Path: ...!news.mixmin.net!weretis.net!feeder8.news.weretis.net!eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: "Norman Nescio" Newsgroups: alt.test Subject: "Burn It Down" Explores SNL and Its =?ISO-8859-1?Q?=93Culture=5Fof=5FImpunity=94?= (Exclusive Excerpt) Date: Tue, 06 Jun 2023 13:18:01 -0400 Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Lines: 773 Message-ID: Injection-Date: Tue, 6 Jun 2023 17:18:02 -0000 (UTC) Injection-Info: dont-email.me; posting-host="3a2f25dde8ae1061a56f42ba4b40db98"; logging-data="858101"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX1/130GKAe4ecY1ma5BGUpNPKGlxXrhym20=" Cancel-Lock: sha1:TDtwb7c1q1i3vwq/fisO3GlfjDQ= X-Newsreader: WinVN 0.99.12N (x86 32bit) Bytes: 48564 https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/lifestyle/arts/burn-it-down-book-excerpt- snl-lorne-michaels-1235507730 Author Maureen Ryan writes that Lorne Michaels’ “long tenure as a power player and ‘SNL’s’ enduring importance are intertwined with a culture of impunity within the world of comedy, in which abuse and toxicity are not just permitted but often celebrated.” “For decades, SNL has been a frequently terrible, punishing experience for a lot of people who worked there or ended up in the show’s orbit.” That’s part of how author Maureen Ryan describes the workplace culture of NBC’s Saturday Night Live in her forthcoming book, Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood. Due June 6, the book from Ryan — a longtime journalist and critic who has contributed reporting to THR surrounding misconduct — has already revealed the toxicity that existed in the writers room on ABC’s Lost. Now, in an exclusive chapter, Ryan turns her lens on the nearly 50-year-old comedy institution that is Saturday Night Live, describing a “culture of impunity” at the Lorne Michaels series where “abuse and toxicity are not just permitted but often celebrated.” In an exclusive chapter to The Hollywood Reporter, Ryan explores the power dynamics between Michaels, his cast, writers and the imbalances that helped lead to frequent cast and writer turnover. Ryan also interviews Jane Doe, the former fan who filed a lawsuit against Horatio Sanz that was settled last fall who reveals her “emotionally abusive” relationship with the former cast member. “He steered me into thinking that everything that happened—when he tried to rape me in the cab after that party—was my fault,” she tells Ryan. Below, THR shares an excerpt. *** She wanted to work in comedy. The mordant wit she displayed throughout our three-hour conversation, which sometimes went to dark places, showed she may have made it in that world. When she called the defendants in the civil suit she’d filed “jabronis,” it was unexpected—and funny. Here she was, taking on a gigantic media company—NBCUniversal—and one of the most powerful and legendary men in the American entertainment industry, Lorne Michaels (among others). But Jane Doe, like so many survivors I’ve talked to, was anything but humorless. She recalled, two decades ago, going to an official Saturday Night Live afterparty, where she chatted with Michaels about the Jimmy Fallon fan site she ran. After another such gathering, she and Horatio Sanz headed to an after-after party. She consumed alcohol at both parties, and she alleged that at the latter, cast member Sanz put his hands on her breasts and genitals, in full view of several SNL cast members. “My control top pantyhose did more to keep me safe than any of those people that I idolized,” she said. Later that night, she passed out in a taxi on the way to Penn Station. She told me she woke up to Sanz’s vigorous efforts to remove her pants. (I contacted Sanz’s attorney, Andrew Brettler, with questions about the allegations in this chapter; he did not reply. In other news stories, through Brettler, Sanz has denied all misconduct, and the attorney has said Doe’s allegations are “categorically false.” Jane Doe was seventeen. She’d been in the orbit of Sanz and SNL for more than two years. *** Studio 8H was smaller than I thought it would be. That was not necessarily surprising; in three decades of covering the entertainment industry, I can only think of a few instances in which sets were larger—or people were taller—than I expected them to be. I visited in 2008, but SNL still goes out live from the same space, which is, in my somewhat timeworn recollection, around the same size as a suburban Costco. Like Costco, SNL deals in bulk quantities. Come 2025, the show will be fifty years old, a milestone reached by few other pop-culture commodities. SNL is close to racking up one thousand total episodes. Hundreds of people have taken its stages during that time. And like another long-running franchise, Doctor Who, SNL—a flagship property for NBC and its parent company, Comcast— has turned the cast regeneration process into a subject of fervent speculation. The interest is there because its stages and the ranks of its writers have, for decades, launched an enormous array of creators, directors, producers, and performers into the upper tiers of various comedy and entertainment industry ecosystems. All these factors make it difficult to write about SNL as an institution. During its lifetime, it has showcased a staggering variety of performers, ideas, and comic tones. Recently, a lot of what SNL has churned out has felt more than a little tired and predictable. But a critic offering that assessment is itself predictable. “A Prosperous Saturday Night Grows Tame” is a headline from 1993. As a comedy nerd and an observer of the industry, Grant, who wrote for the show, kept circling the idea that it was nearly impossible—no, definitely impossible—to write about SNL as an institution. As a cultural force and as a place of employment, there was simply too much to examine, synthesize, and distill. Anyone attempting to write about the show would have to find a way to slice off a smaller segment and focus on that. I’ll attempt to do that by focusing on one person, and, to some degree, another mistake I made. For decades, I too easily accepted certain narratives surrounding SNL and its key executive producer, Lorne Michaels. I will only indict myself, but I don’t think I’m alone in having gone down a mistaken path; I believe I have a lot of company on that road. That’s how good Michaels has been at playing the game for half a century. Michaels is one of the rare people in the entertainment industry who is far more powerful than his public image would indicate. “Executive producer” is hardly a title that does his many roles justice; it’d be like designating the late Queen Elizabeth II a “notable Briton.” For almost fifty years, Michaels has decided who got hired at SNL. Staffers advise him on who the hosts and musical guests should be, but he makes all the big calls. Generations of comedy performers have spent thousands of hours sweating where Michaels will place their sketches in the show’s lineup. But that’s just the start of Michaels’s role as a kingmaker. He and very frequently his company, Broadway Video, have credits on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Late Night with Seth Meyers, Wayne’s World, Mean Girls, 30 Rock, Los Espookys, Portlandia, and Saturday Night Live itself. And that roster is just a tiny slice of industry projects Michaels has had a hand in the past half century. For all these reasons, during many different NBC regimes, his power has been near-absolute. Or, depending on whom you talk to, absolute. When Grant joined the show in the ’90s, he observed that “the lighting designer was an eighty- something World War II veteran who worked there until I think he was in his nineties, and whose vision was failing. And he was the lighting designer of the show!” During Grant’s time at SNL, the rules, such as they were, were “insane.” People smoked in their offices in the early aughts, Grant said, despite the existence of a Manhattan indoor smoking ban. This was all part of Grant’s argument that “it’s a little bit reductive” to examine the program as if it’s any other show; it’s a “weird Hollywood outcropping” that somehow lasted for a long, long time. “You can’t just say, let’s look at SNL, because SNL is fourteen different shows spread out over fifty years.” I do understand that take; it makes sense. Yet the unifying force behind almost every iteration is Michaels. That lighting designer and others had such long tenures at SNL, which is located in Manhattan’s 30 Rockefeller Center, in large part because Michaels is, as Grant put it, “the prime minister of his own nation. He has his own laws and his own rules.” Grant and I disagreed at times, but we were in harmony on one point: the idea of Comcast or NBCUniversal executives having meaningful power over Michaels seems naive at best. “All of the current Comcast executives, when they talk about him, it’s like he’s, I don’t know, Mandela or something —you know, this figure, who looms largely over show business and entertainment and NBC,” Grant said. “He’s the last real direct connection between what we have now and what we had then, this magical, mysterious, nostalgic time—the halcyon days of television.” All the more reason to examine the image and legacy of Michaels, who has spent many years exerting massive power within the center of the entertainment industry and who resides at the epicenter of the New York media scene. The image he has constructed, in my opinion, is the product of conscious effort and strategy. Grant did not agree. “He likes the living in New York part of the job, and the working in 30 Rock part, and the connection to old Hollywood and old show business,” Grant said. “He has a reverence for the history and he likes the stars, and he likes being in a place that culturally matters.” But, in Grant’s view, outside of the moves Michaels makes to protect his late-night fiefdom (which, as noted, includes Fallon and Meyers’s pro- grams), “I don’t think he sits there and says, ‘Here’s how I’ll maneuver.’ He’s not a maneuverer. He’s a guy who likes wearing black Prada suits and getting recognized and eating at fancy restaurants and being a part of a cultural institution.” Regardless of what Grant or I think, the pose struck by Michaels in the many books and articles in which he is quoted is impressively consistent: the cast are the stars, he is merely the majordomo, trying to help them make the magic happen. “It’s very hard, and you don’t really know what you’re doing ’til the day of [the broadcast]. But we have a really talented group of people and the cast has been amazing and the writing staff has come through. So I think everybody cares about it. There’s a certain pride in doing it.” That’s a quote he gave me in 2008, and it’s very typical of this subgenre of journalism. In part because Michaels has so often been so quick to share credit, it is easy to infer that he runs a shop that reflects the public image he has built: low-key, modest, cerebral, hardworking. For nearly fifty years, Michaels has offered the US media a mild-mannered, soft-spoken, extremely Canadian image—he’s positioned himself as the anti–Scott Rudin, if you will. “Toronto in the 1950’s was a very safe and ordered place, so the chief thing ========== REMAINDER OF ARTICLE TRUNCATED ==========