Lorne Michaels Entrusted UT’s Harry Ransom Center With His Archives. Now, We Get a Glimpse.

Within five minutes of entering the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin, visitors with even the scantiest knowledge of American pop culture will be laughing to themselves, if not aloud, at the memories Lorne Michaels, the man behind "Saturday Night Live" and all its many spinoff TV shows and movies, has given us.

Opening to the public Saturday (Sept. 20) and on view through March 20, "Live From New York: The Lorne Michaels Collection" provides a fascinating look behind the scenes of dozens of American cultural touchpoints of the past half century.

Curator Steve Wilson was lured out of retirement to select the objects and organize the exhibit, which he estimates constitutes less than half a percent of the 500 banker's boxes the Michaels family gave the University. As Wilson says, "The idea was that we would have an exhibition about his entire career, and what I found was I couldn't even hit all the highlights, much less misfires and false starts."

The exhibit reminds us that perhaps the biggest footprint in all of American pop culture has been left by a Canadian. The exhibit tracks the start of his career in Toronto before moving to Hollywood and cutting his teeth as a writer on "The Beautiful Phyllis Diller Show," "Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In" and an Emmy-winning Lilly Tomlin special, which drew the gaze of network executives. Visitors can read the original 1975 letters between Michaels and NBC executives Herb Schlosser and Dick Ebersol hashing out a concept for a new show to fill a programming hole on Saturday nights.

From there, the exhibit traces not just "Saturday Night Live" but the growth of Michaels' comedic empire via the stardom of writers and cast members who started there: "30 Rock," "Mean Girls," "Portlandia," "The Three Amigos," "Wayne's World," and the careers of Jimmy Fallon, Seth Meyers and Conan O'Brien.

The collection, which includes marked-up scripts, production notes, photographs, video and cue cards, is augmented to great effect by items on loan from NBC Universal, such as costumes and wigs for characters including the highly caffeinated motivational speaker Matt Foley (Chris Farley), the hyper-judgmental Church Lady (Dana Carvey) and those swinging Czechoslovakian Festrunk brothers (Steve Martin and Dan Aykroyd).

And yes, sitting under glass like a sacred relic, Will Ferrell's cowbell.

Michaels approached the University in 2023 after learning of actor Robert De Niro's positive experience with the Ransom Center, which has been acquiring internationally important collections in the humanities since 1957. "Robert De Niro loves us," says Wilson, "and we've done a good job for him for quite a while now."

The massive Michaels collection is still being cataloged but is scheduled to be available to the public for research in the Ransom Center's Reading Room in January. The collection will be used extensively by students in UT's Radio-TV-Film Department.

Wilson says, "This archive is going to support great scholarship for years and years to come. It's also what I think of as an anchor collection that will attract other collections as well."