Watching “Saturday Night,” Jason Reitman’s entertaining film account of the birth of TV’s “Saturday Night Live,” is like sitting next to your mischievous Uncle Stan at a family dinner, listening as he regales the table with stories of his wild youth.
Eyebrows repeatedly rise as Stan’s tales amusingly stray further into the realm of fantasy. Much like the script for this movie, which director Reitman wrote with Gil Kenan, his “Ghostbusters” reboot co-conspirator.
Historical facts are treated with the same winking contempt that the “SNL” writers accord the hapless NBC censor attempting to curb their rude enthusiasm. Reitman and Kenan (and Uncle Stan) would argue that facts are the enemy of storytellers. They have a grand saga to spin, one that is emotionally true, even if some details crumble under strict scrutiny. Their account is presented as a satiric thriller in which the clock is the villain.
When the film begins, it is 10 p.m. on Oct. 11, 1975 — 90 minutes to showtime. Let the tick-tock begin.
From the look of things, disaster looms for the show that, at this point, is a revolution, a huge departure from the stodgy way TV used to be. Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle), the 30-year-old Canadian creator and producer of “SNL,” sprints through the halls of Studio 8H in NBC’s Rockefeller Center headquarters, trying to keep it together. Sketches are still being written and rehearsed, stagehands are still constructing the sets. Everybody is quarrelling.
“We just have to make it to air,” Michaels breathlessly tells a skeptical Dick Ebersol (Cooper Hoffman), the head of NBC’s weekend late-night programming. Michaels also has to contend with David Tebet (Willem Dafoe), NBC’s unsmiling and unimpressed head of talent, who acts like he’s just discovered the show. Tebet is threatening to abort the launch and replace it with a rerun of Johnny Carson’s “Tonight” show.
In truth, “SNL” was created to give Carson more time off, moving his reruns to weeknights, and to attract a lucrative youth audience that grew up with TV but wasn’t enamoured by it. There was no sword of Damocles hanging over Michaels’ head, but “SNL” did have to prove itself; it did so, quickly.
Such historical quibbling and other factual liberties taken by “Saturday Night” mean naught in terms of enjoying the film. Strangely enough, the presence of a llama on the set is completely accurate; the animal, a real camelid named Pierre, was a running gag early on.
Reitman shrugs off history in favour of the controlled anarchy that “SNL” represents, which, on the big screen, looks like something hatched by the ghosts of Robert Altman and Federico Fellini.
Cinematographer Eric Steelberg whirls his camera through the thicket of people and props with abandon, shooting entirely on 16mm film to impart 1970s grit. Composer Jon Batiste, the Grammy-winning musician who also appears here as musical guest Billy Preston, delivers a percussive score that emphasizes the countdown energy.
The film really succeeds with its actors — kudos to casting director John Papsidera — who convincingly embody the real people they play, albeit some better than others.
The men are mostly spot-on and instantly familiar to longtime fans of the show. LaBelle’s Michaels is fidgety, fussy and focused. Matt Wood’s John Belushi is brilliant and angry. Cory Michael Smith’s Chevy Chase is arrogant and hilarious. Dylan O’Brien is a virtual clone of Dan Aykroyd, getting his faux serious look and voice exactly right. Lamorne Morris looks like he could be the son of Garrett Morris (although the two aren’t related).
Other male players — especially Nicholas Podany as Billy Crystal, cut from the first show but later made a cast member, Nicholas Braun as both Muppet master Jim Henson and comic Andy Kaufman, and J.K. Simmons as caustic TV pioneer Milton Berle — are equally impressive and memorable.
The film’s female characters, alas, don’t fare quite as well. Gilda Radner (Ella Hunt), Jane Curtin (Kim Matula) and Laraine Newman (Emily Fairn), are well cast and historically essential members of the Not Ready for Prime Time Players, yet they get scant screen time and mostly come off as foils for their male comrades.
The one major exception to the male-dominated story is Canada’s Rosie Shuster (Rachel Sennott, superb), a writer on the show and Michaels’ wife at the time, who contributes much sanity to the increasingly unhinged proceedings.
When Michaels frets aloud that “SNL” simply has to succeed — “This is our shot, Rosie!” — she brings him down to earth with a riposte born of innate showbiz savvy: “It’s a shot.”
She knows that nothing is guaranteed in life, least of all television success. Although in this case she might have underestimated the potential of “SNL,” the impactful shot that is still being felt a half-century later: season 50 commences this weekend with Michaels still in charge.
The revolution is now an institution. Even crazy Uncle Stan would be impressed.
