There’s a birth certificate in the Harry Ransom Center. That’s the nickname that’s been given to one of the most important documents in television’s history, the first mention of Saturday Night Live. HRC Director Stephen Enniss explained, “It’s the original memorandum Lorne Michaels wrote pitching what he intended to do on the show.”
That game-changing piece of paper is just one out of 700 boxes of material from series creator and producer Michaels’ life and career that now live on the University of Texas campus. (For context, the entire Woodward and Bernstein archive, documenting their takedown of the Nixon administration, only filled 77 boxes.) “It’s been a massive effort to catalog the collection,” Enniss said. “It covers not only the 50-year history of SNL, but his other film work and other television work … from his very early student days, his first theatrical roles in summer camps, moving through his early career, The Beautiful Phyllis Diller Show and Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, up until SNL.”
A gift to the HRC from Michaels, Ennis said that the plan is to have the complete archive catalogued and available to researchers by January 2026. However, visitors to the HRC will get a first glimpse at highlights starting this weekend and running through March 20, 2026, with “Live From New York: The Lorne Michaels Collection,” a specially curated selection of around 700 items on display in the HRC’s downstairs gallery. The exhibition has been curated by the HRC’s former Robert De Niro curator of film, Steve Wilson, who has come out of retirement just for this show. Opening week also includes a special event on Thu., Sept. 25, as The New Yorker articles editor Susan Morrison discusses her biography of the TV comedy leviathan, Lorne: The Man Who Invented “Saturday Night Live.”
As the show celebrates 50 years of memorable sketches and unforgettable talents, having the collection on-site has reinforced for Enniss how universal and cross-generational its appeal is. He recalled talking to a student recently, “and he said, ‘It speaks so much to my generation,’ and I was taken aback, because the show is my generation.”
Enniss noted that visitors to the exhibit will recognize many favorite moments from the show, no matter what lineup or era they prefer. “They’ll remember the Wild and Crazy Guys, and they’ll remember Church Lady, and there’ll be that spark of recognition.” But what he finds most interesting about the archive is what he saw as insights into the creative process and pointed particularly to “the trace evidence of revision.” That includes that birth certificate, which details proposals for the show that Michaels eventually dropped, scripts with abandoned sketches, and the famous bulletin board where the show format is laid out. Enniss said, “It’s a bulletin board because it’s very fluid. Lorne Michaels is literally testing those sketches in the dress rehearsal with an audience there and making changes before the live show an hour later.”
While the HRC may still be seen as a home for high art and academic rarities, for Enniss it’s just as important to provide a home to collections like Michaels’ SNL archives because of the show’s massive cultural impact. “There’s a way in which a show like Saturday Night Live, which is cobbled together on the fly, week after week after week, might have a very ephemeral kind of presence,” he says. “But when these production materials make their way into an institutional collection, what we’re essentially saying is that we believe it will continue to give insight into not only the process of how the show was made, but also into our larger culture.”
Live From New York: The Lorne Michaels Collection
On display through March 20, 2026, Harry Ransom Center
This article appears in September 19 • 2025.
