Saturday Night

4 outta 5

Saturday Night is an entertaining bit of mythmaking about the first time that NBC’s comedy institution Saturday Night Live went on the air (before it added Live to the title). It is a bit of an obscure topic for an entire movie, even though the show remains popular to this day, and it does get a little self-important about how “groundbreaking” it views the series. Also, the references to that original cast only play well depending on if the viewer knows the history, and this probably isn’t entirely factually accurate either. But it feels mostly true enough to be engrossing (about the best you can say for the recent history genre) and it has a nicely chaotic vibe, as the film follows the frantic countdown to the show going live for the first time as just about everything that can go wrong, does. Repeatedly and often.

In 1975, producer Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle) is starting a new live TV sketch show on Saturday nights on NBC. He has one NBC Page (Finn Wolfhard) outside trying to give away free tickets and isn’t doing that well. Inside he has a bunch of new young comedic actors like Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith), John Belushi (Matt Wood), Garrett Morris (Lamorne Morris), Dan Aykroyd (Dylan O’Brien), Gilda Radner (Ella Hunt) and more. There’s even a Muppet maker, Jim Henson (Nicholas Braun) and a comedian, Andy Kaufman (Braun, again). The host for the first show is George Carlin (Matthew Rhys) who can’t really fathom the whole thing. Lorne is trying to keep it all together with an agitated producer, Dick Ebersol (Cooper Hoffman), a snarky writer, Michael O’Donoghue (Tommy Dewey), conceited standby host Milton Berle (J. K. Simmons) and an NBC executive, David (Willem Dafoe) who is waiting in the wings to potentially pull the plug on the first episode and air a rerun of the Johnny Carson show.

The movie opens with a quote from Lorne Michaels saying that the show doesn’t go on because it is ready, the show goes on because it is 11:30. Amusing and very apt for what this flick is, which is basically just a crazy race to get the first show off the ground. Some moments feel a bit trying too hard to make SNL seem more important than it is, a lot of words about “counterculture” and near the end when Lorne makes an impassioned plea about what the show is. The stories are probably not entirely accurate, Lorne at his lowest point 30 minutes before airing the first show probably didn’t get splattered with fake blood, wander off into a bar, and found a new writer for his comedy show. But it adds to the intensity of the countdown to air, which gives the movie a pulse.

It is compelling to see them try to get all the pieces together. Like Lorne has an entire rundown of what is supposed to be a 90 minute show and the dress rehearsal took three hours. There’s crazy notions of two different musical guests and comics competing for four minutes of airtime, with Lorne saying they have to cut it down to two minutes. When the comic says the setup would take two minutes, Lorne lets him go. There is a corkboard with note cards about each sketch that looks way too big and in a moment of frustration Lorne tears it down.

The casting and makeup for the film is spot on as almost everyone looks very close to the way the cast looked in 1975. LaBelle as Michaels is great, he looks just constantly haggard yet hopeful about getting this show off the ground. He makes short-sighted decisions to prove a point, like when he says he didn’t tape the dress rehearsal, so it had to be the live show or nothing. Cory Michael Smith as Chevy looks amazingly close to how Chevy looked in the 1970s and he is a great jokester yet also be petty instantly. There’s about three different characters who make surprisingly accurate predictions about the rise and fall of Chevy’s career. Even the exec played by Dafoe says Chevy could have a future as a talk show host, a direct reference to the short-lived talk show Chevy hosted. As for Dafoe, his know-it-all exec is ready to pull the show, and it is revealed by Lorne’s producer that the whole show is just a way for the network to stick it to Johnny Carson that they don’t need to run a rerun of his show on Saturday nights. Wood channels Belushi’s manic on stage and mopey in private persona really well, in fact everyone is doing a spot on impression. Lamorne Morris as Garrett Morris is a rounded professional and he feels let down by doing bit parts on the show. Wolfhard is in the movie briefly but he is pretty funny as a NBC Page who can’t get anyone to get tickets but then at the end he has somehow filled the studio with happy audience members.

Co-written and directed by Jason Reitman, Saturday Night has a sense of authenticity. The end credits are a fun version of the opening SNL credits, and it ends on a perfect note. Even though it was on the verge of falling apart, when they all work together and it’s live from New York, the feeling is euphoric.