‘Saturday Night’ Review: Cocaine, Mom Jokes and a Race Against the Clock Punctuate Jason Reitman’s Tribute to the First Night of ‘SNL’ | Telluride

From the moment Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night begins, the clock is ticking as it leads up to the first ever taping of Saturday Night Live, or how it was originally called back in 1975, NBC’s Saturday Night. No literally, the time is displayed in big yellow numbers as the movie plays out the ninety minutes before the first live show (which is also the same length as the show we’ve all come to love over the last fifty years). When putting together this project, Reitman, whose father Ivan Reitman worked with many alumni of SNL over the course of his filmography, said he talked to just about every living contributor to the first season of SNL, trying to capture a cohesive account of the events of the first show; which he didn’t get. Instead he got everyone’s wild perspective of the night, and within all these contradicting, wild stories, Reitman and his co-writer Gil Kenan were able to make a hysterical film about the creation of SNL, celebrate what makes the show so great, but also display to audiences the actual honest truth; this show was near moments away from never existing, which Saturday Night as fascinating look back as the past.

Starting at 10:00 pm ET on October 11, 1975, a NBC page boy (Finn Wolfhard) is passing out flyers for the show, with a disclaimer for a free night of comedy and music. Enter Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle), co-created of SNL, bursting onto the streets of New York City frantically looking to bring in one of the comedic acts for the night, Andy Kaufman (Nicholas Braun, who also plays Jim Henson in the film) into Studio 8H at 30 Rockefeller Plaza. From the moment Kaufman gets out of the cab, and Michaels is able to get him past security, the movie is off to the races as we swiftly see the camera move through all departments within the eighth and ninth floor of the building that occupy the space needed to create the show. It is at this time too we see a mountain of problems that stand in Michaels’ way from getting Saturday Night off the ground; including bickering between the crew and the actors, the entire lighting design for the show falling and shattering into pieces, John Belushi’s (Matt Wood) refusal to sign his contract as well as getting into a fist fight with Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith), and the show’s run time is running at three hours long with Michaels refusing to make cuts to the show. When you pile them up, it’s an extensive list of issues for the creative team to face on the pilot episode of their new, radical late night TV show. But, as we all know, this is still the standard that Michaels still works with the show in its latest form; organized chaos.

As Michaels is putting out as many fires as he can, those issues don’t seem to compare to the biggest one of them all; that this show has been greenlit by Dick Ebersol (Cooper Hoffman), the President of NBC, and David Tebet (Willem Dafoe), VP of talent relations for NBC, to mostly fail, and providing Johnny Carson and others an excuse for more leverage against the studio. Sure, Ebersol tries to explain why the show might need to include advertisements with Polaroid in the sketches, and Tebet is all for the creative mind that Michaels has, but they see a ship about to sink based on everything that has been leading up to the show airing. Tebet’s fear in Lorne and the show succeeding is one that has always been something that is found in entertainment; that a new wave is coming and the way things are done at NBC is about to change too. It takes the entire film for LaBelle’s version of Michaels to explain what the purpose is of a show like this, and it is simple; it is a feeling of being in the greatest city in the world, pulling an all-nighter, and having a laugh or two along the way. It’s the feeling I had when I was a young kid growing up in Texas on a Saturday night, laughing at jokes I barely understood because they were delivered by those seeking to push comedic boundaries for the right reasons and entertain the hell out of you. Throughout watching Saturday Night, I could feel that Reitman and his team knew what that was like, landing the perfect tone necessary to tackle this subject matter with enough nostalgia and comedic precision to make you feel as I did when watching old reruns of the first couple of seasons of SNL during the summer afternoons on Comedy Central at my grandparents’ house, or late Saturday night with my Mom and Dad.  

Inside that magical show always lies a cast of extraordinary, singular talents that were, and still are, some of the funniest people on the planet. Their talents are honored throughout the film by one of the best ensembles of the year so far. From Cory Michael Smith fully embodying the ego that is Chevy Chase to a tee to Dylan O’Brien excellent turn as a smug, sexually confident Dan Aykroyd to Lamorne Morris’ dazzling, soul searching portrait of Garrett Morris to the energetic, surprisingly heartfelt performance by Ella Hunt as Gilda Radner, alongside Wood as Belushi and you could feel these actors finding their way into portraying these legends more as versions of themselves rather than caricatures you find in Time Square. They all get their time to shine, even getting to recreate some of the best SNL moments from the opening show (the infamous first cold open “The Wolverines” is created line for line towards the end of the movie, as well as run throughs of Weekend Update, “New Dad Insurance,” Andy Kaufman doing “Mighty Mouse,” and even a couple of winks to the “Land Shark” and “Julia Child” sketches that would become popular soon). There are also a ton of moments backstage throwing hilarious daggers and insults at each other left and right (George Carlin being called an untalented “Lenny Bruce rip-off,” Chevy Chase being called a “a handsome, funny gentile,” and over a dozen more like this sprinkled throughout the runtime). If you expand the ensemble even more, you will include one of the best performances in the film from Tommy Dewey as SNL head writer Michael O’Donoghue, who has a downright brilliant comedic battle with the FCC representative Joan Carbunkle played by the equally fantastic Catherine Curtin, as they battle over which dirty jokes can be used on air (“I know what blue balls are,” “What is a golden shower?”). There are a lot more faces in the film – that work so well in minor, effective roles like Nicholas Podnay as a young Billy Crystal and Andrew Barth Feldman as Neil Levey, Lorne Michaels’ assistant, but there are also a lot of characters that didn’t fully work here. Matthew Rhys’s George Carlin, J. K. Simmons as Milton Berle, and Braun’s dual characters were the ones that stood out as people who were most likely around that night, and made an impact for the first show or behind the scenes, but didn’t work enough to justify their existence in this movie other than to be a distraction and take time away from other better performances.

But while the supporting cast is mostly outstanding, the film rests upon the shoulders of LaBelle’s turn as the iconic Lorne Michaels, and much like his stellar work in The Fabelmans, he proves himself to be one of the most engaging, bright young actors we have working today. As we are doing Reitman’s version of Aaron Sorkin walk-and-talks throughout the film, we are glued to every wild, manic change that comes out of Michaels’ brain and LaBelle excels at selling that mad genius that is Lorne Michaels. Even in quieter moments when he is talking to his wife and producing partner Rachel Sennott, LaBelle is able to deliver the right amount of vulnerability to get behind rooting for Michaels as he gets the show to air. Sennott, who is usually a rare cinematic force on screen, isn’t given enough to do here to really see her talents shine, but she does the best in the limited time she is on screen. Same goes for Hoffman’s Dick Ebersol, who, outside of one fantastic scene where he channels the anger found in performances from his late father, he is mostly here to support LaBelle, at the cost of his overall work. You can feel that Reitman and Kenan were doing their best to cram every little detail they heard from that night into this movie, and while we could’ve spent more time on the female characters and cut some of the cameos, there is too much gut busting humor and detail in the time period and characters to not have a good time with the vibes they are successfully are able to create.

Beyond the script and ensemble lies Reitman’s smart directional decisions, as humorous stages bits and pieces of the film as actual cutaways and lead-ins to music guests at about the halfway point of the film, just like a normal episode of Saturday Night Live. For me, this isn’t so much a nostalgic choice but rather a smart move by a curious, attentive admirer of the iconic show and knowledge of understanding that you can’t just throw around a bunch of jokes and call it SNL, you have to do like what Michaels says; you have to feel it. This type of attention to detail has been missing in his film for some time, and through his passion and personal connection to the comedy world, he has given us his best work since Up in the Air and a movie worthy of being a part of the celebration taking place later this year as the greatest comedic show of all time turns fifty years old.

Grade: B+

This review is from the 2024 Telluride Film Festival where Saturday Night had its world premiere. Sony Pictures/Columbia Pictures will release the film theatrically in the U.S. on October 11.