A top director once told me 90% of the success of his movies is casting. If you get that right, you are on your way.
If that is the case then Saturday Night director and co-writer Jason Reitman nailed it — and then some. With a killer ensemble of more than 80 speaking roles helping to bring to life this film detailing the chaotic and quite astounding 90 minutes before Saturday Night Live began its first broadcast on October 11, 1975, this is a masterful movie comedy firing on all cylinders. With no time to breathe in its tight 103-minute running time, Reitman (with his co-writer Gil Kenan) has mined comic gold in telling the incredible tale of how producer Lorne Michaels navigated a nervous network, bruised egos, an unpredictable cast, a suspicious censor and a whole lot of disasters as the clock ticked down to 11:30 p.m., when it still wasn’t certain, believe it or not, that NBC would press the button for its first SNL or the Johnny Carson Tonight Show rerun they had ready to go in its place. It was thisclose to not happening, and you have to marvel at everything that could go wrong going wrong in those fateful 90 minutes before showtime.
This isn’t just a comedy, it is a suspense thriller too. Reitman says all of this, wild as it seems now, is based on actual events that took place that night, albeit necessarily condensed to fit into his movie’s running time.
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With big props to cinematographer Eric Steelberg, and editors Nathan Orloff and Shane Reid, Saturday Night is such a marvel of a level of zany manic non-stop energy that even the Marx Brothers would be jealous at the pace set here. This is a motion picture where the motion never stops, something and someone always moving in and out of frame giving that unmistakable feeling you are watching live television about to go live despite the building odds that this now iconic TV staple was not ever going to actually get on the air. In that regard it is clear that Michaels (played with flair and heart by The Fabelmans star Gabriel LaBelle) is some kind of hero who never stopped believing in the concept of his show, even as network executive David Tebet (a perfect Willem Dafoe), who was head of the NBC talent department, was there spinning an ominous spell over the proceedings, even inviting an imposing group of cigar-smoking execs to witness the launch in person. But was this rocket gonna fly?
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Minutes before showtime it appeared it would not fly and nothing was going right, even to the point of Michaels getting accidentally sprayed with red paint from a machine that had not been operating properly. The decision to go live was still in doubt just 10 minutes before when Tebet, fully doubting Michaels, says, “Show me Saturday Night.” Your pulse will be pounding watching this remarkable scene take hold.
Remarkably, there is such a wealth of pure gold comic situations inherent in this idea that Saturday Night becomes an even better movie than all of the comedies that were spawned by the talent honed on SNL (many produced by Michaels himself). Before its world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival on Saturday night (of course), Reitman said his two dreams were to be a director and to write on SNL. Here he has merged both with a treasure trove of material that has been hiding in plain sight over the past half century but now has been turned into the funniest film of 2024, no easy trick since making a movie about making comedy is full of landmines. This crew doesn’t step on any of them.
Of course it is also that casting that makes the difference in buying into this at all, so many of the actors asked to play such recognizable stars, and they all hit it out of the park. Anchoring it all is LaBelle’s Michaels, and he hits the perfect tone throughout surrounded by nightmarish events that threaten to blow his dream to smithereens. Other standouts in a cast full of them are Cory Michael Smith’s spot-on Chevy Chase; Lamorne Morris’s Garrett Morris (no relation), who gets a choice scene doing a musical warm-up number; Matt Wood’s John Belushi, playing a comic genius on the edge; Nicholas Braun‘s twin roles of Jim Henson and Andy Kaufman; Tommy Dewey’s cutting Michael O’Donoghue, a key creative component of the early SNL; and a chilling, pitch-perfect J.K. Simmons as ’50s NBC Variety kingpin Milton Berle, a perfect juxtaposition to NBC’s comedy past just as he stops by NBC’s about-to-be comedy future. Simmons nails Berle’s visit to the set, amidst all this chaos, in a brief but unforgettable turn that has to be seen to be believed (and that includes his legendary manhood).
With less screen time, Ella Hunt’s lovely Gilda Radner, Kim Matula’s Jane Curtin and Emily Fairn’s Larraine Newman hit their marks here as well, especially in the female construction worker sketch re-created for the movie with a riotous Dylan O’ Brien’s Dan Aykroyd as the sexual object of their affection. Rachel Sennott is also excellent as writer Rosie Shuster, who was trying to keep her marriage to Michaels secret. And a personal shout-out to Finn Wolfhard as the hapless NBC page standing in front of 30 Rock hocking tickets to get people in to see this new show no one had ever heard of. It kind of made me tear up a bit because two days later after SNL’s premiere I would start my first show business job as an NBC page.
By the way more shout-outs to Danny Glicker for outstanding costume design (and that includes that page uniform, which was eerily accurate), and to Jess Gonchor’s authentic production design right down to the bricks still being put in place moments before the show went live. Jon Batiste did the lively score and also looks like he is having a blast playing with the SNL band as Billy Preston.
One false move and this whole ambitious soufflé could have fallen, but Reitman steers this all in style creating on the great movies about show business I have ever seen — and I have seen a lot of them. It is a shame that comedy is not always given its due, often dismissed as light compared to heavy dramas, the kind usually on display at Telluride and other festivals. Saturday Night is a breath of fresh air, and I know Reitman’s father, the late great Ivan Reitman whose films include Ghostbusters, Stripes, Twins and on and on, would be a proud dad.
Producers are Jason Blumenfeld, Peter Rice, Reitman and Kenan.
Title: Saturday Night
Festival: Telluride
Distributor: Columbia Pictures
Release date: October 11, 2024
Director: Jason Reitman
Screenwriters: Gil Kenan & Jason Reitman
Cast: Gabriel LaBelle, Rachel Sennott, Corey Michael Smith, Ella Hunt, Dylan O’Brien, Emily Fairn, Matt Wood, Lamorne Morris, Kim Matula, Finn Wolfhard, Nicholas Braun, Cooper Hoffman, Andrew Barth Feldman, Kaia Gerber, Tommy Dewey, Willem Dafoe, J.K. Simmons, Jon Batiste, Naomi McPherson
Running Time: 1 hr and 43 mins
