Last night, my family and I watched Jason Reitman's "Saturday Night," a dramatized look at the 90 minutes leading up to the first-ever episode of "Saturday Night Live" on Oct. 11, 1975.
We saw the events of that hour and a half leading up to Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith) proclaiming, "Live from New York, it's Saturday Night!" while standing over Michael O'Donoghue (Tommy Dewey) and John Belushi (Matt Wood) playing dead after a bizarre English lesson involving the phrase "I would like to feed your fingertips to the wolverines." It is fraught with dysfunction, infighting, accidents, and a lack of preparation on the part of almost everyone involved.
Belushi is belligerent and unwilling to sign the contract, Jim Henson (Nicholas Braun, who also plays Andy Kaufman) is never given a script. Garrett Morris (Lamorne Morris, no relation) feels out of place as a classically trained actor and playwright doing comedy. Host George Carlin (Matthew Rhys) has no faith in the show. Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle) is simply trying to keep everything together almost singlehandedly, especially when his assistant Neil Levy (Andrew Barth Feldman) hits a joint offered by musician Paul Shaffer (Paul Rust) that proves a bit too strong. Almost at the last minute, Dick Ebersol (Cooper Hoffman) admits the executives there to watch the taping expect it to fail.
After finding future SNL writer Alan Zweibel (Josh Brener) at a nearby bar and getting Belushi to come back to the show after locating him ice skating in Rockefeller Plaza, Michaels can finally get the show off the ground.
Even though we all know the show would succeed and become one of the longest-running hits on American television and a cultural touchstone, we still feel the tension, fear, worry, and overall uncertainty of the cast and crew. They want to impress the executives and bigwigs who were expecting the show to fail and planning to play a rerun of "The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson," and we watch as they try to stuff three or four hours' worth of sketches and scenes into 90 minutes.
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However, as someone who has only watched "Saturday Night Live" sporadically and does not know much about its history, I believe the film could have benefited from a few extra minutes. It could have depicted Michaels first conceiving of the show and his search for the talents that would one day become comedy legends like Chase, Belushi, Dan Aykroyd (Dylan O'Brien), and others. On top of that, some moments deserved a bit more expansion and context, such as Rosie Shuster (Rachel Sennott), Michaels's wife at the time, discussing her relationship with him and Aykroyd (flirting with him as well).
Nevertheless, while there is a degree of fictionalization involved (although this happens with every movie for artistic license), "Saturday Night" is enjoyable overall. It's not necessarily good for the humor (although that isn't to say it isn't funny) but for how it perfectly captures the sheer tension and chaos that you experience right before something big, whether it be something personal like a wedding or a significant birthday party, or the first production of what would become a legendary piece of late-night television.
And this just in, Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.
