Saturday Night
Synopsis: An account of what happened behind the scenes in the hours before the premiere of Saturday Night Live.
Sometimes, you just had to be there. No matter how animatedly an anecdote is delivered, it’s hard to transfer the excitement the teller feels to the tellee.
Saturday Night is an attempt to put us ‘there.’ The movie takes on the few hours before the late-night show premiered in October of 1975. We see the dress rehearsal, during which producer Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle) is putting out fires– from searching for an MIA cast member to replacing overhead lighting that crashes onto the set.
From its beginnings as counter-cultural comedy programming to its current status as well-known Americana, SNL has launched the careers of numerous cast members into stardom. 20th century stars include Billy Crystal, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and Eddie Murphy. The 21st century saw Jimmy Fallon, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler gain huge followings.
For the record, these are the OG cast of SNL, and the actors who portray them: Laraine Newman (Emily Fairn), John Belushi (Matt Wood), Jane Curtin (Kim Matula), Gilda Radner (Ella Hunt), Dan Aykroyd (Dylan O’Brien), Garrett Morris (LaMorne Morris) and Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith).
Lorne Michaels is American TV’s best-known showrunner. In addition to decades at the helm of SNL, he currently produces The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. Gabriel LaBelle, starred as Sammy, a stand in for a young Stephen Spielberg’s in Meet the Fabelmans. Here he ages into an adult role. LaBelle imbues Michaels with a palpably overflowing ambition to create something new for his generation.
In Saturday Night, Belushi bristles at playing a bee in a sketch because, according to a crew member, he sees himself as Brando. To be honest, bees look a lot better groomed than Belushi’s bee.
Morris wanders the set talking to himself, and anyone who will listen, about how he doesn’t know what he’s doing there. After all, he trained at Julliard. He’s prescient in declaring that he seems to only be there to play Black stereotypes.
Radner makes wistful observations that don’t give a hint of how funny she could be in sketches. And Chase, shows off his girlfriend (played by Kaia Gerber) and antagonizes everyone, as he insists that he is the biggest star. Biggest a-hole seems to be more like it.
And while Michaels’ wife, comedy writer Rosie Shuster (Rachel Sennott), cracks wise and tries to quiet her partner’s nerves, a lizard man from NBC lurks. It seems that NBC may not care if the SNL fails because they are only using the show to pressure late night TV host Johnny Carson into a contract that benefits the network.
Lizard Man is actually David Tebet (Willem Dafoe), VP of Talent Relations. He knows he needs to keep Carson, but doesn’t seem to have much faith in the future of SNL or its talent.
The success of the show is imperative in bringing comedy away from its stale 1950’s-esque condition. We see Michaels rush over to another studio at 30 Rock, desperate to find a new sound guy. The young guy he poaches leaves the show he’s working on with great relief. We see clips of an abomination called Rumpus Room. An old, arrogant comedian named Milton Berle, whose heyday was thirty years earlier, dances with chorus girls while telling unfunny jokes. We can see why the young sound guy bolted from that job.
SNL is full of young talent, including Jane Curtin, Gilda Radner and Laraine Newman. We don’t get a sense of the women’s personalities, though Gilda’s character has a fair number of lines. Sadly, for years, the women were in a boys’ club where they were regularly reduced to playing sex workers and called sluts for yuks. White men were literally running the show.
Today’s SNL gets crass, but women aren’t often the butt of the jokes. Unless we’re talking about Michael Che’s ‘Weekend Update’ sexist jokes. His co-host Colin Jost just grins, even when his own wife is the target. Makes me miss Fey & Poehler as news anchors.
Back in 1999, Tina Fey broke a glass ceiling when she became head writer. The 2025 cast of fourteen people, includes four women. Notably, Bowen Yang is the show’s first Asian cast member– and very funny.
Weirdly, for a 2025 pic, there’s some tone deafness. Gentle and creative Jim Henson is made sport of; okay, so the SNL writers of 1975 couldn’t figure out how to write for the uncool Muppets creator, but the Saturday Night filmmakers chose to portray him as a doofus. (Funny that Muppets were being hung by staffers? No! Muppets have rights too–or should.) The movie works to wring laughs out of writers pranking Henson and the NBC censor, a self- righteous scold.
Was Saturday Night Live revolutionary? You decide. Did it make younger people of the time laugh? Yep. Did it take on gender and color stereotypes? Not so much.
Lorne Michaels does deserve a lot of credit for catching the humor in the zeitgeist. And finding some great comedy talent over the years, like more recent retirees of the show Kate McKinnon and Kenan Thompson (he’s had the longest run on SNL, 22 seasons). And therein lies the problem with Saturday Night. It may be a good retelling of the premiere night’s dress rehearsal, but it just isn’t very funny.
I guess you had to be there.
P.S. CBS’s Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In was a popular comedy variety show of the late 1960’s – early 70’s that took on current topics. The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour dared to mix comedy with politics. The show’s producers lost out to their network when their planned segment of Harry Belafonte singing a protest song, “Don’t Stop the Carnival,” against a backdrop of protest footage at the Democratic National Convention was axed. CBS TV President William Paley cancelled the show over its increasing anti-war satire.
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