Some Exclusive Lorne Michaels Content

Four years ago I sent the Obama Presidential Library a Freedom of Information Act request for emails with Lorne Michaels’ assistants throughout the Obama administration. Michaels is a guy who takes immense pride in his influence over political discourse, not to mention his own proximity to the famous and powerful, and I was curious to see what sort of contact, if any, he maintained with the White House. A few weeks ago the Library finally fulfilled my request, and I got my answer: not all that much, at least via email, but definitely a little. 

The emails—you can read them yourself here and here—are largely logistical communications managing Michaels’ attendance at White House events, like a 2016 state dinner for Justin Trudeau and a 2017 party celebrating “eight great years.” Nothing too surprising there: obviously you’re gonna want some famous Canadian-Americans at an event with the Canadian Prime Minister, and there aren’t many Canadian-Americans more famous than Lorne Michaels. 

The one thing that did pique my interest is from all the way back in the first year of Obama’s first term. It’s a series of emails scheduling a phone call on October 12, 2009, between Lorne Michaels; Obama advisor David Axelrod; SNL producer Kevin Miller; and WME head honcho Ari Emanuel, brother of then-White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel. The emails themselves are between Michaels’ and Emanuel’s assistants, with the CC line featuring Miller and Axelrod’s aide Eric Lesser. The subject is “RE: cc//Ari, David Axelrod, Lorne Michaels, Kevin Miller.”

I haven’t been able to find any public record of or reporting on the conversation, which isn’t unexpected. It’s not like Obama himself was on the line (as far as I know). I did dig around a bit to see if there might be any relevant news context for the call—I was in high school at the time, so I wasn’t exactly paying attention—and what I found might shed some light. 

On October 3rd, nine days before the call, SNL aired a cold open in which Fred Armisen’s Obama said he hadn’t accomplished anything since taking office. “The sketch has caused a rumble among the inside-the-Beltway chattering classes and New York news nabobs,” reported CNN at the time. It sparked discussion in the Washington Post and on CNN, the latter of which devoted a column, a Situation Room segment, and the above news article to it. “Saturday Night Live is a very important factor in how people get information about American politics,” PolitiFact’s Bill Adair told Wolf Blitzer—some things never change.

So it could be that the White House was trying to manage some bad PR, which isn’t unheard of: one day before the call, Obama’s communications director, Anita Dunn, was on CNN arguing Fox News operated as “the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party.” A week after the call, Axelrod was on ABC blasting Fox as “really not news” and explaining that the White House would stop treating them as a nonpartisan outlet. If he thought he was more likely to find a friendly ear at SNL, it makes sense he’d keep things private.

It’s also a matter of public record that the Obama Administration took seriously late night comedy's influence over public opinion. Over the course of his two terms, Obama twice summoned Jon Stewart to the White House for private conversations. In 2015, the New York Times cited officials who described the visits as “efforts by the president and his communications team to tap into Mr. Stewart’s influence with younger voters.” Politico reported that the administration listened closely to Stewart’s broadsides on The Daily Show and heeded his criticism:

In March 2009, Stewart discussed the new Obama administration’s idea of removing veterans with private insurance plans from the Department of Veterans Affairs rolls. “That can’t be right,” he intoned. The White House scrapped the plan one day after his segment aired, and veterans’ advocates recall Stewart’s commentary being discussed during a West Wing meeting with senior aides including then-chief of staff Rahm Emanuel.

See also: 

Axelrod, a frequent Stewart guest, kept in touch with the host by phone and email. In an interview, Axelrod said Stewart was “a useful prod” for the administration.

“I can’t say that because Jon Stewart was unhappy policy changed. But I can say that he had forceful arguments, they were arguments that we knew would be heard and deserved to be answered,” Axelrod said.

Politico described the White House’s direct engagement with Stewart as a “work-the-umps strategy.” It’s hardly a stretch to suppose that Axelrod and company saw SNL as another ump to work.

Is this a lot of speculation about a few emails scheduling a phone call? Yes, and I think it’s fun and interesting speculation, but speculation it will remain unless any of the folks in those emails get back to me. In the meantime, I’ll send the Obama Library a FOIA request for Axelrod and Lesser’s call logs and daily schedules on October 9. I’ll also look through Michaels’ own appointment books when I visit his archives in Austin. 

Which brings me to an ask: we’re halfway through the month of August and I’m about halfway to the goal of my subscription drive, which is to raise funds for a research trip to Lorne Michaels’ archives at the University of Texas. To recap, the drive comes with the following perks:

If you can’t swing a full subscription but still want to chip in, you can use the tip jar function. I appreciate any and all support you can offer, and I promise to share the fruits of my research with you here. 

Let me be clear, too, that I am not simply looking for amusing curiosities, but for insight into how Michaels wields his power within and beyond the walls of 30 Rock. One small example: as I recently discussed in the Humorism Evening Podcast, in 2022 I sent various New York State agencies requests for their communications with SNL and NBC about the show’s return to the studio with a live audience in 2020, which NBC managed by exploiting an apparent (and, I would argue, nonexistent) loophole in the state’s guidance for media productions. 

Among the fruits of these requests were emails coordinating a May 1, 2020 call between Lorne Michaels, his PR guy Steven Rubenstein, and two of Andrew Cuomo’s closest aides, Melissa DeRosa and Bill Mulrow. 

At the very height of the pandemic, when bodies were lying frozen in trucks on the streets of Manhattan, Michaels was coordinating directly with some of the most powerful people in New York. I doubt he just wanted to chat: the man had a show to get back on the air in a few months, and as he told Vulture in September 2020, he needed it to have a live audience.

It’s not news that Cuomo’s office worked with him to make that happen—he says as much in the Vulture interview—but I do think it’s noteworthy how early he was working with Cuomo’s office. As contemporaneous reporting in Fox Business noted, Mulrow is a banker and a former longtime Cuomo aide whom the governor tapped to work pro bono with business executives on a reopening plan. At the time of the May 1 call, the hope was to resume upstate manufacturing and construction by May 15. On May 4, Cuomo classified arts and entertainment businesses as among the least essential. With SNL’s season ending on May 9, it’s hard to imagine the show was much of a priority.

And perhaps it is noteworthy too how much he kept pushing the state government after it gave him clearance to bring audiences back into the studio. Here’s his PR guy, Steven Rubenstein, asking Robert Mujica—then the state’s Budget Director, who had authority over reopening guidelines—for permission to add 18 first responders on top of the audience. “We wouldn’t come to you for any show,” Rubenstein said. “But as SNL is a symbol of NY to the country, we wanted to ask if you’d talk to Lorne directly to see if there’s a safe path.”

If this interests you as much as it interests me, please upgrade your subscription (or buy one for a friend) and help me get down to Austin: 

For now, I’ll leave you with the following emails about Lorne Michaels’ Presidential Medal of Freedom. Here he is receiving an email from the White House—apparently memorializing the phone call notifying him about the medal—and forwarding it to his assistant, who lets the White House know what name to put on it:

And here, after the ceremony, is his assistant passing along a question about some pins that accompanied the medal:

Have a great weekend.

Like this post? Check out more of my public records reporting on SNL:

How SNL Spends Its Money

And other odds and ends.

HumorismSeth Simons