Saturday Night: The Chaos of SNL's Opening Night is a Non-Stop Roller-Coaster of Anxiety
By Jim Slotek
Rating: B-plus
Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night is a representation of 90 eventful minutes of TV history as tightly packed narratively as a neutron star.
It is about that tightly wound as well. For a movie about the debut of Saturday Night Live, the show that changed comedy, the experience is more anxiety than humour.
But that may be the truest aspect of this real-time fact-based fiction. Those who know comics and comic actors know that what you get before and after the applause can be pure drama.
Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle), Jacqueline Carlin (Kaia Gerber) and Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith)
And this fast-moving, claustrophobic film – set almost entirely in the environs of 30 Rockefeller Plaza’s famous Studio 8H – is a convincing depiction of a revolving door of characters (there are more than 80 speaking parts), most either furious or on the verge of panic. It has much in common with a work of Aaron Sorkin, with actors walking quickly and talking fast much of the time.
Of course, only a handful of those characters are “important,” and the representations of the Belushis, Aykroyds, Gildas and Chevys are what most people by which Saturday Night will likely be judged.
SNL-heads will also catch real-life characters like Rosie Shuster (Rachel Sennott), Michael O'Donoghue (Tommy Dewey) and future-temporary SNL boss Dick Ebersol (Cooper Hoffman), and may not catch the fact that one actor (Nicholas Braun) is playing both Andy Kaufman and Jim Henson.
If this were another director telling a true story – say Adam McKay doing The Big Short – the camera would freeze as certain characters are introduced, to offer up a thumbnail description. Reitman prefers a fly-on-the-wall approach. Saturday Night is not going to stop for anything, whether you know what is happening or not.
The time is 10 p.m. The date is October 11, 1975. And with 90 minutes to go until the 90-minute comedy revolution, nothing seems to be going right on the SNL set. Things catch fire. Injurious accidents are barely avoided, as are outright fist-fights between the cast members. John Belushi (Matt Wood) won’t sign his contract and sure as hell won’t dress up as a bee. Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith, easily the best of the Not Ready For Primetime impersonators) is on a full-flight ego trip. The writers seem to have conspired to sabotage Jim Henson’s Muppets.
And creator Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle) and his wife Rosie are playing out their divorce in a showbiz way by arguing passive-aggressively over her name on the credits.
Meanwhile, this revolutionary idea for a show is shown to be a mere negotiation ploy in the hammering out of Johnny Carson’s new contract. Nobody expects it to work, least of all the King of the Talk Shows, who makes an angry, drunken phone-call (voiced by Jeff Witzke) to Michaels, calling him a nothing who’ll soon crash.
This isn’t the only time the old guard wields its hammer. In a studio encounter, Chase encounters Milton Berle (J.K. Simmons), who expresses the same sentiment.
How many strange, disparate things can happen in 90 minutes before the thumbs-up/thumbs-down moment with seconds to go? I have barely scratched the surface here.
I have no idea whether the things that happen in Saturday Night will be relevant to anyone who wasn’t alive in 1975, let alone watching SNL as I was. Reitman himself wasn’t born yet. But he’s betting the box office that generations of later SNL fans will also find it fascinating.
I will give him this. He has managed to avoid “Titanic syndrome,” the notion that we already know that the first episode of Saturday Night happened, kicking off 49 years more, and thus the suspense is suspended.
On the contrary, at any given point in Saturday Night, it seems legitimately impossible that the show will make it to air. And Willem Dafoe as Dave Tebet, the NBC exec with his finger on the eject button, pretty much owns the ending. Which, after all, is just the beginning.
Saturday Night. Directed and co-written by Jason Reitman. Starring Gabriel LaBelle, Cory Michael Smith and Matt Wood. Opens Friday, Oct. 4 in Toronto, and in wide release on Friday, Oct. 11 (the 49th anniversary of the first SNL episode).