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"I think Scott has turned into the best version of Scott Rudin," Michaels said. "He was more driven at the beginning." (Rudin is known for impetuously firing assistants and throwing staplers. A few years later he would be forced to step back from his businesses after former employees went to the press with these tales.)

Hill nodded. "I would hear all those bad things about him, but, as a director, I had nothing but the best experience," he said. "Do you recognize that sort of change happening with a lot of legendary people?"

"Oh, yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah," Michaels said. "Mike used to tell this story about when they were editing Catch-22." (He took it for granted that Hill knew he was referring to Mike Nichols. Sometimes he will pause after saying a famous friend's first name; then, as if realizing that his interlocutor is at a loss, he will supply the surname almost apologetically, in a clipped way. This results in a lot of sentences with a halting cadence: "Paul...Simon used to say..." Or "Jack...Nicholson told me." Colleagues refer to "Jack" and "Mick" and "Paul" as "Lorne's all-stars.") "Mike was walking on the beach with his editor, Sam O'Steen, and another friend. Sam said to the guy, 'You notice something different about Mike? He's not an asshole anymore.'"

Hill gave a huge laugh, elated at being included in this cozy conversational orbit with the late director of The Graduate.

 

"Because he'd been an asshole on his first two movies," Michaels clarified. "It's that thing of, when you start to believe in yourself, when you're not so frightened—"

Hill jumped in: "Then you don't have to be a psychopath!"

The cautionary tale dispensed, Michaels turned to business: "So, we're going to do a comedy show? The writers are going to come in, you're going to pretend to like their pitches."

Hill wagged his head up and down. "It's pure joy to be here," he said.

Michaels rules SNL with detached but absolute power. He harbors no illusions that his Canadian tendency toward self-deprecation is taken seriously by anyone. One talent agent routinely tells clients auditioning for Michaels to always remember that 'he' is the real star of the show. He is the alpha in most of his employees' lives. To those people, and to the wider comedy world, he is, not accidentally, a mythic figure, a mysterious object of obsession. "He is aware of his own Lorne-ness," Mike Myers says. Conversations about him are peppered with comparisons: He is the Godfather (Chris Rock, Will Forte), Jay Gatsby (Bernie Brillstein), Obi-Wan Kenobi (Tracy Morgan), the Great and Powerful Oz (David Spade, Kate McKinnon), Charles Foster Kane (Jason Sudeikis), a cult leader (Victoria Jackson), Tom Ripley (Bill Hader), Machiavelli, and both the Robert Moses and the Darth Vader of comedy (Bruce McCall). Bob Odenkirk feels that Michaels "set himself up as some kind of very distant, strange Comedy God." "There's so many people who, their whole lives, have been trying to figure him out," Bill Hader says. Another colleague put it this way: "I feel about Lorne the way I feel about the ocean. It's huge and beautiful, but I'm afraid of it."

Michaels's office door opened, and Hill turned his chair to face the room, as thirty-some people filed in, most in jeans or sweatpants, several in slippers, many chewing gum. At least a few were fresh from talking about Michaels and the show in therapy sessions, Monday afternoon being the optimal therapy slot, given the week's ironclad schedule. As in elementary school, people sit in the same place each week: four across a velvet couch, a dozen on chairs placed against the walls, others standing in the doorway and wedged near Michaels's private bathroom (his Emmy statuettes are crammed in a corner by the sink), and around fifteen on the floor, their legs folded like grade-schoolers. The effect was of a young prince—Hill—on a throne, a throng of supplicants at his feet, the potentate behind him at the desk. (More than one staffer has heard their therapist say, "You start your week by sitting on the floor?") Tina Fey describes the Monday meeting, with its mandatory genuflecting, as "a church ritual."

Michaels, his back to a window framing the Empire State Building, put his feet on his desk. He's had it since 1975, when he first set up shop at NBC. "There were deer running through the halls of Rockefeller Center then," he told me. Of all the floors he was shown when picking out space for his new venture, he chose seventeen, because he was born on the seventeenth of November, and because it was serviced by a different elevator bank than the executive floor. He found the network-issued steel desks and shelves too corporate, so he hunted out some funkier wooden pieces in dusty NBC storerooms. The network had initially put Michaels in temporary quarters, in the vacant office of a former programming executive. In the desk he found some old Maalox tablets and a desiccated ivy plant. As if trying to keep alive a connection to a swankier era of NBC—the age of Toscanini's NBC Symphony Orchestra and The Tonight Show with Steve Allen—he nursed the plant, faithfully hydrating it with a special mister. Today its vines of heart-shaped leaves climb the window frame and spread along the top of a pair of barrister's bookcases. The shelves hold hundreds of SNL episodes on VHS tapes.