For younger generations who’ve grown up on TikTok and YouTube, the significance of Lorne Michaels’ Saturday Night Live (originally titled Saturday Night) is hard to fully convey. And in the new film Saturday Night, director Jason Reitman (Juno, Up in the Air) barely tries, for better or worse. His movie is an adrenaline-fueled, tension-filled, 16mm recreation of the frantic 90 minutes that preceded the October 1975 premiere of the iconic show that took a John Belushi-wielded samurai sword to American television.
Assembling a fantastic group of performers to channel the spirit of an original cast that included Chevy Chase, John Belushi, and Dan Aykroyd, Reitman’s challenge is to approximate with as much verisimilitude as possible the chaos, confusion, and doubt that marked the last waning moments of a world without Saturday Night Live. And while he succeeds with great flair and energy, there is nothing to glean from the attempt and no larger point to consider, other than to acknowledge the successful completion of the task that Reitman set for himself. With such a narrow focus, Saturday Night downgrades itself to a loving and thoroughly convincing bit of myth-burnishing mimicry.
Invented Scenes Lead to a Larger Truth
When Saturday Night premiered during the Gerald Ford administration, the aging generation that inaugurated the medium of television was still expecting their evening’s televised entertainment to include Milton Berle going through his musty, post-Vaudeville dance moves with a gaggle of showgirls. The fact that Michaels managed to convince NBC executives to green-light a show featuring a gonzo group of unknown comics running on youth and cocaine seems like a miracle. Especially because he — at least on premiere night — was a runaway train of stress in constant danger of jumping the tracks.
In near perpetual motion, be it physical or mental, Michaels (the terrific Gabriel LaBelle, who played the young Steven Spielberg in The Fabelmans) seems eternally befuddled and unable to answer basic questions like, “Do you even know what the show is?” But like all good producers, he manages to pull the right words out of his exasperated mouth to calm down or soothe the egos of his untested cast, his grouchy, middle-aged crew, and the executives who’d prefer the premiere be preempted by a rerun of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.
Saturday Night Features Odd Historical Inaccuracies
Reitman, who co-wrote the fast-moving screenplay with his Ghostbusters: Afterlife partner Gil Kenan, is not above condensing timelines or manufacturing events (we doubt Belushi was ice skating in Rockefeller Plaza 20 minutes before air) to get to the larger truth about the show’s difficult birth. But maybe he should've been, or we’d have avoided the phone call Michaels receives from Carson, who calls him a “bench warmer” and advises him to not “get too comfortable.” That’s an odd and historically questionable raising of the stakes considering that Saturday Night was greenlit so Tonight Show reruns that ran on weekends could be moved to weeknights allowing Carson more days off.
This occasional fudging may prioritize the spirit of the moment over the strict retelling of the facts, but it’s off-putting considering how much care, especially by production designer Jess Gonchor and costume designer Danny Glicker, went into maintaining authenticity. The film lives and dies on its verisimilitude and real-time energy, so incorporating historical inaccuracies for the sake of drama seems incongruent with the purpose of Saturday Night.
A Brilliant Cast Brings the Classic Ensemble to Life
The care given to recreating the night is best evidenced in a cast so well-chosen that one wishes the Academy Award for Achievement in Casting could be handed out starting in 2025 and not 2026. With cinematographer Eric Steelberg’s nimble camera constantly over his shoulder, Michaels winds his way through the halls of 30 Rock and Studio 8H putting out various behind the scenes fires and dealing with the insecurities of the herd of cats that constitute his comedy troupe. Almost everyone entrusted with playing a key cast member or writer expertly uses body language and voice to approximate the real thing without tipping into caricature.
Cory Michael Smith, who channels the cocky a-hole energy of “handsome, funny gentile” Chevy Chase, is essentially a dramatic actor (he’s appeared in three Todd Haynes films), which is one reason why his performance — especially his cross-generational face-off with Berle, portrayed by the predictably great J.K. Simmons — works so well. Most others are given at least something to play, including Lamorne Morris, whose Garrett Morris (no relation), a Juilliard-trained playwright, wonders why he’s been cast. Dylan O’Brien, whose vocal inflections are uncannily and hilariously like Dan Aykroyd's, hasn’t much to do except flirt with various female cast members, including Rosie Shuster (Rachel Sennott), a terrific writer who also happens to be married to Michaels.
As the occasional title card reminds us of the time remaining until they go live, Michaels deals with a season’s worth of talent issues, most notably Belushi’s reluctance to sign his contract. Playing Belushi with his explosive energy left roiling on the inside, Matt Wood has one emotion to convey — primal annoyance — which limits his performance. But he is still more prominent than female cast members Gilda Radner (Ella Hunt), Jane Curtin (Kim Matula) and Laraine Newman (Emily Fairn), who are all terrific if not as foregrounded as the men.
Fan Service for Lorne Michaels & SNL 50 Years Later
The main villain in Saturday Night, other than time and history, is the intense pressure Michaels feels from panicky executive producer Dick Ebersol (Cooper Hoffman) and the whole old boys’ network of NBC affiliates and C-suite hard asses like David Tebet (Willem Dafoe), whose words of confidence seem poison-tipped with hopes for disaster.
Even the NBC censor (Catherine Curtin) tasked with protecting America’s TV viewers from sex, vulgarity and hedonism, is hellbent on removing all that dangerous counterculture comedy from the script. That runs her afoul of the show’s legendary head writer, Michael O’Donoghue, played by an absolutely spot-on Tommy Dewey, who effortlessly tosses off Reitman and Kenan’s best lines, including O’Donoghue’s disdainful description of television as a “lava lamp with slightly better audio.”
All this fretting and fighting is maintained at an energetic pace that only flags in purposeful moments, like the clever diegetic use of Janis Ian’s plaintive 1975 hit "At Seventeen." That we know the premiere makes it to air doesn’t seem to matter on this well-oiled rollercoaster, but at some point it becomes troublesome that the film has no second gear. Nor was it meant to have one. Instead, Reitman has created a tightly focused, vibe-accurate, mile-a-minute chronicle of how an insanely difficult and profoundly influential television series careened like an out-of-control bumper car to its premiere.
Reitman's willingness to forgo context and deep characterizations to achieve that end ultimately renders Saturday Night a fan-servicing (and corporate-servicing, since the show is about to enter its 50th season) curiosity. But it's still a forceful reminder that, despite the current show operating at near-unwatchable comedic levels, there was a moment — specifically 11:29pm on October 11, 1975 — when there was nothing and then suddenly, one minute later, all the comedy doors flew open.
Saturday Night will debut in select theaters on September 27, 2024, and expand on October 11, 2024.
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