Saturday Night First Look: How the SNL Movie Captures 1975’s Wild Opening Night
from the magazine snl saturday night live movies film what is cinema
Anthony Breznican Tomris Laffly Eve Batey Rebecca Ford Savannah Walsh Julie Miller Tara Ariano Chris Nashawaty David Canfield Meena Ganesan
Director Jason Reitman calls it a “thriller-comedy” that counts down to the very first “Live from New York…”
https://www.vanityfair.com/verso/static/vanity-fair-global/assets/favicon.ico
Vanity Fair
The first thing director Jason Reitman wants people to know about Saturday Night is that it may be about funny people—writers and performers who unquestionably redefined comedy—but it’s not intended to be a laugh riot. The movie plays out in real time over the course of about 90 minutes, and there are certainly uproarious moments, but even more tense and fraught ones. The story starts at 30 Rockefeller Center at 10 p.m. on October 11, 1975, and culminates with the first-ever broadcast of Saturday Night Live. What unfolds is a ticking-clock suspense movie. “It’s a thriller-comedy, if you can call that a genre,” Reitman says of the film, which arrives in theaters on October 11. “I always describe this movie as a shuttle launch, and the question was, ‘Would they break orbit?’”

Nearly 50 years later, we know that the show will go on, of course, but watching the desperate scramble is unnerving nonetheless. Chaos reigns, egos clash, drugs flow, passions erupt, and pressure builds until everyone involved seems ready to feed one another’s fingertips to the wolverines. (Google that classic SNL joke if you don’t know it.) At the center of this maelstrom is the young producer Lorne Michaels, played by Gabriel LaBelle. The actor, who was 21 when he filmed it, was nine years younger than Michaels was when SNL started, which adds to the sense that the character is in over his head. “We meet Lorne as he’s still forming. He is a genius, and he has a vision beyond anyone else there—and anyone his age. It’s a lot for an actor to carry,” Reitman says. “In this movie, everyone gets to kind of screw around except for Gabe, who has to be the metronome.”

This movie’s version of Michaels is not the dapper, seemingly unflappable TV maestro viewers have come to know. Reitman consulted with Michaels during preproduction but dissuaded LaBelle from trying to talk to him beforehand. LaBelle latched on to other details instead. He credits a piece of arcane Bill Murray lore for reconciling his own unraveling version of Michaels with the smooth operator he later became. “Everyone sees him as this fearless leader, this captain who’s steering the ship in the fog,” LaBelle says. “Bill Murray, when he came back to host the show 15 or 20 years after he left, said to Lorne, ‘Wow, you really figured out how to do this.’” (Murray is not depicted in the film, since he joined SNL in its second season, after Chevy Chase departed and started making movies.) For LaBelle, that remark underscored the fact that it took time for the SNL producer to settle into his steadiness: “He started it when he was 30. He’s now 80 and has been doing it for 50 years. Nobody knows what to do when they first start.”

Saturday Night tells not just Michaels’s story, but virtually everyone’s from that opening night cast and crew. “This is about not only the first seven actors, but the writers, the art department, and everybody who came together at the last second to change television,” Reitman says. “What was so unusual about this show was not only that it was live, but the format was unlike anything anyone had ever seen before. You had sketch comedy, you had two musical guests, you had a live band, you had stand-up comedians, you had Andy Kaufman, you had the Muppets, you had a film by Albert Brooks….”

Many of the movie’s central characters were unknowns who became household names: Matt Wood plays the human hurricane that was John Belushi, Dylan O’Brien is a pertinacious (look that word up while you’re at it) Dan Aykroyd, Ella Hunt is the fairy-like Gilda Radner, and Cory Michael Smith achieves armor-piercing levels of sarcasm as Chase. Meanwhile, Emily Fairn’s Laraine Newman layers costumes atop each other so she can hop within seconds into the next sketch, and Kim Matula’s Jane Curtin and Lamorne Morris’s Garrett Morris bond over their shared uncertainty about what this show could be and whether they belong.

Each of the Not Ready for Prime Time Players has a different arc in Saturday Night, but they end up at the same destination—together. “The whole movie is the story of people trying to figure out what their identity is on the show,” Reitman says. “The story we tell is the moment each of these comedians find the way they coalesce as a group, which I think is the reason the show eventually was the success that it is.” The movie also delves into the behind-the-scenes wrangling of the NBC team that brought SNL into America’s living rooms, including Willem Dafoe as imperious NBC executive David Tebet, who must decide whether the show is fit to air live. And Nicholas Podany plays aspiring comic Billy Crystal, who’s heartsick at being cut from the first show just before it aired. “The way it’s always told is that he took the train back home and got there just in time to tell his family not to watch,” Reitman says. “This is a movie where the villain is time. It’s like our Sauron. Our Darth Vader is a clock, and you feel its presence at all times. And Billy loses to the clock.”

Having known and interviewed Reitman for almost 20 years, I’ve noticed that one constant in his life and career is a fascination with the mechanics of comedy. He’s the son of the late Ivan Reitman, who produced Animal House, directed Stripes and Ghostbusters, and helped bring the wild vibes of Saturday Night Live’s stars to movie screens. Jason grew up around Aykroyd, Murray, Crystal, and Chase. He’s best known for his feature films—among them Juno, Up in the Air, and Young Adult—but that fascination with dissecting humor also inspired him to direct the 2016 short Roast Battle about the brutal camaraderie of insult comics. Reitman’s first production company was even called Hard C, based on the linguistic comedy theory that k sounds make the best punchlines. (“I don’t know if you can print this, but my example was always: ‘Punched in the dick’ is nowhere near as funny as ‘kicked in the cock.’”) Saturday Night originated in the same lifelong curiosity. “Anyone who is a self-described comedy nerd—you’re interested in the weird chemistry of what makes something funny,” he says. endless number of books and articles have been written about SNL, but Saturday Night is not based on any of them. Reitman and cowriter Gil Kenan researched their script by picking the brains of more than 30 original sources. “We interviewed everyone we could find that was alive from opening night,” Reitman says. “Every living cast member, every living writer, people from the art department, costumes, hair and makeup, NBC pages, members of Billy Preston’s band—I mean, anyone we could find.”

Newman, an original cast member, recalls sharing her memories with Reitman and Kenan in a video chat during the pandemic. She thinks the prospect of the movie is thrilling, even if she feels uneasy about the prospect of watching “herself” onscreen. “It’s an honor in a lot of ways, and I hope it’s well received,” she says. “I still can’t believe that anybody would be interested in us old codgers at this point, when there’s been so many great casts since then. But I understand the genesis of this thing that’s lasted for 50 years could be interesting.”

Newman’s anecdote about guest host George Carlin (who’s played by Matthew Rhys) objecting to a sketch about Alexander the Great’s high school reunion became a key part of the film, and she’s grateful that Reitman focused on the strange mix of stakes they faced that night. “We were led to believe that nobody was watching—11:30 p.m. was considered just a dead time,” she says. “There was no expectation that the show would last. So really, it was like we were doing the show for ourselves. That’s what it felt like.”

She answered questions not just from Reitman but also from the actor playing her, as did some of her former castmates. Garrett Morris bonded with Lamorne Morris, who’d actually been claiming to know Garrett since he was a kid. “Obviously we had the same last name, so I used to tell people that he was my dad, as a joke,” says the actor, who’s best known for Fargo and New Girl. Now that they’re friends, the 87-year-old Garrett is running with the gag. “He called me and said something about owing my mom a call because he’s not convinced that he’s not my dad,” Lamorne says. He feels there’s a genuine connection creatively: “Subconsciously, you are picking up cues from those before you. No matter what I do, at some point, it probably came from Flip Wilson, Garrett Morris, Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy.”

In the movie, Morris feels adrift and uncertain about this new endeavor. “Obviously, race plays a little bit of a factor in it, especially during those times when folks didn’t necessarily know if this was Lorne just trying to fill a quota,” Lamorne says. Also, Garrett was about a decade older than his costars, so there was a distance there as well. Lamorne notes that his predecessor was a Broadway singer and a playwright, among other talents: “His journey is, ‘Hey man, I got all these skills. I’ve been a part of the Civil Rights Movement. I’ve helped desegregate the acting unions. All of these things have happened to me, and here I am with all these kids telling dick and fart jokes.’ It’s like, ‘What am I doing here?’”

Ultimately the character comes to see this strange show as ideal for his offbeat versatility. As Lamorne puts it, “He finally goes, ‘Hold on. There are a lot of things I can do, and I think this is the place where I can do all of them.’” He adds that Garrett made a simple request of him. “He said, ‘Tell the story as it happened. Be honest about it. I just want the audience to know that I did not quit. I never gave up.’”

Not all of the SNL tales that the screenwriters gathered took place in the countdown to showtime on October 11, but Reitman and Kenan took some artistic license to merge the most compelling stories into one night. That included hints of now beloved sketches yet to come, Michaels giving the Weekend Update job to Chase instead of performing it himself, and a demoralizing encounter some of the cast had with Milton Berle (played by Reitman stalwart J.K. Simmons) when the hopelessly old-school yuckster hosted the show a few years later. Some of their research took place just in time. “Three people that we interviewed have now passed away,” Reitman says, including writer Anne Beatts, costume designer Franne Lee, and production designer Eugene Lee, who also gave the filmmakers original schematics that allowed them to re-create Studio 8H in its entirety inside a soundstage in Georgia.

Those designs turned out to be so accurate that when LaBelle finally did get to meet Michaels in person, he felt an uncanny sense of déjà vu. It was in March, when Josh Brolin hosted the show and the movie production had shifted from Georgia to New York to shoot outside of 30 Rock. “We were invited to watch an SNL live,” LaBelle says. “Someone was like, ‘We’ll take you to Lorne’s office because people hang out there to watch the show.’ I remember following this person on our way there but knowing how to get there already. It was a weirdly familiar environment. You’re like, ‘I’ve been here.’”

Seeing the real Michaels in person was a bit unreal, but it didn’t spook him. “I didn’t need to ask him anything. I didn’t need to try to hack him,” says LaBelle, whose breakthrough role came playing a variation on a young Steven Spielberg in the director’s own movie The Fabelmans. “I think it was more weird for Lorne than it was for me. I was used to that kind of weirdness of: I’m here to be you.”