If there’s a show that has found more comedic talent in the United States than Saturday Night Live, I couldn’t tell you what it is. Starting 50 years ago, the sketch comedy show has launched more comedy careers in front of or behind the camera than I care to even try to number, and while not everyone who has been a member of the cast has gone on to major stardom, enough have that it is essentially an institution at this point. Of course, many people (myself included) would probably say the show was at its best when it was new in the 70s and still trying to figure out what kind of show it was going to be. Since the series’s 50th season just started, it does seem appropriate that co-writer/director Jason Reitman’s dramatization of the first episode’s troublesome 90 minutes before it went live would come out now.
And yes, I did see the article on Entertainment Weekly that outlined just how much of the story here is entirely fictional, but I don’t watch movies like this for accuracy. I watch them to see if I get a good narrative and maybe a couple laughs from this behind-the-scenes comedy.
Playing out in something like real time, Saturday Night follows the mishaps and problems facing producer Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle) as he tries to get the first episode of his soon-to-be-cultural-phenomenon on the air. His problems range from the minor to the potentially catastrophic. Will his wife, writer on the show Rosie Shuster (Rachel Sennott), be credited under her married or maiden name? Can Lorne fit all the acts he has scheduled into a 90 minute broadcast when he has 3 hours of material? Can he keep the NBC executives happy, whether it’s well-meaning Dick Ebersol (Cooper Hoffman) or the more critical David Tebet (Willem Dafoe)? Can he get the bricks he wants on the studio floor laid if the union guys working on the show insist it isn’t part of their job and refuse to help? What happens when arrogant, egotistical Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith) can’t stop being an asshole for long, and why can’t the temperamental John Belushi (Matt Wood) just sign a contract when he is in near open-revolt against the Bee costume he’s being asked to wear?
These are just some of the problems facing Michaels as he runs around the NBC building and even occasionally heads outside to make sure his show goes off with as few hitches as possible. It’s not even clear if he can get an audience for the show as an NBC page (Finn Wolfhard) can’t seem to get anyone off the street to come in for the show’s free tickets. What is Michaels even trying to pull off? He can’t quite seem to put it into words, and as the network seems inclined the cancel the show before they can even put on their first episode, when everyone from members of the cast to the execs to even first episode host George Carlin (Matthew Rhys) seems inclined to say the show stinks, and that’s not when head writer Michael O’Donoghue (Tommy Dewey) isn’t openly clashing with everyone around him. History says the show went on and became a hit. But these are people who don’t know that yet. It’s not whether they get the show on the air. It’s really more of a how.
As I stated above, this isn’t the most factually accurate representation of the 90 minutes before the show went live for the first time. What it is is a comedy that plays off what the audience knows about the show and the people involved. Plenty of people know Chase got into a fistfight with Bill Murray when he returned to host the show for the first time, so why not show Chase doing something similar here? The different members of the SNL original cast all have something to do as characters, some more than others, going from the moody Belushi to the fast-talking and flirtatious Dan Aykroyd (Dylan O’Brien) to the girlish charm of Gilda Radner (Ella Hunt) as needed. Laraine Newman (Emily Fairn) is just happy to be there while Garrett Morris (Lamorne Morris) is asking why he’s there at all given his background compared to everyone else. This is a cast composed mostly of lesser-known actors if they’re known at all, but they all seem to embody the real world people they’re playing rather well, particularly Succession‘s Nicholas Braun considering I didn’t realize until the closing credits he was appearing as both the timid and weird Andy Kaufman and the very puppet-focuses Jim Henson.
The movie, as a result, is well-acted, but that wouldn’t work without the good writing and fly-on-the-wall direction Reitman gives with his co-writer Gil Kenan. It would probably be easy to have just done this as a more straightforward movie in a way, but instead, the script and direction emphasize more the chaos of the moment, one where Michaels can get frustrated and leave only to discover a major talent working nearby that can brought in at the last second. Yes, there are moments where old sketches are recreated, few of which made the first episode, and the movie doesn’t quite emphasize the divide between the old generation–best embodied by Dafoe’s Tebet, J.K. Simmons’s Milton Berle, and the voice of Johnny Carson over the phone–with the flying by the seat of their pants style of Michaels and his cast and writers, but it did make for an entertaining look into what we might want to imagine it might have been like. The real SNL almost certainly wasn’t hiring writers and building sets in the minutes before the show went live, but the fiction that it was that freewheeling, somewhat backed up by the fact that there was a lot of drugs and sleeping around going on behind the scenes, probably makes for a more interesting movie regardless.
Grade: A-
0 Comments