“The show doesn’t go on because it's ready, it goes on because it’s 11:30.”
—"Saturday Night Live" creator/producer Lorne Michaels, as quoted onscreen at the beginning of the 2024 film "Saturday Night."
We all know a nerd who knows seemingly every excruciating detail about the TV series or movie franchise he loves. The "Star Trek" fan who can explain at great length why the show’s first pilot episode was rejected by NBC and why the second attempt succeeded. There’s at least one blog whose author goes into granular detail about the suits that James Bond wears. There are "Star Wars" fans who have not only spotted every digital change George Lucas made to the original trilogy but who have created their own “despecialized editions” designed to recapture all of the original analog glory from 1977 through 1983.
But do such anoraks exist who focus on the origins of NBC’s venerable sketch comedy series "Saturday Night Live"? Apparently not, since Jason Reitman’s "Saturday Night," released to celebrate the 50th anniversary of "Saturday Night Live" later this year, only grossed $9.5 million in domestic ticket sales, failing to recoup his reported $25 million budget, when it played in movie theaters this fall.
(Full disclosure – I almost qualify, in part because of how much I loved the show’s first five seasons, but much more because of how many times I’ve read Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad’s meticulously researched 1986 book, "Saturday Night Live: A Backstage History of Saturday Night," the best tome on the making of a TV series since Gene Whitfield’s "The Making of Star Trek" in 1968, and far more readable.)
Recently added to Netflix and available to rent on Amazon Prime Video, "Saturday Night" is built around a central conceit: the majority of the events depicted in the film actually did happen, but in real life, most occurred slowly and randomly, during the months between when the show was originally conceived and its creative talent assembled, not all in the whirlwind 90 minutes between dress rehearsal and its first live airing at 11:30 pm on Oct. 11, 1975.
On the Plus Side: Excellent Casting
"Saturday Night" works because of Reitman’s large Robert Altman-style ensemble cast and the movie’s nonstop manic drive. But while so much of what is on streaming platforms relies on “member berries,” references to iconic moments we all shared watching TV or at the movies, "Saturday Night" assumes the viewer has a lot of inside baseball knowledge of the venerable show’s earliest days. The lack of Bill Murray during the first season. The inclusion of Jim Henson’s Muppets. The connection between the show and Milton Berle. Who Dave Tebet was. Who Dick Ebersol is.
However, the casting is what makes the film relatively watchable. Gabriel LaBelle is spot-on, both visually and vocally as a young Lorne Michaels, Matt Wood portrays a John Belushi who vacillates between angry and soulful. Dylan O’Brien, the actor who portrays Dan Aykroyd, absolutely nails the young Aykroyd’s voice and performing style. Though, as Jim Treacher notes, “All he does is hit on every woman in sight with his ‘Fred Garvin, Male Prostitute’ bit. Why is he doing a sketch character that wouldn’t be created until years later? Because it’s that kind of movie, that’s why.” Similarly, Treacher praises Lamorne Morris, who does “an uncanny impression of Garrett Morris (no relation), but he only shows up from time to time to complain he’s not in the show enough. Which is really weird, considering it hadn’t even aired yet.”
On the Negative Side: We Know Exactly How This Will All End
Catherine Curtin (apparently no relation to Jane Curtin) plays “Joan Carbunkle,” a composite of the show’s early censors when NBC wrestled with the show’s underground comedy style. But based on what Hill and Weingrad wrote, she’s primarily based on Jane Crowley, a member of NBC’s Standard and Practices division, the network assigned to the show in its first season – but again, several months after it first aired, when earlier, more relaxed censors let a lot of raunchy material appear on the air:
Crowley was almost a caricature of what a censor should be: A bosomy, matronly woman, she wore suits with pleated skirts that hung several inches below the knee, bright-red lipstick and nail polish, and a gold necklace that she twisted nervously in her fingers as she talked. She was a devout Catholic, so devout that, according to an NBC executive who worked with her, she once protested the selection of news anchorman Chet Huntley as the luncheon speaker for a religious club she belonged to because Huntley had been divorced.
Crowley’s frame of reference was so different from that of Saturday Night that for much of the time she spent on the show the main problem was one of basic communication. She often didn’t understand the jokes, and sometimes let things by that she probably wouldn’t have if she’d understood them. Crowley never questioned, for example, an Update opening that announced, “Brought to you by Hershey Highway: the candy that’s turned America’s taste around for fifty years.” She didn’t know, apparently, that the joke was about anal sex.
Taunting Crowley quickly became a favorite pastime of the writers. [Michael] O’Donoghue would lace his scripts with words he knew would never get by just so he could sit in the control room and watch Crowley turning several shades of red as she scanned them. It’s said there were times she nearly leaped over the console to throttle him. Al Franken and Tom Davis would double-team her. First they’d write some outrageous line and then say, “Let’s go see what she’ll do!” When she rejected it, they’d start offering even more outrageous alternatives. The goal of this game was to cause Crowley to throw up her hands and run out of the room.
At one point in "Saturday Night," the Carbunkle character hisses at Michaels, Franken and Davis, O’Donoghue (portrayed by Tommy Dewey), and the other assembled writers, “You see this? I know it looks like an ordinary red marker, but this one is special. It has kept America safe for the better part of a decade. It is a weapon against vulgarity, sex, communism, and hedonism.”
Like everything else about "Saturday Night," we all know what Carbunkle’s fate will be. In this case, she will fail spectacularly in her mission; by the Obama era, Michaels’ comedic instincts and limousine leftist worldview dominated cable television and late night. At age 80, Michaels still executive produces SNL and Jimmy Fallon’s iteration of the "Tonight Show." (If Johnny’s looking down from show business heaven, he’s got to be absolutely furious at the thought.) Jon Stewart’s "Daily Show," where Stephen Colbert made his debut, is simply Chevy Chase’s “Weekend Update” segment stretched out to a half-hour runtime.
Here’s Johnny!
Despite being the impetus for NBC creating "Saturday Night," we only hear Johnny Carson in voiceover, phoning in from Burbank to threaten Lorne Micheals with language such as “It’s my f*cking network; it’s my f***cking night.” But in real life, Saturday night wasn’t his f***ing night: while Carson never liked SNL’s countercultural sensibilities, the show was created because he was feeling overexposed by having "Tonight Show" episodes rerun every Saturday night. (Carson’s politics were Kennedy-style liberalism, not McGovernite leftism. His musical tastes were ‘40s-era big bands and ‘50s-era cool jazz, not ‘70s-era hard rock.)
After Carson’s phone call, Dick Ebersol (played by Cooper Hoffman, the son of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman) corners Michaels in the stairwell at 30 Rock and tells him:
EBERSOL: They want you to fail. They’re betting on it. NBC makes more money playing reruns of the "Tonight Show" on Saturday.
LORNE: So why don’t they?
EBERSOL: Contract dispute. They need to prove to Johnny Carson that the reruns are inevitable. So, they built a show that was guaranteed to fail.
Pretending that Carson could instantly be back on the air on Saturday night if SNL’s debut failed is arguably the movie’s biggest falsehood, though it’s once again a way to build up tension where none existed.
Uncle Dave and Uncle Miltie
Willem Dafoe plays Dave Tebet, who was a real-life NBC executive who worked at the network from 1956 to 1979 (when he became vice president of Carson Productions) and who was quick to spot Chevy Chase as a potential young successor to Johnny Carson. According to Hill and Weingrad, early in Chevy’s tenure with SNL, Tebet really did once muse that “Chase is the only white gentile comedian around today. Think what that means when Johnny leaves,” a line that Dafoe paraphrases to Cory Michael Smith’s Chevy Chase. However, despite sharing Tebet’s name and a few of his actual quotes, Dafoe’s Tebet is really a composite of all of the New York NBC executives who wanted Herb Schlosser’s expensive folly to be quickly canceled before becoming too huge a drain on the network.
Dafoe’s character tells Lorne Michaels, “I expect you to be an unbending force of seismic disturbance. Light up the NBC switchboard like a bomb went off…Ebersol, we’re standing in the presence of a prophet. A man with a vision... [looks at Lorne] I want you to take that vision like a Sherman tank and plow it through any f*** who gets in your way,” apparently to goad him into going so over the top that his show would quickly self-destruct. But once again, it’s tough to build suspense when we all know when the show debuted and that it’s been on the air since, with Michaels present for all but five seasons in the early 1980s.
Curiously absent is anyone actually portraying Herb Schlosser, the president of NBC who conceived of a live show out of Rockefeller Center replacing Carson’s Saturday night reruns and championed Lorne Michaels’ vision of the show that would fill that timeslot, even after it was obvious that Michaels was creating the most radical network TV show of its time. Of course, having a champion atop the ozone layer of NBC’s management would completely eliminate the “TV show that barely made it on the air at all” conceit of its script.
One of the film’s most audacious casting choices was J.K. Simmons as Milton Berle. But Berle’s connection to the show is never explained beyond the chance to compare ‘50s television royalty with what would become ‘70s television royalty. In real life, Berle handed off the Emmy award for best comedy-variety show to Michaels at the end of its first season and then hosted the show himself – disastrously – in its fourth season. But Berle’s presence in the script does generate some real tension with Chevy Chase, as Giancarlo Sopo wrote in October at NRO’s Corner:
Then there’s the scene with J. K. Simmons as Milton Berle, the legendary comedian and Hollywood relic clinging to his crass bravado. In a backstage clash with Chase — both trying to flex their muscles in front of a young female cast member — the generational divide comes into sharp focus: While Chase’s humor is irreverent, Berle’s response is a literal power play, pulling out his, uh, manhood to assert dominance.
The exchange shatters every 20-something’s illusion that their generation invented transgressive humor. The old guard may not have flaunted it on TV, but their audacity ran just as deep — and was perhaps even more outrageous. The scene is a reminder to leave the stage with grace when your time is up — and for the next generation, to step onto it with a bit more humility.
DANGER
"Saturday Night Live" is a show that, from its start, was associated with excessive drug use among its cast – marijuana jokes were a staple of the show’s first couple of seasons; by the end of its first five years, many in the cast and creative team had serious cocaine addictions. John Belushi, of course, died in 1982 from an overdose of cocaine and heroin.
An early scene in "Saturday Night" depicts Billy Preston, who, along with Janis Ian, were the musical performers on SNL’s debut, handing Garrett Morris a vial of pharmaceutical-grade coke. Those knowledgeable about the show’s history will make the connection that, according to Hill and Weingrad, Morris is reported to have developed a massive addiction to freebasing coke by the show’s fifth season. (Although, to be fair, most viewers will at least make the connection that almost everybody on SNL would soon have coke issues of their own.)
"Saturday Night" is a reminder that during its first five years, SNL worked by the sheer force of its comedic personalities and strong writing. Because much of the cast had already appeared as members of the "National Lampoon" and "Second City" comedy troops, making the transition to live television wasn’t as difficult as it has been for their unknown replacements over the decades. The original SNL cast thought of themselves as “video guerrillas,” as Dan Ackroyd would say back then. “Every show was an assault mission,” Hill and Weingrad added. Their replacements, having seen the enormous big-screen success of Eddie Murphy, Bill Murray, Ackroyd, Chevy Chase, and Mike Myers, now see SNL as a mere springboard to superstardom and its concomitant mega-wealth.
When Michael O’Donoghue returned for a season as head writer in 1981, he began by spray painting the word “DANGER” on an office wall to tell his young cast members what had been missing since he and Lorne Michaels had left the show.
But “DANGER” has been missing from SNL for decades. It’s become so establishment that the show can phone it in each week because it now exists only to provide Sunday column fodder for Beltway journalists. (Anne Beatts, the wife of Michael O’Donoghue, famously said, “You can only be avant-garde for so long before you become garde.) As John Hinderaker wrote in early 2017 at Power Line, political reporters and wire services love to recap SNL episodes because it allows them to get their biases in print while still maintaining a thin veneer of objectivity. “‘Respectable’ news outlets like the AP can’t publish absurd comedy skits ripping President Trump, much as they might like to,” Hinderaker wrote. “But by covering Saturday Night Live, they turn such meaningless attacks into fake ‘news.’”
In contrast, "Saturday Night" is a reminder of when SNL actually did have some danger — so much so that it dramatically changed television’s tone, and in many ways, not necessarily for the better.
The more inside baseball knowledge you have of "Saturday Night Live’s" brilliant first five seasons, the more you’ll enjoy Jason Reitman’s "Saturday Night" movie. Its breakneck pacing hides a lot of its flaws upon first viewing – if you go back for a second viewing, you may wonder why a film like "Saturday Night" should require this level of insider knowledge to be enjoyable.
It’s not entirely accurate, but to paraphrase the line from "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," when the legend becomes fact, film the legend – and add plenty of simulated mescaline, to boot.
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