Saturday Night

Few televised cultural phenomena have been as exhaustively documented as Saturday Night Live. Documentaries about SNL range from Kenneth Bowser's TV retrospective, Live from New York: The First 5 Years of Saturday Night Live, to James Franco's backstage document of a week of production before a single live show, Before Saturday Night, to Bao Nguyen's disposable collection of CliffsNotes and feeble commentary Live From New York! Countless books about the show range from the 1977 you-are-there account by OG SNL writer Anne Beatts, talent coordinator John Head, and photographer Edie Baskin, called Saturday Night Live; to the colorful 1994 coffee table compendium Saturday Night Live: The First Twenty Years by Michael Cader; to the cluttered 2002 collection of interviews Live from New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live as Told by Its Stars, Writers, and Guests by James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales. Then there are the over 200 personal memoirs and biographies that have been published by and about folks who worked on the show. I've taken in more of these films and books (as well as podcasts and live appearances) than I care to admit. The best telling in any medium (at least in terms of documenting the show's first decade) is Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live by Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad. I defy any creative person (regardless of what you think of SNL) to read that book and not feel inspired to go out and create something. Like watching The Beatles Anthology, reading it engenders an exhilarating feeling of invincibility that anything is possible, combined with the wistful awareness that nothing quite this transformationally significant will occur in its given medium ever again.

I've been a fan of SNL for my whole life. I watched my first episode in an airport hotel room in 1978 and have seen at least one episode of the show for all of its 50 years on the air (watching almost every episode in every season from 1975 to 2012). It's been with me since I've been conscious, and as an occasional producer of live comedy and music events myself, I have deep respect, fascination, and frustration for the show and its creators. Being so well-acquainted with SNL history, I may not be the ideal audience for Jason Reitman's lightweight biographical docudrama, Saturday Night, about the night of the show's debut broadcast. Still, watching the film, I had to ask myself that standard (often stupid) film reviewer question: who is this movie for? Reitman and co-writer Gil Kenan, who together penned the director's atrocious Ghostbusters reboots, cull as many legendary backstage stories from the months that preceded and followed SNL's first show and cram them into a fictionalized account of the 90 minutes leading up to the first program going out over the airwaves.

The movie centers on the show's creator and producer, Lorne Michaels (played by Gabriel LaBelle, Steven Spielberg's teenage avatar in The Fabelmans), following him as he wanders through the winding corridors, hallways, and floors of 30 Rockefeller Plaza, juggling the needs and demands of his cast, crew, writers, guest stars, journalists, NBC execs, network affiliates, and power players. Michaels weaves in and out of interactions with nearly all the key individuals who were part of that fateful evening, including his acerbic head writer, Michael O'Donoghue (Tommy Dewey), his angry, coked-up guest host, George Carlin (Matthew Rhys), his button-down partner in developing the show, Dick Ebersol (Cooper Hoffman), the sinister NBC television executive David Tebet (Willem Dafoe), and his wife and one of the show's primary writers, Rosie Shuster (Rachel Sennott).

Regardless of how clever or ill-advised (or both) this quasi-real-time structural choice may be, movies like this live and die by how well they're cast. With a few horrendous exceptions—Succession star Nicholas Braun is unbearably awful in a dual performance as the peerless icons Jim Henson and Andy Kaufman (though the way these parts are written is even more unforgivable) Saturday Night does a good job in its casting. It fits contemporary young actors into the forty-nine-year-old personas of the original Not Ready for Prime Time Players and others who were present for this legendary night of television. The casting choices seem to have been based more on finding an actor who can capture each performer's essence rather than putting big stars in each role or finding look-a-likes. The one member of the cast who absolutely nails the look, the performance style, and the personal vibe of who he's playing is Nicholas Podany as the young Billy Crystal. Podany is so spot-on that it makes me wish every instance of CGI de-aging in movies could be done by just finding a doppelganger this perfect looking and talented.

But with so many real-life characters being represented in the movie, Saturday Night doesn't have the luxury of time most celebrity biopics get to ease us into acceptance of actors who don't look or sound exactly like the real people they're playing whom we know so well. The normal adjustment period required to fully give oneself over to an actor doing something between an impression and an original character is clipped. Therefore, the impressive way Cory Michael Smith embodies the attitude of Chevy Chase or Dylan O'Brien perfectly mimics Dan Aykroyd's voice and mannerisms, despite neither man looking much like their famous counterparts, takes you out of the movie rather than pulling you in. You spend a lot of this film's running time thinking about the casting of Saturday Night rather than the cast of Saturday Night Live.

The choice to center the film on the show's creator and producer, Lorne Michaels, a well-known but deliberately enigmatic behind-the-scenes celebrity, makes sense. Likewise, elevating Rosie Shuster to the film's key supporting player is another smart move, even though it relegates the other major woman on the show's original writing staff, Anne Beatts, to a single shot of her looking dumpy and useless as she takes a nap on a sofa. (I guess in Mr. Rightman's judgment, this comedy pioneer didn't merit one of the tip-of-the-hat scenes that most of the show's key male writers get.)

LaBelle is quite good as Lorne. He sidesteps a hagiographic characterization—that is, until the film's pretentious final monologue. I appreciated how the movie captures one of the traits that's rarely discussed about Michaels: his indecisiveness. It has always seemed to me that one of the reasons Michaels ran SNL in such a haphazard manner for so long was to disguise a near-crippling fear of making the wrong choice. Seeming to possess a unique ability to magically make order out of chaos is an effective way to make yourself look like a magician. But to do that, one must maintain a level of disorder and confusion that inevitably results in the type of unevenness Saturday Night Live has forever been known for. This movie comes down firmly with the belief that Michaels' desire to keep all options open until the very last minute is part of his genius. Still, I think one of the main plusses to structuring this movie this way is that we get to observe how noncommittal Michaels was but how ultimately inconsequential this usually fatal flaw for a producer was in this case. His lack of decisiveness until the last minute didn't matter because the show was always going to be more about attitude than polish. SNL combined so many undeniable talents that as long as it wasn't a trainwreck, that first episode was going to be something truly special.

Rachel Sennott (Shiva Baby, Bodies Bodies Bodies, Bottoms) is even better as Shuster. The film takes the most creative license with her character and adds a little narrative runner by posing the question of whether Shuster will use her maiden name or her married name in the show's end credit scroll. The Lorne/Rosie dynamic adds a nice bit of marital tension to this story while simultaneously illustrating how much matters of the heart had to take a back seat (or, more often, had to come later in a separate car) to the job in high-pressure creative situations of this era. And is illustrates how both of these individuals understand this reality. I wish the film indulged in a few more fact-based but fictionalized dramas that capture key aspects of the times rather than trying to shoehorn in as many major historical anecdotes and amusing little footnotes into the running time as possible.

For one thing, the insertion of so many behind-the-scenes stories into a 90-minute period makes the choice to set the film in real-time ridiculous. It is certainly interesting to learn that Alan Zweibel, who wrote the funniest one-liner on the first Weekend Update—a joke about a postage stamp commemorating prostitution, "It's a 10 cent stamp, but if you want to lick it, it's a quarter"—wrote gags for lame Borscht Belt comedians before finding his true calling collaborating with members of the SNL cast on their signature recurring characters. But it's not at all effective to suppose that Michaels spotted and hired Zweibel 20 minutes before the show went live, with the writer handing Chevy Chase that iconic joke at the precise right moment to transform the night from a disaster to a success. That timing just strains credulity.

Similarly, John Belushi (played well by Matt Wood) famously refused to sign his contract up until the very last minute on show night. But depicting him leaving the studio half an hour before the show to go ice-skating on the famous Rockefeller Center rink—just so we can have a scene of Michaels contemplating the meaning of it all with Gilda Radner (Ella Hunt)—undercuts the sense of urgency this movie's structure is trying to convey. The real story was that Belushi only agreed to sign his SNL contract after getting Michael's manager, the legendary Bernie Brillstein (who drew up the contract), to sign him to a management deal, ensuring that Belushi had the same representation as his boss. Presenting this set of circumstances would have been a better way to maintain the heightened energy of the ticking clock, with the added benefit of including something that actually happened that night.

Just like Aaron Sorkin's dreadful backstage-at-an-SNL-like show, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, this movie feels desperate to showcase the cultural importance of this TV show, but it has no narrative mechanism for doing so. It trots out J. K. Simmons as Milton Berle to stand in for everything old, stiff, and worthless about television before Michaels and Company started their revolution. This idea is not terrible since no one better represents 50s-era TV comedy than Berle, who is also well known for being one of the most disastrous hosts of SNL's first season. But Reitman can't help make these scenes more about Mr. Television's famously oversized member than the clash between old-school comedy traditions and those of the National Lampoon generation. We're treated to a glimpse of Berle taping a typical, painfully unfunny 1970s variety show on another floor to contextualize the standards of the day that SNL was pushing back against.

This juxtaposition of the then-current state of TV comedy programming and what SNL was going to be should be one of this film's strengths, but it only illustrates one of Saturday Night's biggest weaknesses: the movie is distinctly unfunny. It's not completely devoid of any understanding of what humor is, like Studio 60, but the filmmakers can't figure out ways to showcase how the irreverence and rebellious nature of its characters translated to filmable hilarity. Scenes that recreate moments from the live show, or rough drafts of sketches that would air later, fall painfully flat. Worse are the scenes depicting how the jaded, old-school studio crew and director Dave Wilson (Robert Wuhl) react to the "comedy" being created. These moments ring so false it’s embarrassing. I almost expected one of the fat, dismissive teamsters to start a slow clap when Chase starts to win them over when running through Weekend Update.

Still, Saturday Night's biggest failure is the element that should set it above a generic all-star docudrama or biopic: its real-time structure. The movie constantly undermines its countdown clock by showing events that would take far longer than their allotted timeframe. It's jarring each time the movie cuts to a title card showing how much time remains before air because the clock seems so disconnected from any notion of how time passes—either in reality or in the heightened mindset of someone in a high-pressure situation. It's almost a relief when we see the clock because it always shows much more time is left than we thought there would be. The real-time structure amounts to little more than a gimmick and a cheat rather than an effective narrative device. It would have made much more sense and created more tension for this movie to have taken place over the course of the day of the first show rather than the last 90 minutes of that day. That way, cramming all these events into a tight time frame might have felt credible, and the clock counting down would have held more suspense and meaning. Instead, Reitman tries to convey tension and energy with frantic long takes that whip-pan from one character to another, intense walk-and-talks down crowded hallways jutting in and out of busy spaces, and constant introductions of new characters with famous names who add little to the proceedings. It all plays like a soft mishmash of Uncut Gems with the tension stripped out, Birdman without any imagination or surrealist dream logic, and one of Robert Altman's overcrowded ensemble pictures that never get off the ground, like A Wedding. Worse, once the movie finally arrives at the inevitable moment where the broadcast goes live, we're not sure why we should care.