Lorne Michaels Had No Input in Jason Reitman's ‘SNL’ Movie

We’re less than two months away from the release of Saturday Night, the gritty 30 Rock reboot directed by Academy Award nominee Jason Reitman. As the recently-released trailer illustrates, Saturday Night tells the story of how a scrappy young Canuck producer named Lorne Michaels propelled Saturday Night Live to greatness by bucking authority and challenging the established norms of TV comedy, thus changing the world of pop-culture forever!

Hopefully the movie ends with Young Lorne morphing into Old Lorne, à la Saving Private Ryan, sipping white wine as he watches Elon Musk try on Wario mustaches.

Since the film appears to be a fairly glowing portrait of Michaels, the presumptive hero of the story, one might wonder if the longtime SNL boss, himself, had any involvement in the production. After all, Michaels is famous for keeping a pretty tight grip on both his public image and the SNL brand. But according to Lamorne Morris, who plays pioneering cast member Garrett Morris (no relation), Michaels didn’t have any direct participation in the film. During a recent episode of Literally! with Rob Lowe, the Wayne’s World actor asked Morris whether or not Michaels was “around” during the making of the film. 

“Lorne wasn’t involved throughout the process,” Morris clarified, though he noted that there was no bad blood between the SNL camp and the production, because Reitman got “the blessing from everyone.”

Morris also revealed that Reitman conducted brand new interviews with some of the film’s real-life subjects while writing  the script, and “everyone was cool about it,” although he added the caveat, “I think everyone was cool about it.” 

Yeah, come to think of it, it’s hard to imagine that everyone from the original cast was 100 percent helpful…

Morris got a chance to sit down and chat with Garrett Morris, who apparently wasn’t so concerned with whether or not the New Girl star captured his voice and mannerisms, telling him, “Just as long as you portray the fact that I never gave up. … Just let the folks out there know that, that I wasn’t a quitter and that I had drive and that I needed certain things out of SNL,” adding, “As long as you do that, I’m happy. I don’t wanna look like no bitch.”

“And I think we did that,” Lamorne Morris concluded. 

Michaels, on the other hand, was seemingly a tad more elusive when it came to collaborating with the cast. Gabriel LaBelle, who plays Michaels in the film, has stated that he only met the producer “briefly” and created his take on him by “reading books” and watching people’s impressions — not because he wanted to do a “caricature of him” but to see “what mannerisms kind of pop up that the people closest to him remember.”

Which means there’s a non-zero chance that studying Dr. Evil was a part of his creative process. We’ll have to wait until October to see if the film finds Lorne MIchaels telling staffers to “zip it.”

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