Not-So-Live From New York, It’s ‘Saturday Night’

Jason Reitman's look at the first-ever episode of 'Saturday Night Live' should have been a miniseries.

There have been, to date, two great peeks behind the curtain at Saturday Night Live. The first, 2002’s Live From New York by James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales, is an oral history featuring every living person of import to the history of Saturday Night Live up until that point; it’s full of all kinds of sordid, juicy gossip. The second is a 2010 documentary, Saturday Night (directed by James Franco, of all people!) that chronicles the creation of a single SNL episode (hosted by John Malkovich, of all people!) from start to finish; it makes you understand how totally nuts it is that these people put together a live television show in just a few days every week (like, no kidding it’s not funny as often as it is - the miracle is that it exists at all).

Jason Reitman’s new film, also called Saturday Night, is a dramatization of the 90 minutes leading up to the first-ever SNL broadcast on October 11, 1975 (when the show actually was called Saturday Night - the “live” wasn’t added until 1977). It’s a droll, diverting movie, but it is not, alas, nearly as good as Live From New York or the other Saturday Night. There’s just too many colorful characters involved to do everyone justice in 109 minutes; consequently, each storyline feels a little much like a sketch (pardon the pun) rather than a fully fleshed out narrative. Y’know when you see a movie and you’re like, “That should have been a HBO miniseries”? Yeah, well, Saturday Night is one of those movies.

One thing that Saturday Night does pretty well is give you an idea of how intense things were in those early days. Gabriel LaBelle, having already played a young Steven Spielberg in The Fabelmans, now plays a young Lorne Michaels. Poor Lorne has the network, NBC, breathing down his throat in the form of an older, adversarial executive, Dave Tebet (Willem Dafoe), and a younger, less-adversarial executive, Dick Ebersol (Cooper Hoffman); a cadre of brilliant, neurotic, and volatile young upstarts to wrangle in both the regular cast, the guest cast, and the writing staff; and a, uh, complicated marriage to one of those writers, Rosie Shuster (Rachel Sennott from Bottoms). The score, by Jon Batiste (who also appears in the film as Billy Preston), is percussion-centric and anxiety-inducing; Reitman and cinematographer Eric Steelberg film the whole thing in handheld, cinema verité style; editors Nathan Orloff and Shane Reid cut quickly and often; the dialogue pops and crackles (Reitman co-wrote the screenplay with frequent collaborator Gil Kenan). It’s barely controlled chaos, like a less-pretentious version of Birdman.

Unfortunately, if understandably, Reitman isn’t quite willing to reduce all the important folks who aren’t Lorne Michaels to appropriately-sized supporting roles. When your story involves legends like John Belushi and Gilda Radner, you don’t just wanna push those people over to the side, right? So they all get little subplots - about who’s not willing to sign their contract, about who is sleeping with who and who’s jealous about it, about who is overconfident and who doesn’t think highly enough of themselves, etc. - all of which are either allowed to either kinda fizzle out or just disappear. Because, again, there’s no time for all of this in a 109-minute-long movie. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s the women who suffer the most: Radner (Ella Hunt), Laraine Newman (Emily Fairn), and Jane Curtin (Kim Matula) all feel like afterthoughts compared to Belushi (Matt Wood), Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith), Dan Aykroyd (Dylan O'Brien), and even Lorne’s assistant, Neil Levy (Andrew Barth Feldman). Garret Morris (Lamorne Morris, no relation), the original cast’s sole person of color, fares slightly better, but only slightly.

Similarly, many of the film’s themes also get the short shrift. For all of Saturday Night’s talk about how revolutionary SNL has been, the movie doesn’t do much to dramatize - or even just tell us - what made it so revolutionary. There is very much a running conflict between the old guard and the new guard, exemplified by clips of a lame variety show filming in a different studio, Chase competing with Milton Berle (J.K. Simmons) for the affections of his finaceé (Kaia Gerber), a confrontational phone call between Lorne and Johnny Carson (Jeff Witzke), and an running dispute between the show’s head writer, Michael O'Donoghue (Tommy Dewey) and an uptight network censor (Catherine Curtin, no relation to Jane Curtin as far as I can tell). But Saturday Night barely has time to dig into the philosophical differences between the two generations.

The more I think about it, the more I feel like this is Saturday Night’s biggest flaw: it will be useless to anyone who doesn’t already know what Saturday Night Live is, and what made people like Radner and Belushi such forces in pop culture. If you know that Chevy Chase has a reputation for being an egomaniacal dick and that he left the show after just a single season, then all the half-assed stuff about executives flattering him and Milton Berle ostensibly daring him to step up and become a true superstar makes sense. But if you have no idea who Chase is, or don’t know anything about his reputation - which seems plausible for younger viewers, given Chase’s lack of visibility in more recent years - all of this stuff will just be baffling. It’s as though the film is saying “These people were important, trust us,” rather than dramatizing why they were important.

The cast, for their part, is perfect; when young celebrities play older celebrities, there’s always a chance that it’s going to be distracting, but somehow, everyone here manages to channel the spirit of the person they’re playing without just doing a silly imitation (although Wood’s resemblance to Belushi is uncanny - close your eyes, and he sounds just like the late comedian).

But there’s only so much they can do with the material they’ve been given… and that material basically amounts to a glorified episode of Aaron Sorkin’s Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. Someday, perhaps, someone will make a great movie about the early days of Saturday Night Live; for now, we’ll just have to settle for one that’s pretty good.