TNo show in history is more obsessed with its own traditions than Saturday Night Live. Almost every week, the long-running sketch show is sprinkled with returning alumni and jokes that reference the show’s illustrious and controversial past: the status of the great, charitable New York City Social Club; And the drug-related deaths of its most prominent stars, such as John Belushi and Chris Farley; The superstars it has created in Eddie Murphy, Bill Murray, Adam Sandler, Will Ferrell, and Tina Fey, to name a few, are five of the hundreds.
SNL is so legendary that it has actually inspired dozens of documentaries and several scripted TV shows based on it, including 30 Rock and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. In February, there will be a three-hour special to celebrate the show’s 50th anniversary, an event likely to be even more starry than the Oscars (at a similar 40th-anniversary event, Taylor Swift, Paul McCartney and Prince formed an impromptu band for the Enjoy Afterparty). At the center of it all is Lorne Michaels, the series’ mysterious Canadian executive producer, who has become the most powerful man in American comedy, yet is famously incredibly difficult to laugh at.
You’ll find few people who adore the SNL legend and the man responsible for it more than Jason Reitman. In 2008, Reitman was one of the most established directors in Hollywood, having just scored a surprise hit with the indie film Juno. He could have worked with almost anyone (he later did so with George Clooney in Up in the Air and Charlize Theron in Young Adult), but what he really wanted to do was fulfill his childhood dream of writing sketches for Saturday Night Live. As a child, he grew up around the original cast. His father, Ivan Reitman, was the director of National Lampoon’s Animal House and the original Ghostbusters films, and Jason would follow him on set. John Belushi gave him a blanket when he was an infant, and Bill Murray called him a “pain in the ass.” SNL is in his blood.
Michaels agreed and allowed him to be a guest writer for a week, pitching sketches to the cast, which at the time included Amy Poehler, Kristen Wiig, and Maya Rudolph. He submitted three sketches and managed to get one on the air: “Death by Chocolate,” in which that week’s host, Ashton Kutcher, plays a murderous bartender in Hershey, stabbing strangers in back alleys. “It was one of the greatest weeks of my life,” Reitman told me.
Being on set that week gave him the idea for a movie about the beginnings of SNL, before it became a television institution. “What I’ve always been interested in is the moment when genius comes into the universe,” he says, with no interest in bombastic accusations. “What’s it like in the room when Paul McCartney writes Yesterday? Does it sound like something special happened or is he just messing around writing a song on a napkin? With SNL, it’s this magic trick, the choreography of the voice people, the camera people, the costume people, how they work Together like a ballet in this little space in an office building in New York City, it’s crazy.”
Now, 15 years later, Reitman has finally turned his obsession into reality with the release of Saturday Night, a film about trying to get the first episode of SNL on the air in 1975. The film hits familiar beats: The network suits the people who it is they’re told They do not understand the avant-garde genius they witness; Leading comedians who struggle to be contained by the constraints of television or real life. But Reitman’s twist is to make it an exciting film, more like watching Speed or Taken than a traditional biopic.
It starts 90 minutes before broadcast time, and there’s chaos everywhere. Belushi isn’t signed, he fights with Chevy Chase in the makeup room, writers bully Jim Henson because they think his Muppets are stupid, and comedian Gilda Radner flies across the studio on a camera crane. . There’s no script, no set, and NBC threatens to reboot Johnny Carson instead. Will they be able to broadcast the show live? The film answers the question in real time with Jon Batiste’s TikTok track, which was recorded live on set while the film was being filmed, adding to the tension.
While trying to interview Reitman and the film crew at a Toronto hotel, there is a similar degree of time-sensitive pandemonium. In the hotel’s maze of corridors, I’m herded, without explanation, in and out of rooms where a different personality waits — the calm of Reitman, for example, or the wisdom of that-moment comedian Rachel Sinnott (Bottom, Shiva Baby), playing an SNL writer and Michaels’ wife. The first is Rosie Schuster, or the serious theatrical chops of Cory Michael Smith (who turns in a frighteningly precise turn as Chase). Sometimes I’d be left completely alone in the room with an actor and given an hour, other times I’d get 10 minutes, and strangely enough there would be four cameras pointed at me.
One thing that’s clear is how connected the actors are. When I asked them about meeting Michaels during filming, they couldn’t help but try to make each other laugh. “What he said to me was: ‘Sir, get off my lap. “I don’t know you, and I hope your career takes a dive,” says Dylan O’Brien, who plays Dan Aykroyd.
There’s a definite ambiguity to the whole project, which Reitman has embraced — after all, just like Michaels, he’s also trying to corral a group of eager, vulnerable young actors with varying degrees of experience to make something fairly unknown. So they were allowed to riot on set and improvise at will.
“We didn’t have trailers. We had a big living room with a lot of 1970s furniture, old records, old movie posters on the wall, board games and tennis tables,” says Gabriel LaBelle, who just played a veiled Steven Spielberg in the director’s latest film. The table.” The Fabelmans now take on the role of the famous mystery Michaels. “Jason was very smart to pull that off and build the camaraderie between this cast.”
“We were free to do what we wanted,” says British actress Ella Hunt, who plays Gilda Radner. “In one scene, we were running like demons down the hall, and I took a huge pile of scripts and threw them up in the air. It felt like nothing was precious, and all mistakes were welcome.
For the Saturday Night actors, that meant they had an eerie feeling playing characters who were household names in their homes. “My dad would have a viewing party with his college friends,” says Sinnott, whose background is in more serious independent films. “I’m just excited that he was watching me giving blowjobs left and right. This is him being able to watch it with his friends and relax.
Sennott, who is currently going through a moment of cultural explosion that the first SNL crew may be familiar with, has appeared in both A24 songs and Charli xcx videos. Her undergraduate portrayal of Shuster gives the film a different center of gravity from previous accounts of its history. Shuster is portrayed as a masseuse with an ego, a sharp writer and a general problem solver, who flirts with the stars and turns her husband’s big dreams into something on the air.
Sinnott spent some time with Shuster before filming: “Just hearing her voice, her laugh, how she was so brave in the face of chaos and all these challenges — it was exciting to play, because that’s not what I like at all.”
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Unlike Sinnott, Hunt never attempted comedy when she auditioned for Gilda Radner, the first person cast on the original SNL. “You might think an English girl speaking with a brassy Detroit accent sounds like something out of a horror movie,” she told me. “But she’s like me. Her foolishness seems so familiar to me in the way I act around my family.”
In real life, Radner had to negotiate endless sexism on set: Belushi would yell, “Women aren’t funny,” backstage. Hunt had to embody the way Radner disarms men who disobey her, while still looking like she could take a joke. “When I watch Gilda navigate that space, it feels so subtle to me, she manipulates the room on so many levels. Thinking of Gilda and [fellow SNL female alumni] Jane Curtin and Laraine Newman occupy that space, and how many men in the room didn’t really think they should be there, the odds were against them.
Once he settled on the cast, Reitman sent them all emails telling them not to spend too much time looking at old footage of the people they were portraying, to trust that they had the essence of the person within them. It was a huge vote of confidence… and almost the entire staff completely ignored it.
“For about two months I watched Chevy Chase exclusively,” says Michael Smith, a charming, self-serious leading man whose character couldn’t be more at odds with the wise-cracking Sinnott. “I watched him over and over again until I felt like I was starting to have his quirks — things like the way he would blink emphatically after a line to get people to laugh.”
Chase is one of the most arrogant characters of the 1970s, but Smith wanted to understand what he was like right before that moment: “We all know the confident, charismatic, swaggering Chevy Chase. But this is the night before the world met him. He’s closer to me: he’s an optimist, an optimist, and a hustler.” And a little nervous, and maybe feeling a little fraudulent. He famously made his first humiliating appearance on Johnny Carson where he was so nervous everyone laughed at him. It was helpful, seeing this weak man And nervous.
The final film is a mess and includes so many memorable performances that it’s almost impossible to mention them all: Nicholas Braun’s dual acting duties as Andy Kaufman and Henson; JK Simmons plays old school entertainer Milton Berle. Willem Dafoe as the NBC CEO wants everything to fail; standup Lamorne Morris, the film’s most obvious comedian, as Garrett Morris, SNL’s first black cast member (no relation); and Cooper Hoffman (son of Philip Seymour Hoffman) as jaded young executive Dick Ebersol.
Some reviews criticized the film’s lack of answers: it presents one disaster after another and then somehow it all works out. It’s true that Reitman may be a little too much of a believer in the magic of exposition, but the film manages to create a taut mess, never lets you settle into what’s happening, and is full of new little tidbits that big fans like Sinnott’s father will tell. Love (eg Billy Crystal was still in pain years after his sketch was cut from the opening episode).
But I wonder how the film will make it into the UK, where SNL doesn’t have such legendary status. Will the public care much about whether Belushi signs his contract? “SNL is just a set, but the movie is about that adrenaline,” Reitman says. “Everyone knows what it’s like to do a show, even if it’s a talent show or a high school play. At some point, everyone has tried to do something, where 30 minutes before you’re due: ‘How the hell could this happen?'” And then This is how we stick together, where enemies become friends and you make something and I wanted to make a film that really embodied that concept.
Reitman is clearly still fascinated by the magic of live television, giddy at the thought that he might now be the magician — taking a real set, an improvised crew, a live band and 80 microphones and trying to do what Michaels did 50 years ago. : Get the offer on the road.
Saturday night in cinemas from January 31.