| This week, The New Yorker’s Susan Morrison wrote a Profile of Lorne Michaels, the late-night impresario who has guided “Saturday Night Live” from its début, in 1975, to its current, fiftieth season. Now eighty years old, Michaels retains a firm grip on a show that Morrison describes as being in a state of “perpetual adolescence,” a function of its eternally revolving door of writers and stars. Inevitably, however, the passing years have sparked curiosity about Michaels’s eventual successor—a conversation that has at times focussed on the show’s first female head writer, Tina Fey. In 2003, the contributor Virginia Heffernan observed Fey at work at “S.N.L.”—in the writers’ room, during rehearsals, and on the air. It was a frenetic time. As the co-anchor of the show’s “Weekend Update” segment, Fey was testing jokes about a former-frat-boy President (“This is the hardest Bush has worked since that time he tried to walk home from Mardi Gras”) amid backlash to criticism of the recently launched Iraq War. When Fey wasn’t immersed in “S.N.L.,” she was flying weekly to Toronto for the filming of the movie “Mean Girls,” based on a script she’d written. Although Fey’s leadership at “S.N.L.” was unprecedented—and was helping improve its ratings—the series still had a reputation as a boys’ club; among its twenty full-time writers, only three were women. Heffernan’s portrait takes in Fey’s comedy beginnings, working on her high-school newspaper (where she got in trouble for a double entendre involving the word “annals”); her reaction to an anthrax scare at 30 Rockefeller Center in the aftermath of 9/11; and how her comic tastes had changed the sensibilities of the show. “There’s a group of people who feel Tina can do no wrong in my eyes,” Michaels, a famously reticent boss, tells Heffernan. “But that’s because she’s just wrong less often than other people.” | 
No comments:
Post a Comment