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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
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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 
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