How to Sustain Creativity for Decades
Hi, I’m Matt. Welcome to my column on books and fitness to level-up your midlife.
As you’re likely aware, Saturday Night Live recently turned 50 years old.
The show celebrated by strafing a three-hour NBC telecast with a merciless stream of famous funny people—most of whom cut their comedy teeth at Studio 8H.
Adam Sandler’s song about the cast through the decades was my favorite moment of the anniversary show.
For 45 of those 50 years, one man has been at the helm, the creator and sustainer of the most enduring comedy institution in American history.
How the hell does Lorne Michaels do it?
Susan Collins’ new biography Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night, shows us in a deeply detailed researched look at Michaels’ life and methods. We hear plenty from Michaels himself, many who worked with him both in front of the camera and behind it, and through Collins’ narrative voice.
The book flows much better than Live From New York, which is meticulously sourced but offers no narrative in between interview quotes. Lorne is a smoother reading journey.
At 655 pages, the book is presidential-biography length, and I blew through it. Never dull. Never drags.
This book isn’t full of salacious stories of drug use, sexcapades, hatred, and jealousy. Though those elements are present, it’s in the context of helping us understand Michaels and how he’s been such a creative force for so long.
Creative excellence for the long haul
So, how did Michaels do it?
How did he build something so powerful, so durable, when American pop culture, political leanings, and technology swing and shift so rapidly and unpredictably?
He rides the ups and downs. Michaels didn’t get too excited when ratings and reviews were riding high. Experience told him a valley was coming, and it always did.
He lets people cook. Sure, Michaels steps in late in the week — crunch time, when sketches get cut or fine-tuned — but most of the time, he stays out of the way. Writers and actors get room to run. He nudges, with anecdotes and off-hand comments, but allows people freedom to create and explore. The flip side is that Michaels doesn’t throw many life preservers, either. If a writer or actor flames out, or never really gets started, that wasn’t his concern. His concern was cultivating the high-end talent that drives the show forward.
He develops his taste. In Michaels’ early career, he acted in and wrote for Canadian shows and specials, and then for Laugh-In and specials with Lily Tomlin in the United States. That process helped Michaels build his sense for creating great humor for TV.
Ignore this
Michaels has another key to his success: he ignores stuff.
Put more eloquently, Michaels uses a strategy the book refers to as “The Fabius Strategy”:
“Robert Carlock, who developed the show with Fey, remembered a high-school Latin lesson about General Fabius Maximus, who avoids battle and seeks to win by attrition. “His strategy was retreat, retreat, retreat, and wear the enemy out,” Carlock said. He and Fey had seen Lorne Michaels triumph with NBC again and again by simply deflecting, letting time go by.”
Michaels simply waited problems out. He didn’t overreact to angry executive decrees he didn’t agree with, fussy talent flexing egos, or public outcry over an insensitive sketch.
Often, he did nothing.
By deflecting and delaying, Michaels let problems evaporate. The one time this strategy failed him, he was forced to fire Norm MacDonald and later Adam Sandler and Chris Farley. But the Fabius Strategy has a ridiculously high hit rate for Michaels.
He always plays the long game, never getting too carried up in the days highs or lows. That’s why he’s still playing it 50 years later, with no end in sight.
And in our age of daily outrage, playing long and steady is a superpower.
Side note: What did Write of Passage and SNL have in common?
I found myself nodding along to the books’ description of sketch development and live-show management, because we had similar processes at Write of Passage for developing our live session content. The use of paper, for example, to arrange and rearrange content chunks, instead of technology. The meticulous attention to the smallest details:
“In his booth, Michaels yelled, “Get Tom!” An assistant scurried to fetch Tom Broecker, the costume designer. Seconds later he was there, and Michaels gave him a note about Strong’s wig obscuring her face. He also wanted the shot on her to be tighter; Caroline Maroney scribbled on a legal pad.”
And the way they communicate in real-time and adjust on the fly, adding or cutting content to fit into a 90-minute window. On SNL, they communicate via headset. During Write of Passage Live Sessions, we used WhatsApp. But the goals were the same: adjust pacing, give real-tine feedback, cut and move content sections, making changes on the fly—we were doing a lot the same things the books shows Michaels doing during the live show.
If you love SNL, comedy, and want to understand how to sustain creativity for the longest of runs, Lorne is well worth your time.
Current and upcoming reads
The Man Who Saw Seconds. Just finished this thriller, about a man who can see five seconds into the future. That doesn't sound like much, until his abilities have global consequences. I loved the premise and frenetic pace of this one, from Alexander Boldizar.
Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World. Just released from Anne-Laure le Cunff, the founder of Ness Labs, a community I was a part of. I greatly respect her ideas and work, and I’m sure this book will exceed expectations, also.
The way Sandler locks up, just for a fraction of a second, after mentioning Chris Farley. Gets me every time!
…imagine making any piece of human art that could last so successfully so long…