Lily Tomlin Believes Young Lorne Michaels Used Her As Stepping Stone to Get Ahead
We’re just over a month away from the 50th anniversary celebration of Saturday Night Live, and in addition to the retrospective documentaries, unnecessary clothing lines and baffling children’s books, we’re also getting the first serious biography about the show’s creator: Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live by Susan Morrison.
Morrison’s research about Lorne Michaels also formed the basis for a recent profile published by The New Yorker. And while it certainly contains a lot of praise for the long-time TV producer, it also spotlights some low-key criticisms, including from one of his earliest collaborators: comedy legend Lily Tomlin.
When Michaels was still a largely unknown comedy writer (in the United States, at least), Tomlin gave the young Canadian a job. “She was probably the formative influence on me,” Michaels told Rolling Stone in 1979. “She was the first person I met who really cared about quality and getting it all right. At a point when I had very little self-confidence she said, ‘I appreciate you and I appreciate your work.'”
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Michaels and Tomlin collaborated on three network TV specials, including 1973’s Emmy-winning Lily. “Lorne can add to stuff, but he’s not necessarily, like, a really diligent writer,” Tomlin told Morrison, who noted that the first special had a “pointedly feminist slant.”
Not long after his success with Tomlin, Michaels made connections that enabled him to produce Saturday Night Live (at that point, just Saturday Night) for NBC. According to Morrison, when Tomlin heard the news, she thought she’d been “used like a stepping stone.” And while she didn’t say anything to Michaels, she claims to have had the feeling of “when protégés float over you.”
Of course, Tomlin did host SNL in its first season, appearing in the sixth episode.
Even though she hosted the show multiple times, Tomlin wasn’t exactly a huge fan. “I don’t think that I thought it was something I’d never seen before,” Tomlin said during an interview for Live From New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live. She also pointed out that the show had some major problems: “There was a lot of misogynist stuff that I considered to be demeaning to women — or to any group — on Saturday Night Live.
On the subject of Michaels, Tomlin praised, not any creative attributes, but his political posturing and behind the scenes deal-making. “I don’t really want to say a lot about Lorne,” Tomlin began. “I don’t think he could accomplish what he has accomplished if he wasn’t ambitious. Also he’s more astute politically than someone like me. He would know who to have lunch with. It would never occur to me to have lunch with somebody, or something like that. I’ve never understood about functioning in the system.”
Given Tomlin’s recent statement, those past comments seem to take on a whole new layer of meaning.
