Lorne
- 17 hours ago
- 3 min read
Morgan Neville's new film LORNE is proof that you need a willing participant to make a compelling documentary.
From the start, Lorne Michaels lets it be known that he is not interested in offering up anything personal. Then, best friends like Paul Simon all convey to Neville, "good luck, you're not getting anything out of Lorne".
So what are we supposed to watch for the next 101 minutes?
If you've been alive for any duration of the past 50+ years and have even a hint of pop culture awareness, you know who Lorne Michaels is, the creator of Saturday Night Live, a late night institution.
Michaels also has a solid record of turning the characters from the show into some massive box office hits like "Wayne's World". He's also taken the show's cast to big screen stardom in films like "Tommy Boy" and "Mean Girls".
For about half this docs running time, the film coasts on clips from the most iconic episodes of SNL, Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin's "30 Rock" (what a fantastic show that was) and snippets of new interviews with many of our favorite SNL alumni.
But the past few years have seen entertaining and exhaustive recaps of SNL around its 50th anniversary. If you haven't been hiding under a rock, you've seen all this material and nostalgically enjoyed it very recently.
We're here for something new, and that material is pretty sparse.
I enjoyed the details around Michael's five year absence from the show in the early 80's. In my memory, it was only a couple years he was gone and the show absolutely hit rock bottom.
The ONE new thing I did see for the first time is Lorne's own performances on his short lived Canadian TV skit show, featuring him in front of the camera as half of a comedy duo. It's fascinating to see that young, formative comedian in contrast to the behind the scenes figure he would become.
It was fun hearing the dirt around some of the morons in NBC's executive suite bitching about the shows biggest stars like Adam Sandler, who they just "didn't get". I'm a huge fan of the late Norm MacDonald and the way he refused to quiet doing OJ-is-Guilty jokes even though NBC honcho Don Ohlmeyer was Simpson's steadfast best friend. But like the majority of the film, there were no new insights on that conflict or any behind the scenes feedback from Lorne. Nothing.
Neville gets so desparate with the lack of material that Michaels is offering that he spends most of the movie filling the gap with "TV Funhouse" style animation and someone doing an impression of Lorne's voice for the cartoon.
Huh?
I could be content for quite awhile watching Conan O'Brien, Bill Hader, Fred Armisen and Chris Rock share stories, that table is a great place to be.
Then the film focuses on Lorne during a week of prep for SNL, saying very little. We're forced to watch Michaels move colored index cards around on a cork board while a dozen acolytes stare silently at the board and him, saying nothing. Then he moves another card and swaps two others and the loyal dozen silently act like they've just seen a miracle. The first time we see this routine, its intriguing. By the fourth time we sit through it, it feels like filler.
Meh.
Neville has created some superb docs in the past decade, including 2015's "Best of Enemies: Buckley vs Vidal", 2018's "Won't You Be My Neighbor" and "20 Feet from Stardom".
But even he can't spin gold out of an unwilling participant. The last ten minutes of the film are quiet shots of Lorne standing in the fields of his upstate farm, while Neville bends over backwards to make elementary connections between blooming flowers and the stars he discovered.
It's pedestrian and far below what we've come to expect from Neville.
Meanwhile, Lorne's still standing in that field listening to the wind, and like the entire documentary...saying nothing.
LORNE gets a C.
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