Lorne Michaels’s ‘S.N.L.’ Archive Is Going to the University of Texas
The archives of the man behind the tagline “Live From New York” is on its way to Texas.
Lorne Michaels, the creator of “Saturday Night Live,” has donated his archives to the Harry Ransom Center at University of Texas, including hundreds of boxes of material relating to the show, which has its 50th anniversary this year.
The collection includes storyboards for classic “Coneheads” sketches and material chronicling the birth of the Blues Brothers, “Wayne’s World” and thousands of other sketches that have collectively transformed television comedy and American pop culture since the show’s first episode, hosted by George Carlin, aired on Oct. 11, 1975.
Michaels has been a producer or executive producer of “S.N.L.” for all but five seasons in the 1980s, when he left to pursue other creative endeavors.
“It’s an extraordinary resource documenting Lorne Michaels’s career, which in some ways for many of us was our own youth and early adulthood,” Stephen Enniss, the Ransom Center’s director, said. “His impact has been huge.”
The donation came directly from Michaels, who approached the center more than a year ago, Enniss said. It traces the full arc of his career, including his early days as a writer and performer in the comedy scene in Toronto and his pre-“S.N.L.” work on “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In” and “The Beautiful Phyllis Diller Show.”
But the “lion’s share,” Enniss said, covers Michaels’s nearly five decades of work on “Saturday Night Live,” which first aired under the title “Saturday Night.”
Michaels, 80, is known for his dedication to old-fashioned communication, refusing to use teleprompters and requiring that all script revisions be done on paper, according to Susan Morrison’s forthcoming biography, “Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live.”
The archive, Enniss said, captures the full writing and production process for each episode, including many examples of the index cards used to shuffle and assemble the elements of the show up until the last minute.
While the archive contains tapes and cassettes and born-digital records, the bulk is paper. “It’s a very analog archive,” Enniss said.
The show itself remains under copyright. But NBC Universal has provided digital copies of every episode, Enniss said, for use in research and teaching.
The archive announcement is timed just ahead of the show’s 50th anniversary celebrations, which includes a three-hour prime-time special scheduled for Feb. 16. The Ransom Center is planning an exhibition drawn from the archive, set to open this fall.
The center is best known as a top destination for literary archives, including the papers of Gabriel García Márquez, Arthur Miller and David Foster Wallace. But it also has sizable holdings pertaining to film and television, including the papers of Robert De Niro and the archive from the AMC series “Mad Men,” as well as extensive collections relating to vaudeville and other forerunners of the modern variety show.
The Michaels archive also contains material from his work on other projects, which have included TV hits like “30 Rock” and “Portlandia” alongside stalled efforts like “1985,” a feature-length spoof of George Orwell’s “1984,” written by the “S.N.L.” veterans Al Franken and Tom Davis. Jenny Romero, the Ransom Center’s curator of film and television, described the collection as both sprawling and particular to the man who amassed it.
“It’s from his perspective, as a producer,” she said. “You’re not going to see things you would see in a director’s or writer’s or actor’s collection.”
