Saturday Night Live almost never happened. Fifty years after what almost never happened, we can take the inception story of Hollywood’s greatest comedy feeder machine with perspective and grace. I think. I hope. For -once upon a time- there were better reasons for it to have ended before it began, the primary one being that Johnny Carson reruns existed, and were basically free. It was only an internal NBC contract dispute that gave SNL a chance at life. And there were so, so many opportunities to throw it away, all of which seemingly culminated in the 90 minutes prior to the first episode.
October 11, 1975. Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle) – who knew that Lorne Michaels was ever young?- arrives at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in Manhattan to produce his brainchild. Nobody can seem to define what the show is; the best guesses are “comedy/variety,” and everything that can go wrong is currently going wrong. Michaels arrives at 10:00 pm sharp. The show will air live at 11:30 pm. In 90 minutes, Michaels has to bring all the elements together. The film has given him a tidy 100 minutes of runtime to do so.
Lemme see if I can rattle off the issues coming to mind:
1. The show’s star, John Belushi (Matt Wood) is a diva and hasn’t signed his contract
2. Belushi and fellow comedian Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith) loathe one another
3. The stage isn’t built
4. The lighting standard crashes, causing the lighting guy to quit on the spot
5. The show’s only black performer, Garrett Morris (Lamorne Morris, no relation), is openly questioning his role
6. The show has three hours’ worth of material for ninety minutes and nothing has been cut yet
7. Michaels is no amateur, but he sure ain’t a veteran
8. The puppeteer, Jim Henson (Nicholas Braun, also playing Andy Kaufman in the film), has no script
9. Most of the NBC brass is rooting for the show to fail, thus justifying the use of reruns for the time slot
10. The network censor doesn’t like anything
11. The writers don’t seem to care
12. The guest host, comedian George Carlin (Matthew Rhys), doesn’t seem to understand -and certainly doesn’t appreciate- sketch humor
13. The show is way over budget
14. Most of the crew won’t help build the stage “not my job”
15. There’s no studio audience
16. Representatives from dozens of countrywide affiliates are present and in need of convincing that this show makes best use of their Saturday late time slot.
17. The women cast members are having costuming issues due to immediate transitions – for the most part, however, Gilda Radner (Ella Hunt), Laraine Newman (Emily Fairn), and Jane Curtin (Kim Matula) seem on board with the chaos; they are the most go-with-the-flow people in the house — it’s the men who are all proving difficult
18. Meanwhile, Dan Aykroyd (Dylan O’Brien) comes off as a horndog
19. The show’s initial anchor for the “Weekend Update” segment is Lorne Michaels himself. Michaels is no comedian, and it shows.
20. NBC exec David Tebet (Willem Dafoe) has ultimate say on whether the show airs live or not, and he is well aware of every.single.thing going wrong around him
Twenty is enough for now, doncha think? Ninety minutes to air. And
Belushi has at least five issues by himself. TBH, if I’m the NBC exec making the call to air or not, I go with the Carson rerun. It’s almost a no-brainer.
Pacing is one the most difficult issues in filmmaking. You have to tell your story, but can’t bore or lose the audience in the process. I don’t envy the editor. Pacing is damn near perfect in Saturday Night. As an audience member, I understand from the outset that the film is going to describe problem after problem after problem all occurring in the 90-minute gap between introduction and showtime. In that time, we’re going to see exactly how extensive the problems are and how (mostly) Lorne is going to solve each and every one of them not to our satisfaction, but to the satisfaction of the people whose job it is to decide whether or not a show goes on the air; that’s a bigger ask. All we the audience ask is to be entertained.
Perhaps the most curious part of this biographical recreation is the appearance of comedy legend Milton Berle (J.K. Simmons), who at one point unzips and releases Hurricane Milton to taunt Chevy Chase. Did that really happen? I guess it must have; I mean, why would you make up a detail like that, especially if it doesn’t fit with the rest of the film, huh? There is so much going on here, I haven’t even gotten around to mentioning some of my favorite people: Billy Crystal (Nicholas Podany), Paul Shaffer (Paul Rust), and Billy Preston (John Batiste). You know how they have those “ensemble” awards? This is an ensemble award-winning film.
If I have any true critique, it’s that this film namedrops with such aggression that it is clearly intended for people who lived through the era. Anybody under boomer age is unlikely to see just how funny it is when a veteran writer prognosticates the future of Chevy Chase and nails it exactly. Can GenZ or a Millennial enjoy this film? Sure, the chaos is far and wide, and they may even be amazed at how people in the 1970s had to deal with such low tech, but this film is intended for people over fifty … and in most cases, well over fifty at that.
’75 and there’s a gap in the sked
Exec want to go reruns instead
But a producer named Lorne
Has overcome scorn
For inspiration to make comedy widespread
Rated R, 109 Minutes
Director: Jason Reitman
Writer: Gil Kenan, Jason Reitman
Genre: The “What if” game
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: People who identify Chevy Chase, Dan Aykroyd, and John Belushi primarily as “SNL” cast members
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: “Yeah, so?”
