The archive of the man with the tagline “Live From New York” is headed to Texas.
“Saturday Night Live” creator Lorne Michaels has donated an archive containing hundreds of boxes of materials related to the show, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas.
This collection includes storyboards for the classic “Coneheads” sketches and material chronicling the birth of the Blues Brothers, “Wayne's World,” and the best TV sitcom since the show's first episode, hosted by George Carlin. and thousands of other sketches that have collectively transformed American pop culture. It was broadcast on October 11, 1975.
Michaels served as a producer or executive producer on SNL for all but five seasons in the 1980s, when he left to pursue other creative endeavors.
“This is a wonderful document of Lorne Michaels' career, and in some ways, for many of us, it was our own youth and early adulthood,” said Stephen Ennis, director of the Ransom Center. said. “His influence was enormous.”
Ennis said the donation came directly from Michaels, who approached the center more than a year ago. The film explores his entire career, including his early days as a writer and performer in Toronto's comedy scene and his pre-SNL stints on “Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In'' and “The Beautiful Phyllis Diller Show.'' Follow.
But Ennis said the “large portion” covers Michaels' nearly 50 years of work on “Saturday Night Live,” which originally aired under the title “Saturday Night.”
According to Susan Morrison's forthcoming biography, Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live, the 80-year-old Michaels refuses to use a teleprompter and insists that all script revisions be done on paper. It is known for its emphasis on traditional communication.
Ennis said the archive documents the entire writing and production process for each episode, including numerous examples of index cards used to shuffle and assemble the show's elements until the last moment. Masu.
The archive includes tapes, cassettes, and born-digital records, but is mostly paper. “This is a very analog archive,” Ennis said.
The program itself is protected by copyright. But Ennis said NBCUniversal is offering digital copies of every episode for use in research and education.
The archive announcement comes just ahead of the show's 50th anniversary celebration, which includes a three-hour prime-time special scheduled for February 16th. The Ransom Center is planning an exhibition of excerpts from its archives, scheduled 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 extensive film and television holdings, including Robert De Niro's papers, archives from the AMC series Mad Men, and extensive collections of vaudeville and other pioneers of modern variety programming. .
Michaels' archive includes such TV hits as “30 Rock'' and “Portlandia,'' along with stalled efforts like “1985,'' a feature-length parody of George Orwell's “1984,'' and others. Also includes material from his work on the project. “SNL” veterans Al Franken and Tom Davis; Jenny Romero, curator of film and television at the Ransom Center, said the collection is vast and special to the man who assembled it.
“This is from his perspective as a producer,” she said. “You're not going to see anything like it in a director's, writer's, or actor's collection.”
