🎬 Inside UT’s new ‘SNL’ exhibit

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Similar to an Austinite’s rite to whine about how the city has changed, complaints that “Saturday Night Live” used to be funny have been happening since the show’s beginning.

“I’ve been a fan since this show started, but I’m disappointed in this season,” reads a piece of mail from 1978 now on display in a special Harry Ransom Center exhibit.

SNL had premiered on NBC just three years earlier, after Johnny Carson told executives he didn’t want to run old episodes of his show on Saturday nights. Producing a live show on Saturdays would be cheaper than a scripted one, and network executives turned to a young producer who had just won an Emmy award: Lorne Michaels.

“All I ever wanted to do was put on a cool show,” Michaels, creator of “Saturday Night Live,” told Steve Wilson, the curator of “Live from New York: The Lorne Michaels Collection.”

The collection, which includes costumes, scripts, index cards, cue cards, photographs, and more, opens tomorrow through March 20. Located on The University of Texas at Austin campus, the Harry Ransom Center is free to attend.

From New York to Austin

Michaels reached out to the Harry Ransom Center about donating his archive of work three years ago and, after visiting in 2023, reached an agreement to bring his trove to Austin. No one but him really knows why.

“We’re not really sure, we have some ideas,” Wilson said.

Primarily, he thinks, Michaels was interested because the center has a reputation for making collections accessible to students, scholars, and the general public.

“It’s quite possible, I think, that Lorne Michaels' archivist talked to Robert de Niro’s archivist and asked, ‘What do you think about this outfit?’” Wilson said. “As we happily know, Robert de Niro loves us and thinks very highly of us. We’ve done a good job for him for a long time, and that might have had something to do with it.”

Annotated scripts, production notes, and copies of every “Saturday Night Live” episode showed up in more than 500 banker’s boxes. Michaels’ full archive will be available for research in January.