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The archives of the man behind the tagline \u201cLive From New York\u201d are on their way to Texas.<\/p>\n
Lorne Michaels, the creator of \u201cSaturday Night Live,\u201d has donated his archives to the Harry Ransom Center at University of Texas, including hundreds of boxes of material relating to the show, which has its 50th anniversary this year.<\/p>\n
The collection includes storyboards for classic \u201cConeheads” sketches and material chronicling the birth of the Blues Brothers, \u201cWayne\u2019s World\u201d and thousands of other sketches that have collectively transformed television comedy and American pop culture since the show\u2019s first episode, hosted by George Carlin, aired on Oct. 11, 1975.<\/p>\n
Michaels has been a producer or executive producer of \u201cS.N.L.\u201d for all but five seasons in the 1980s, when he left to pursue other creative endeavors.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s an extraordinary resource documenting Lorne Michaels\u2019s career, which in some ways for many of us was our own youth and early adulthood,\u201d Stephen Enniss, the Ransom Center\u2019s director, said. \u201cHis impact has been huge.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
The donation came directly from Michaels, who approached the center more than a year ago, Enniss said. It traces the full arc of his career, including his early days as a writer and performer in the comedy scene in Toronto and his pre-\u201cS.N.L.\u201d work on \u201cRowan & Martin\u2019s Laugh-In\u201d and \u201cThe Beautiful Phyllis Diller Show.\u201d<\/p>\n
But the \u201clion\u2019s share,\u201d Enniss said, covers Michaels\u2019s nearly five decades of work on \u201cSaturday Night Live,\u201d which first aired under the title \u201cSaturday Night.\u201d<\/p>\n
Michaels, 80, is known for his dedication to old-fashioned communication, refusing to use teleprompters and requiring that all script revisions be done on paper, according to Susan Morrison\u2019s forthcoming biography, \u201cLorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n The archive, Enniss said, captures the full writing and production process for each episode, including many examples of the index cards used to shuffle and assemble the elements of the show up until the last minute.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n While the archive contains tapes and cassettes and born-digital records, the bulk is paper. \u201cIt\u2019s a very analog archive,\u201d Enniss said.<\/p>\n The show itself remains under copyright. But NBC Universal has provided digital copies of every episode, Enniss said, for use in research and teaching.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The archive announcement is timed just ahead of the show\u2019s 50th anniversary celebrations, which includes a three-hour prime-time special<\/a> scheduled for Feb. 16. The Ransom Center is planning an exhibition drawn from the archive, set to open this fall.<\/p>\n The center is best known as a top destination for literary archives, including the papers of Gabriel Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez, Arthur Miller<\/a> and David Foster Wallace<\/a>. But it also has sizable holdings pertaining to film and television, including the papers of Robert De Niro and the archive from the AMC series \u201cMad Men,\u201d<\/a> as well as extensive collections relating to vaudeville<\/a> and other forerunners of the modern variety show.<\/p>\n The Michaels archive also contains material from his work on other projects, which have included TV hits like \u201c30 Rock\u201d and \u201cPortlandia\u201d alongside stalled efforts<\/a> like \u201c1985,\u201d a feature-length spoof of George Orwell\u2019s \u201c1984,\u201d written by the \u201cS.N.L.\u201d veterans Al Franken and Tom Davis. Jenny Romero, the Ransom Center\u2019s curator of film and television, described the collection as both sprawling and particular to the man who amassed it.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s from his perspective, as a producer,\u201d she said. \u201cYou\u2019re not going to see things you would see in a director\u2019s or writer\u2019s or actor\u2019s collection.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n