“Saturday Night is a new kind of entertainment.
Defiant, abstract, avant garde, yet blue collar –
an opportunity to explore our possibilities as humans.”
⎯ Lorne Michaels“Also, it’s a comedy.”
⎯ Dick Ebersol
“Saturday Night Live was a defining moment in our coming of age as comic storytellers,” recall Gil Kenan and Jason Reitman as they captured the raw exuberance of the first episode of the show ninety minutes before going to air on October 11, 1975 at 10:00 pm in New York City in their film Saturday Night.
The filmmakers didn’t want to make an origin story about Saturday Night Live (SNL) or a Lorne Michaels biopic. The soldiers who made the live show were ready for battle. Anything could happen. Start the countdown timer.
Lorne Michaels (played by Gabrielle LaBelle) in Saturday Night revelled in his deft ability to grab anything from his packed creative pantry to create entertainment. His vision for the show contains opening monologues, sketches, pre-recorded segments, news segments, musical guests, and some truly “did they really do that on live television?” moments. This format has endured for over fifty years, and counting.
The original smorgasbord format has prevailed. The evolving variable is the people on the show which rejuvenates and refreshes each episode. “I think that the biggest shifts in the presentation of the show has been through the tone, the youth, the spark, and energy of the new cast,” notes Kenan.
But What Exactly Is The Show?
Lorne Michaels notably had a tough time communicating his vision to television executives. He described the ingredients to them, but they couldn’t fully visualize the full meal. Michaels speaks of the show as “having all the ingredients, but the amounts are constantly adjusted.”
“The conversation about making Saturday Night started with Jason, who had the spark of the idea of telling a story about a group of young people who came together to take on the impossible – the entertainment industrial complex of American comedy in the mid-1970s. They brought their street smarts, their new wave of comedy, and did the impossible – make something new and get it on live television on one of the major networks,” explains Kenan.
SNL is more of a combined attitude than a list of performances.
Sure, Lorne Michaels is the brainchild of SNL, but it was his unflappability that made him the perfect producer at the tender age of twenty-nine.
Jason Reitman and Gil Kenan. Photo by Eric Charbonneau/ Sony Pictures
His aptitude for dealing with seemingly impossible production logistics and constantly changing the run sheet to address behind the scenes issues made him the perfect candidate to change live television culture forever. To the untrained eye, Michaels was an over-ambitious, relatively inexperienced producer, who had bitten off more than he could chew. The establishment thought it would all be over in a few weeks.
“Lorne created something that was capable of flexibility, change, and involvement. What’s truly remarkable about the show is that he organized a system of this orphanage for wayward comedians that would then launch hundreds of different careers,” continues Reitman.
Jason admires that Lorne Michaels is willing to be a dad on SNL and the segments are his children.
“Lorne arrives at the show as a participant, but realizes that the only way for this show to be a success is for it to have a singular producer who is going to be responsible for everyone and learn how to be a parent to each type of child personality in this cast, his writing team and his crew so that he can actually run the orphanage.”
Dropping The Audience Into The Middle Of The Action
Jason Reitman was especially influenced by Michael Ritchie, the director behind Downhill Racer, Smile and The Candidate to shape Saturday Night. Specifically, their relative lack of set up and backstory in their films.
“The storytellers just dropped you into the moment, into a location without introducing the characters or what they were doing there, and you were forced of find your bearings,” adds Reitman. He carried this spirit into Saturday Night and allowed the characters to “roam the halls and feel the energy of what the show is as it’s about to go live.”
“I think it’s so remarkable that fifty years later SNL is still a living comic invention. One of the things about watching live performances is that we’re investing in the bravery of the performer,” continues Kenan.
Most live comedy entertainment at the time was stubbornly rooted in Vaudeville and old variety acts. It catered more to advertisers than audiences.
“Lorne showed some real balls by going up against this entire apparatus of television entertainment and creating something that felt honest, urgent, and authentic,” comments Kenan. The performers spoke directly to the audience. Everyone worked as a team to show the television establishment the brave new world of television.
Writing Saturday Night
“Gil and I do our best work when we’re moving. When we’re on long drives, or we’re going for walks, we chew on ideas,” says Reitman. “I’m a big believer in the little elves that are our conscious and our subconscious.”
At some point, the elves delivered their verdict on how Saturday Night should play out. “One day I just woke up and thought the movie starts at 10pm and the last line is, ‘Live from New York, it’s Saturday Night,’” exclaims Jason.
Knowing this precise ending was Gil and Jason’s queue to start writing.
“The next stage of the process was more journalistic than a creative one. We set out to find and interview every single person that we could who was there that night in any capacity,” states Kenan. These included production designers, cast, and writers.
These interviews revealed many anecdotes that “leapt off the page and begged to be part of a screen story,” he continues. The piecing together of these anecdotes allowed a better understanding these creative relationships, formed the outline for the film.
Reitman describes the process of filtering which interview segments and anecdotes would make it to Saturday Night as similar to adapting a book. “You’re constantly trying to figure out is what is the movie and what fits on the tree. And there’s always too many ornaments for the tree.”
Unlike many films, Saturday Night wasn’t exclusively focused on Lorne Michaels. According to Jason, “It followed geography.” And the stopwatch.
“Imagine a character on 50th street, he walks in the lobby, he gets in an elevator, he gets off at the 8th floor, goes down a hallway into a control room and onto the main floor up the stairs.”
It’s a matter of tracking physical space and a time crunch.
Saturday Night doesn’t follow a few main characters, each with a dozen character beats. It follows dozens of characters who each has many fewer beats.
“It really became the geography of where the characters are going to go, how to create five or six layers of character work in each scene, what is primary versus the background character work, and then how to make sure that each character is getting three or four or five beats along the way that hit at the natural moments,” mentions Reitman.
“And then there’s point of view, where we are really telling this story over Lorne’s shoulder.”
The frenetic pace of the show was girded by its perceived impermanence. Everyone tried to fully-load each episode with as much content as they could because it might be cancelled in a few weeks.
Billy Crystal conceded that his fate was sealed. “It’s a moment where all of this heightened joyous energy of getting the show off the ground came to a sudden deafening silence,” warns Kenan. Chevy Chase anticipated the end of his career after Episode 1.
Dan Aykroyd muses, “There was no expectation about how the path of life would go once the show went live.”
“The moment and the way he recounted that story for us felt so human, so honest, and so painful, that it helped us identify a truthful emotional current within all of these heightened beats,” states Kenan.
Bricks
Jason Reitman reiterates what an extraordinary show SNL is. He discusses the segment of placing bricks on set.
“The bricks are such a simple idea and they do so much. Any normal show would have drawn painted bricks on the ground or rolled out linoleum that looks like bricks. They wouldn’t have got actual bricks.”
“Lorne had this vision that the show was going to feel as though you were being brought to a street corner in Manhattan.” The physicality of the show conveyed the emotion.
“As writers, all we want to do is show off how good we are at writing dialogue. But we feel so lucky when you get a piece of physicality that does everything for you,” he explains.
“Because at that point, we’re getting into what this movie really is about. Anyone who’s ever put on a high school play, or even put on a musical in their grandparents’ living room knows that feeling of what it’s like when everything comes together at the last second. It’s actually more exciting than the show itself or the cast party at your mom’s house.”
“We somehow made it over the finish line. And you can’t do that through dialogue. It has to come through physicality. It has to be a visual,” he concludes.
