Playboy Interview: Lorne Michaels

a candid conversation with the ringmaster of "Saturday night live" about gilda, chevy, dan, John, dana, eddie, jan and the show that made them stars

Lorne Michaels, the executive producer and creator of "Saturday Night Live," sits in his cubbyhole command center beneath the balcony seats in NBC's studio 8H and waits patiently for dress rehearsal to begin. He puts on his headphones and sips from a tall glass of cold beer.

For Michaels, dress rehearsal is more important than the actual show. It's his last chance to correct flaws, punch up weak lines and fix recalcitrant props before the show is broadcast live later that night to 20,000,000 viewers. Even though the show has been on the air for 17 years and has become a pop-culture phenomenon, Michaels can't fully relax. He studies and analyzes every scene, dictating notes to an assistant who sits by his side.

This show's opening skit re-creates the Senate Judiciary Committee's recent hearing. Anita Hill has been excused and Judge Clarence Thomas returns to the witness table. Michaels leans forward and stares at the TV monitor sitting on a shelf two feet away.

"Can anyone tell me why that pretty girl behind Phil [Hartman, playing Ted Kennedy] keeps leaning into the frame?" he asks. "Get her out of there." A split second and another camera angle later: And get rid of the Coke can, please." After a series of close-ups of Dana Carvey (playing an ancient Strom Thurmond), Al Franken (a bow-tied Paul Simon) and Kevin Nealon (a wispy-haired Joe Biden), Michaels throws up his hands in despair. "Why the fuck doesn't anyone know where their camera is?"

As Chris Rock (playing Long Dong Silver) shouts the familiar refrain--"Live, from New York, it's 'Saturday Night'!"--Michaels enters into a tense confab with his staff, one of many that will occur during and after dress rehearsal. Show time is only three hours away.

The scene in the command center is probably not very different from what it was on October 11, 1975, when Michaels produced the very first "S.N.L.," a bold experiment on the part of NBC to replace the usual Johnny Carson reruns with what Michaels characterized as "a comedy show, frank and intelligent, for young urban adults." It would be a departure from regular network fare--with guest hosts, a low-profile repertory cast and music that young people actually listened to. Michaels achieved much of his goal: The humor was hip, the music contemporary, and young urban adults responded enthusiastically. He was wrong, however, about his repertory cast remaining low-profile. That first night introduced Chevy Chase, Gilda Radner, John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Jane Curtin, Laraine Newman and Garrett Morris. And that was only the beginning.

For the next five years, Michaels won Emmys, launched careers--including that of Bill Murray, who joined the cast during the second season--and made TV history. Finally, burned out, tired and abandoned by many of those stars he had created, Michaels called it quits.

The show went on. At first, it seemed that, without Michaels, "Saturday Night Live" would be "Saturday Night Dead." First-time producer Jean Doumanian ran the show for one extremely shaky season--remember Charles Rocket, Denny Dillon, Ann Risley or some of the other cast members from that year?--before she was fired. But the next season, with Dick Ebersol, an experienced TV executive, in charge, the show seemed to regain its footing--if not its ratings--giving sizable career boosts to Eddie Murphy, Billy Crystal, Martin Short, Joe Piscopo, Jim Belushi and Christopher Guest.

Michaels, meanwhile, puttered in his garden, failed in his first weekly prime-time outing, "The New Show," and collaborated with Steve Martin and Randy Newman on the movie "Three Amigos." He then stunned the TV world by deciding--five years after he had quit--to rejoin and rebuild his brain child and try to take it into the Nineties.

Was it a step forward or a step backward in his career? And could he do in the late Eighties what he had done so successfully in the late Seventies? At first, it looked as if Michaels had made a big mistake by going home again. NBC decided to cancel the sputtering show in 1986, but Michaels pleaded for one more chance. He got it, pulled the show back from the brink and led it this past season to its greatest popularity ever.

It was an amazing achievement in a business in which most new shows disappear after a few weeks and virtually none live longer than it takes to earn a college degree. It was even more impressive given the fact that the man who accomplished it was never supposed to be in show business at all.

Michaels was born Lorne David Lipowitz on November 17, 1944, in Forest Hill, a ritzy Toronto suburb. His father, a successful furrier, died when Michaels was 14. Michaels and his brother and sister were raised with high parental expectations. For Michaels, who majored in English literature, that meant law school or teaching.

But while at the University of Toronto, Michaels co-wrote and directed a satirical revue, piquing his interest in show business. Shortly before graduation, he approached the comedian Frank Shuster, father of his soon-to-be first wife, Rosie, seeking advice. "I said, 'I'm seriously thinking of going into show business full time. What do you think?' He said, 'If I were you, I'd go to law school.'"

Michaels ignored the advice and soon teamed up with his friend and partner, Hart Pomerantz, to write and perform for Canadian TV. The duo moved to New York in 1968 and landed a job writing jokes for Woody Allen. "But I don't think we added anything to his career," Michaels is fond of saying.

Next came Los Angeles and a stint with "The Beautiful Phyllis Diller Show," then a year penning opening monologs for Dan Rowan and Dick Martin on "Laugh-In." In 1969 Michaels and Pomerantz returned to Canada to produce comedy specials for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Once back home, he got the chance to ask Shuster why he told him to go to law school. "He said, 'When you're in show business for a long time, you realize how few people succeed. So who wants the responsibility for giving that kind of advice? Besides, if you're really going to do it, nothing is going to stop you.'" After splitting from Pomerantz, who wanted to perform while Michaels wanted to produce, he made a comedy pilot for the CBC and was told it was "too serious, too clever, too avant-garde." Later, Lily Tomlin asked him to be a writer on her comedy special "Lily" in 1973. He won an Emmy for that work and co-produced, with Jane Wagner, two other Tomlin specials.

But it was with "Saturday Night Live" that Michaels found himself. He did more than create and produce one of the most successful shows in TV history and launch dozens of careers (many of his behind-the-scenes colleagues have been successful as well). Michaels also showed stodgy TV executives that hip comedy could work; he made the airwaves safe for David Letterman, "In Living Color" and Arsenio Hall. His comedic world view, which seemed unique in 1975, permeated TV, movies and comedy clubs. He is the unofficial godfather of modern comedy.

We sent Contributing Editor David Rensin to meet with Michaels over a six-month period in New York and in Los Angeles, where he was producing the "Wayne's World" movie, to plumb the secrets of his longevity. Michaels gives few interviews, and a look back at "S.N.L." history through the creator's eyes promised to be a rarity. Says Rensin:

"For a man who has done so much for comedy, Michaels is surprisingly low-key. He's a droll, charming man who takes most things very seriously and often travels a roundabout route to making his point.

"Michaels has always preferred to let 'Saturday Night Live' be his public face, keeping the rest to himself. Attempts to get him to open up on personal matters are met with self-effacing resistance and explanations that a good producer is an invisible one.

"But when the subject is 'Saturday Night Live' itself or any of the people who have passed through it, Michaels loves to talk. It's clearly the great love of his life. And while he frequently gives credit to others, he is justifiably proud of his creation. Among entertainment programs, only 'The Tonight Show' has been on the air longer than 'S.N.L.' We started there."

[Q] Playboy: Considering the life span of most television shows, Saturday Night Live should have died years ago, and its audience is now larger than ever before. Why has S.N.L. lasted this long?

[A] Michaels: Because it's about writing, and it has attracted writers forever. So writers write about it, and other writers read about what they write. At first, we didn't know that the show had any value; we thought it was biodegradable. It probably still is biodegradable. But it's important to me. I love doing it. People always ask me about Saturday Night's role in the history of television----

[Q] Playboy: That sounds like a good question to us.

[A] Michaels: There's a joke I told when the show received a Peabody Award. You know that saying that if you put a bunch of monkeys in a room with typewriters, sooner or later they'll write Hamlet? In the Sixties, Dick Cavett used that in a joke. He said he had left the monkeys in the room; none of them had written Hamlet, but three of them had written Valley of the Dolls. Funny. But Stanley Myron Handelman's version was the most brilliant. He said he left the monkeys in the room, and a couple of weeks later, he looked in on them, and he said, "You know something? They were just fooling around." I always loved the joke because for me it represented what we were doing at the show: We were just fooling around.

[Q] Playboy: Didn't the public and the critics think that you were doing something important?

[A] Michaels: Maybe it is bigger than we knew, but there was a period, a state of grace, for the first few years when all we were doing was fooling around, making one another laugh. We had more in common with early Warner Bros. cartoonists. Disney was taken seriously, they weren't. They just made one another laugh and they did great comedy. But to answer the historical question, our contribution was we were making other people out there--people just like us--laugh. We knew they were out there because we had just sprung from the audience. We were the people watching.

[Q] Playboy: Is that why you thought Saturday Night Live could succeed?

[A] Michaels: Yes. The head of NBC then, Herb Schlosser, said, "We're looking for a show for young urban adults." Yuppies weren't invented yet. I was a young urban adult. I knew that television had changed everything. There was no difference in what people knew whether they lived in New York, Los Angeles or the heartland. So if I could bring what was already popular in records and movies to television--if I just did a show that I would watch--well, there were lots of people like me. There was nothing cynical about it; no clever scheme of outsmarting anyone.

[Q] Playboy: Today, S.N.L. is part of the establishment. One writer even suggested that the current cast is "perfectly ready for prime time. No one is dangerous." Do you agree?

[A] Michaels: Nobody's self-destructive, if that's what you mean. There's a phosphorescent glow to people who are self-destructive. People pick up on that. There was certainly a much harder edge to the original cast. Most of them came with little professional experience and almost no idea of compromise. It looked like you did Saturday Night for a while, got some features and then became a big deal.

[Q] Playboy: Is that a reasonable expectation today?

[A] Michaels: Everyone comes in thinking that, but I don't think it happens for many people.

[Q] Playboy: Maybe that's because Saturday Night Live was once on the cutting edge of comedy----

[A] Michaels: That's not my terminology.

[Q] Playboy: What's yours?

[A] Michaels: I never bought "the cutting edge." Maybe it seemed more passionate then. And honest. I think it's still that way. I honestly think the show is better written now than it was in the beginning. [Producer] Jim Downey wrote a political piece early in the season that was as smart as anything we have ever done. And probably a little sharper in its edge.

[Q] Playboy: Even so, hasn't the audience changed? Aren't your viewers now in the mainstream?

[A] Michaels: Many people tell me that they watch it with their kids. So it's the mainstream baby boomers and their kids. Last year we did a show hosted by Christian Slater, with Bonnie Raitt as the musical guest. I'd watch it for Bonnie. The next week we did Kiefer Sutherland and Skid Row--not so much a baby-boomer show. Last year Susan Lucci hosted. Why? Because there are a bunch of people at our office now who grew up on Susan Lucci and love her. As always, the show reflects the culture and the people writing it. This period of Saturday Night Live is much more Jim Downey's, from a writing perspective. He dominates in much the same way that I dominated in the early years.

[Q] Playboy: And yet, he's nearly forty.

[A] Michaels: It isn't so much about chronological age. Jim doesn't have a political agenda in the sense that the show once seemed to symbolize--or at least its media image did--the disenfranchised. That's what gave it the ragged and raw feel. It looked more menacing than it was, but I think that had more to do with fashion than with content. We were always a comedy show.

[Q] Playboy: And now the show plays to the franchised?

[A] Michaels: No, Saturday Night Live's core audience is still the disenfranchised, which is the youth of America. People between the ages of twelve and seventeen are probably at their peak of feeling disenfranchised.

[Q] Playboy: That's the audience?

[A] Michaels: An enormous part. We take them very seriously. And they take Skid Row seriously. Wouldn't you have a hard time taking Skid Row seriously? They don't. Or they're at least intrigued by it, or they think that it's honestly rebellious.

[Q] Playboy: What lessons from the first five years have helped you in this second run?

[A] Michaels: I'm much faster to confront things, like the fraternal stuff, which got us into trouble with drugs. I used to think it was none of my business what somebody did in his off hours. I don't buy into any of that shit anymore. If somebody has fucked up, I deal with it immediately.

The other important thing is this: Before, I never left the studio satisfied. I saw only the mistakes and it took me two days to shake off the show. I'm still the same pain in the ass regarding attention to detail, but I'm also more forgiving. Saturday Night Live has always been called uneven. I think "uneven" should be on my tombstone.

[Q] Playboy: Are you more open?

[A] Michaels: Yeah. Once, I was incredibly judgmental about who I would let on the show. I stopped Steve Martin from being on the show during the first year because I didn't take his act seriously. Here was this guy with an arrow on his head and doing balloon animals. It wasn't my definition of the show. I wanted to distance us from that--for fear of not being taken seriously.

[Q] Playboy: Yet he became one of the most successful hosts.

[A] Michaels: The most successful, without question. Actually, there were a lot of comedians, without mentioning names, whom I was rejecting on the basis that they were wearing shirts with enormously large collars--which was nothing but snobbery, I suppose. We were all of a generation that, at that time, was tremendously unforgiving, just as political correctness is now. There was a kind of social correctness then. I resented it when Bob Hope made jokes about hippies. We were incredibly serious about what was ours.

[Q] Playboy: Now it's seventeen years later. Saturday Night Live hasn't been your only work, but is it your life's work?

[A] Michaels: To a large extent. Being with the show has been like meeting somebody and falling in love when you're young, and it ends up that it's the person you're with for your entire life--and you think you must have made some mistake.

[Q] Playboy: What do you mean?

[A] Michaels: I was so young. I was emotionally immature. I was completely unprepared for what happened, except professionally. It took a long time to gain equilibrium, though I was very good at acting balanced, as if everything were all right. On the other hand, I wanted this kind of life; to be in charge and at the creative center of my work. I had to apprentice a lot and I learned an enormous amount from many people. I got a lot of breaks.

[Q] Playboy: For instance?

[A] Michaels: The first was just getting on the air. Saturday Night Live was the first show--not the first attempt, certainly--to break through in the protected late-night time period without being stepped on, with its exuberance intact. I got lucky. Just because the clouds parted, just because NBC was number three, because we were in New York, because it was late night, because all of these things came together at that moment in October 1975. The odds of it ever happening again are, well, there hasn't been another. I didn't take it for granted.

[Q] Playboy: Did the show deviate much from your orginal vision?

[A] Michaels: The original concept was to be more of a special each week. I figured the attraction would be a different host every show: from show business, from music, from politics, from sports.

[Q] Playboy: But the real stars turned out to be the regular players, such as Chevy and Gilda. Why did you pick them?

[A] Michaels: At the time, they were the funniest people I could find. I wanted not so much physical types as types in range. For instance, Dan Aykroyd was brilliant at playing authority figures. Bill Murray could hold a room spellbound, if he chose to. Of all the people who did the show, I admired him the most, in terms of his believing in what he did. I think he was touched by genius.

[Q] Playboy: What else did you look for?

[A] Michaels: I had to like them. They had to be smart, make me laugh, have a gift. I went through a giant upheaval in adolescence when my father died. Gilda Radner's father died when she was young and Bill's did, too. So a part of me got stuck in adolescence for a long time: the rebelliousness, the resentment of authority, the questioning of the official version. I chose people who also had that "bad attitude." I had to know I could spend a year in a room with them without being driven crazy. Most of us had moved to New York City. We had no other entanglements, so we were mostly at the office. Our closest relationships were on the seventeenth floor. It was our first opportunity to prove ourselves.

[Q] Playboy: Which you did, winning a slew of Emmys after the first year. And then Chevy left. Were you surprised?

[A] Michaels: Chevy and I sensed it was over by the end of the first season, when he and the press had separated him from the Not Ready for Prime Time Players. He was never an official cast member anyway, so he had the freedom to leave; the others didn't. We knew that the show would either become the Chevy Chase Show or----

[Q] Playboy: Did he want that?

[A] Michaels: Not really. And I wouldn't allow it. The tug of opportunity and career made his life difficult. He was flooded with offers. And in the end, the separation took months and months.

[Q] Playboy: What were your parting words to him?

[A] Michaels: I used the only metaphor that worked for me: "We're a championship team. Next season, with you gone, we won't win as many games, but I still think we'll be a championship team," I told him. "Don't leave. You think you're going to get to go from championship team to championship team, but it doesn't happen that way."

[Q] Playboy: And you were right.

[A] Michaels: It's all water under the bridge now. If Chevy hadn't left, John [Belushi] and Gilda wouldn't have emerged. Suddenly, a very tall tree was gone and there was more sunshine and lots of other things sprouted.

[Q] Playboy: Are you saying that you were forced to take those guys seriously because Chevy left?

[A] Michaels: Not exactly forced. I was always a big fan of the other work. There's just as much John and Danny in the first few shows as there is of Chevy. Actually, more.

[Q] Playboy: After Chevy left, didn't your friendship deteriorate?

[A] Michaels: We stayed friends. The only time that it was awkward, and just tore me apart, was when Chevy came back to host, and he and Billy Murray got into the legendary fistfight backstage. It was like old show versus new show. I remember Chevy was just absolutely devastated by it. And then he had to go on and be funny. It was pretty ugly.

[Q] Playboy: Backstage controversy still occurs. What happened when Andrew Dice Clay hosted the show and cast member Nora Dunn refused to appear?

[A] Michaels: The true story is told from many perspectives. Clay had just sold out Madison Square Garden, which, for a one-man show, seemed to me like something was happening there. I knew that his act was coarse. I'd encountered a diversity of opinion on him: from funny to offensive. I had no problem with people's not liking Clay's comedy, but what I was so astonished by--particularly in the press--was that we were criticized for putting him on television in the first place. There was a long-winded piece in The Boston Globe that compared Clay's appearance to the Holocaust, which, to me, trivialized an important metaphor.

[Q] Playboy: Sounds as if you were accused of letting Nazis march in Skokie, Illinois.

[A] Michaels: Worse. And the criticism tended to be directed at me. If he were making fun of Jews, would I allow him to do the show? And of course the answer is, "Watch the show." The only other time that happened was in the mid-Eighties, when we were told we couldn't do anything that had to do with drugs, period. They saw any discussion of drugs as prodrug. Ridiculous. We're a comedy show, not a civil-liberties forum. Our job is to be funny and bright.

[Q] Playboy: Isn't your comedy perceived as liberal, and therefore in these conservative times, dangerous?

[A] Michaels: We make fun of liberal and conservative politicians. We just get in and go, "That guy's a dick" or "Did you see that? Do you believe they did that?" Sometimes we do it with wit and intelligence and sometimes we do it stupidly and ham-fistedly. Come on, we did the "MTV Spring Break from the Kennedy Compound."

[Q] Playboy: What happened to Clay?

[A] Michaels: He got blind-sided. Please understand, Nora Dunn had every right not to do the show that week.

[Q] Playboy: Were you upset by the way she handled it?

[A] Michaels: If she had let the other women on the show know, or if she had talked to me or anyone else and said, "I have a problem with this," that would have been fine. But before Clay arrived at the office, it was on the wire services. None of us had even met him yet, so it was awkward, to say the least.

[Q] Playboy: You didn't know about it?

[A] Michaels: No. For reasons that were best known to her, she had gone to the press first. I was responding to the A.P. and U.P.I. before I'd met the host or talked to Nora.

[Q] Playboy: What was the reaction of the other women?

[A] Michaels: I don't think it's unfair to say that Jan Hooks was upset, as were Bonnie Turner and Christine Zander. I think that Nora felt that by taking the stance she did, others would join her. It's like declaring war and then looking behind you to see if you have amassed an army. They were in such an awkward position because it meant that by going on with the show, they tacitly agreed with Clay. We never suggested that putting someone on the show is endorsing what he believes in. I've had Ralph Nader on the show a couple times; I'm not sure I endorse everything he's ever done. Or Ron Nessen, who was President Ford's press secretary. Or George Steinbrenner, for that matter.

Clay didn't deserve the treatment he got, even though there was some validity to Nora's position. I also think that she was coming to the end of her time on the show and was going through a big emotional upheaval about deciding to leave or not.

[Q] Playboy: She hadn't decided to leave?

[A] Michaels: No, she was going back and forth about it. There are certain people who have to break things off and make it so they can't go back, for fear that they will go back. Lots of people break off relationships that way.

[Q] Playboy: How did you handle these problems, especially back in the early days when you were young and dealing with being an overnight success?

[A] Michaels: I never had that kind of success. And because of the way I was brought up, I was worried about being vulgar, success going to my head, being thought of as an asshole.

[Q] Playboy: You wanted to be liked?

[A] Michaels: Yeah. Being liked is just congenital with me. I would take things away from Gilda or Danny and give them to Laraine or Billy if they were light in the show. I guess I picked up my value system at summer camp. I wanted to make fair what is never a fair thing: show business. My ex-partner in Canada, Hart Pomerantz, used to say that in a Canadian beauty contest, they don't give the award to the most beautiful girl, because she's already beautiful; they give it to the girl who's going to be hurt the most by not getting the award. I did some of that. But the audience also had clear favorites.

[Q] Playboy: According to the book Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live, around the third season you became less accessible. Did you start closing your office door more?

[A] Michaels: I don't know if the office door was closed more. I do know that there had always been, fairly or unfairly, a hierarchy to the show. Chevy and I were the same age. Danny and John never had the same vote in that way. Gilda, in a certain way, always had my ear. Laraine was always very perceptive about what was really going on. Jane always held herself aloof because she was married and had a life outside the show. John had enormous influence over Danny. Danny worshiped John for his talent and style.

[Q] Playboy: Here's a quote from the book: "He [Lorne] became a different man: imperious, even regal.... No longer a slightly scruffy, ambitious, romantic Young Turk.... He would withdraw into his own center. He created an enormous black hole, an impermeable mirror." That's flowery, but is it accurate?

[A] Michaels: No, it's incredibly fanciful. I didn't read the book. There was a pecking order. Talent selects itself. People knew who was funnier. Some were never certain of what they were going to write. Also, people were trying to find a way to get on the show, but they weren't confident in their own voice. They'd come to me and say, "Tell me what to write; guide me." At a certain point, I probably was less likely to listen to that. But the more insecure they got, the more they pressed.

[Q] Playboy: And the more you resisted?

[A] Michaels: Yeah, because it wasn't about the work anymore, it was about Lorne's time. Also, there was now money in it. People always wanted to get something on the air. The outside world was saying to them, "You're on Saturday Night Live? You know Gilda Radner and Bill Murray?" So they were now important, by definition. They were all attracting entourages and fans. And suddenly Chevy was making a couple million dollars in the movies. John Belushi was offered a couple million dollars. There was a lot of "How am I gonna get in on it?"

[Q] Playboy: And your time and approval would make it happen?

[A] Michaels: Sometimes. But mostly I was the one who had to pull it back into reality and get a show on that week. I was the guy going, "What the fuck are you doing?" One of the show's writers came to me in the middle of the second season and said that he wasn't sure that he wanted to write for the show anymore. Instead, he suggested we hire some new writers, and he could just tell them his ideas and they would write them up. I tried to explain that writing is about writing. It's about the million little decisions you make. That's why you get a writing credit. In other words, despite any success, it was hard to do the show. It's still hard. But as you get more rewards and more fame, you somehow think it should be easier. You have money, you can go to restaurants. Famous people seek out your company. And that was happening to everyone.

[Q] Playboy: Including you. The book implies that your perks grew: Now you had the apartment, the limo, the famous friends such as Paul Simon, Mick Jagger, Steve Martin, Jann Wenner----

[A] Michaels: Please understand, I bought my Amagansett house in 1977, but it was a little cottage. Until 1979 I lived in the same one-bedroom sublet that I lived in when I came to New York to do the show. My lifestyle wasn't about having material things. Success allowed me to travel a little more, but I had traveled a lot before. Also, I had basically the same friends I had for a decade--names not on your list--and I didn't drop them. I am friends with Paul Simon. I can't deny it. I've worked with Mick Jagger. You're just saying that I know a lot of people who are powerful. For some of those on your list, work is at the center of their lives. So they're more apt to be friends with other professional people who live the same sort of life. I certainly didn't come to New York to hang out with people, I came to New York to do a show.

[Q] Playboy: But the show was an immediate hit. How did all that attention make you feel?

[A] Michaels: It seemed to us that we were at the center of the universe. We were in Rockefeller Center, we didn't go out of the building much. We relied on one another. But that inevitably began to fall apart. Some people were more talented than others; some people were more in demand than others. And that began to lead to a panic, an absolute psychic panic, on the part of the people who were terrified that the train was leaving and they weren't going to be on it. The more desperate they became, the harder they were for me to be around. Somebody might have been a splendid joke writer--that was his gift; now he wanted to write longer pieces. We would read them at read-through and they wouldn't work. Well, do I always have to give the bad news? So people began to leave the show. People became producers, did TV pilots, did sitcoms, did movies. Everybody got an opportunity. Everybody got to be who they thought they wanted to be. And the person in the way was me, who actually knew who had done what.

[Q] Playboy: What do you mean?

[A] Michaels: As a producer, one thing I most object to is minor characters building their parts--someone in the background coughing loudly during a scene, the equivalent of a little hand on their head waving at the audience, saying "Look at me!" Of course, everybody does it, but people normally have the decency to do it only on résumés. But the specifics of that information goes to the grave with me. If I'd wanted to spill it, I would have long ago. That's the nature of being a producer.

[Q] Playboy: The book is full of people taking credit for S.N.L.'s success, isn't it?

[A] Michaels: The book was all about paternity. People were setting the record straight and taking credit for things. That's why I try so hard to be scrupulous about "Jim Downey wrote that, Robert Smigel wrote this." If Arabs evidently remember things for ten or fifteen generations, so do writers. I know that Don Novello wrote "The Greek Restaurant"--the "cheeseburger, cheeseburger" thing. But if somebody else says he did and he gets away with it, it doesn't bother me much anymore. The secret of a happy life is to keep moving. Personally, I'm easily bruised. I'm not when it's about the work. With criticism of the show, I get pissed off and I just drop it.

[Q] Playboy: Not to piss you off, but a former cast member, Harry Shearer, continues to criticize both you and the show.

[A] Michaels: I was wary of hiring Harry. I didn't have a good experience with him. He did the fifth season. He was, for me, a sour presence. He was highly critical. Most people never talk about that period, particularly the people who were part of it. Harry was there for a little while and has done an enormous amount of talking about it. I'm sure that everything he's said has been well documented, but I don't want to respond to it. I'm not really interested in him.

[Q] Playboy: If you disliked him so, why did you put him in the cast?

[A] Michaels: Before the fifth season, Dan Aykroyd told me he intended to come back to the show. Not many people know this. When Belushi wanted to leave, I agreed it was time. Although his contract had another year to run, I thought by his coming back after the summer of Animal House and putting in the fourth season, that he had lived up to his obligations. Danny said he wouldn't be able to write as much, but that he would be performing. So I had Danny and Billy and Garrett and Laraine and Gilda and Jane. And I thought I needed one more male, possibly. But there were enough people around--Al Franken, Tom Davis and others--who were solid players. I thought we'd get by. In the beginning of July, Danny flew out to see me in Amagansett. He said he didn't want to come back. The Blues Brothers movie was going to start in November and he didn't feel he could handle both. It wasn't a confrontation, it was a gentle talk. We went for a walk. I don't think I would have come back for the fifth season if I had known that John and Danny were both going to leave. It knocked the wind out of me. And now I needed another man. Al Franken said, "What about Harry Shearer from the Credibility Gap?" I'd seen his work and I thought he also had some of Danny's traits.

[Q] Playboy: Shearer says, "On Saturday Night Live, you don't think about comedy, you think about how you can please Lorne."

[A] Michaels: Certainly he didn't. There's a guy on the L.A. Times who Harry works with, [comedy critic] Lawrence Christon. They're incredibly religious about comedy, almost like monks. There's something severe in their judgments. They're always disappointed at the lack of precision in others. Harry can be brilliant, but it's cold brilliant, precise, exact. We were lighter. Goofier. When we did the joke with William Shatner and the Trekkies, where he said, "Get a life!"--that's what you wanted to say to Harry. Harry does deep character stuff. He tended to get heavily into drag, having to look like the characters he played. Chevy never tried to look like Gerald Ford, or Danny like Nixon or Carter.

[Q] Playboy: But doesn't the current cast rely heavily on make-up and wigs and total immersion in character?

[A] Michaels: Dana Carvey and Mike Myers do remarkable character work. But they're not as strict as Harry. Listen, I did not fire Harry. He stayed the entire year. He was the only person from that group who offered to come back the following year, and even Jean Doumanian [the producer at the beginning of the sixth season] told him she did not want him back.

[Q] Playboy:Saturday Night Live has had its imitators, especially during the early days. Today there's In Living Color. Is it the black Saturday Night Live?

[A] Michaels: God, they must hate being called the black Saturday Night Live. I think they're In Living Color. It's very much Keenan Wayans' show. He knows what he's doing with it, what he wants to do with it. It's a big hit.

[Q] Playboy: Do you wish you'd had the idea for In Living Color?

[A] Michaels: No. I don't think there is an idea to In Living Color. Keenan and his brother Damon just came up with stuff that made them laugh.

[Q] Playboy: Damon Wayans was once an S.N.L. performer. Didn't he break your cardinal rule and ad-lib on the air?

[A] Michaels: I fired Damon after that--a mistake on my part, but a bigger mistake on his part. At dress rehearsal, he did one thing and then on the air he did something else. He did a sort of caricature gay voice. It was a funny voice, but it was completely inappropriate for the scene. More importantly, it threw the other two actors in the scene, who had no idea what he was doing.

[Q] Playboy: Nobody had ever done that?

[A] Michaels: No, nobody ever had. Everybody has to play by the rules, so I hit the roof.

[Q] Playboy: Immediately?

[A] Michaels: Yeah, immediately.

[Q] Playboy: What happened when he came off the stage? Adios, Damon?

[A] Michaels: We had words, as they say. But he came back later in the season and did a stand-up routine that was brilliant. It was a period where we were both having a rough time in our personal lives. I always thought he was great. It always makes me crazy when there are people who I can't figure out how to use well, because I know the talent is there.

[Q] Playboy: We mentioned rebellion earlier. We've all heard about some of the cast's drug use. Did you indulge?

[A] Michaels: How easy it would be to say I didn't. When I used to smoke pot, which I did with great dedication for a number of years, I found its associative power was thrilling. It amused me. I haven't smoked pot in four or five years now. In the Seventies, I could come home at night--I was living alone--and smoke a joint. I used it to go to sleep and obliterate the recent past, as a friend of mine used to say. And I also smoked it in order not to obsess about how bad that particular week's show was. I was never confident that it came off well.

Let me put it this way: Most of the drug use you've heard about happened after people left the show. Saturday Night Live was such an incredible task that it was a governor on people's self-destructiveness. You couldn't get stoned and do the show. And people didn't have that kind of money.

[Q] Playboy: They couldn't afford drugs?

[A] Michaels: The top amount for a writer then was seven hundred and seventy dollars a week. Top of the show. Franken and Davis were splitting four hundred. Now people make fifteen or twenty thousand dollars for doing the same task.

[Q] Playboy: But by the third and fourth years, wasn't the money keeping pace with the show's success?

[A] Michaels: Look, drugs were not the dominant thing. Success was. It was the most destructive drug. Suddenly, everyone got to play out fantasies. For instance, John would much rather have been a rock-and-roll star than a movie star. And that lifestyle, which at that time seemed more attractive than any other, killed him, because he couldn't handle it.

[Q] Playboy: Where were you when you heard Belushi was dead?

[A] Michaels: I was in my office at my production company, Broadway Video, and the first thing I did was start to make arrangements. There was all this stuff to do. [Pauses] I felt anger. Anger because John always left a mess and this was just what he'd done again. The circumstances of his death were just ... just the worst. It couldn't have been more low. I knew how much he loved Judy. I knew how proud he was--too proud to die that way. This wasn't the John that his brother knew, or that his wife knew, or that I had known. John Belushi was a kid who always overpromised his tickets for the show. People were given only two tickets and John would have promised probably thirty or forty people they could come. He would never say he couldn't get or do something.

[Q] Playboy: He couldn't say no.

[A] Michaels: Yeah. Occasionally, he would take the tickets from my desk, but quite often he would come in and try to get them from me. I would be talking on the phone, and one of his tactics would be to start massaging my shoulders in a way that he used to do for his grandmother. Now, somebody who gives a neck rub to his grandmother--it's kind of hard to see that same kid in a body bag. There's something that was so humiliating about his death. But, initially, I focused more on how hurt and how devastated everybody else was going to be. The next morning, I got on my exercise bicycle, which I'd never used, and was only to use one other time when somebody else died. I put on the Stones tape that has Start Me Up. About thirty minutes into it, I started to cry. And it was only then that it hit me that he was dead. It was so much easier to be mad at him than it was to be moved, because it was impossible to comprehend.

[Q] Playboy: Was Belushi really as brilliant as the media has made him made out to be? Or did dying young make him larger than life?

[A] Michaels: He was just funny doing certain things. He didn't always have the best judgment about his work. Is anybody that good? He made me and a lot of other people laugh. In those early years, a new generation was beginning to emerge on television. There was so much optimism about what we were going to do as a generation that it had a dreamlike quality. Dreams are about potential. So did we live up to the potential? Well, John certainly didn't because he fucked up his life.

[Q] Playboy: Do you feel responsible for not trying to stop him earlier?

[A] Michaels: No, I don't. John lived his day in three eight-hour shifts. If you spent eight hours with him, you were exhausted at the end of it and you thought he went to bed because you went to bed. But he didn't. He was very star-struck and he got consumed by it, ultimately, when there wasn't anything that could stop it. John Belushi got killed trying to be John Belushi in life.

[Q] Playboy: How did Gilda Radner's death affect you?

[A] Michaels: I suppose I had intimations of it. I was awakened at a quarter to nine on a show day, which is not my style, and it was CBS News, saying "Gilda Radner's dead, do you have any comment?" My first thought was, How'd you get my number? Of course, it's stupid to ask that. The big secret of life is that they have everybody's number. That night, Steve Martin hosted the show. We showed the piece that he and Gilda had done to Dancing in the Dark. I worked with him on a line to say after the tape. I don't think I've ever seen him that shaken, that moved. And we were pros. We were in the middle of doing a comedy show. I knew Gilda was sick, but when I talked to her she didn't give me that impression. She was fighting it. I tended to buy into the hope she talked about. People older than I, to whom I talked, were more pessimistic. We were closer to brother and sister than any other relationship on the show.

[Q] Playboy: You left Saturday Night Live after the fifth season. Why?

[A] Michaels: Fellini said that when you're making a picture, the director is like a father. Everybody--the actors, the actresses, the designers--eat at one big table every day. They're like the children. "But the moment the picture is over," he said, "you must leave the picture. Or the children, they will eat you." I kept from being eaten by leaving. Also, where we were once earning our laughs from the audience, by the fourth season, John Belushi or Gilda Radner entering a scene got laughs or applause on its own. Everything we did was now popular. If we could do an old thing, we did. Worse, Saturday Night Live began to be perceived as a step, not an end. It changed the attitude of the people who worked there. I was trying to hold the show together. It was all I cared about. It gave me all I needed, used all my talent, all my energy. But for others, it was time to move on.

[Q] Playboy: Weren't you getting offers, too?

[A] Michaels: Yeah, to do all the things I'd always wanted. Studios were offering me five or six firm pictures. I was the flavor of the month. I was hot. And as Paul Simon once wisely said, "In California, people don't get happy, they get hot." The sad thing about being hot is, the moment you're hot, you just sense yourself getting less hot. It's confusing. And you can't even complain about it. You have what everybody in the world wants and you can't say, "I'm miserable now" or "I'm confused and I don't know what I'm doing," because everybody's going, "Congratulations!"

[Q] Playboy: Is it true that as part of your exit deal after the fifth season, you received a substantial portion--perhaps fifty percent--of the video rights to Saturday Night Live and used it to build your production company, Broadway Video?

[A] Michaels: In our first year, the network thought that live shows could not be repeated. So I said that I would not be very happy if my grandchildren ended up watching Saturday Night Live reruns and I had no [profit] participation in my work. I made that my point. I thought it was fair--the show was my idea and my work. But when I left, I left clean. I took no participation in the show that was ongoing. Years later, when we were doing The New Show, Buck Henry said, "But you've still got all that money coming in from Saturday Night Live." And I said, "No, I don't. When I left, I left clean. I didn't want any connection to it whatsoever." And he said, "You're a bigger fool than I thought you were."

[Q] Playboy: What did you do during the off years?

[A] Michaels: I am by nature restless. I'm a compulsive improver. I built a house in the country, I got married and I went to an enormous number of baseball games. I worked on a pond at my Amagansett house. I moved trees around. I used to say that a garden is like a show that doesn't talk back to you.

[Q] Playboy: Are you sorry you quit?

[A] Michaels: No. I couldn't see any way to come back. My friends with whom I'd started the show were gone. Being away from Saturday Night Live allowed me to do a lot of thinking, and also a lot of healing. I would have just repeated myself if I had gone back for a sixth season. You could say I was running away from stuff; my mother did say that, at the time. But for me it was mostly about digestion and distance.

[Q] Playboy: Did you watch the show?

[A] Michaels: No, I didn't. Nobody, of course, believes it. I took no pride in those years; it wasn't mine. Eddie Murphy, who may well be the biggest star who ever came out of the show, had nothing to do with me. I didn't discover him, I didn't nurture him, I didn't encourage him. I laughed at him occasionally, but I had nothing to do with that.

[Q] Playboy: Before signing on again at Saturday Night Live in 1985, you did The New Show and it bombed. Why?

[A] Michaels: There were troubles at the network. Everything they were trying wasn't working. They had fallen into third place. They were doing shows like Manimal. Brandon Tartikoff asked me if I would be interested in doing a new series. I thought, Well, yeah, I'd like to try a new show.

[Q] Playboy: Were you happy with the show?

[A] Michaels: The first show got nice reviews and a sixteen share. Brandon told me that wasn't a passing grade. And it was our best shot. Since my company, Broadway Video, was producing the show for more than NBC was paying us, I was losing two hundred thousand dollars an episode. That was in addition to not making money. And I couldn't say to the people I worked with, "Listen, can you guys work for half of what I agreed to pay you?" I took my lumps; I took it right on the jaw. And at the end of it, I'd lost a couple million dollars.

[Q] Playboy: Of your own money?

[A] Michaels: Of my own money. Because I agreed to pay the difference. Paying it back took me up until the 1988 season of Saturday Night Live. It wasn't the reason I went back there, though. I was paid very well for doing Three Amigos. But I then had to take jobs, which was a position I hadn't been in since I'd left Saturday Night Live.

[Q] Playboy: In hindsight, should you have tried a regular TV series?

[A] Michaels: What series was I going to do, Maverick?

[Q] Playboy: How did you get involved in Three Amigos?

[A] Michaels: Steve Martin asked me if I would like to come and write Three Amigos, which was an idea he had. We spent a year doing it [with Randy Newman]. During that time, my personal life began to fall apart. When you're taking blows repeatedly, you're probably not as much fun to be around. Susan [Forristal, his second wife] and I got divorced. I needed the job. And when I was in the room with the two of them writing all the time, that became important to me again. I thought, This is what I do. This is the thing that makes me happy.

[Q] Playboy: Writing?

[A] Michaels: Well, being there. In that case, it was writing.

[Q] Playboy: What about your return, in 1985, to Saturday Night Live, the show that you had created?

[A] Michaels: When I was thinking about coming back to the show, a very powerful guy in the industry said, "You don't do Saturday Night Live, somebody who wants to be you does it."

[Q] Playboy: Why didn't you take his advice?

[A] Michaels: I didn't mind being me. I liked doing it.

[Q] Playboy: Your first season back was very rocky. What did you have to do to turn things around?

[A] Michaels: I made some whopper mistakes. But having been through the pounding and the body blows of The New Show, and then the stuff that I had gone through in my personal life, my instinct was to hang on. I thought, It gets very bad, and then it has to get better. I had to rebuild the writing staff, which was very difficult to do. I had to lure back the designers. The band, for fuck's sake, which had been the heart of the show, wasn't even on camera anymore. I decided I couldn't do it all in one season, but since I still believed as I did in 1975--that this thing has value and is important--then it was worth doing.

[Q] Playboy: Did you feel as if S.N.L. was getting back on track?

[A] Michaels: Yeah, but Brandon still canceled the show at the end of that 1985 season. That's seldom written about, but it's true.

[Q] Playboy: How did you change his mind?

[A] Michaels: I flew to California and I said, "I know I can turn this thing around. I know how to do it. I know what needs to be done."

[Q] Playboy: During the bad times, did you want to tell everyone to fuck off?

[A] Michaels: If you enjoy the good times, then you have to be there when there are less-than-good times. I had approximately seven years of very good times, in which the sun had shone and the crops were bountiful. I don't mean to sound like a gambler, but I suppose my luck had just turned. And the times had changed. Reagan was a completely different kind of President than Ford or Carter had been. Based on the values in their ascendancy in the early Eighties, I couldn't have been further out of style. What Saturday Night Live represented in the Seventies was now being bashed. We were in a time of acquisitiveness--all the stuff that the Nineties is now trashing. The ugly part of the drug culture was now so apparent. When I was growing up, Time magazine had a section that was called "People," and you had to fly the Atlantic to be mentioned in it. Celebrity came from achievement. Now there was an industry: People who were on talk shows were celebrities. And it wasn't tied to achievement anymore.

[Q] Playboy: What was it tied to?

[A] Michaels: A value system based on what the Reagan years represented to me, winners and losers. Never before had The New York Times, for example, begun printing the top-ten TV shows in the Nielsens. People were making decisions on what movie to see based on how it had done on the weekend, whether it had ranked one, two, three or four. The criterion was not "Is the work good?" but "Is it a hit?" All the things the hippie generation--for which I had great affection--had utterly rejected were back in. As Lenny Bruce said years ago, "There's nothing sadder than an aging hipster."

[Q] Playboy: Are you an aging hipster?

[A] Michaels: No, but happiness, in my conception of happiness, is finding the appropriate style for each age. Boyish isn't a look you take into your fifties. If you're still doing what you were doing and in the exact same way, then it may be time to take stock. So I wasn't going to do Saturday Night Live the same way. People criticized us this season for the "Pentagon Press Conference" sketch--I mean idiots criticized us--by saying, "In the Vietnam war you wouldn't have taken the side of the military." We were on the side of where we thought the hysteria was. The piece was the funniest take on that situation.

[Q] Playboy: Wasn't there talk at one time of you being handed responsibility for all of NBC late night, excluding The Tonight Show?

[A] Michaels: I've never been approached to be an executive. I wouldn't be very good at breakfast meetings. I wouldn't know how to make a good version of Full House. I know my strengths.

[Q] Playboy: What's your relationship with Johnny Carson like?

[A] Michaels: Nonexistent. There was about a five- or six-year period when every year I called him to be on Saturday Night Live--to do the prestigious first show. And he would unfailingly and politely take the call. And then say that this just wasn't the year for him to do it. One of these years I'll get him to do it.

[Q] Playboy: This is the guy who once said that Saturday Night Live couldn't ad-lib a fart at a bean-eating contest.

[A] Michaels: He wasn't particularly kind to us at the beginning, but that had to do with a New York magazine cover on Chevy in December of the first season that called him the next Johnny Carson. It was written by Jeff Greenfield, who now works on Nightline--which shows you that growth is possible. Anyway, Chevy now plays cards with Johnny, so that's long been forgotten. However, there was a period, after that cover story, when no one from Saturday Night Live was allowed on The Tonight Show, period.

[Q] Playboy: Now that Jay Leno will be running The Tonight Show, it seems he'll be getting guests that could be on your show. Does that bother you?

[A] Michaels: No. Saturday Night Live is, with all due respect to the other late-night shows, the highest-rated late-night show. It is pre-eminent. We spend a week on it. They do one a day. We deliver a younger audience than The Tonight Show.

[Q] Playboy: Will Leno do well?

[A] Michaels: I wish him well. I also think it's almost impossible to imagine that time of night without Johnny Carson.

[Q] Playboy: At the beginning of this season, there was an S.N.L. sketch that was particularly hard on Leno. He was called a brown-noser. He shrunk on screen. Fun was made of his voice and his jaw. Are you putting him in his place?

[A] Michaels: Yeah, it was tough. You just sense that's in the air.

[Q] Playboy: Was it unfair?

[A] Michaels: Unfair? Probably. Was it funny? Yeah. It was a hard shot.

[Q] Playboy: Should David Letterman have gotten the Tonight Show job?

[A] Michaels: [Chuckles] Only because I'm going to bump into everybody we're talking about around the time this comes out, I'll just say that the transition will be made. And that David Letterman will be around for a long time.

[Q] Playboy: Dennis Miller, who used to do "Weekend Update," now has his own talk show. He's one of many who have moved on over the years. Who hurt you the most by leaving?

[A] Michaels: I was probably the most thrown by Danny's leaving. As I said, I wasn't prepared for it. Now, I would hate it if Phil Hartman left. Phil has done more work that's touched greatness than probably anybody else who's ever been there. Would he be paid more if he were Jay Leno's sidekick? Of course. There are probably thirty or forty other jobs that would pay him more. There are probably thirty or forty other jobs that would pay me more. I'm not trying to make us sound heroic, I'm merely trying to say that I think we both know this is what we do best.

[Q] Playboy: Apparently, Jan Hooks didn't agree.

[A] Michaels: I hadn't expected Jan to leave. I thought she was coming back, but then she got the opportunity to do Designing Women. It left a big hole. Now, whether or not Designing Women shows her off in the same way that we showed her off, who knows?

[Q] Playboy: What about some of the other notable defections--Jon Lovitz, for instance?

[A] Michaels: Jon left because, in many ways, he was unhappy.

[Q] Playboy: Why was he unhappy?

[A] Michaels: Because he didn't feel he was being treated with respect.

[Q] Playboy: By whom?

[A] Michaels: By the writers. You have to understand that every piece is somebody's. By the time it gets presented to the public, it's "That cast member was really funny." When I was a kid and I saw Bob Hope do his monolog, I didn't think that there were twelve writers going, "That was my joke." And so for writers, particularly comedy writers of the Saturday Night Live style, they have just as big a say--and most of the cast would call it a much greater say--in the determination of a piece as a cast member does. So it's always a power struggle.

[Q] Playboy: Lovitz came back a few times--and you made jokes at his expense. Early in the season, you did that to Dennis Miller.

[A] Michaels: Right, in the same way he made jokes about Chevy. That's been a long tradition. I don't like it when people leave.

[Q] Playboy: So when are you planning to leave?

[A] Michaels: Never. I signed a four-year contract last year, which was a way of my reassuring the network of my commitment to the series. The show was at a ratings peak; it was an excellent time to leave and I was going through a rebuilding period again.

[Q] Playboy: We shouldn't look for you to make some grand move?

[A] Michaels: Well, I'd like to be surprising. But as long as there's an NBC, I expect to be there.

[Q] Playboy: You've just produced a movie for Paramount, Wayne's World, starring Mike Myers and Dana Carvey. How did that happen?

[A] Michaels: I had been asked to come to Paramount to do movies. I was actually going to do something else first. But I like what Mike does on the show. He has great talent.

[Q] Playboy: Was it his idea to do this movie or yours?

[A] Michaels: His. We said we wanted to do movies together, and Wayne's World was the first suggestion.

[Q] Playboy: How will Wayne's World transcend the Saturday Night Live--alumni movies that have come before?

[A] Michaels: The writing style is different. If it works, and God willing it will, it's because I think its approach is original. It's referential, it's about movies. It isn't parody in any sense.

[Q] Playboy: Have you liked much of the work S.N.L. cast members have done in movies?

[A] Michaels: I liked Billy very much in Stripes. John was very funny in Animal House; Blues Brothers had some nice stuff in it. I didn't actually see Ghostbusters II, but when Danny and Billy at the end of the days look back at what their finest hours were, I don't think they'll think that was one of them. They have too much quality in them and too much integrity to look in the mirror and go, "I'm doing this, not because I have this incredibly great idea that I'm excited about, but because it's there and I would be a fool not to do it." I think that when you do that, the part of you that gets along with yourself wilts. Clearly, I think Saturday Night Live's important. I'm still doing it. What am I gonna say?

[Q] Playboy: What do you still have left to prove?

[A] Michaels: I love David Lean. But his career contained an element of tragedy: He was a master at a kind of picture, The Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia, that they don't make anymore. Imagine him saying, "Well, fuck, I just got good at this and now they don't make it anymore." I'm doing a kind of show that they don't make anymore, either. In Living Color does thirty-six episodes and they go on to their movies. They're doing so many episodes a year, they don't even tape them as particular shows. They're banking material and sketches. But Saturday Night Live is the old-fashioned way to do a television show. You broadcast live. Unfortunately, it's way more expensive. It's the David Lean thing again. In Lawrence of Arabia you need the desert. You can't use the back lot.

[Q] Playboy: So you're the last ship in the fleet.

[A] Michaels: I believe The Tonight Show lost its soul when it moved out of New York and stopped being live. I liked it, when I was a kid, that they were up at eleven-thirty. People are different when they're up at eleven-thirty. I don't blame David Letterman for taping his show, but I like hearing people on the radio, at one in the morning, who are there. Gilda used to say that she didn't like cable because if World War Three happened, there would be no one to come on and tell you that World War Three had happened.

[Q] Playboy: Would Lorne at twenty-five admire Lorne at forty-seven?

[A] Michaels: I always thought you could learn a lot more from older people than you could from your peers. When Paul Simon finished his last album, we were talking about this. There's this look you get when you show up with a piece of work when you're over forty. People say, "You still around?" It's not resentment, it's curiosity. Like, "Why would you still want to be doing it?" The fact that it's what you chose to do with your life, the fact that it's important to you, is shocking to people who are young. They can't think past forty.

[Q] Playboy: Maybe they haven't realized that life is about making choices--often imperfect ones.

[A] Michaels: And also just how long it takes to get good at something. I'm the best I've been at my game these last two or three years. And one of the comforting parts of my forties has been that the early returns are in. All this stuff that I was so anxious about in my twenties--about the way I'd be judged--all that doesn't matter anymore. The early returns are in and I know what I'm good at and not good at. I'll never be a lumberjack, but I take comfort in the things I have done, and I'm much more forgiving. Now.

[Q] Playboy: We asked earlier if Saturday Night Live would be your life's work. As we wind down, tell us if it will be enough for you to be known for having accomplished what you did.

[A] Michaels: Somewhere around the time of the fifteenth-anniversary show I thought, Hey, maybe I did do something--and even that sounds glib. All I want is to do the show as long as I can, where the curve is still going up, where it's getting better. I love working and I love keeping busy. Clearly, that puts off the pain of introspection. And if I keep busy enough, I might actually get to the end of my life, when I'll take just the last few minutes to think it through. I admire people who can take the time to think about things; who don't answer quickly. I answer quickly and then think about it as I'm talking. And quite often as I'm doing something, I'm thinking. I'm very often the last to know what it is--so for the purposes of an interview, I don't know why you should know any more than I do about what I think.

[Q] Playboy: Is there anything you would like to say to the various members of the Saturday Night Live family?

[A] Michaels:They'll be saying, "Why the fuck didn't he mention me, after all we've been through?" My apologies. Inadvertent, I assure you. I don't know what to say. This is all an ongoing process with me. I love stimulation. I have an invented life and it's uncharted. I'm the first person in my family to be doing this. And I'm making it up as I go along. [Pauses] I will say that while I'm flattered that you've kept calling Saturday Night Live my show, it's as much others' as it is mine. I'm the Pooh-Bah, there's no question about it. And deservedly so. But on any given week, there's somebody else whose effort was the greatest or whose idea saved the day.

For the last while, things have been going my way. I'm married to somebody who I'm in love with [third wife Alice Barry], we're having a baby, the show is going well, I'm working on a movie that I've had a lot of fun doing. Broadway Video is doing pretty well. So it's a nice time, but I don't count on present trends continuing. I just figure that life will be what it is.

"There's a phosphorescent glow to people who are self-destructive. People pick up on that."