‘SNL’ Producer Lorne Michaels, Maya Rudolph, Cast Speak Out On 50th Season To WSJ. Magazine

• Michaels says now that he never felt fully assured of the show’s survival until the 2010s, after Comcast’s acquisition of NBC ushered in top executives who revered the SNL legacy. “They’d grown up with the show. For them it had always been there,” Michaels says. After a beat, “which isn’t to say they weren’t worried occasionally.”
• Four days before the season 50 kickoff, Maya Rudolph is in Los Angeles, preparing for the first of many expected commutes to New York to play the Democratic presidential candidate. “It felt like a call to duty,” she says of Michaels’s request, received a few days after Biden dropped out, to play Harris.
• Most viewers would agree that SNL puts a softer bite on its Democratic targets these days. That’s been the trend across late-night comedy, says former writer James Downey. “You create your own audience over time by pleasing some people and offending others.” Michaels doesn’t see it quite the same way. He says he’s a registered independent voter, doesn’t know or care about the political leanings of his staff and takes a bipartisan approach to satire. “There’s stupidity on both sides. Our job is to make fun of it.”
• With about 30 writers to 17 cast members now, the configurations are fluid. Though the cast pitches and writes material, too, they’re always looking to link with writers who can boost their chances at joining a sketch that can survive the week. That musical-chairs factor adds to the pressure of generating funny ideas on deadline. “My first year, it was really hard for me to knock on doors and think that anyone would want to write with me. Not because people weren’t welcoming but because I thought I was following the rules of senior, junior, sophomore, freshman,” says Heidi Gardner, who came on in 2017.
• Sketch writers oversee every step required to produce their pieces. “That’s where my nerves come from—my responsibility to everyone involved,” cast member Chloe Fineman says. To conjure a weird French variety show from the 1970s in a sketch she co-wrote, “La Maison Du Bang!” Fineman needed funky custom music, dances and outfits, including her dress designed by costume head Tom Broecker and crafted with extra rhinestones by head tailor Sam Bennett. Fineman’s mindset: “Oh, my God, I have to get this thing on air because 30 people are involved, and 10 of them were up until 3 a.m. last night.” The sketch got cut from the lineup when Timothée Chalamet hosted last November but made it to air five months later, featuring a shimmying Kristen Wiig instead.
• Though sex, drugs and anarchic behavior are part of the SNL lore, staffers have long said it became a tamer environment over time (notwithstanding the stashed containers of urine Fey occasionally found in writers’ offices, according to her memoir, Bossypants). Michaels believes the SNL collective has a way of self-policing for destructive or deadbeat behavior. “If you can’t perform or you’re f—ed up, everyone notices, and if you let everybody down, they’re going to give you a really hard time because they’re your peers,” he says, then points out that the show’s most notorious casualties—namely John Belushi and Chris Farley—died in the years after they left SNL.

• “He said something stupid, but it got blown up into the end of the world,” Michaels recalls. “I was angry. I thought, you haven’t seen what we’re going to do, and what I’m going to try to bring out in him, because I thought he was the real thing.”
• NBC made the call to fire Gillis, Michaels says. “That was very strong from the people in charge. And obviously I was not on that side, but I understood it.” Michaels says he stayed in touch with Gillis as the comedian later blew up into one of stand-up’s top acts. He allows that there was symbolism in his choice to have Gillis host SNL last February.

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