What is ‘Saturday Night’ about according to ‘Saturday Night Live’?

When I first heard about the premise of Jason Reitman’s “Saturday Night” — the entire film takes place in the 90 minutes leading up to the late night comedy landmark’s first episode in 1975 — I have to admit that I was averse to the idea. head scratcher. Sure, it looked like there was going to be a show backstage. “What could go wrong? Anything can go wrong!” real-time frantic bustle around the thing. And that sounded nice.

But more importantly, the show that came to be called “Saturday Night Live” (in the first season it was simply called “Saturday Night”) did not happen overnight, or in 90 minutes. A universe of pitching and planning, casting and writing, along with an infinite number of decisions big and small, led to the formation of a revolutionary new spirit and form of television comedy. How did “Saturday Night” come about? How was it dreamed? How did it all come together? By definition, 99 percent of everything was in the rearview mirror by the time the show made its network premiere on October 11, 1975. So how could Reitman’s film hope to capture something truly crucial about the show’s invention?

Now that the film has opened (in limited release) and audiences are getting to see it, ‘Saturday Night’ is being revealed as a much more interesting film than I expected. I was held by every minute. Part of it, but only part, is the sheer cosplay stunt of it. If, like me, you grew up with “Saturday Night Live” and have been immersed in its early days, then it’s irresistibly fun to watch everyone associated with the show transform into a dramatic character, and to watch those that appear true and sincere. those who don’t – in other words, judge what Reitman has done and what he hasn’t done quite right. For me, there’s a lot of both.

Here are a few he nailed. Matt Wood, as John Belushi, is tapped to play the woolly anarchist from the ’70s comedy as an italicized prima donna who won’t cooperate, sign his contract or even stick around (he just keeps disappearing). , yet Wood manages to capture the Belushi persona – the somewhat zoned discontent, which was already a hidden form of entitlement, and which led Belushi to play rambunctious megalomaniacs who violently attacked the world (the samurai, the self-imploding ‘ Weekend Update’ commentator, Bluto). I also thought Dylan O’Brien really got Dan Aykroyd – the brilliant Canadian spirit he exuded as he fooled people with his verbosity in technical jargon. And Kim Matula comes very close to Jane Curtin’s faux-smiling hauthor.

But there are some fake comments next to the real ones. Cory Michael Smith captures a lot about Chevy Chase: the glowing humor, the way he bossed everyone around him. But he frowns too much, and while I have no quarrel with Chase’s portrayal as a big dick, he had a superficial lightness that Smith doesn’t have. Ella Hunt’s Gilda Radner is too effervescent and amorphous; she doesn’t radiate Radner’s personality. And I have to say that I was deeply disappointed by the film’s portrayal of Michael O’Donoghue, the visionary of the destructive, nihilistic, tawdry world-trash comedy who, more than anyone else, captured the sensibility of the National Lampoon in the film brought. shaping world of ‘Saturday Night’. O’Donoghue, who I befriended (full disclosure) when I was in college, did indeed smoke thin brown cigarettes and harassed the network’s goons for tampering with his concepts. But he wasn’t this precious grinning troublemaker; he was much deadpan, more hostile, cutting and colder – the comedy writer as ruthless killer. Couldn’t they have studied some tapes to get the voice right?

That said, I’ve read a lot of criticism about Lorne Michaels’ performance in the film, but I thought Gabriel LaBelle’s performance was spot on. LaBelle, who played the young Steven Spielberg in “The Fabelmans,” just turned 22, but he is completely convincing as Michaels, the producer of “Saturday Night,” who was 30 the night the show premiered. He gets the voice, and also the look: the rounded vowels and the passive quicksilver stare. Either way, he gives Michaels a fascinating relationship with the chaos around him.

Lorne has to cut the three-hour sketches in half (all those index cards!), he has to rein in the raging egos and massage the network reps who don’t get the show and don’t trust it and don’t do it. I don’t like it. (When he receives a “congratulations” call from Johnny Carson, it is clear that Carson, who NBC considers are (network, wants the show to die a quick death.) More than that, Lorne has to believe in this show, keep everything together in his head, even if he doesn’t quite know what it is yet. Nobody does that. Because “Saturday Night” will not only be a bigger phenomenon than anyone could have imagined; it will be much greater than the sum of its parts. It will be the revolution that no one fully saw coming, not even those who launched it.

Here’s the trick of the movie. Lorne thinks he knows what he wants the show to do, but he doesn’t know what the show will do are. And Reitman, in the lightning-fast, sweeping, countdown to 11:30 form of his film, reflects the discovery of what “Saturday night” was. He could easily have made a film the way I first envisioned it — a meticulous docudrama that details the places “Saturday Night” comes from (the National Lampoon, the Second City groups of Chicago and Toronto), how it emerged from the drug culture. , of feminism, of the whole twisted counterculture thing. And pieces of that are there. At a key moment, Lorne gives a speech that takes on the appeal of ‘Saturday Night’ from a melancholy and almost poetic angle. He says the show is about everyone at home connecting to the romantic mystique of late-night New York City in an immediate new way. And he’s right. In the Midwest, where I lived and watched the show in the early years, it really felt like that. I’m not exaggerating when I say I would count down the week to a new episode as if it were a mini Christmas.

But mostly, Reitman leaves the definition of what “Saturday Night” is to the story that happens between the lines. It’s the reckless thing mood of those 90 minutes before the show – not the last-minute cobbling together of the stone stage, not the location of the missing Belushi, not even the tense confrontation (exaggerated by the film, I would say) over whether a ‘Tonight Show’ rerun is redeemed at the last minute. All of that is propulsive and entertaining, but the real theme of ‘Saturday Night’ (the movie) is that ‘Saturday Night’ (the show) would be the first TV show to highlight the off-stage aggression of showbiz personalities. to take. of the camera. The reason the players who weren’t ready for prime time weren’t ready for prime time is because they were too busy to show you exactly who they were. That was their magic. That’s why they were almost the Beatles of comedy.

In one of the film’s spiciest parts, Milton Berle, played with gleeful enthusiasm by JK Simmons, saunters backstage, strutting around like he’s God’s gift to the business world and to women. He targets Chevy Chase as the potential breakout star of “Saturday Night,” and therefore a threat to his ego. So he flirts with Chase’s girlfriend, and then gets into a verbal pissing contest with Chevy that’s so intense you can feel the smoke rising from it. Berle thinks he has beaten Chase; he wants to show how superior he is to the new generation. But his acid banter is all backstage stuff – the stuff that comedians of his generation left out of their act. Chevy Chase and the other funnymen of ‘Saturday Night’ will inject that killer spirit straight into their comedy. They will be fearless, ruthless and without limits. (The show opens with a sketch about feeding fingertips to wolverines, after which the two armchair characters both immediately die of heart attacks.) This isn’t your Uncle Miltie’s variety show — it’s Uncle Miltie’s identity on drugs . And once “Saturday Night” let the genie out of the bottle, television would never be the same, and maybe the world wouldn’t be either. Everything that mainstream comedy had suppressed for so long would no longer remain hidden. It would be live.