The last 90 minutes leading up to a very significant moment in TV history are the focus of Saturday Night, a realistic, real-time look back at what it was like for producer Lorne Michaels and his crew when they premiered the almighty, insane Saturday Night Live.
The show is in its 50th season this year, so there’s no better time for a fun throwback to how it all started. I’m old enough to report that my 7-year-old self was watching live when some weird-looking dude named John Belushi invaded our TV screen in 1975 instead of a Johnny Carson rerun on a Saturday night. When he grabbed his heart and fell on the floor—live from New York—a new era in comedy began.
Pitch-perfect casting under director Jason Reitman allows the likes of Belushi (Matt Wood), Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith), Dan Aykroyd (Dylan O’Brien), Gilda Radner (Ella Hunt) and Michaels himself (Gabriel LaBelle) to be convincingly depicted nearly losing their minds before giving life to what turned out to be a very successful mass-media experiment.
The film painstakingly recreates many classic SNL moments, like the legendary Mighty Mouse routine by Andy Kaufman (Nicholas Braun) and the “heart-grabbing” Wolverine series debut sketch featuring Belushi and then-head writer Michael O’Donoghue (Tommy Dewey). There are easter eggs everywhere, including glimpses of Land Shark, the Killer Bees and even Colon Blow cereal.
The original Saturday Night show included—strangely—Jim Henson’s Muppets, much to O’Donoghue’s chagrin. In an inspired piece of double casting, Nicholas Braun also plays the frustrated Henson, who despairs over his lack of script pages and the crew’s tendency to hang effigies of Big Bird with a noose in his office.
When Lorne Michaels and co-producer Dick Ebersol (Cooper Hoffman, son of Philip Seymour Hoffman) got their live sketch show to air, American TV was in the death throes of a golden age that wasn’t aging very well. TV dinosaurs like Milton Berle (played here by J.K. Simmons, who nails the nasty icon) were still dominating prime time and late night.
In one of the movie’s greatest scenes, Berle dances lazily in a cardboard-cutout number on a fictional variety show that perfectly depicts how bad those ’70s variety shows were; in fact, at first, I thought it was real. Michaels walks in and offers the dejected director of the show a job for less money; that director gladly accepts in order to cleanse his creative palette.
Smith and O’Brien are especially good at capturing the essences of Chase and Aykroyd—not just during their famed sketches, but their alleged backstage behavior over the years. Aykroyd was a lady’s man, having (or trying to have) dalliances with nearly every female in the crew and cast, while Chase had his eyes on advancing his celebrity and jettisoning SNL as soon as he could.
While Smith and O’Brien deliver full characterizations, the same can’t really be said for Wood’s Belushi. While it’s not bad work, Wood’s depiction comes closest to caricature. It’s hard to believe that Belushi was this much of a bummer in real life.
One of the film’s more touching scenes is a depiction of Belushi and Radner at the skate rink in Rockefeller Center, contemplating the future and where they would be “20 years from now.” Sadly, neither would make it out of the 1980s. (Belushi died in 1982, Radner in 1989).
The real-time approach, the sparkling cast and a masterful attention to period detail make Saturday Night a sweet and funny time capsule that might help garner a new appreciation for a show we’ve perhaps taken for granted over the years. The craziness depicted in this movie has been going on for five decades, with Michaels piloting most of the shows and seasons.
How does he do it? We’ll never know. I mean, we can make a few guesses. Chemicals must be involved, right? At the least, he must be taking B12 shots … B12 shots laced with cocaine?
