‘Saturday Night’ Blu-ray (review)

The first time I watched Saturday Night Live, I didn’t know what I was watching.

When I was eleven years old I found an old black-and-white TV in the attic and hooked it up so I could watch TV in bed. After a few weeks of Tom Snyder and late-night Star Trek reruns, I started exploring.

There were no lead-ins to the show I watched on that late night in October, no promos. I had no idea what to expect. The television warmed up and two guys were talking about wolverines. There were fake commercials and a fake news broadcast and a guy lip-syncing the Mighty Mouse theme song. There were Muppets.

I laughed but I won’t say the comedy was perfect. There were odd stumbles and silences, like even the actors didn’t know what was going on. That was actually what hooked me: that where-is-this-going feeling of suspended chaos.

I didn’t tell my family about what I’d seen. I was sure my mom would send the TV back to the attic. Nobody in my family brought it up. Nobody in school was talking about it on Monday morning.

As far as I knew, I was the only person in America who’d watched NBC Saturday Night. I could have dreamed it.

In all the years since I’ve never forgotten that feeling of discovering something new with no context or prologue, a cast of brilliant nobodies who made you laugh but also made you feel like you were walking blind, with no winks to the camera to tell you how to feel, no catchphrases to quote or celebrity cameos to milk applause, and no recurring characters getting the same laughs telling the same jokes every week: in other words, none of the things that have unfortunately come to define Saturday Night Live over the past half-century.

SNL was an unplanned birth that has since grown to become the mother of predictability. It was a discovery that killed its own sense of adventure.

And yet every one of us of a certain age has golden memories of the Not Ready For Prime Time Players, back when the show played it dangerous. This is the plank that Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night walks during its ninety minutes—literally, minute for minute, the hour and a half ticking down to its live network debut on October 11, 1975.

Anything that can go wrong does. The show is nearly cancelled before it even airs, John Belushi won’t sign his contract, the writers hang Big Bird over Jim Henson’s desk, somebody delivers a llama backstage, George Carlin is too stoned to remember his routine, and falling stage lights threaten to electrocute the actors. It’s like watching baby sea turtles trying to reach the ocean before the gulls take them. Along its teetering way we meet the cast members before they were famous—when they were, in the words of a reptilian network boss (Willem Dafoe), still not ready for prime time—as well as the army of writers and and designers and stagehands who would never become famous, but who bore the show on their backs.

Holding it all together—barely—is SNL’s creator, a very young and tetchy Lorne Michaels (The Fabelmans’s Gabriel LaBelle). Though intricately choreographed scenes we follow Lorne around the winding halls of Studio 8H—watching him beg, cajole, browbeat, lie, threaten, tap dance, and do everything short of wrapping Band-Aids around his infant show to keep it alive till airtime. This is what really went down that night, and Saturday Night gives us a backstage pass for it all.

At least, this is what the movie tells us it’s about. Although Saturday Night begins with a favorite quotation of Michaels’s—“The show doesn’t go on because it’s ready, it goes on because it’s 11:30”—a line from a very different movie came to mind as I watched the movie. That would be The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance’s “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

What we’re seeing on Saturday Night is not history, or exaggerated history, or even tall tales. It’s a legend. I’m not talking about the stuff that co-writers Reitman and Gil Kenan made up, or stretched for the sake of a better story. I mean that it does what foundational myths are supposed to do, mainly explain how gods and heroes came to be. This is a view of SNL that stands in its own shadow: colored not by what the show it meant to people at the time, but by what it’s come to mean since. Saturday Night isn’t a love letter to SNL, it’s a love letter to our memories of SNL.

It’s in service to this myth that Saturday Night is so rife with anachronisms. Milton Berle (an unrecognizable J.K. Simmons) wouldn’t come near the show until its fourth season. He’s there not because he really was there, but because everyone has so many stories about Milton Berle and his legendary wang. Later, we see the writing team of Al Franken and Tom Davis pitching the infamous Julia Child sketch—the one where Dan Aykroyd “cuts the dickens” out of his/her finger and jets blood all over the set—even though that sketch wouldn’t be written for another three years. It’s there to pay fan service to one of the show’s most infamous routines. Likewise, there are allusions to other SNL classics (Chevy Chase’s pratfalls; Akyroyd’s Fred Garvin, Male Prostitute; a slyly placed box of Colon Blow cereal) that weren’t even a gleam in the writers’ eyes during that first episode. Even the llama gag is borrowed from a later season.

Of course there’s a very smart reason for this: that first episode wasn’t much like the SNL we all remember. Chevy Chase wasn’t the preening front man. Belushi hadn’t established himself as the show’s resident anarchist. Akyroyd wasn’t yet the coked-out pitchman. Jane Curtin hadn’t been typecast as a humorless scold. Gilda Radner wasn’t the imp.

Classic SNL had yet to emerge from its cocoon. It wasn’t even clear at that point if The Not Ready For Prime Time Players would be the centerpiece of the show: in the second episode, Paul Simon and his musician friends would play for virtually the entire ninety minutes while the regular cast would be limited to a single sketch.

Reitman’s need to pack in so many inside references—to make room for everything we loved about the early seasons of SNL—loads too much material onto a film this short. Added to which, he seems to have made a pledge of honor to give every single cast member and writer a moment to shine. That’s noble (and deserved), but it does mean that we’re spending a lot of the movie watching people tell us who they are.

Some of these vignettes really shine: as Garrett Morris, Lamorne Morris (no relation) really slays with his rendition of “I’m gonna get me a shotgun and kill all the whiteys I see” (even though, once again, Morris wouldn’t sing that classic number until later in the season). Nicholas Podany channels a young Billy Crystal, denied his shot at a network debut when his routine is cut for time. Every minute Matthew Rhys is onscreen, he owns George Carlin’s razor wit (not to mention the paranoia that the great comedian often flashed in his more drugged-out performances).

But then the cameos run out of control. Every writer from Anne Beatts to Michael O’Donoghue gets a hot second to explain their philosophy of comedy. The camera pauses to give nods to bandleader Paul Shaffer, writer Herb Sargent, agent Bernie Brillstein, and Tony Orlando (?). Johnny Carson’s voice on the phone gets a solid two minutes. This is a party where every kid gets a piñata to smash: as far as I can tell, the only cast member they missed was George Coe, aka the old guy that nobody remembers because he was only in that one episode.

Overall, the headline roles were really well cast. Matt Wood doesn’t just capture the wild beast in John Belushi but his oddly endearing moments of wide-eyed innocence. Dylan O’Brien finds the charming flirt in Dan Aykroyd, something he was apparently known for among the cast. As Lorne Michaels, LaBelle switches easily from impresario to hapless nerd. I would have liked to see more of Ella Hunt as Gilda Radner: she embraced the fun in Gilda Radner, someone I’ve always considered the original cast’s greatest comic genius. On the other hand, I would have been fine seeing a lot less of Cory Michael Smith’s Chevy Chase. He played his part just as smug, thin-skinned, and deeply unfunny as the real Chevy Chase has always seemed to be, so I guess it’s not his fault. Still, every time he was on the screen I wanted to be watching someone else.

There were only two characters that I thought were badly represented, and it so happens they were both played by the same actor. Nicholas Braun portrays both Andy Kaufman and (owing to an actor dropping out at the last minute) the legendary Jim Henson. He plays Henson as silly and indignant—unable to fathom why Michael O’Donoghue, the author of “Children’s Letters to Hitler” doesn’t like his Muppets. For some reason he plays Andy Kaufman as if he was Foreign Man, cluelessly wandering the halls looking for a missing llama, totally missing Andy’s impeccable timing or the pure joy that radiated every time he sang “Here I come to save the day.”

All that said, it was fun to be in the world of Saturday Night. I’m not sure why Reitman felt it was necessary to keep it to the exact length of an SNL episode—another half an hour and it might have really caught fire (I’m told that the original plan was to shoot it all in a single take, which might have justified a shorter run time just to avoid killing the actors). There were times when I wondered, “Are we really supposed to be worried that this show won’t make it to air?” But then Saturday Night does give me strong jolts of nostalgia.

It’s not a yearning for those early sketches, some of which (like the Bees) were a lot less funny than most people remember. It’s definitely not for the cold opens or “I’m Chevy Chase and you’re not” or the Muppets or the short films of Albert Brooks. A lot of it is joy in seeing the cast young again, right on the threshold of brilliance.  Mainly, though, it’s nostalgia for a feeling. That feeling I had when I was eleven years old and glued to a barely functioning black-and-white TV, keeping the volume low so my sisters wouldn’t yell at me. It’s a longing for a time when we still didn’t know where Saturday Night Live was going next.

The movie got me there a few times, but I wanted to get there and stay. SNL was above all things a voyage into uncharted territory. If we could have stayed on that voyage—if the show hadn’t gotten so damned safe—then Saturday Night would truly have something to celebrate.

Extras include commentary, featurettes, brief profiles on each of the Not Ready For Prime Time Players, and previews