Like Oppenheimer, Saturday Night compares its protagonist to Prometheus. The film, set backstage at Studio 8H in the 90 minutes immediately preceding the first live broadcast of Saturday Night Live, in October 1975, gooses an already extensively mythologized comedy institution with fictional incidents such as one featuring the first two breakout SNL stars to die prematurely, sharing a private moment in Rockefeller Plaza in the minutes before showtime. Gilda Radner (Ella Hunt) is girlishly euphoric with pre-show jitters and prematurely nostalgic, already anticipating looking back on the night from the middle age she would, as we know, barely live to see; John Belushi is skating on the ice rink in the bee costume he hates, moody and ungovernable. Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle) comes down to try to convince Belushi to sign his contract; having already quoted Che Guevara to a roomful of NBC executives, he now gestures to Rockefeller’s Prometheus statue and explains to Belushi that Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to mankind, which, when you think about it, is a lot like mounting a hip sketch comedy variety show in the late-night slot previously given over to Carson reruns.
The ticking-clock, not-quite-real-time narrative begins at 10pm, with Lorne Michaels pacing nervously on Sixth Avenue, facing down a litany of anxieties, some of which really happened: a 90-minute show that ran three hours at dress rehearsal; a cast of big egos already at each other’s throats; a radical comic sensibility at odds with network politics; a set that’s falling apart as the union guys sit around doing nothing (glib libertarianism being a stock-in-trade of director Jason Reitman, who cowrote the film with Gil Kenan).
Back and forth whip-pans in the 30 Rock elevators and faked Steadicam single takes give a semblance of frenzied quiet-on-the-set energy to densely expository dialogue and the introduction of famous comic after famous comic; for laughs, the film’s snappy, frequently groaningly wiki-referential dialogue draws liberally from canonical bits, and the many published recollections of the show, in both memoirs and Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller’s oral history Live from New York. So many of Saturday Night’s jokes work now because they worked in the late 70s, from Alan Zweibel’s one-liner about a new stamp commemorating prostitution to LaBelle being sprayed by prop blood purchased for Dan Ackroyd’s Julia Child bit (which aired in Season 4). Though Reitman shows Michaels blanching at the show’s now-famous applause sign, he’s not above cutting away from a gag to show an audience laugh, just in case today’s audiences don’t understand what’s so funny about the original “Wolverines” cold open. (Writing frequently brutally cruel characters who’ll do anything for a laugh, Reitman and Kenan are not above raiding Reddit to find old jokes for their characters to snap at each other.)
Much of the film is riffs on well-established comic personae: host George Carlin (Matthew Rhys) is foul-mouthed and coked to the gills; Andy Kaufman and Jim Henson (both played by Nicholas Braun, guessing quite vaguely in two underwritten roles) are holy innocents doing the Foreign Man voice and PBS conscientiousness respectively; Billy Crystal (Nicholas Podany) is all showbiz schmaltz. Of the Not Ready for Prime Time Players, Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith) is a smug, insecure alpha jock; Dan Ackroyd (Dylan O’Brien) has a large vocabulary and a history of UFO sightings; Garrett Morris (Lamorne Morris) and Jane Curtain (Kim Matula) are anxious about being tokenized; Larraine Newman (Emily Fairn) is anxious; Belushi is a tortured artist and budding coke fiend; and Gilda is an angel. As staff writer and Michaels’ then-wife Rosie Shuster, Rachel Sennott gets a star’s entrance and a big build-up from the script, which posits her as a sensual talent-whisperer and the real power behind the throne.
Michaels and his cast are told it will never work by seemingly a different establishment figure in every scene: by terrified junior executive Dick Ebersol (Cooper Hoffman); by Johnny Carson, over the phone from Burbank; by the original “Mr. Television,” Milton Berle (J.K. Simmons), who shows up to dick-measure with the rising star Chase; by NBC suit Willem Dafoe; by a network censor (Catherin Curtain) with a red pen that, she says, keeps the viewers safe from communism and godlessness, provoking a facts-and-logic atheist rant from legendary writer Michael O’Donoghue (Tommy Dewey) meant to stand in for the show’s revolutionary irreverence.
Michaels was a month shy of 31 years old when SNL went out for the first time; the 21-year-old LaBelle heads a cast of babyfaces who, at their best, capture some of the winning esprit de corps that made the show an authentic cultural phenomenon (the bond between Saturday Night’s Radner, Newman, and Curtain is especially affecting if you’re at all invested in the friendship between the three real women, comedy trailblazers who stuck together in the boys’ club). To his semi-estranged wife Shuster, Micheals is a “stray” who assembled this island of misfit toys as a surrogate family. Playing the young Spielberg stand-in in The Fabelmans, LaBelle put across a precocious go-getter with a ruthless edge befitting the film’s self-critical look at an artist who understood mise-en-scène before he understood people. Playing another boy wonder in Lorne Michaels, he’s an altogether cuddlier proposition here, a starry-eyed showbiz dreamer overcoming the underestimations of others and his own self-doubt – an incongruous and hagiographic take, given the cultural capital that the canny Michaels has amassed and hoarded over the show’s half-century on air.
For Jason Reitman, Saturday Night is a fitting followup to Ghostbusters: Afterlife, which he directed, and Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, which he produced and co-wrote. In those films, he picked up where his father, Ghostbusters director Ivan Reitman, left off, reanimating the icons beloved by 80s kids who held onto their Ghostbusters toys; here, he turns back the clock ten more years, to Boomer comedy’s breakout moment, and sets his characters in motion across his rebuilt soundstage like they’re the action figures Dan Ackroyd and others would eventually become. The film is fan fiction about real-life celebrities.
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