Ashlee Simpson got caught lip-syncing during her performance. But Michaels handled the situation calmly. At that point, he was 30 years into running a live sketch comedy show, so not much could phase him—except for Lesley Stahl’s questions about the drug culture behind the scenes of the show and the destructive behaviors of original cast members like John Belushi and Gilda Radner. “There was a period, which ended abruptly for me when John Belushi died, but there was something, a value system that was much more fraternal,” he reflected. “In the sense of, ‘Whatever gets you through the night,’ or, ‘Who am I to judge what somebody else does, as long as people show up on time, can do their job, whatever,’ clearly a bogus value system, and it didn’t work. And I think people felt that people’s privacy and what they did was their own thing.”

Specifically, with Radner’s bulimia, he claimed to be able to “sort of carbon date the moment where Gilda Radner saw herself on camera and thought she looked heavy.” He admitted to having a “paternal” attitude towards his stars, sharing that “at the beginning and I’d say, ‘No, I think you look fine.’ But I think… and we all know that when you’re around people, when you’re around cameras all the time and you see your image all the time, you begin to put it under a microscope and you… become much more dependent on the people who make you look good.”

In the first cast (which also included Garrett Morris, Chevy Chase, Larraine Newman, Dan Aykroyd, and Jane Curtin), “everybody that I chose had gone through some screw-up in adolescence,” Michaels told Stahl. “Either death of a parent, divorce, something, some upheaval.” Michaels, too, had lost his father at a young age, causing him to feel “stuck in adolescence” in a way that made him more likely to “challenge authority.” That attitude presents itself in SNL‘s political content, which Michaels insists is never “partisan.” But “if you’re founded on a distrust of authority and that sort of adolescence, then I think whoever’s in power is probably wrong, and it’s your job to go after them,” he said. “But not in a way that’s partisan or in the belief that if somebody else were in power, things would be much better. Just whoever’s in power.” You can listen to the full episode here.