Imagine a movie about an era-defining experiment by a visionary who battled the establishment, aided and hindered by an endless cavalcade of supporting characters who would all merit their own biopic. Basically, Saturday Night is comedy’s Oppenheimer.
Writer-director Jason Reitman bursts into a huge smile at the comparison. “I love that.”
Wait. Comparison is the wrong word. “Recognition” is arguably closer when it comes to what he made with Saturday Night, his fictionalized re-creation of the 90 minutes before the first episode of NBC’s Saturday Night (now better known as Saturday Night Live) went to air. Like Christopher Nolan’s Oscar winner, Saturday Night is a massive ensemble piece, packed with iconic figures of the 20th century who are humanized as part of a project bigger than any one person. “Oppenheimer was a touchstone for us,” Reitman said, calling it “the most successful experiential film of recent history, and we wanted to be an experiential film.”
The urge to make this kind of immersive movie actually predated the idea for Saturday Night. Reitman said he wanted to make a movie that was “part Michael Ritchie and Robert Altman and part [German single-take thriller] Victoria. …. Then it kind of hit me one day, ‘Oh, opening night of SNL is the perfect opportunity to create that 90-minute freight train.’”
At its heart, Reitman described Saturday Night as “a movie about one generation ripping television out of the hands of another.” Further, he sees it as a sports movie: On one side of the field are nameless but powerful NBC executives who are still betting on Carson. On the other is Lorne Michaels (played by The Fabelmans‘ Gabriel LaBelle), a former writer for Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In with a handful of producer credits and an unhinged dream to put on a late-night variety show. The first episode was supposed to break the mold of the stodgy old sketch show format: There was a short film from Albert Brooks, a clip from the Muppets, music from R&B legend Billy Preston and folk singer Janis Ian, and sketches from an ensemble drawn from what Reitman called “two groups of outsiders from Chicago and Toronto” who were not-so-ironically dubbed the Not Ready for Prime Time Players. “There was nothing like them,” Reitman said. “Not only that sense of humor, but people who looked like John Belushi and Gilda Radner when everyone on TV looked more like Jane Curtin and Chevy Chase.”
It was undeniably a bizarre grab bag, and much of Saturday Night revolves around Michaels trying and failing to explain to the suits what the show even is. Not everything fit, “but the fact that Lorne was thinking ‘we can also have puppets’ shows that he was trying to weave together culture into opening night in a way that he knew something was changing and someone was going to hold that mantle.”
Even though Reitman undoubtedly tells the story from the perspective of those young dissidents, “what’s scary to me now is that I’m in my mid-forties and I would easily be on the old guys’ team if staged today.” Moreover, it’s clear that he’s not blindly mythologizing the SNL crew just because they were the young rebels. “I’ve never felt like, ‘Oh, my generation got it right.’”
Because it’s not simply the old guard versus the new vanguard. There’s the establishment of the executives, but that’s different to the seasoned professionals, techs, and crafts toiling away on set, who ultimately are pulling in the same direction as those crazy kids with their radical ideas and no clue. Reitman explained, “I grew up on movie sets, and as a result I’ve watched this intergenerational play that happens on movie sets because you have the veterans and the kids, and they fuck around with each other. But also making movies is hard, so you watch people who work 12-, 16-hour days, and they’re exhausted, they’re exposed to the elements, it’s freezing cold, it’s blazing hot, it’s raining, and yet they come back the next morning to do it again because there’s this addiction to telling stories. I’ve watched crews coalesce and it’s thrilling, and I wanted to portray the way that happens under high pressure, on live television.”
Saturday Night is filled with the SNL team’s triumphs and mistakes, like the ever-cocky Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith, 1985) getting into a literal dick-measuring contest with Mr. Television himself, Milton Berle (J.K. Simmons), and coming up short. It’s just one of a million moments and anecdotes that deluge the audience, but Reitman was confident they wouldn’t drown. “I’ve always believed that the audience can keep track as long as you tell them how to watch the movie in the first 10, 15 minutes,” he said. “We don’t understand the science of Oppenheimer. We just want to be in the moment, feeling what it’s like being on that train, heading in that direction that’s feeling inevitable. We wanted this film to be the same thing. We wanted it to be a roller coaster.”
That’s where talking to all those SNL veterans, from A-listers to camera crew, was so important, because it gave context to the unexpected ways in which Lorne Michaels was tearing up the TV rule book. Reitman explained, “I interviewed people from the control room, and it’s really funny because in 1975 Lorne was asking for things they could not do or had never done on network television, and the building was really upset at him for the things that he was trying to do.” His plans involved literally rewiring 30 Rock: “At a place like Rockefeller Center, there is the control room for a show and there’s master control. The control room for the show is live editing the show and sending a signal to master control, and master control decides what goes on the air – when you go to commercials, when you go to the show, when you go to the next show – and Lorne convinced NBC that master control had to be in his control. It was the first time in that network’s history that they allowed the producer of a television show to have master control over actually what goes over the air.”
Saturday Night is boiled down from endless such interviews that Reitman undertook during the writing process, talking with everyone still alive and still available from that first broadcast. However, he’s embraced the inherent sloppiness of oral history. “We’re weaving together all these people’s different memories from in and around that night, which is weeks before and weeks after [but] whether you’re a fan of the show or actually made the show, all your memories are loosely stitched together, often mistaken, often contradicting three other people who were there at the same time.”
It’s the kind of wild and woolly history that powers another film that influenced Saturday Night – Michael Winterbottom’s 24 Hour Party People, charting the unexpected rise and sadly predictable collapse of Manchester’s Factory Records, and how it changed music forever. Reitman called it one of his favorite films and in his top 10 most rewatched movies. “It’s a perfect depiction of friends over time and the creation of art. Also, I don’t think any movie has ever witnessed one art movement moving to another that perfectly, that subtly, that you really feel how punk becomes new wave in a way that make sense.”
The films also share an unlikely POV in their protagonist. Just as 24 Hour Party People followed Factory founder Tony Wilson instead of any one of the era-defining bands on the label, Saturday Night concentrates on Lorne Michaels rather than a member of his star-studded ensemble. For Reitman, both share the same challenge for the filmmaker: “How do you follow the creator who’s not the onscreen talent but has a personality, has a vision, has an arrogance or an ego to them. Tony speaks with a similar intellectuality and verbosity that Lorne does, so to me they were similar heroes.”
There’s a similar intellectual streak to Reitman, that inquisitiveness that led to those long interview sessions with the SNL team. Even when he’s the interviewee, he asks as many questions as he’s asked, on topics from tiki shirts to the genius of storytelling in Disney parks to Austin’s development. (The previous night at Fantastic Fest, in the intro to the Secret Screening of Saturday Night, he’d joked about how he’d almost moved to Austin years earlier but didn’t. He did, however, make Men, Women& Children, a startlingly prescient depiction of the suburban tract house Austin rarely seen in movies.)
These aren’t asides. Reitman sees connections. Take the discussion about Disney parks: He sees SNL creator Lorne Michaels as a dreamer much like Walt Disney, with the same sense of confidence, and the same ability to form a team that can create something revolutionary and seemingly impossible. “Think about them pulling this theme park together – hammer, nails, Scotch tape – and it’s similar with Saturday Night Live in terms of that first group. They’ve never made a television show before, they’re almost all in their twenties, and they do something almost completely innovative because they’ve no idea that they’re doing anything wrong. That’s how I feel about the Jungle Cruise, and that’s how I feel about Saturday Night Live.”
As any Disney fan can tell you, there’s no Walt without his brother, Roy O. Disney. In loosest terms, Walt had the dreams, but as CEO and board chairman Roy made those dreams real. In Saturday Night, that role is filled by NBC executive Dick Ebersol, who often clashed with Michaels while still being a key part of him pulling the whole insane affair off. As played by Cooper Hoffman, Reitman said, “The Ebersol we portray in the film is one who just wants to love the show and the show won’t receive his love.”
Of course, there’s an underlying “what if?” to such stories. What if Disneyland is a flop? Do we have modern amusement parks? Does Disney go bankrupt? And what if that first episode of Saturday Night Live tanks in the ratings, or never makes it to air? How does culture change? Reitman was confident that, whatever happened, change was inevitable. “You have a generation primed for it,” he observed. “You’d already had the Woodstock moment where music defines, OK, things are going to be different from here on in. It’s already happened in film, everything from The Graduate, Five Easy Pieces, whatever your film is from the late Sixties, early Seventies. For television, you’re coming off of vaudeville, radio, and the reflection of those two things in variety TV. Someone is going to change those things. There’s already been the Smothers Brothers, but Saturday Night Live is a lightning rod. It’s so specific and it’s such a clean line of one generation going, ‘From here on in, we are going to reflect ourselves – comedically, politically, musically,’ and they nail it within one show, and within four episodes they’ve defined themselves.”
Saturday Night is in theatres now. Read our review and get showtimes here.
Saturday Night
USA, 2024, 109 min.
Secret Screening
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This article appears in October 4 • 2024.