This week, everybody is talking about an ultra-gory killer-clown movie (Terrifier 3) beating out a tamer killer-clown movie (Joker: Folie à Deux) at the box office. Meanwhile, Saturday Night, a behind-the-scenes chronicle of the birth of “Saturday Night Live,” premiered in seventh place, despite the comedy bona fides of director Jason Reitman (Up in the Air, Juno, Ghostbusters: Afterlife).
Perhaps this period piece has limited interest for the younger folks, while the older ones are waiting for streaming or don’t want to taint their memories of beloved comedians by watching actors imitate them. What are they missing?
The deal
It’s October 11, 1975, approximately 90 minutes before the premiere of a live sketch-comedy show called “Saturday Night” on NBC. In the Manhattan studio, chaos reigns.
Fresh-faced network suit Dick Ebersol (Cooper Hoffman) is rooting for the show that he hired young Canadian comedy writer Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle) to create. Michaels tells executive Dave Tebet (Willem Dafoe), who represents the NBC old guard, that he envisions “Saturday Night” as the only show “by and for” the first generation to grow up watching television: a showcase for boomers, with a brand-new comedy sensibility to match.
Tebet is amused but not convinced. To him, “Saturday Night” is merely a pawn in a contract dispute with all-powerful late-night host Johnny Carson (Jeff Witzke), who offers Michaels a poisonous welcome by phone. Tebet has the power to ax the new show before it airs, and he might do just that.
Meanwhile, Michaels can’t decide which sketches will make the air; his potential breakout star, John Belushi (Matt Wood), keeps going on the lam; audio and lighting mishaps abound; the set isn’t finished; the host, George Carlin (Matthew Rhys), is openly contemptuous of the show; the censor (Catherine Curtin) wants to chop up the script; players Garrett Morris (Lamorne Morris) and Jane Curtin (Kim Matula) wonder what they’re even doing there; comedy legend Milton Berle (J.K. Simmons) wanders around causing trouble; and no one treats Jim Henson’s (Nicholas Braun) Muppets with the proper respect.
Will you like it?
I’m not of the generation that “Saturday Night Live” was made by and for, according to the movie. But as a child of the 1970s, one of my great ambitions was to stay awake all the way through an episode. Before the players were household names and the show became an institution, those 90 minutes felt like a wonderful, subversive secret. Here were grown-ups acting just as ridiculous as kids! And no one was stopping them!
Reitman’s film, which he cowrote with Gil Kenan, does a decent job of capturing that anarchic spirit. The subplots I listed are only the tip of the iceberg, and the wordy dialogue flies by as fast as in any Aaron Sorkin production.
To enhance the panicky, countdown-to-live atmosphere, Reitman shoots many scenes in a mock vérité style, with tracking shots and whip pans making us feel like a documentarian trying to capture the chaos. We’re constantly struggling to keep up with the rapid-fire character introductions — who is Tracy Letts playing? Wait, is that Billy Crystal (Nicholas Podany)? — but we’re not bored.
The performances aren’t bad, considering that they’re mostly impersonations. Wood is surprisingly funny as Belushi, while Ella Hunt doesn’t feel weird enough to be his partner in crime, Gilda Radner. Morris steals every scene he’s in, Dylan O’Brien makes a great Dan Aykroyd, and Emily Fairn as a wan Laraine Newman deserves more screen time. Cory Michael Smith plays Chevy Chase as if he were Patrick Bateman, an all-American sociopath determined to be the breakout star of this fiasco.
The usually hilarious Rachel Sennott is fine as Michaels’ spouse, Rosie Shuster, who deserves more recognition as a founding writer of the show. But we never learn enough about the couple to be invested in their relationship. The baby-faced LaBelle tries a little too hard to make his character winsome and likable. It doesn’t help that Michaels feels less like a person than a delivery system for Reitman and Kenan’s retrospective commentary — for instance, painstakingly informing everyone that the unruly Belushi is a comic genius who will have a towering legacy. (You don’t say!)
Saturday Night obviously exaggerates the pandemonium of the premiere night for comic effect. But it also conveys just how wild and irreverent the show’s early days were, without overly sanitizing or sentimentalizing them for modern sensibilities. Despite some heavy-handed detours, the movie doesn’t run solely on nostalgia, and it will whet your appetite for more knowledge about the hundreds of big comedy personalities who fly by here. Reitman loves “Saturday Night Live,” and it shows.
If you like this, try…
“Saturday Night Live” (50 seasons, 1975-2024; NBC, Peacock, rentable): Chances are, the first thing you’ll want to do after seeing Saturday Night is to revisit the real Episode 1 to see just how loose and wacky these young comedians were.
Live From New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live as Told by Its Stars, Writers and Guests by Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller (2015): First published in 2002 and later expanded, this book has been hailed as the definitive oral history of the show, warts and all. Or, if you’re interested in the process of creating a single episode, James Franco’s hard-to-find 2010 documentary Saturday Night takes a deep dive.
Belushi (2020; fuboTV, Paramount+, YouTube Primetime): While Saturday Night mostly plays Belushi’s cocaine problem for laughs, R.J. Cutler’s documentary offers an earnest look at the star’s troubled life.
This article appears in Oct 16-22, 2024.
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