We’re at a very exciting milestone in television history. Saturday Night Live is about to air its 50th season on the 2024 TV schedule! However, that’s not all, we’re also getting a fun new interpretation of the iconic sketch series' 1975 cast through Jason Reitman’s film Saturday Night. Now, amid all this, an old unaired interview of Lorne Michaels has been published where he candidly spoke about that original cast and what the comedians all had in common.
In a partially unaired interview from a 2004 60 Minutes episode, Lorne Michaels spoke about that first iconic cast of SNL and the group of comedians he brought together for it. He explained that he knew Gilda Radner and Dan Aykroyd from Toronto. He worked with Laraine Newman on one of Lily Tomlin’s shows. Jane Curtin and John Belushi auditioned. Garrett Morris was hired as a writer first. And he knew Chevy Chase because they met in line for a Monty Python show.
Then, despite them all coming from different places, Michaels opened up about what all these comedians had in common, as he said in the 2004 interview that aired on 60 Minutes: A Second Look:
Everybody that I chose had gone through some screw up in adolescence in that original group. Either death of a parent, divorce, something, some upheaval.
So, while they came from different backgrounds and locations, all of them had been through it when they were younger. They also discussed some of the tougher moments in the show’s history, like the deaths of John Belushi and Chris Farley. However, the questions were brought back around to Michaels and how he faced traumatizing events as a child too.
As Michaels noted that many of the cast members were “stuck in adolescence,” he confirmed that he was too. Journalist Lesley Stahl asked him during the interview about that and losing his father at the age of 14. In response, the SNL mastermind said:
I'm considerably less since being a father, but I think there was a long period of time in which I thought it was all right to challenge authority.
It’s been well-documented that working at Saturday Night Live is chaotic, and based on early reactions from critics about Saturday Night, the film captures that energy well as it gives us a snapshot of what Lorne Michaels and co. did back in 1975.
Speaking about his goal for SNL back then, Michaels explained:
Comedy generally followed action, there’d been big action in culture. And what I tried to do was gather the most talented people I could find, people who never at that point would have been allowed to do a television show.
Well, the people he found turned out to be perfect, even if they did have traumatic pasts.
While they have that in common, as Michaels revealed, they’re also all hilarious, and that’s why Saturday Night Live has been on the air for 50 years. Lorne Michaels knows who to hire, and the show knows how to nurture great talent. That happened in 1975, and it’s still happening now.
To go back and witness the 90 minutes that led up to SNL’s first episode, you can catch Saturday Night in theaters when it premieres on the 2024 movie schedule on October 11. To see the incredible fruits of that labor, you can stream all of SNL as well as its Season 50 premiere (which is happening on Saturday, September 28 at 11:30 p.m. ET) with a Peacock subscription.