For more than half a century, NBC’s Saturday Night Live opened with the iconic line, “Live from New York, it’s Saturday night.” With the arrival of the Lorne Michaels collection at the Harry Ransom Center, Austin now stands at centerstage.
The world-renowned humanities research library and museum is currently cataloging more than 700 boxes containing thousands of scripts, notes and production materials from Michaels’ career, with more to come. The exhibit will open for a campus preview on Sept. 19 before opening to the public on Saturday, and will be on display until March 20, 2026.
“It’s a living history,” Cindy McCreery, the UT Austin radio-television film department chair, wrote in an email. “It’s one thing to read biographies or historical accounts about a person or a particular piece of work, but to be able to have access to everything from initial ideas, to drafts of scripts, notes, business documents, props, costumes – it allows students and researchers to really dig into particular areas of interest that they just could not find otherwise.”
McCreery also wrote the research opportunities presented by this acquisition are remarkable experiences for UT students, including media studies Ph.D.
student Ann Laudick, who assisted with the archiving of the collection.
“I’d like to think that (Michaels) recognized the importance of the (Ransom) Center being on a university campus as part of the continued life that his archive would have,” Steve Ennis, Ransom Center Betty Brumbalow director, said.
Archivists, conservationists and researchers spent the better part of two years sorting through the inventory and describing each file in great detail, guest curator Steve Wilson said. The HRC estimates the full inventory will be available to the public in January of 2026.
“There’s so much more here than Saturday Night Live,” Wilson said. “There’s a lot about his early career, but also all the movies that he made and other television shows like 30 Rock and Portlandia. I would say that it’s probably about half Saturday Night Live, and half everything else.”
The collection, which curators say is one of the largest housed at the center, joins major archival contributions, including the Robert De Niro papers and the Mad Men archive, expanding the Ransom Center’s reputation as one of the premier destinations for the study of modern popular culture.
Notable items presented as part of the exhibit include original costumes worn by Lindsay Lohan and Rachel McAdams in “Mean Girls,” the wig worn by Alec Baldwin as part of his impersonation of President Donald Trump and the picture of Pope John Paul II ripped up by Sinead O’Connor and put back together by Joe Pesci.
“An archive is not something that will ever be exhausted,” Ennis said. “Each
generation will have new questions about what it was, and what it meant. The archive, in some way, is never going to be used up, but will always be a stimulus for inquiry about the last 50 years.”
