TELLURIDE – You may love or hate “Saturday Night Live,” but it’s almost impossible to ignore its cultural impact. With the NBC staple’s 50th Anniversary less than a year away, Jason Reitman is revisiting the tumultuous launch of the landmark program in “Saturday Night,” a world premiere at the 2024 Telluride Film Festival. His narrative focus on the 90 minutes before the show’s 11:30 PM ET debut is potentially an ingenious way to frame it. His casting choices to portray some of the most recognizable names in comedy and television history are simply stellar.
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“SNL” debuted on October 11, 1975. What many are unaware of, and the film eventually reveals, is that the series was at the center of a contract dispute between the network’s moneymaker, Johnny Carson, host of the lucrative “The Tonight Show,” and NBC. And up until its launch, “SNL” could have been pulled at any moment for a rerun of the established late-night program. But when the film begins, at 10 PM on that fateful night, “Saturday Night Live’s” creator and executive producer, Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle), is just trying to figure out how to fit 3 or more hours of intentionally irreverent programming into a 90-minute timeslot with commercial breaks. The building is tense and chaos reins.
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Reitman captures this mayhem in a multitude of ways. In the first 20 minutes, so much happens, and the camera work is so intentionally frenetic (perhaps a wee bit too much), that it’s often too difficult to keep up with all the historical figures popping up on screen. It starts with the arrival of Andy Kaufman (Nicholas Braun) in front of NBC’s 30 Rock headquarters as an NBC page (Finn Wolfhard) struggles to recruit a live audience for this unknown program. Michaels is assisted by another eventual television legend, Dick Ebersol (Cooper Hoffman), who convinced NBC to go with the Canadian comedy writer’s Not Ready For Prime Time Players pitch. However, the onus is on Michaels to keep the train running. As the minutes tick away, he has to deal with a feisty head writer ready to go to blows with the censors in Michael O’Donoghue (Tommy Dewey), a lighting director who quits at the last minute, a temperamental future star who won’t his contract in John Belushi (Matt Wood), and David Tebet (Willem Dafoe), the head of NBC’s Talent Relations who holds the power to kill the show in his fingertips.
But, wait, there’s more.
The one and only Billy Crystal (Nicholas Podany) is waiting to find out if his stand-up bit will make the cut; the show’s first guest host George Carlin (Matthew Rhys), has no interest in sketches; Jim Henson (Braun wonderfully pulling double duty) is practically begging for scripts for his Muppets; and, on a personal level, Michael’s wife and the obvious secret sauce to his success, Rosie Shuster (Rachel Sennott), isn’t sure what her credit should be or if she should even use his last name. And that’s just the start of the narrative threads and historical figures Reitman and co-screenwriter Gil Kenan introduce in this very condensed timeframe.
That being said, the two writers have cooked up some major creative liberties. There is an entire scenario that finds Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith) and Milton Berle (J.K. Simmons) at odds with each other that likely occurred years later (if at all). It’s still unclear if Tebet was the NBC who controlled the go-ahead that night. A skit pitch for Dan Ackroyd (Dylan O’Brien) as a bloody Julia Child from Al Franken (Taylor Gray) didn’t occur till years later; a sketch that flipped the script on the male gaze and featured female construction workers gawking at a man in short shorts (Akroyd) didn’t occur until a future episode when Lily Tomlin hosted; and the only African-American member of the ensemble, Garrett Morris (Lamorne Morris), fixation on why he was even hired was something that troubled him for years, not just before the series formulated a creative identity. Will these changes frustrate some purists? Likely, but at least they serve to give a snapshot of the drama that was part of the lifeblood of the show’s early years.
Beyond Reitman and Keenan’s tight screenplay and a fantastic recreation of Studio 8H from production designer Jess Gonchor, the movie would not fly without an ensemble that may end up being legendary in its own right. We’re not sure how close LaBelle’s take to the real Michaels is, but he masterfully carries the film in what is, essentially, his first leading role. Shockingly, O’Brien is simply transformative as Akroyd. An eye-opening turn based on his previous work. Chase might have been a notorious a**hole, but Smith makes sure he’s likable enough so you believe he’d become a star. Ella Hunt brings out the creative joy that made Gilda Radner beloved, Kim Matula conveys the obvious, that Jane Curtain was always one of the smartest people in the room, and Emily Fairn paints a portrait of Laraine Newman in a mostly non-verbal performance that teases a multitude of storylines.
What sets “Saturday Night” apart, though, isn’t just that the movie is a portrait of television and entertainment history. It’s the fact that despite history telling us “SNL” launched on the aforementioned date, you’ll still be rooting for Michaels and his crew and ensemble to get the show off the ground. Reitman and his cast generate significant tension over the fate of this program. That may not be as funny as you’d expect, but it sure is thrilling. [B+]
“Saturday Night” opens nationwide on Oct. 25.
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