Michaels Says Maybe to Palin

It seems like the inevitable comedic summit of this fall’s presidential campaign: the real Sarah Palin coming on Saturday Night Live to meet her look-alike impersonator, Tina Fey.

“All in good time,” said a cagey Lorne Michaels, longtime executive producer of NBC’s Saturday Night Live, which has been rejuvenated this fall by Fey’s three skits as the Republican vice presidential candidate.

Michaels said he wasn’t actively seeking Palin, but that the McCain campaign called after the first skit, when Fey’s Palin appeared with Amy Poehler’s Hillary Clinton on the show’s Sept. 13 season premiere, to say they enjoyed it.

SNL has a long history of political walk-ons. Michaels prefers keeping this sort of news a surprise until it happens, an opinion reinforced when word leaked that Barack Obama would be on that same show and the Democratic presidential candidate had to cancel at the last minute. “I think we looked stupid,” he said.

There are three more first-run Saturday Night Live episodes before the election.

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James Percelay, a television producer who grew up in Pawtucket and now lives in New Jersey, has produced a new show for the Web: High Drama: Against All Oz. The documentary, released this week on the Warner Brothers’ Web site, www.thewb.com, features students at Barnstable High School in Cape Cod auditioning, rehearsing and performing a production of The Wizard of Oz. The documentary is presented online in 10 five-minute episodes.

Compiled by Lynne Chaput from staff and wire reports.

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