The new movie Saturday Night chronicles a momentous 90 minutes and change in TV history: the time immediately leading up to the premiere of Saturday Night Live on October 11, 1975. Director and cowriter Jason Reitman used his movie-industry connections (forged by his father, comedy director Ivan Reitman, who worked with plenty of SNL folk on movies like Ghostbusters, and perpetuated by his own directing career) to interview people who were there that night, compositing various stories into a fictional version populated by countless real-life characters. The resulting movie bustles with energy and neuroses as producer Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle from The Fabelmans) struggles to articulate his vision for the show, taking it on faith that everything will come together in the end. And, of course, it did, and in the movie, it does.
Except for the stuff that’s mostly made up.
Yes, naturally Saturday Night takes some creative liberties with TV history in order to both crank up the tension and provide some signposts that audiences not deeply versed in comedy lore may recognize. Most noticeably, this means fudging a bit of the content of the episode itself – easy enough to do, because only the first sketch is shown in full. That sketch, an absurdist bit where a bespectacled, pipe-chomping teacher (writer and brief cast member Michael O’Donoghue) teaches nonsensical English phrases to an accented pupil (John Belushi), is faithfully recreated in the film. The rest of the episode is only seen in pre-air bits and pieces: abbreviated rehearsals, sound checks, and pitches for sketches that the movie implies were in the works around the premiere, but in some cases didn’t appear until weeks/months/years later. (No, the famous Dan Aykroyd Julia Child sketch was probably not being workshopped 60 minutes before the first episode, and some three years before it actually aired.)
As it happens, the first episode is available in full on Peacock; because the first five seasons were licensed for complete DVD sets, those episodes tend to be fuller and less cut-down than many of the seasons that followed. This means it’s possible to perform a sort-of fact-check on the hyped-up movie.
The first chunk of the episode is accurately represented in the film. George Carlin does a short monologue, followed by a fake ad for “New Dad,” an insurance policy that replaces a departed father (Dan Aykroyd) with a stand-in (Chevy Chase), and then Billy Preston performs “Nothing from Nothing,” a song that also appears in the movie. Janice Ian’s “At Seventeen” is also shown in a rehearsal scene doubling as a movie-world needle-drop. The movie shoehorns in Andy Kaufman’s famous Mighty Mouse routine by having Kaufman (Nicholas Braun) perform it for the suits and the crew as a kind of proof of concept literally minutes before the show begins; kind of gratuitous, but fair enough that the movie wanted to have Kaufman do more than wander around the studio.
Contributions from other artists are mentioned in the movie; Braun also plays Jim Henson, who created Muppet characters for an ill-fitting feature on the first season. But Henson is treated as kind of an abstract, stand-alone nuisance – and more egregiously, something of a humorless dork who didn’t vibe with the SNL writers. It was true that Henson and his fellow Muppet performers (who union rules prevented from writing their own material) didn’t get along with the SNL writers, who resented their assignment to work up material for the characters. But the movie portrays Henson as gently humor-challenged and vaguely appalled by the provocative sensibilities of the writers, while in reality Henson was eager not to be pigeonholed as a creator of children’s entertainment, and sought out the SNL gig. (He also likely wouldn’t have been roaming the studio halls on his own, considering the elaborate, multiple-performer technical nature of his “Land of Gorch” segments.) The “Gorch” segment in the first episode definitely doesn’t work all that well, but the movie weirdly downplays the logistical challenge it would have represented, instead reducing it to Henson nagging Michaels about not getting script pages, and hating them when he eventually does. The movie goes easier on Albert Brooks, another first-season fixture who didn’t stick around for long; in a lineup that’s clearly and repeatedly described as pressed for time, his comparably endless four-minute filmed piece never prompts so much as a minor grumbling.
But where Saturday Night really departs from the reality of the aired episode is the sheer number of sketches that it claims were in the mix for that night’s broadcast. The movie is trying to convey the sheer volume of material Michaels was contending with – multiple comedians and musical guests, fake commercials, sketches, a short film, and a Muppets segment – and in doing so, it throws in references both overt and microscopic to future classics that may not have been in the works this early.
Curiously, while there are repeated references to a sketch about Alexander the Great at his ten-year high school reunion (which, per Laraine Newman, was indeed cut at the last minute); a sketch about female construction workers learning how to objectify men (which turned up in the sixth episode of the season); and multiple Dan Aykroyd bits that didn’t air until his fourth and final season, several short sketches that actually made it to air in the first episode aren’t so much as glimpsed in the movie. There’s a courtroom sketch about a sexual assault that the movie seems to elide entirely, and a sketch about a phony shark-bite victim that the movie sort of quietly allows the audience to assume might be the first appearance of the Land Shark character that debuted a few weeks later. Even stranger, the movie seems to ignore the existence of George Coe, an older actor who was only credited as part of the cast on the first episode, but appeared on-camera multiple times, and continued to make supplemental guest appearances for multiple episodes thereafter. This may be the single most glaring example of Reitman’s print-the-legend approach.
What the movie conveys more clearly than some of the written histories of SNL is how packed that first episode is. Saturday Night keeps circling back to the image of a familiar card board where Michaels must decide how to arrange various segments into a 90-minute show that apparently came in closer to three hours at dress rehearsal. Though the first episode does wind up relatively lean in actual sketch comedy, with multiple quick-hit commercial parodies and most actual sketches well under the three-minute mark, it’s also surprisingly agile compared to descriptions of how little it resembles the show today. This tends to imply something a little slower and less sure of itself, less revelatory than it would become when the cast grew into their various week-to-week roles. But if anything, that first episode is surprisingly zippy, if scattered. In the recent 49th season (and plenty before it), the show typically features about a dozen segments: cold open; monologue; Weekend Update; two musical performances; one to three pretaped sketches, music videos, or fake ads; and four or five live sketches. The first episode has over 20 segments. That’s the truth that Saturday Night gets at, through all of its embellishments and exaggerations: That in 1975, SNL was still sorting itself out even as it went to air.
Stream the first SNL on Peacock
