I have no idea whether Jason Reitman was a Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip fan, but man, it sure feels like it watching Saturday Night. Either way, Reitman’s film — about the 90 minutes leading up to the debut episode ofSaturday Night Live —is extremely Sorkinesque, from the labyrinthian walk-and-talks around Studio 8H to the dialogue that is sometimes quite clever but rarely laugh-out loud funny. (Personally, I would like a movie about Saturday Night Live to be funny. The actors playing the cast and crew of Season 1SNL do way more laughingat one another onscreen than I ever did in my theater seat.)
Still, Saturday Night’sconcept is undeniably clever: Tell a heightened version of the hour and a half prior to SNL’s premiere in real time —although“real time” here is a bit unreal. (Somehow,a film that transpires between 10 and 11:30PMruns 110 minutes.) Even more than that: Structurethose 90 minutes like an episode ofSNL.Saturday Night includes oddball comedy sketches, musical guests (Billy Preston and Janis Ian, played by Jon Batiste and Naomi McPherson, respectively), monologues (Tracy Letts a veteran TV writer whosets forth an elaborate prediction of one cast member’s future rise and fall), celebrity cameos (hey, there’s Finn Wolfhard as an anonymous NBC page!), bits that don’t quite work (Nicholas Braun plays Andy KaufmanandJim Henson for no reason), the whole thing gets a little shaggy in the final 15 minutes, and in the last scene the whole cast is there at home base to send you off for the night.
READ MORE: The BestSNL Cast Members of All Time
That night: October 11, 1975. That’s when producer Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle) and NBC executive Dick Ebersol (Cooper Hoffman) launched their bold ideafor a new kind of late-night TV comedy: An edgy variety show featuring standup, rock and roll, and a repertory companyof up-and-coming comedians who were mostly unknown to mainstream America.
AsNBC’s Saturday Night(as it was known back then) nears showtime, the entire production is in complete disarray. A lighting rig falls during rehearsal, nearly killing spark-plugactor John Belushi (Matt Wood), whostill hasn’tsign his talent contract. Muppet maestro Jim Henson (Braun) doesn’t have a script for his sketch. Despite being the old guy who got laughs during a disastrous dress rehearsal, Billy Crystal (Nicholas Podany) doesn’t know if his lengthy monologue will make it to air. All the while, whe NBC censor (Catherine Curtain) keeps slashing dirty words out of the scripts by firebrand head writer Michael O’Donoghue (Tommy Dewey).
Most crucially, NBC’s smooth-talking head of talent David Tebet (Willem Dafoe) remains unconvinced thatMichaels’show is ready for prime time; ifhe can’t get his team’s act together,Tebet vows to pull the plug and air a rerun of Johnny Carson’sTonight Show.As the seconds tick down to 11:30, Lorne rallies hiscrew and fights for the integrity of a creative vision that hecan’t fully articulate yet. (Pressed by Ebersol to tell him whatSaturday Night is, Michaels will only concede he’s certain of the “ingredients” but not the “proportions.”)
Reitman and co-writer Gil Kenan’s concept of a frenetic race to the finishthat plays like a pseudoSNLepisode doesn’t sync perfectly with the actual history of earlySNL.It’s been a few years since I re-readLive From New York, James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales’ incredible oral history ofSNL,or the underratedSaturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Liveby Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad, but even if you’ve never read a page of either one, some of the notes struck in Reitman’sSaturday Nightare just patently false. To pick just one: According to the movie, 15 minutes before the premiere of the very firstSNL,John Belushi, Gilda Radner (Ella Hunt), and Lorne Michaels were casually shooting the breezedown at the Rockefeller Center ice skating rink. Really? And the rinkwas open in early October?And no one else was usingthe rink or standing anywhere in theentire plaza?
That’s one of manyodd and unbelievable moments that pile up like so many discarded cue cards by the end of the film. SoSaturday Night’snot great history. But if you want history, go read those aforementioned books. What you go to this film for, I suppose, is energy, whichSaturday Nightdoes have in abundance. The swirling Steadicam shots, the jittery score, the ticking onscreen clock counting down the minutes to air, plus a couple performances that really nail the vibe of the Not Ready For Primetime Players, particularly Dewey as the rebellious Michael O’Donoghue, Cory Michael Smith as the cocky Chevy Chase, and especially Lamorne Morris, who nails Garrett Morris’speaking rhythms and slinky physicality and gets a couplestrong scenes where he rightfully questions hisrole on the nascentseries.
In many ways, Saturday Nightis not what the production of the firstSNLwas like.That’s becauseSaturday Night is notactually about firstSNL taping, or about the show’s history in a more general sense. It’s about the mythology of this proving ground for the biggest minds in Americancomedy for half a century and counting. Reitman clearly made this film from a place of love and admiration for the institution ofSNL and the people, then and now, whoproduce it. He might get the facts wrong at times; what he gets right is thefeeling that every fanwho grows up watchingSNL imagines the show is like behind the scenes — giddy and chaotic and brimming with passionate creativity.
To watchSaturday Night is to get a taste not just ofSaturday Night’s first night, but an idealizedmicrocosm of what it’s like backstageeverynight. And if this had been the pilot ofStudio 60, I would have absolutely watched Episode2.
Additional Thoughts
-It’s hard enough to make a biopic about one famous person, where you need someone who not only looks and acts like an iconic figure but has to deliver a performance that rises above the level ofSNL-style imitation.Saturday Nightis all famous people. Some of the actors don’t look like their real-world counterparts (Dylan O’Brien as Dan Aykroyd), some don’t sound like their real-world counterparts (LaBelle), and some don’t lookor sound like their real-world counterparts. (J.K. Simmons as Milton Berle, who wasn’t even on the debut episode of SNL.)
-The more I’ve sat with all that casting, though, the more I’ve wondered if the questionablelikenesses could be by design. After all, where wouldSaturday Night Live be withoutimpressions of famous people by cast members who bear no resemblance to the folks they were playing? (Go look at pictures of Chevy Chase as Gerald Ford if you don’t believe me.) Maybe that adds more to the vibe that Reitman is going for of the ultimateSNL episode, in movie form.
RATING: 6/10
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