Saturday Night (2024)
On October 11, 1975, Saturday Night Live began its wild and crazy ride into American culture and vernacular, and that was before the cameras started rolling. Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night gives us an idea of what that first night was like, and if they’re to be believed, it was almost too wild and crazy.
I wasn’t born when the show started, but my brother, who’s eleven years older than I am, filled in the blanks for me. Well, for the most part, because he was technically a little too young for it himself. Still, the siren calls of Steve Martin’s King Tut and those Two Wild And Crazy Guys were hard to resist.
On that first night, though, no one was sure anything would happen. There might be a show or there might not, but NBC always had a Johnny Carson rerun at the ready. The movie takes place an hour and a half before the show starts, with the time relentlessly counting down, whether it’s with the clock numbers clicking by like an episode of 24, or with the stagehands constantly yelling how many minutes were left. Conversations are carpet-bombed with F-words just because they could. Well, that, and profanity was strictly verboten on American television in the 1970s, so people must have been getting it out of their systems.
Producer Lorne Michaels has to be everywhere at once. He’s got to make sure his actors have made it into the studio. He’s got a board full of sketches and he doesn’t want to cut any of them. He’s got to make sure everyone knows what they’re doing. He’s got to make sure John Belushi signs his contract and doesn’t hurt anyone. The guy’s not thrilled at having to dress like a bumblebee, after all.
As the minutes get shorter, the pressure mounts, and watching it all like a Greek chorus are the investors, headed up by NBC network executive David Tebet, who hounds Lorne as if he wants to send him to the underworld. Will Tebet pull the plug, or will Saturday Night go live for the first time?
Saturday Night does a great job of taking us through the chaos that was that first night, and it’s almost like watching the beginning of Robert Altman’s The Player in that there’s a lot of flow with not a lot of cuts. It makes the randomness and frenetic energy less jarring. We might see a papier mache shark get carried across the hall while Lorne is settling yet another drama, but we have time to take it all in stride.
We also have time to take in the differences between the way comedy is done today and how it was done in 1975. Garrett Morris, for instance, sings a song about “shooting Whitey” and no one looks uncomfortable. Only Dave Chappelle can get away with that nowadays.
As far as the actors who approximate SNL’s original cast, they give competent impressions, but a lot of it falls on the side of flat and bland. I kept wanting to see the real Dan Akroyd, or Chevy Chase, or George Carlin, or Billy Crystal. On the other hand, Nicholas Braun plays dead-on dual roles of Andy Kaufman and Jim Henson that are quite impressive.
And on a side note, Milton Berle seemed like kind of a jerk. He’s got a lot of screentime and is constantly high-hatting Chevy Chase. He literally pulls out his schlong in one scene to make a point, which we thankfully don’t see. I don’t know if this really happened on the first night, although Berle was known for displaying his, ahem, manhood, but the movie already had a lot of Old Guard standing around and Voices of Doom predicting failure. It didn’t need Mr. Television piling on (Which is why Lorne poaching Berle’s assistant lighting tech later in the film is a nice coup d’etat).
After an hour or so Saturday Night starts to feel like a runaway rollercoaster, and just as exhausting. While it’s a lot of fun, I found myself looking for something to latch onto, and it’s not until the cameras start rolling that there’s a chance to relax. Which is kind of the point.
Saturday Night is currently in theaters. Rated R.
My grade: B+
Principal Cast: Gabrielle LaBelle, Rachel Sennott, Cory Michael Smith, Ella Hunt, Dylan O’Brien, Emily Fairn, Matt Wood, Lamorne Morris, Kim Matula, Finn Wolfhard, Colby James West, Nicholas Braun, Ellen Boscov, Steven Badalamenti, Cooper Hoffman, Peter E. Dawson, Andrew Barth Feldman, John Dinello
Directed by Jason Reitman.
Written by Jason Reitman and Gil Kenan.