Mr. 'Saturday Night'

Twain Prize Winner Lorne Michaels, Nurturing Stars and Skits . . . Forever?

Lorne Michaels, who created 'Saturday Night Live' three decades ago and who tomorrow night will receive the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, plans to stay on as producer of the show: 'If it's up to me, at least another five years.' (Helayne Seidman For The Washington Post)

NEW YORK

America is the land of "What's next?" Or so it's suggested to Lorne Michaels. "And it ruins the present," he says. "It just ruins the present."

What's next for Lorne Michaels, and mere hours away, is to report to the Kennedy Center tomorrow night to accept this year's Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. What else is next is easy to predict. On 24 Saturday nights a year, you will find Michaels in NBC's Studio 8-H producing, pacing and agonizing over "Saturday Night Live," which is arguably the most influential comedy program in TV history.

It isn't history yet, though; it's still in there swinging, wailing, rocking, rolling, introducing new stars and raising old eyebrows, a combination L'Academie Nationale du Haha and our longest-running off-Broadway revue, performed live in a theater that on a good week accommodates 7 million people.

"Saturday Night Live" is a great show that has reached the stature of American institution, and the man behind it -- its Ziegfeld, its D.W. Griffith, its Henri Langlois, its Minsky -- is a sly, wily and unassuming Canadian-born genius who took five years off during "SNL's" 30-year history but otherwise has never missed a single show.

"No no no no no no no," he says, a single "no" rarely sufficing, as he sits at an ancient desk (recovered from outgoing NBC trash in 1975) eating a salad. "And I don't want to talk about it because I don't want it to be an observed thing. I'm just superstitious about it."

His mind has never let his body be sick enough on a Saturday night to miss a show. "I've been sick on Friday nights and once or twice left early," he says, "but never on show day, for some reason. I vomited once on a Friday night. I think it might have been undercooked chicken." There is an undercooked-chicken restaurant right downstairs in Rockefeller Center, he says.

It was 1975 when Michaels and NBC executive Dick Ebersol, now in charge of sports and such monumental undertakings as the Olympics, got permission from NBC President Herbert Schlosser to create a 90-minute late-night program to fill the space left when Johnny Carson insisted that reruns of his "Tonight" show vacate the premises.

Neither Johnny nor Herb knew what was coming. Some NBC executives imagined a nice safe musical-variety show hosted by mimic Rich Little.

They didn't expect an abrasive, eccentric, audacious series that would take satirical aim at virtually every phenomenon of the modern world, including television -- especially commercial network television -- itself. Michaels, verging on 30, was perhaps getting a late start, but he made up for it with five dazzling years of the funniest live TV since Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca. "SNL" had edge before anybody even knew what edge was. And it introduced a cast of explosive unknowns that included Chevy Chase, John Belushi, Gilda Radner and Bill Murray. The amazing parade of talent continues.

Michaels's reward from NBC after those five skyrockety years: cheap pettiness at contract renewal time, executives fearing he had too much control over his own show. Michaels and almost everyone who'd worked with him left, and five years of infamous failure followed -- one of those years redeemed by the returning Ebersol and a cast that included such big names as Billy Crystal and Martin Short (plus Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Larry David, who'd both later work on "Seinfeld" in the '90s).

Then, like Scarlett O'Hara returning to Tara, Lorne Michaels reclaimed "Saturday Night Live," and it's been his ever since. There've been fights with network management, in particular a bombastic Don Ohlmeyer, who wanted Adam Sandler fired because he didn't find him funny, and network-quaking shockers, like singer Sinead O'Connor's surprise decision to tear up a photo of the pope at the end of a song (and, essentially, of her career), but now "SNL" is as comfily ensconced as a guest in one of Michaels's overstuffed chairs, or the "Today" and "Tonight" shows.

But Michaels is by nature a worrier, and so he worries that the show is too comfy in its ensconcement. "Does it affect me? Totally. I live it and worry it until the end each week. That's the part that really amazes me: not so much that I care as much but that it baffles me as much as it still does."

Winning awards -- he also has 10 Emmys -- almost forces him to reminisce. In addition to the Mark Twain Prize, he won a special honorary award this year from the Directors Guild of America, even though his fame has come as a producer and writer (he wrote for "Laugh-In" and Lily Tomlin before "SNL" was born). A few years ago he got his own star on Hollywood Boulevard. And, as always a couple of decades behind where pop culture is concerned, "60 Minutes" is preparing a piece on him and the show, air date yet to be determined.