Is Lorne Michaels Who We Think He Is?

I watched Saturday Night Live’s latest behind-the-scenes special, this one called “Saturday Night Live Backstage.” Ostensibly, it was supposed to be about what it’s like to put together a show like SNL – working in a small space, putting sets together in two minutes, and so on – but instead it ended up just another straightforward SNL history lesson.

It’s disappointing because the actual magic of seeing how the crew puts on a show like that would be a fascinating documentary to watch. I’d like to see the late night writing sessions, watch the pitch meeting, see the host interact with the cast members, follow sketches as they go through re-writes, see the new cast members fight for air time and learn the ropes, watch Lorne Michaels cut things at the last minute, and so on. I’ve certainly seen enough of the standard retrospective talking-heads TV special, but that’s what we got this past week anyway. Worse, this special seemed to be culled almost exclusively from leftover – and sometimes reused – interviews from those specials, including yet another rundown of how Norm MacDonald was fired from "Update" midseason (this one blamed the O.J. Simpson jokes, which is a sort of revisionist history so clearly inaccurate that the viewer should feel insulted).

But amidst the endless back-patting of “Backstage,” there was an extended section where they interviewed cast members who had failed to make a mark during their runs on the show, but had gone on to bigger things elsewhere. They were all gracious about their failures – I suppose becoming fabulously successful and wealthy later will do that to you – but there were so many of them. It made me wonder if maybe it wasn’t just an example of the stars themselves failing.

In a show of SNL’s size, it’s perfectly understandable that a few talents would squeeze through the cracks. But look at the list of cast members who failed at SNL but became much more successful outside the show: Robert Downey, Jr., Adam Sandler, Chris Farley, Chris Rock, Joan Cusack, Julia Louis-Dreyfuss, Sarah Silverman, Damon Wayans, Ben Stiller, Chris Elliot, Janeane Garofalo, David Koechner, Rob Riggle, Paul Shaffer, Anthony Michael Hall. And that’s ignoring the fates of the writers who failed on the show but succeeded elsewhere, like Larry David and Conan O'Brien. You can make a valid excuse for the lack of success any of those, but when you see them all together, it makes you wonder.

In the midst of “Backstage,” frequent host Alec Baldwin referred to Michaels as “Darwinian.” SNL creates a place where “only the strong survive,” he noted.  In many ways, that’s a healthy attitude for a comedy show. Something’s either funny or it’s not, it either makes it on air or it doesn’t, and you have to adjust to that. But look again at that list of cast members. Doesn’t it seem likely that with that group, if they had created an atmosphere where these people could have succeeded, the show would have been much better off during those terrible, unfunny years?

And there have been a great many unfunny years. Of course, our memories betray us. Everyone always complains about how the show is terrible now (whenever now is), and complain about how it was much better when _______ was on the show. But it usually wasn’t.  And there were long stretches where it was truly abysmal.

The show has developed a pattern where it flounders for a couple years, finds its footing for a short time once a cast gels, then begins to splinter as the writers and actors run certain characters into the ground. The cast disintegrates, new cast members come in, the show flounders again, then reasserts itself. But nobody remembers the bad years, other than the famous replacement cast of '80-'81 and '85-'86.

We remember the best of the Will Ferrell sketches (and Ferrell himself was just as good as everyone recalls), but most of the stuff on air during his run was the same sketch trotted out over and over.  The "Cheerleader" sketches, the horny couple that Chris Kattan and Cheri Oteri played, Mary Katherine Gallagher… all had grown unbelievably stale by the end.

The mid-90’s were a disaster for SNL. Looking back now, it seems that a crew with Chris Rock/Chris Farley/Adam Sandler/David Spade/etc. must have worked. But it didn’t work – so much so that this article was written – and Sandler and Farley were both fired from the cast without much fanfare.

The 80’s were an unmitigated disaster, save for Eddie Murphy’s performances, until the Dana Carvey/Phil Hartman cast saved the show. And so on.

But we don’t remember any of that. All we remember is what we see on those SNL retrospectives that VH1 loops ad nauseum, until a whole decade of mediocre work is distilled down in our mind to three or four brilliant sketches. And Lorne Michaels knows that.

There’s a mystique to Michaels, the silent, deadpan “comedy genius” who turned a late-night variety show concept into a television institution.  There’s a reason why Matthew Perry’s character on “Studio 60” seemed patterned after Michaels. The respect for him seems to reach the level of idol worship.

Cast members – even the failed ones – are quick to absolve Lorne of all blame, explaining how they just “didn’t get it,” or they weren’t confident enough, or they made mistakes they couldn’t recover from. Lorne “fought for them” as long as he could. There’s a pantheon of reasons given of why their failures are self-inflicted.

But how much of Lorne’s story is talent and genius, and how much of it is luck? If SNL wasn’t as successful as it is, we wouldn’t be telling the same stories we are now. No one is in any hurry to anoint the creators of “Mad TV” or “In Living Color” comedic superheroes. The idea is laughable. But what’s the real difference between them and Michaels? Just a few share points a night.

I don’t mean to discount Michaels, whose legacy I appreciate as much as the next comedy nerd. But at some point, Lorne moved into kid-gloves territory, where every comment about him has to be framed with the understanding that Michaels is untouchable, because of all he’s done for comedy. But before we build that Hall of Fame plaque for him, maybe we should take another good look at the man’s batting average.

Because when the show's bad, we'll find a way to blame everyone else but him. But for the entire 35-year run of the show, they've had a lot of really bad shows - and only one constant presence there for almost all of it.

3. The Social Network

Back in October, I wrote a review of The Social Network, and my feelings on the film are unchanged - and I'm suspecting that others are starting to feel the same. The review is reprinted here.

I've always been a fan of David Fincher and his exacting filmography. And if there's anyone who's completely bought in to Aaron Sorkin's verbose style and intelligent-discourse-is-sexy scripts, it's me. So the idea of the two of them doing a movie together, any movie, is automatically appealing to me. Even the idea of a "Facebook movie."

If you've seen the reviews, you don't need me to tell you that the movie's very, very good, perhaps great. It will garner a Best Picture nomination this spring, Fincher will likely be nominated for Best Director, and Sorkin's an early frontrunner for Best Adapted Screenplay. If you were torn on seeing it, do so. It's worth it.

Interestingly, the things that one would think (or, at least, I would think) should weaken the movie are some of its strongest aspects. The casual viewer might assume that watching someone create a website would be boring, or that the bickering of two college kids creating a web start-up would seem small and petty, but these are some of the strongest parts of the film, simply because the audience inherently knows the stakes of these moments. The small decisions to do something one way and not the other, the slights that slowly fester, the little disputes that that brook separation rather than compromise, all move with the weight of the audience understanding that these seemingly throwaway exchanges changed the course of these character's lives - and, by extension, our lives - in a way they can't remotely comprehend at that moment.

Sorkin noted that he would be just as unhappy as Mark Zuckerberg about the movie (Zuckerberg, Facebook's creator and CEO, has refused involvement in the film and refuted most of its content), since the decisions made at 19 years old would make for an unflattering movie for anyone. I imagine that if someone cobbled together my worst moments from age 19 to 21, you would find a tough character to root for. Especially because these battles are over business decisions made by people who aren't actually in business in any real sense of the word. They're college students. They don't understand how the world works.

I'm now 27, and I now have done enough freelance work to have some understanding of how business is done when the work is hammered out in your living room at 3 in the morning, and all contact is just quick emails and short phone calls. But I made mistakes along the way, and I was mistreated by some of the people who contracted me. These things happen when you're young and unfamiliar with business protocol.

A huge part of the film is based on the lawsuit brought by three students who had hired Zuckerberg to build a social networking website for Harvard students. However, Zuckerberg doesn't build this site, instead he builds Facebook and puts it online himself. The students maintain that he'd stolen their idea, whereas Zuckerberg maintains that his idea was different, and better, which is why his idea worked and their site doesn't exist. Sorkin strives to make sure that both points seem valid: Zuckerberg remembers it one way, the students another, and both are convinced their story is the right one.

And isn't that the way things always are? The Social Network has a clearly deliberate Rashomon quality to it. To Zuckerberg, his idea is different from the one proposed to him, because that proposal made him think "well, then, why not this?" Because his mind works ten steps ahead of most people, he misses the fact that there's a logical progression between the idea proposed to him and the site he created, and that progression means something in the business world. It's the same as a bright high school student who finds himself capable of leaping to the answer in his algebra work without working through the steps given to him in the textbook: since he didn't seem to need the steps, he doesn't realize the steps exist whether or not he's cognizant of using them.

All these mistakes and hurt feelings mean so much more because the end result is a multi-billion dollar business, one that everyone feels they have a stake in. But the weakness of the film is that in some ways, it doesn't recognize that in order to buy the emotional investment of the characters, we need to be convinced that their battles are real. The truth matters.

You would think that it wouldn't, since it's just a movie. Both Fincher and Sorkin have admitted to changing details, imagining conversations, combining multiple encounters into one more dramatic one. Sorkin even pushed to deliberately try to make things more fictional than necessary sometime, with the argument that sometime reality isn't the best choice for a story. There's a scene early in the film where Zuckerberg, the night after a bad breakup, builds a website for comparing Harvard girls against each other. In the scene, and in real life, he drinks several bottles of Beck's, but Sorkin wanted him to make a screwdriver in the film, so that it's clear that he set out to get drunk. And there's nothing wrong with that, right? People understand that this movie version of the story, not the real version.

Except that what keeps this story gripping is its ties to real life. There's only so much an audience can care when a movie character gets cheated out of a billion dollars. But if you can say "this is the story of how Eduardo, a real person and the co-founder of a website you use every day, got cheated out a billion dollars back in 2005," then all of a sudden the financial details, the small decisions carry the weight of us understanding that this guy missed out on not just a lot of money, but on Facebook, the behemoth that controls our online consciousness. That's the only reason we can get involved in this story at all.

I think, in a few years, our appreciation of the movie will fade. We'll remember that it takes place mostly in deposition hearings, we'll recognize the unlikabilty of the Zuckerberg character, and most importantly, we'll forget how important Facebook was in our lives. It'll become MySpace, Friendster, and AIM; Homestar Runner and HotOrNot.com. Something we used to do, someplace we used to spend all our time. The movie will seem dated, and maybe even a little silly. Imagine a website about the founding of any one of those sites. Who would care? Who can even remember?

But as a movie about now, as a movie primed to tap into the zeitgeist, it's damn near perfect. Get out and see it.



4. Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World

Is Michael Cera underrated? He famously “only plays one character.” But isn’t that always the complaint about actors who’ve been typecast. What does Scott Pilgrim really have in common with George-Michael Bluth, or Evan from Superbad, or that short-shorts guy from Juno? George-Michael is nerdy and dumb, Evan was nerdy but smart, and short-shorts guy was… I dunno, kind of quaint, I guess. He never really got a full character in that movie (Did he even have a name? Was it something super-hipstery? I bet it was hipstery. <checking> His name was Paulie Bleeker. So, yes).

Scott, though, isn’t nerdy at all, he’s just bucket o’ rocks-level dumb, and Cera gets to bring his small-voiced, off-beat comedic sensibility to the role. Almost everything Cera says here is laugh-out-loud funny. I wasn’t sold on Cera as the cool rocker kid, or the cool anything kid, and now that he's 22, I'm getting less sold on him as a kid at all. But he and director Edgar Wright seem like a perfect comedic match. He’s fantastic as the consistently quizzical titular hero.

Scott Pilgrim feels like the kind of movie that shows where movies are going, for good and for ill (I’m in favor). It’s frenetically paced, packed with flashy special effects that whiz in from all directions, and tosses off jokes pell-mell in a wild dash to the finish. The critics who disliked it said scathing things about it being “a movie for an ADD generation,” as if filmmakers should make movies for generations other than their target audience. My favorite criticism was that “the film is, like the comic's creator, tragically Canadian.” I’m not totally sure what that means, but I’m pretty sure that’s racist. But they are right, it sometimes feels more like you’re watching a Saturday morning cartoon after six bowls of Lucky Charms than it does a feature film

But let’s appreciate, for once, a movie that is not for everyone for still being very good at what it is. I get tired of film geeks harping that “not nearly enough of America” saw X documentary (this year it's either Waiting For Superman or Restrepo, and it's pretty much the same group who saw both), or infrequent moviegoers looking scornfully at vaguelly artsy movies and saying loudly (why are these people always so loud?) “who would want to see that?” on their yearly pilgrimage to see a Fockers movie. Scott Pilgrim is energetic and entertaining and – this is truly shocking in this day and age – completely unique. And someday we will only watch movies that look exactly like it on our space iPods (It's like an iPod, but it works in space. I guess. I'm not good at imagining the future). 

5. How To Train Your Dragon

I’m not a Dreamworks Animation guy. Other than Pixar, and Disney films from their heyday, there’s very few children’s movies I’ll put myself through. I don’t like animals singing pop songs or cartoons getting kicked in the nuts or excessive fat jokes. Just not my thing.

I understand that they’ve produced some perfectly acceptable movies, but I haven’t felt the need to bother with them, and after years of steering carefully around the Madagascars and Shark Tales and Shrek sequels and various films featuring the Dreamworks face, it took a heckuva lot of good reviews for me to decide to see this film. I’m glad I did.

This will be my third consecutive review of a children’s movie where I’ll use the word “maturity.” The reason is, there’s a growing divide in children’s movies these days between lowest-common-denominator jokes and movies with grown-up themes of longing and sadness and learning to grow up. This is the latter. At the end of this movie, one of the characters loses his leg. No offense to the classic Nickelodeon tunes, but we’re a long way from Wile E. Coyote popping back up out of a crater with a shrug at the camera after the TNT blows up. Movies like How To Train Your Dragon or Up combine the fantastic with the realistic, so that everything you see seems perfectly possible in a child’s world. I’d much rather have a kid see something like that than Mars Needs Moms.

How To Train Your Dragon seems less in the business of making lewd references that go over kids' heads, and more in the business of trying to spark the imagination. Y’know how the best part of Avatar was the part where he trained the dragon (fine, Avaturds, it's not a dragon, it's an ikran. Kill me) and then flew around on it for a while? Well, all of Dragon is like that scene. The animation is thrilling - the camera darts and flits around rocks and through caverns, making full use of 3-D (about time, moviemakers) – if someone had turned a fan on me during the movie, I think I would’ve really thought that I was flying (though I am prone to becoming disoriented in darkened spaces).

Dragon is fun, adventurous, well-told, and while occasionally a little dark, it’s mostly a light-hearted romp through that age-old story of tenuous dragon-viking relations (how many times have you seen that old chestnut trotted out?). It’s strong enough that I’d recommend it to anyone, regardless of whether you have progeny or not.

6. Toy Story 3

Speaking of children’s movies with surprising maturity…

All you need to understand about how good this movie is can be distilled down to a single sentence: at the climax of the movie, when the characters are being dragged helplessly down towards a burning furnace, I honestly believed that this movie was going to end with all the toys being burned alive. I was that convinced by this movie’s commitment to expressing the deep sadness of the plight of the forgotten toy.

All of the of the Toy Story films have explored similar territory, of course. A toy is only important in the life of a child for so long, and then he grows up and doesn’t need it anymore. But if a toy was a living, feeling object, how would that toy feel to be thrown aside so readily? How does a toy adapt to not being needed anymore?

This being a Pixar movie, the answer is: in as amusing a fashion as possible. Were there any comedies this year as consistently funny as this film was?For a movie they reportedly didn’t want to make (feeling they’d sufficiently completed exploring the themes available in Toy Story 2) but were forced to by the studio, the film avoids all the traps that sequels fall into. It isn’t endlessly self-referential, nor full of in-jokes, and it doesn’t tell the same plot as last time from a slightly different angle. Instead, it explores the theme intrinsic to a toy’s life: “what happens when I’m not needed anymore?”

Some of the Pixar films age better than others, and after two straight films that were more impressive but felt less re-watchable (Wall-E, Up), it’s nice to see them return to their biggest strength: making films that people of any age can watch over and over again.