As the clock ticks down toward the inaugural broadcast of the show not yet known as Saturday Night Live, an exasperated NBC executive asks producer Lorne Michaels (played by The Fabelmans star Gabriel LaBelle), “Do you even know what the show is?” That question, posed in slightly different forms, recurs several times throughout Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night, which screened at the Toronto International Film Festival on Tuesday night. The movie, which Reitman co-wrote with his Ghostbusters: Afterlife collaborator Gil Kenan, covers in more or less real time the chaotic 90-minute stretch on Oct. 11, 1975, before the cameras went live, and it takes Michaels most of that time to come up with an answer, preoccupied as he is with wrangling a temperamental and inexperienced cast, his skeptical bosses, and the stone-faced network affiliates who will ultimately decide the show’s fate.
In actuality, it took NBC’s Saturday Night, as it was initially known, even longer to figure out what it was supposed to be. The first episode includes familiar elements—an opening monologue, musical guests, parodic commercials—but it’s striking how little of the show we now know is present. The actors who would become its breakout stars are almost an afterthought, confined to sketches that rarely run over a minute and billed under a collective name so new that announcer Don Pardo got the words scrambled and called them “the Not for Ready Prime-Time Players.” There’s more of Billy Preston (Jon Batiste, who also wrote the movie’s score) and Janis Ian (Muna’s Naomi McPherson) than there is of John Belushi (Matt Wood), Dan Aykroyd (Dylan O’Brien), or Gilda Radner (Ella Hunt), although Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith) does get some face time at the Weekend Update desk. Which leaves Reitman, and Saturday Night, with a bit of a dilemma: How do you mythologize the beginnings of a show when you’re building up to an episode that barely feels like SNL at all?
One way is by making Saturday Night feel more like the present-day show than its embryonic predecessor. The movie plays like a cross between one of Robert Altman’s lesser let’s-put-on-a-show ensembles and the SNL standby where the camera follows the evening’s guest host through the hallways of Studio 8H, setting up a string of sight gags and one-liners that both teases and mocks the audience’s desire to peek behind the scenes. It’s not as unhinged a portrayal as the one in James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales’ definitive oral history Live From New York—there’s a lot less cocaine, for one thing, and a lot less sex—which undercuts the movie’s consistent assertions that Michaels and Co. are up to something genuinely revolutionary: the first TV comedy made by and for the generation who grew up watching TV. Although we’re following the goings-on through Michaels’ eyes, we’re effectively put in the position of those hidebound affiliates, wondering whether all this mayhem can produce anything but an ungodly mess.
Because Saturday Night eventually takes us no further than a couple of minutes after 11:30 p.m., Reitman and Kenan build up their not-yet-a-show by dragging down the existing comedic icons of the time, including George Carlin (Matthew Rhys), who hosted the first episode, and Milton Berle (J.K. Simmons), who for reasons unknown is taping a non–live TV special in the building. (This is not a movie to which one should look for a strict recapitulation of the facts.) Berle, who is regularly remembered as one of SNL’s all-time worst hosts, has at least earned his ignominious place in the show’s history, but the shots at Carlin, whom head writer Michael O’Donoghue (Tommy Dewey) calls a “ponytailed vulture feeding off the corpse of Lenny Bruce,” are both gratuitous and wide of the mark. Carlin’s not the only comic genius to whom Saturday Night gives short shrift either. Radner, who stands with Belushi as the most explosive talent in the original ensemble, barely registers as a presence among the teeming ensemble cast, in a telling of the story that, with the exception of Michaels’ wife, writer Rosie Shuster (Rachel Sennott), seems much more interested in the contributions of men.
The movie reserves its most dismissive treatment for Jim Henson, played by Succession’s Nicholas Braun as a hapless, gangly intruder who spends most of the movie begging for the show’s writers to tell him what to do. SNL’s staff was famously hostile to Henson’s presence—O’Donoghue quipped, “I won’t write for felt”—and even in the first episode’s grab bag of acts, the Muppets sketch feels like a particularly bad fit. But considering that the premiere of The Muppet Show was less than a year away, depicting Henson as an out-of-his-depth doofus being hazed by the cool kids strikes a sour note. (Braun also stepped in for an unavailable Benny Safdie to play Andy Kaufman, whose lip-synch to the Mighty Mouse theme is correctly played as the first episode’s one unqualified triumph.)
In Live From New York, Michaels says that the writers discovered early on that the audience liked it when the show made fun of its own flaws, a tradition that carries through the sketch where Kerry Washington has to double as Oprah and Michelle Obama because there weren’t enough Black women in the regular cast. Please Don’t Destroy’s digital shorts have made SNL’s offices as familiar a location as the Update desk, feeding a consistent fascination with how the show is made. It helps that the process is perennially interesting, even or especially when the show is not, when sketches fall flat and the cast thins out and all you can think is how much better it was whenever you first started watching. (No matter when you started, this is always true.) But Saturday Night is so focused on the process that it neglects to establish why the product matters—an especially odd lapse given that its release is timed to coincide with the fanfare about the beginning of SNL’s 50th season. There’s plenty of adrenaline to go around, but once that wears off, all that’s left is emptiness.
