'Saturday Night' fact check: The true stories behind wildest tales of 'SNL' premiere (original) (raw)

Saturday Night tells the pulse-pounding tale of the 90 minutes leading up to the very first episode of Saturday Night Live — then titled NBC's Saturday Night — on Oct. 11, 1975. Things go completely off the rails as the show's largely inexperienced cast and crew, led by promising young producer Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle), race against the clock to put together a live show against the threat of the network pulling the plug, performers fighting, the set falling apart, scripts not being written, and Milton Berle menacingly hanging around, ready to drop trou at any moment.

Although the Lorne character is the primary focus of the film, we also get fun glimpses into the idiosyncrasies of the show's original Not Ready for Primetime Players, Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith), John Belushi (Matt Wood), Dan Aykroyd (Dylan O'Brien), Gilda Radner (Ella Hunt), Garrett Morris (Lamorne Morris), Jane Curtin (Kim Matula), Laraine Newman (Emily Fairn), and Michael O'Donoghue (Tommy Dewey), as well various others involved, like Jim Henson (Nicholas Braun), Andy Kaufman (also Braun), George Carlin (Matthew Rhys), Billy Crystal (Nicholas Podany), Valri Bromfield (Corinne Britti), Paul Shaffer (Paul Rust), Berle (J.K. Simmons), writers Rosie Shuster (Rachel Sennott) and Alan Zweibel (Josh Brener), and more.

The 'SNL' cast in 'Saturday Night'.

Sony Pictures Entertainment/YouTube

Director and co-writer Jason Reitman interviewed countless past and present SNL staffers and researched written accounts of the sketch show's opening night, but to squeeze it all into a feature-length film required some dramatic license. Below, Entertainment Weekly rounds up the true stories behind some of the movie's more surprising plot points to distinguish what's straight from the history books and what was made up for the big screen.

Did Milton Berle flash Chevy Chase after hitting on the comedian's fiancé?

There's no record that Milton Berle was lurking around SNL on premiere night, nor that he flashed Chevy Chase after hitting on the comedian's fiancé. However, Uncle Miltie was widely rumored to have a proclivity for showing off his notoriously large genitals and did whip it out at Studio 8H at least once. In SNL oral history book, Live From New York, writer Alan Zweibel said he was flashed in Berle's dressing room when Mr. Television hosted in 1979 (several years after Chase left the show). Zweibel recalled telling Berle that he'd gotten his start writing penis jokes about the comic, and Berle responded by showing off the source material. Just as Zweibel was marveling at Berle's "enormous" package, Gilda Radner happened to walk in. "She opens the door to his dressing room just in time to see me looking into his dick saying, 'Yeah, it's really, really nice," Zweibel said.

Was Lorne Michaels the original 'Weekend Update' anchor before turning it over to Chevy Chase?

Surprisingly, this is rooted in some truth. In lesser-known SNL lore, Michaels has said he was actually planning to anchor an early iteration of "Weekend Update." But he did not hand it over to Chase moments before showtime; in fact, it happened before Chase was even on the cast. "I’d done the equivalent of 'Weekend Update' in Canada," Michaels told Deadline in 2014. "But as we got closer to the air show, I began to realize that I didn’t think I could be the person who cut other people’s pieces and left my own in." Michaels gave the role to Chase, who was first hired only as a writer for the show before being tapped to join the cast ahead of the premiere. Chase and writer Herb Sargent are credited with conceiving "Weekend Update" as we know it, which is still a popular part of the show 50 seasons later.

Chevy Chase anchors 'Weekend Update'.

Ron Galella/getty

Did Garrett Morris sing a song about killing whities at soundcheck?

Although there are no stories about Garrett Morris singing at the show's first soundcheck, he did perform the song from the movie on SNL itself in the first season. An episode 11 sketch featured Morris auditioning for a jailhouse production of Gigi by singing, "I'm gonna get me a shotgun and kill all the whities I see." Morris previously said he got the idea for the song from one of Harry Belafonte's singers who told him a story about a Southern woman being brought onstage during Art Linkletter's TV show to perform a racist song she'd written, a white-supremacist version of the song Morris performed in the real sketch and in the film.

Was 'The Tonight Show' host Johnny Carson openly hostile over 'SNL'?

Contrary to the film's portrayal of Johnny Carson rooting for the show's demise, SNL was created as a solution to the host insisting NBC stop airing reruns of his Tonight Show on weekend nights so that he could instead cut his talk show down to three times a week and air repeats on the remaining weeknights. Instead of yielding the ad revenue to local stations to fill their own time slots, NBC decided to develop original programming for Saturday night.

Per Live From New York, Carson was skeptical of the show and "later openly appalled by some of its more outrageous gags" but did not make a threatening phone call to Michaels ahead of the premiere. Instead, at the King of Late Night's request, he met with Michaels and NBC exec Dick Ebersol in Burbank, Calif., months prior to make an agreement about not booking guests within the same timeframe. The SNL boss regularly invited Carson to guest host, but the late-night legend never appeared.

Was the network prepared to show a tape of 'The Tonight Show' in case 'SNL' wasn't ready to go live?

Actually, it was Michaels who wanted a backup plan, but not of The Tonight Show. "We almost didn't get on the air because dress rehearsal went so poorly," associate producer Craig Kellem recalled in Live From New York. "I remember Lorne seriously asking the network people — or having me ask them — to have a movie ready to go, just in case. And I don't think he was kidding."

Did John Belushi refuse to sign his contract until moments before the show went live?

Belushi was indeed without a contract until moments before starring in the cold open. Michaels' manager, Bernie Brillstein, recalls in Live From New York that five minutes before they went to air, Belushi was sitting on a bench where an associate producer was begging the comic to sign his contract or else NBC would not let him go on. Brillstein says in the book, "I just happened to walk by at the time, and I didn't really know John well at all. I couldn't believe NBC, in its stupidity, was pressuring him at such a time." He said the comedian asked him whether he should sign, and he replied, "Of course," before lying that he had helped write it.

"He said, 'Okay, I'll sign the contract if you manage me.' I swear to God, it was five minutes before showtime.... At that time, I didn't know how great Belushi was, so I just said yes to get him to sign the goddamned contract."

Although Belushi didn't hit the ice at Rockefeller Plaza in his bee costume as part of his stand-off, he was part of the Bees, SNL's first recurring characters, who did appear in an ice skating sketch later that season.

John Belushi and Garrett Morris as the Bees in season 1 episode 7 with Walter Matthau.

Fred Hermansky/NBC

Was Lorne Micheals' wife, Rosie Shuster, having an open affair with Dan Aykroyd?

The awkward love triangle depicted in the film is true to the free love spirit of the show's origins. Michaels was married to his childhood friend, writer Rosie Shuster, who was sleeping with Dan Aykroyd, who was dating Laraine Newman after previously seeing Gilda Radner.

In Live From New York, director John Landis recalled visiting the SNL offices, where he was struck by an attractive woman and asked Belushi who she was. "John says, 'That’s Rosie Shuster. That’s Lorne’s wife and Danny’s girlfriend.' Which is true. It was wild," Landis said.

Michaels and Shuster didn't divorce until 1980, but she continued to work with him at SNL off and on in the '80s.

And although Newman is depicted in the movie as being jealous of Aykroyd and Shuster's relationship, the real Newman seemed more grounded about them and her own fling with her costar. "I had a thing with Danny for a while. He was just adorable and irresistible, and we had a lot of fun," she shared in Live From New York. "And I always knew, you know, exactly what I could expect from Danny, so I never really got hurt."

Did Chevy Chase and John Belushi get into a physical fight backstage?

Similar to the film, Chase was involved in a legendary fistfight with a fellow SNL superstar backstage mere minutes before showtime, but it actually involved Bill Murray, although Belushi did end up getting hit in the fracas.

"I got in a fight with Chevy the night he came back to host [in 1978]," Murray, who joined the cast in season 2, said in Live From New York. "It’s almost like I was goaded into that. You know, I think everybody was hoping for it. I did sense that. I think they resented Chevy for leaving, for one thing. They resented him for taking a big piece of the success and leaving and making his own career go. Everybody else was from the improvisational world, where you didn’t make it about you. You were an ensemble, you were a company. So when he left, there was resentment about that. It was a shock."

Although the fight was with Murray, Chase put most of the blame on Belushi. "In a sense, John caused that fight with Billy, but we both ended up hitting John by mistake," the Community star recalled in the same book. "Billy came after me and tried to throw me off a little bit just before I was going on the air. Ultimately, Billy’s still Billy and I’m still me, but it didn’t faze me for the show. I was sure upset, but I noticed John when I was going into Billy’s dressing room, and John was like the Cheshire Cat—sitting there like 'mission accomplished.'"

Newman offered more insight in the SNL book, "It seems like there was a tension between Chevy and Billy all along during the week.… It culminated with Billy saying to Chevy, 'Why don’t you f--- your wife once in a while?' And I don’t even remember who threw the first punch, Billy or Chevy. But it was ugly. I’d never seen guys fighting like that, let alone people I knew."

"I don’t know how he did it, but Chevy went out and did the monologue a few minutes later," she said. "Watching him from the floor, he seemed shattered."

Landis, who went on to direct movies starring several members of the early SNL cast, was also in the room for the brawl. "Chevy and Billy were having a huge screaming fight in the hallway, and Michael O’Donoghue and Tom Davis were holding them back, and John and Danny jumped in because Chevy and Billy were really going to come to blows," he recalled in the text. "The thing I remember about Bill Murray — I don’t know Bill Murray, but he’s screaming, you know, foaming at the mouth, 'F---ing Chevy,' and in anger, he says, 'Medium talent!' And I thought, Ooh boy, that’s funny. In anger, he says, ‘medium talent.' That really impressed me."

George Carlin hosts 'SNL' season 1 episode 1.

Herb Ball/NBCU Photo Bank

Did George Carlin do so much cocaine before hosting he got lockjaw?

There isn't any record or George Carlin giving himself lockjaw from cocaine use before going live on SNL, but he is described as being "stoned out of his mind" in Live From New York. And according to a New York Times piece after his death, Carlin had at one point confessed to being “loaded on cocaine all week long" during his hosting stint.

Was Chevy Chase courted to replace Johnny Carson before he'd even been on one episode?

In Saturday Night, Chase so effortlessly charms a room full of NBC execs that David Tebet (Willem Dafoe), the VP of talent relations, tells the comic he's got what it takes to succeed Carson, thanks to being a "handsome, funny gentile." In real life, Chase did come across as handsome and charming once the cameras rolled. As "Weekend Update" anchor, he was the only cast member to state his name in every episode, and the public and media quickly took notice of him. With his meteoric rise, NBC was desperate to get Chase under a performer contract, as he'd only signed onto SNL as a writer.

According to the landmark SNL history book, Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live, Tebet is quoted as saying, "Chase is the only white gentile comedian around today. Think what that means when Johnny leaves."

Chase ended up leaving SNL behind only six episodes into season 2 for a successful film career throughout the '80s, including Caddyshack, Vacation, Fletch, Three Amigos, and holiday staple National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation.

Carson did not "leave" until he hosted his final Tonight Show on May 22, 1992. Although Jay Leno became Carson's successor, Chase, his career in decline, actually did end up with his own weeknight talk show the following year, The Chevy Chase Show on Fox. The late-night show was widely panned from the very first episode (EW gave it an F at the time) and was canceled after 29 days.

Was Dan Aykroyd embarrassed by wearing short shorts in a construction worker sketch?

There's no evidence that Aykroyd was self-conscious about strutting around in a pair of denim cutoffs in front of the cast and crew, but the sketch he's shown rehearsing in the film is real. It was not in the premiere, but six episodes later, when Lily Tomlin hosted, there was a sketch called "Hard Hats" in which a group of female construction workers learn how to objectify a man by catcalling an actor wearing a red tank top and Daisy Dukes. Watch it below:

Did the cast torment Jim Henson and his Muppets, including hanging Big Bird?

Saturday Night treats Jim Henson as a punching bag for the cast and writers, who bully him by making him wait for his script and hanging Big Bird from his dressing room door. Although it didn't all play out in the moments before the premiere, it's true that the writers hated coming up with material for Henson and did once hang a toy version of the beloved Muppet.

"Whoever drew the short straw that week had to write the Muppet sketch," Zweibel explained in Live From New York, sharing that it was often "rigged" so that he and fellow rookie writers Al Franken and Tom Davis were made to do it.

The main issue, he explained, was that Henson was so protective of dialogue for his beloved creatures, which the _SNL_ers just couldn't take seriously. He recalled, "There was one character named Skred, and I remember we're reading the sketch, Jim Henson’s reading the pages, and he gets to a line and he says, 'Oh, Skred wouldn't say this.' And I look, and on a table over there is this cloth thing that is folded over like laundry, and it’s Skred. 'Oh, but he wouldn’t say this.' Oh, sorry."

Of his first time meeting head writer Michael O'Donoghue, Zweibel recalled, "He had taken Big Bird, a stuffed toy of Big Bird, and the cord from the Venetian blinds, and he wrapped the cord around Big Bird’s neck. He was lynching Big Bird. And that’s how we all felt about the Muppets."

Jim Henson and his Muppets.

getty

Was Billy Crystal cut from the premiere after refusing to trim his act after making a pact with a fellow comic to not budge?

Billy Crystal indeed had a bit that involved stomping around to the sound of someone crunching potato chips in a bowl cut out of the premiere after refusing to trim down, but it was not quite as down-to-the-wire as it is in the film — and it involved his own managers killing the opportunity for him. In Live From New York, Crystal described his six-and-a-half-minute bit killing at a Friday rehearsal in front of an audience, but admitted the act required a lot of set-up. In a bit of movie dialogue taken straight from Crystal, he recalled Michaels telling him on Friday night "I need two minutes," to which the comic replied, "Cut two minutes?" before being told "No, I need two minutes. All you get is two minutes."

Instead of staying loyal to a pact with Valri Bromfield (whose act did make the premiere) as in the film, the real Crystal just didn't have two minutes to give. "It was a drastic cut in the piece, and frankly as a new performer I didn't have a hunk like Andy Kaufman's Mighty Mouse," Crystal explained.

Ultimately, it was Crystal's team who pulled him from SNL. The comic was still included on the rundown for the live show until his managers met with Michaels privately before Saturday's dress rehearsal and tried to convince him to cut Kaufman from the show to allow Crystal more time. "I think what I objected to was him telling me what I should cut as opposed to just making the pro-Billy case," Michaels recalled in the book, saying the exchange got "very heated." Crystal said he was already in makeup when his team emerged to tell him they were all leaving. "I was upset — mad, I guess — because I had wanted to be there," he said. Crystal got his shot 17 episodes later, when he performed a different bit of stand-up on the show. He later became a cast member from 1984 to 1985, after already hosting the show twice the previous season.

Lorne Michaels in 1976.

NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty

Did Lorne Michaels wander over to a bar while covered in blood and hire comedy writer Alan Zweibel on the spot just before the first show?

Zweibel did get hired after showing Michaels a list of jokes he'd come up with for low-paying stand-ups that got him a gig writing for SNL, but it did not happen less than an hour before the premiere while Michaels was covered in fake blood (from a future Julia Child sketch). At least a year before the launch of SNL, Zweibel and Michaels met at a bar where it was Zweibel himself performing a terrible comedy set. The comic said in a 2004 interview with The New York Times that Michaels approached him to say his material was "not bad" and asked to see more. Two days later, they met up again, and Zweibel presented the showrunner with "1,100 of my best jokes," but Michaels hired him after reading just the first one. That joke was later used in the premiere episode and is the joke Zweibel gives to Chase in the movie: "The post office is issuing a stamp commemorating prostitution in the United States. It's a 10-cent stamp, but if you lick it, it's a quarter."

Was Rosie Shuster on the fence about being credited as Rosie Michaels?

It's unclear if the writer left everyone hanging all day about how to include her name in the end credits, but unlike in the film, where Michaels and Shuster declare at the same time that she should use her maiden name in the end credits, in the real show, she was credited as "Rosie 'Bud' Michaels." In episode 2, she again went by Rosie Michaels, then in the next two episodes, she was credited as Rosie Apple before landing on Rosie Shuster throughout the rest of her professional career.

The inclusion of "Bud" as a nickname for every member of the cast and crew in the premiere's end credits was done as "a nod to the crazy closing credits of Monty Python's Flying Circus (1969)," per IMDB.

The end credits during the 'SNL' season 1 premiere on Oct. 11, 1975.

NBC

Was NBC exec David Tebet trying to prevent the show from airing?

Saturday Night portrays the NBC head of talent as skeptical that Michaels and his team will pull things off, then as showtime nears, he's all but completely thwarting the show's premiere. The real Michaels remembered the exec in a warmer light, aside from some deep concerns about Carlin's outfit.

"The major focus of the night, weirdly enough, was over a directive we got that Carlin had to wear a suit on the show," Michaels recalled of the premiere in_Live From New York._ "He wanted to wear a T-shirt. The directive came from Dave Tebet; he was head of talent and very supportive of the show, but he was also trying to anticipate."

Michaels elaborated, "The fear was that if George was in a T-shirt and it looked like the wrong kind of show, we would lose affiliates, and we weren’t anywhere near 100 percent as it was. And the compromise was a suit with a T-shirt instead of a tie. That was a much greater distraction than can possibly be understood right now."

Was a set designer laying bricks until minutes before showtime?

Of all the anxiety-inducing problems that Saturday Night portrays as coming down to the wire on premiere night, the ticking clock of a set designer meticulously laying down real bricks to form the stage may be closest to reality. It wasn't quite happening minutes before showtime, but SNL set creator Eugene Lee told Vanity Fair in 2016 that he was still laying bricks mere hours before cameras rolled for the first time. Though the Emmy-winning production designer, who worked at SNL from show No. 1 up through his death last year, was not depicted as the one doing the manual labor in the film, another notable member of his team was. Production designer Akira "Leo" Yoshimura, who was part of the original season 1 crew and still works at SNL, is the one doing the job in the film. SNL super fans know Yoshimura for his on-air appearances over the years, most notably as Hikaru Sulu in season 1's "The Last Voyage of the Starship Enterprise" Star Trek parody, a role which he reprised 41 years later in a season 42 sketch.

Was Paul Shaffer on 'SNL'?

David Letterman's longtime bandleader, Paul Shaffer, got his start on TV as a member of SNL's house band, playing keyboards from the show's start until 1980. Shaffer regularly popped up in sketches, most notably as the pianist accompanying Bill Murray's recurring character Nick the Lounge Singer, beginning in season 2.

Paul Shaffer on 'SNL' in 1980. Alan Singer/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images

Did Chevy Chase's fiancé sneak into sketches?

Chase's fiancé, Jacqueline Carlin (played by Kaia Gerber), appeared as an extra throughout SNL's first three seasons (even though Chevy himself left the show less than halfway through season 2). The couple was married from 1976 to 1980.

Did Andy Kaufman come to save the day by lip-syncing the 'Mighty Mouse' theme song?

There's no indication that Andy Kaufman performed his bit in front of affiliates before airtime to convince the room SNL could actually be funny, but what was shown in Saturday Night — Kaufman lip-syncing to exactly one line of the Mighty Mouse theme and standing awkwardly through the rest — was taken straight from Kaufman's now legendary performance on the premiere. It is hard to imagine the anti-comedy comic's act going over warmly in a room full of middle-aged suits, but his unique blend of absurdist humor is exactly why Michaels thought he was a perfect fit for the revolutionary show meant to appeal to the "TV generation."

"It wasn’t just that he lip-synched to 'Mighty Mouse;' it was that he only did that one part in it, that one line, and stood around for the rest," Michaels explained in Live From New York. "It was very conceptual, and it instantly signaled to the brighter part of the audience that that was the kind of show we were going to do. And they weren't getting that anywhere else on television."

Kaufman performed many more times on SNL over the first couple of years. His popularity, especially as his Foreign Man character on the sketch show, led to him landing the role of Latka on the sitcom Taxi, and the rest is history.

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Saturday Night is in theaters in select cities now, followed by a wide release on Oct. 11, the anniversary of the show's premiere. Saturday Night Live, currently in its 50th season, airs Saturdays at 11:30 p.m. ET/8:30 p.m. PT on NBC and Peacock.