Saturday Night Isn’t Factually Accurate, But It Feels Spiritually True

Before the world premiere of his new picture Saturday Night at the Telluride Film Festival, Jason Reitman took the stage to describe the intensity of preparing an episode of Saturday Night Live. “It’s a level of adrenaline usually reserved for test pilots and heroin addicts” was how he put it. The director said that after the success of Juno, he did a one-week writing stint on SNL (it had been a lifelong dream of his to work on the show) and came away from the experience even more astonished at the process. Saturday Night, which depicts the hectic 90 minutes before the live broadcast of the very first episode on October 11, 1975, has the veneer of authenticity to it: Filmed in freewheeling, handheld 16mm, it speeds almost verité style through cluttered studio corridors and crowded stages abuzz with activity, dissension, and doubt. But there’s quite a bit of mythmaking going on here as well. Everything’s been played up (and sometimes made up) for maximum drama and chaos.

Back in 2018, before he descended into Ghostbusters sequels, Reitman made a film about the disintegration of Gary Hart’s 1988 Presidential campaign called The Front Runner, for which he employed a wandering, Altmanesque camera style that drifted among the characters, catching snippets of conversations and scenes. (The Front Runner was something of a critical and financial bust, but I was transfixed by it.) Reitman does something similar here, though it’s a turbo-loaded variation, with the melodrama and the sensationalism and the conflict kicked up several notches. Saturday Night plays like an anxiety dream, and the dreamer in this case is Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle), the producer at the center of SNL, who spends the hour and a half before airtime unable to explain to anyone what the show is. We’re told he has a vision – he’s told he has a vision – but even he doesn’t really believe it. “It’s postmodern, it’s Warhol, it’s iconic” is how one character describes a much-derided (and now-legendary) bit involving the cast in bee suits; we’re meant to think that’s a lot of hooey, but the description is later used to describe SNL itself, still with a hint of hooey.

There’s a touching truth here about the whole creative process. Michaels might have once known what type of show he wanted to create, but now, faced with the terrifying fact of its impending existence, he’s lost, and everybody else is lost along with him. The idea is to bring an irreverent, underground, at times almost Dada-ist sensibility to network television, but that also means surrounding himself with people whose own factory settings are bedlam and cynicism. And so, the lunacy swirls ever faster, and this disorienting, at-times nausea-inducing uncertainty carries the whole film. LaBelle, who broke through a couple of years ago playing Steven Spielberg’s anxious young avatar in the biographical drama The Fabelmans, has just the right deer-in-the-headlights anti-charisma to pull off Michaels; he at no point seems to be a man with a plan, and we enjoy watching him squirm.
Writer Rosie Shuster (Rachel Sennott), who also happens to be married to Michaels, is a lot more pragmatic and a bit more in control of the situation, energetically managing the many personalities around them, but she also doesn’t feel like her whole life depends on the success of this one show. “This is our shot, Rosie,” Michaels tells her. “It’s a shot,” she replies. She also tells him that, while they’re married, she’s not his wife. Among the many questions in the picture is how Shuster will be credited on the show – with her own last name, or as Michaels. (Even though Lorne’s real last name is itself Lipowitz, as she eventually reminds us.) This attempt to coax a conventional romantic through line out of the madness doesn’t really work, partly because Reitman and co-writer Gil Kenan have otherwise done a fine job of making clear how unconventional this whole situation was.

The frenzied nature of the filmmaking rarely settles on any big scenes, which forces the actors to fill in their parts with a combination of acting strokes and our own shared memory. The movie’s cast mimics the show’s cast well, but they never feel like they’re doing impressions, save maybe for Cory Michael Smith’s somewhat programmed turn as Chevy Chase – but Chase’s self-consciousness was also part of his appeal, so it still basically works. Matt Wood has an uncanny resemblance to John Belushi, but he portrays the man as a frustrated artist, unwilling to sign his contract and almost catatonically humiliated by the fact that he’s doing television comedy dressed as a bee. We don’t see much of the unhinged physical energy that made Belushi so famous, but we can sense it, just under the surface. As Andy Kaufman, Nicholas Braun has just the right gawky awkwardness, and his brief, odd, mostly silent appearances in the first half of the film delightfully pay off near the climax. Ella Hunt gets Gilda Radner’s sweetness just right – but we see little of her actually performing.

It would take forever to go through the whole cast here, but they’re mostly aces. Matthew Rhys, in his brief moments, gives George Carlin a chest-thumping, confrontational machismo. As Garrett Morris, the show’s first Black cast member, Lamorne Morris strides confidently around the studio while constantly wondering what he’s doing there, a perpetual outsider. As the bottom-slapping Dan Aykroyd, Dylan O’Brien has a nice, chummy unpredictability, able to go full-nerd one minute, full party boy the next. His libidinousness gets a fun turnaround when we see him play a scantily clad man being harassed by a group of female construction workers. By that point, Reitman has already sent Michaels into one of NBC’s other stages to witness a garish dance number featuring Milton Berle (a howlingly good J.K. Simmons) groping a bunch of showgirls; the contrast between the TV That Was and the TV To Come couldn’t be starker, even as we get hints (muted, naturally, in this cinematic love letter) that the TV To Come came with its own share of issues.

Saturday Night compresses a lot of the intriguing storylines around SNL’s first episode – and, really, its first season — into this one short night. When Willem Dafoe is introduced halfway through the film as NBC’s gravel-voiced, authoritarian head of talent David Tebet, we might wonder why such a person is appearing right before airtime on a show he doesn’t seem to know anything about. Well, that’s because he didn’t; by most accounts, Tebet was a champion of SNL and had been involved with it for months. When Lorne Michaels gets an angry phone call from Johnny Carson calling him a “benchwarmer” and “a stalking horse,” that too might feel a little off to those familiar with this history. SNL was in fact created because Carson didn’t want NBC airing any more of his reruns on weekends; he wanted to do reruns on weeknights to give himself more time off. So, SNL was there to make Carson’s life easier, not to compete with him. (Though, being Carson, he did reportedly have an adversarial relationship with the show.) Michaels is told that NBC wants him to fail: That these suits are just humoring him because they want to prove to Carson that they need to keep airing his reruns. This too might be a print-the-legend situation. But there’s another underlying truth here about the creative process: Sometimes, it feels like the whole world is against you. What’s more, sometimes you have to imagine that the whole world is against you in order to get anything meaningful done.

Condensation and embellishment are, of course, Filmmaking 101, but they do stand out more in a movie that’s all about the packed intensity of such a short timeframe. Isn’t it crazy that Lorne Michaels had to wander out into the streets of New York 30 minutes before showtime and pull a random, impoverished joke-writer named Alan Zweibel out of a bar where a stand-up comic was butchering Zweibel’s jokes in a back room? Well, yes, it is crazy, and it does not appear to have happened: In the real world, Zweibel came on board well before SNL first aired, though he was indeed writing cheap jokes for Borscht Belt hacks while also working a deli counter. There’s enough genuinely crazy lore around Saturday Night Live’s first episode that it probably didn’t need all this extra semi-fictional material. At the same time, for anyone who’s worked on the show, the all-consuming commotion probably makes it seem like everything is happening in those few brief hours. Saturday Night might not be factually accurate, but it feels spiritually true.