Editor’s Note: Vanyaland film editor Nick Johnston is in Canada all week covering the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival. And as usual, we wish we were up there with him! Check out our continuing TIFF 2024 coverage, read our official preview, and revisit our complete archives of prior editions.
Out of all the people to valorize at our current moment, it was a strange choice on Jason Reitman’s part to make a hagiographic paeon to Lorne Michaels’ visionary skills as a producer. He’s our window to the world of Saturday Night, a Safdie-styled imagining of the two hours before the very first episode of Saturday Night, not yet Saturday Night Live thanks to Howard Cosell, aired and Revolutionized Everything Ever. That’s some cold comfort to all the comedians who found their Waterloo to be Michaels’ desk or the staff at the National Lampoon, who were the people who discovered much of that first cast that Michaels (played here by Gabriel LaBelle) poached. But you can’t argue with the results, and he had one great idea: To put these people in a room together. He was responsible for ensuring that it went off without a hitch, enforcing NBC censorship (Reitman portrays him as super sympathetic to the writers’ plights when he was just a few years away from banning Elvis Costello for playing “Radio Radio”) as well as stamping out creative visions. Sure, he was a major player in its success and the “creator,” but he was its gatekeeper whose instincts often failed him. His peerless eye missed Jim Carrey, John Goodman, Dave Foley, Donald Glover, Tiffany Haddish, Jordan Peele, Paul Reubens, JB Smoove, Amy Sedaris, Kevin Hart, Jennifer Coolidge, David Cross, Stephen Colbert, among others – many of whom would later return to host the fucking thing once they hit it big. But, hey, he found Eddie Murphy, right? No, that was his much-hated successor, Jean Doumanian.
It’s a fundamentally bizarre choice to focus on the producer rather than all of the talent in Studio 8H that fateful October night in 1975. It was a murderer’s row of Lampooners and NYC comedians, chief among them John Belushi (Matt Wood), Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith), and Dan Aykroyd (Dylan O’Brien). We don’t get much time to hang out with them, though. Aykroyd’s coked up and is lost in the shuffle, Chase is too busy trying to impress everyone with his quick wit and good looks, and Belushi is fighting with Michaels over signing his contract, not wanting to compromise and become a part of the corporate machine. His sole black cast member, playwright and actor Garrett Morris (Lamorne Morris, who is always charming in anything he’s in), wonders why he’s there in the first place. The women, including Jane Curtin (Kim Matula), Laraine Newman (Emily Fairn), and Gilda Radner (Ella Hunt), are off doing their own thing, basically just ignored by Reitman and company. The guest stars, like host George Carlin (Matthew Rhys), are in rebellion, the studio suits are mad, and everything in the production seems ready to collapse, much like the lighting rig that nearly kills Belushi early on. But they soldier on, knowing that, eventually, Michaels will go on to create the cultural zenith known as Fridays.
If you’ve ever been backstage at a studio or a playhouse, you know things are chaotic, and Reitman wants you to experience the Chaos of Genius firsthand. His camera flows from room to room as Jon Baptiste’s score blares, making it impossible to tell what the hell is happening at any given moment, attempting to overwhelm you sonically as a way to find his tone instead of, you know, using editing or storytelling to get there. The score smothers most of the punchlines, the camerawork obscures any of the visual gags, and most of the movie isn’t funny, which is the most bizarre thing. It’s one thing to document the series work that goes into creating comedy – God knows it’s a hard fucking business, much like television itself – but the movie assumes you’re already a convert to the SNL cult and never tries to justify what made the early seasons of the show so goddamned special that they deserved an entire movie about how hard it was to produce. This was, perhaps, the only time in show business that Michaels was an underdog. After this moment, he had power, and I guess that’s why it’s so compelling to Reitman.
But the director can’t picture his subjects without their halos, with every character in the ensemble – aside from the women, at least, who aren’t his concern — getting their edges sanded down to serve their memories better. Belushi is “daringly” presented as absolutely hating the show, requiring everyone to massage his ego to extract the comedic goods from him. Chase is the only person who can insult him (but only about his looks, not his attitude). After all, he’s a capital-A Artist, as everyone recognizes his talent and will do anything to ensure he signs that contract. It’s almost like everyone knows he will be a mega-star, even can’t-give-a-shit Union crew members, who practically hold out glossy 8x11s waiting for his autograph. The conflict might have been more interesting if, say, during one of his temper tantrums about having to wear a bee costume, someone else might have said, “Hey, you’re a fucking jerk!” and left Michaels to be his sole advocate.
This is the interesting thing, I guess, about Saturday Night: Here, Michaels’ instincts are never wrong, when they were frequently and miserably so in real life. They’re only too ambitious, either in how he wants to cram three hours of material into two or in how he wants to present the “counterculture” to the audience at home and capture that youthful energy, which makes him a dramatically uninteresting character. Everybody likes him, aside from the occasional gaffer that he fights with, and he has a way of finding talent even when he’s not expecting it, like when he picks up an up-and-coming writer in a bar who just so happens to be the legendary Alan Zwiebel while he’s looking for Belushi. He fights with Dick Ebersol (Cooper Hoffman), his supposed benefactor and, in truth, the guy who even gave Michaels the opportunity in the first place to put his version of comedy on the airwaves. This is the only time that Michals oversteps his bounds, and he gets a monologue from Ebersol about what an ungrateful and tyrannical asshole he’s being towards him. The movie keeps making fun of him, though. What a square!
Any force that stands in the way of SNL making it to air that exact night is presented as out of touch, like Ebersol or, potentially, malicious. Johnny Carson gives Michaels a threatening phone call before they make it to air; Milton Berle (a funny JK Simmons) whips out his dick to prove a point to Chase; and David Tebet (Willem Dafoe), the NBC exec who has to decide if the show will even hit the air, is an unreadable devil, tempting Chase with talks of hosting his late-night talk show (lol) and reducing Michaels’ ego to dust. There’s already enough going on to stress that it’s probably a bad idea for them to go on that specific Saturday night – maybe wait one week? – but Michaels knows that if they don’t air that night… well, they’ll still have to take four episodes to find the show’s rhythm, and that son-of-a-bitch Carson will get a syndication check. He can’t take it! It’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to anybody, after all.
This is the problem with how Reitman and co-writer Gil Kenan (who got Reitman’s job on the Ghostbusters reboot once he decided he was done directing these movies) approach this story: it is fundamentally dramatically inert, much like any prequel. We know SNL will make it to air, that all of these people will go down in history, and that Lorne Michaels revolutionized television or whatever. If the entire conceit of your story is “popular thing almost didn’t happen,” there has to be relevant detail to make it compelling. When you’re a kid, the stories your parents tell you about their awful first dates and courtship are funny and intriguing because of what they reveal about these towering figures in your life: they are human, too. If the most human thing about your protagonist is just that he’s too good at what he does, and nobody respects his vision, you have to have him learn something more profound from the experience – Michaels finding out that he can’t squeeze everything into three hours isn’t a lesson learned, it’s constructive criticism.
So, what’s the fucking point? Reitman’s made a cacophonous and unfunny portrait of one of the most pivotal moments in television history, centering its mercurial and oddball creator as an everyman with a dream and, hell, a soon-to-be-ex-wife who won’t even take his name, played by Rachel Sennott. All he wants is to humanize these towering legends, but he has to contend with the fact that most are still alive and that the ones who aren’t have very active estates that want to manage their images, and all of them have their intensely devoted fans who demand to be seen in a particularly flattering light (except for Chase because fuck him).
It doesn’t do anybody’s legacy any good to have them styled like the animatronic puppets in the Hall of Presidents at Disney, but that’s what Reitman has created with Saturday Night: an imitation of life, going through the motions of sketch comedy and mediocre parody, hoping to stumble upon some sort of novelty through cameos and guest appearances and occasional utterances of the “fuck” word, misusing young talent and outright ignoring the influence of the people Michaels cut for time. Instead of directing this, Reitman should have considered helming a modern episode of SNL because, as rendered here, they’re functionally the same.