Saturday Night review - a dizzying 90-minute trip to a landmark TV event

“A countercultural sketch show full of unknowns, with no script, no structure.” The verdict of NBC’s head of talent about the embryonic Saturday Night Live expresses everything audiences loved about it when it first aired in 1975.

To capture the anarchic birth of this TV institution, Jason Reitman has made a stylish film that initially seems as wayward as the show. But it gradually comes to seem like the obvious way to handle the material.

He has opted to depict just the 90 minutes before the show was due to go live, a real-time madcap sprint to the moment when the first sketch rolled and Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith, pictured below right) came on camera to proclaim, “Live from New York, it’s Saturday Night!” The camera roves restlessly around the studio, stopping for brisk conversations before dashing off to the lift, the street outside, the bar next door. Exposition has to be shoehorned into the dialogue, much of it gabbled off as the camera rushes past. 

Milling around the studio are the improv performers from all over north America who would become household names: Belushi, Chevy Chase, Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, Andy Kaufman — the first fruits of what would turn into SNL’s factory of fun. Terrific casting means they will be instantly recognisable to veteran SNL devotees. But the begetter of all this mayhem, a pint-sized Canadian producer called Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle, pictured below, with Kaia Gerber and Cory Michael Smith), arguably still the most important man in north American comedy, is somebody many viewers will have to get to know from scratch.  

Reitman's camera follows him as he buzzes around putting out fires, some of them literal ones. Michaels is a man skilled at giving non-answer answers and back-burnering a clear decision until its shape instinctively becomes clear to him. As with the board covered in cards he consults — all the items in the show, including musical guests, spoof advertising and satirical news bulletins. Trouble is, it totals three hours of content that has to be cut in half. 

Meanwhile, Belushi (an uncanny Matt Wood, pictured bottom, who does the sneering eyebrow raise to perfection) won’t sign his contract, the lighting director quits, the sound system blows, the writers (one of them future senator Al Franken) keep doing rude things with Jim Henson’s Muppets, Kaufman (Nicholas Braun) wanders around carrying a large tape recorder, Billy Crystal kvetches about having his spot cut in half and the sinister head of talent (Willem Dafoe) keeps threatening to can SNL and rerun an old Tonight show instead.

Did American viewers actually want something so different from the shiny-floor shows like Rumpus Room, with their spangly chorines and stale comedians, that dominated Saturday nights? Obviously, hindsight tells us, yup, they did. Michaels is given pretentiously messianic statements to spout about the importance of SNL, though on at least half-a-dozen occasions is rightly asked, “But what is this show, do you even know?” 

The script leaves Michaels’ rather poetic answer to the film’s final stretch. It becomes clear SNL’s schtick is going to be finding gems in a bran tub. The film includes little of the eventual show. We see rehearsals of gender-flipped construction workers learning “sidewalk skills” and spoof newscast Weekend Update, given to Chase to present at literally the last minute, with Belushi as an explosive weather forecaster. The very first sketch on air is recreated, featuring Belushi as a bizarrely accented immigrant repeating English sentences about wolverines delivered by a pompous teacher (the show’s lead writer, Michael O’Donoghue, played by Tommy Dewey). 

Belushi is seen stomping around angrily as a Killer Bee, a strand he apparently despised, but none of the bee sketches. There are none of his samurai working in sundry service industries, no Coneheads or Radner’s Roseanne Roseanadanna.

The creatives' interactions with their colleagues are a window on the finished product, though. Jane Curtin (Kim Matula) breaks into a bravura mock advertisement, of the kind SNL perfected, for steel-wool facial cleansers. The sweetly eccentric, spirited Radner (Ella Hunt, pictured left) hops onto a camera seat and is lifted high above the studio, before going out to find Belushi and coax him back. (He’s at the Rockefeller Plaza skating rink, unsuccessfully attempting a triple Axel.) Garrett Morris (Lamorne Morris), the only Black cast member, goes around claiming he is only there to play silent characters, breaking into a song for a sound check about getting him a gun and shooting all the whities. 

Michaels is clearly an envelope-pusher. One exasperated NBC techie looks at his list of demands and shouts, “This isn’t a budget, it’s a ransom note!” When Michaels insists real bricks be laid on a section of the floor, bricks are duly cemented in place with seconds to go. A llama arrives for one of the sketches — “it’s funnier than a donkey”, MIchaels tells his NBC producer (Philip Seymour Hoffman’s son Cooper).

This chaotic human zoo, pulsing to a soundtrack of free-form jazz by Jon Batiste (who appears as Billy Preston), is a little world of its own, one that speaks to the counterculture. But it slowly emerges that SNL is really there to fail and thereby confirm to late-night supremo Johnny Carson that audiences don’t want live comedy on a Saturday night, something he is pushing for in his new contract. Two of the most shocking moments involve the old guard: Carson’s crudely expressed phonecall to Michaels and a blistering scene where Saturday-night star Milton Berle (a note-perfect J K Simmonds) flashes his penis at Chase and his starstruck fiancee.

Through the chaos moves pint-sized Michaels, pronouncing his vision: “This is the first show for and by the generation that grew up with TV.” His first wife, writer Rosie Shuster (Rachel Sennott), is clearly his linchpin, a fixer and soother who can cajole Belushi into shaving. Like the rest of the cast, she is given a full set-list of one-liners and smart rejoinders. The whole film is pretty quotable, most of it seemingly authentic dialogue, such as O’Donoghue’s description of television as “a lava lamp with slightly better audio”.

The potential foes of the show invariably come dressed in suits. Chase nails it when he addresses a room full of them, the affiliates who hold the show’s success in their grip, with: “‘Ladies and Gentlemen’ — who am I kidding? ‘Gentlemen…’”, which they unashamedly find funny. Choicest of all is the network standards lady (Catherine Curtin), there to take her red marker to their excesses but ending up bamboozled when she asks them what “clam diving”, “zipper dinner” and “golden shower” mean, and innocently signs off the broadcast.

The cast have huge fun. Cory Michael Smith captures the swagger of Chevy Chase; Dylan O’Brien is Dan Aykroyd to a T, physically and, especially, vocally; Nicholas Braun projects both the childlike craziness of Kaufman and the unworldliness of Henson; and Emily Fairn has Laraine Newman’s deceptively quiet voice down pat. Look out for Matthew Rhys as angry guest star George Carlin, who almost cokes himself into a seizure.

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