‘Saturday Night’ Review: Live TV at Its Mildest (original) (raw)
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When it debuted 50 years ago, “S.N.L.” was chaotic, rangy, even offensive. But nothing’s wild or crazy in Jason Reitman’s fictional reimagining of its first episode.
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‘Saturday Night’ | Anatomy of a Scene
The director Jason Reitman narrates a sequence from his film about the making of the first episode of “Saturday Night Live.”
Hey, this is Jason Reitman. I’m the co-writer and director of “Saturday Night.” “O.K, let’s see if we can get through one of these skits.” “Sketches! Davey, please.” So what you’re seeing here is a scene from very early in the film. We’re getting introduced to characters left and right. And what we really wanted from the very beginning was a completely immersive experience. You’re watching a movie that is 90 minutes of real time, the 90 minutes leading to the first episode of “Saturday Night Live.” The last line we knew from the beginning it was going to be, “Live from New York, It’s Saturday Night.” “What’s the problem?” “What’s going on, Dan?” “It’s a little lodged.” And we’re seeing the rehearsal of a sketch with John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Dan Aykroyd and Garrett Morris. And we wanted to give the audience a pure adrenaline roller coaster ride of what it’s like to be there minute to minute as things are happening. And at the beginning, it’s going through the normal steps of trying to figure out blocking and camera work. And by the end, it’s obviously it’s a total catastrophe and it’s one of the many things that hopefully keeps you on the edge of your seat as you’re watching this film. And to do that, we needed to create a living, breathing set where every background actor was brought through a boot camp where they learned how to do their jobs, whether it was cable lighting, sound, and every actor was mic’d every single day. “I’m president of Trojan Horse Home Security.” “I’ve broken into your home tonight to illustrate to you and your family just how ...” [LOUD CRASH] Boom! There goes the light boom. And this refers to something that’s actually happening that Lorne just kept requesting more and more lights. He was being demanding because he had never made television before. No one on that show had done television before. In order to create this kind of chaos on screen, what we found is that we actually had to choreograph this movie like a dance film. I’d have a giant white board like a football coach, and I would have to write plays for all the extras and background actors and crew just so everyone would know where to be. We were given this giant stage to create chaos every single day. And what continues to boggle my mind is that Lorne Michaels does this every Saturday. “I don’t guys. It was kind of exciting. Like, it’s probably good luck.”
The director Jason Reitman narrates a sequence from his film about the making of the first episode of “Saturday Night Live.”CreditCredit...Hopper Stone/Sony Pictures
Published Sept. 26, 2024Updated Sept. 27, 2024
Saturday Night
Directed by Jason Reitman
Biography, Comedy, Drama, History
R
1h 49m
Movies about tectonic cultural shifts tend to be too neat and tidy, too frictionless. “Saturday Night,” the director Jason Reitman’s fictional reimagining of the debut of “Saturday Night Live,” is a nice, safe movie about a revolution. Busily plotted and sporadically funny, it is a backstage look at the night a gang of comics whom most of the world had never heard of began taking over TVs across the country. It was a comedy home invasion on a national scale, and it was glorious (when it didn’t suck).
The movie, written by Reitman and Gil Kenan, has a straightforward conceit. It opens on Oct. 11, 1975, the night that the show, then called “NBC’s Saturday Night,” is scheduled to debut. (The name was changed in 1977.) In just 90 minutes — ticktock — the show will go live if the performers, writers, crew, network suits and some guy named Lorne can get it together in time. A lot of money, reputations and possibly bright futures are riding on the show, but with its deadline looming, it still seems underbaked and, from some vantage points, overly abstract.
To convey that premiere and what it portended, Reitman both sticks to the historical record and embellishes it, building momentum by zeroing in on some mini-crisis amid rapid edits, swish pans and rushing bodies. Everything and everyone at 30 Rockefeller Plaza runs too fast or seems immobilized, with characters either in frenetic motion or huddling in pools of flop sweat. As the minutes pass, Reitman periodically cuts to a clock onscreen or someone calls out the time; at one point, a set designer, Leo Yoshimura (Abraham Hsu), slowly begins installing bricks on the stage of Studio 8H, each brick an emblem of the show’s parts sliding into place.
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The cast of “Saturday Night,” from left, Kim Matula as Jane Curtin; Emily Fairn as Laraine Newman; Gabriel LaBelle as Lorne Michaels; Rachel Sennott as Rosie Shuster; and Matt Wood as John Belushi.Credit...Hopper Stone/Sony Pictures
In a (real) 1975 news release, NBC called the show “a new concept in late-night programming.” The network wanted a replacement for weekend reruns of “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson,” and this venture was going to be a comedy show with sketches, musical guests, short films and the Muppets. But it was unclear what it was, maybe even to those behind the scenes. That much seems obvious when an NBC executive, Dick Ebersol (Cooper Hoffman), asks the show’s creator-producer, Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle), if he knows what it is. The straight-faced Lorne responds with an amusing, self-aggrandizing analogy involving Edison, the lightbulb and electricity. Who are you in this metaphor, the baffled exec asks.
Lorne doesn’t answer, but the movie does by making him its focus. The character is less interesting than his surroundings — he’s more a blurry place holder than a fully realized personality — but whether here or there, Lorne is the center of this storm. He’s the hub, the visionary, the guy who can see past the chaos. Sure, there’s his wife, the writer Rosie Shuster (a tart Rachel Sennott); the host, George Carlin (Matthew Rhys); and a creepy suit, Dave Tebet (Willem Dafoe, in by far the funniest turn). But the star is Lorne because even genius apparently needs a boss.
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