‘Saturday Night’ details wild and crazy story behind birth of ‘SNL’

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Director Jason Reitman has been obsessed with Saturday Night Live for pretty much his entire life.

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But it was after he scored a week-long gig on the sketch comedy program back in 2008, that the Oscar-nominated filmmaker — whose late father, Ivan, directed many SNL legends — thought a feature-length movie about the show’s early days would be the perfect “thriller-comedy.”

“You know, after spending a week as a guest writer, I just couldn’t get it out of my head. The countdown to going live was exhilarating and I wanted a movie audience to feel what it was like to be in that room,” Reitman, 46, tells Postmedia in an interview.

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After creator Lorne Michaels brought Reitman on for a stint to be part of the writers’ room, he couldn’t shake the idea of trying to capture on film the weekly chaos that goes into producing the live TV staple.

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“It was one of the most thrilling weeks of my life,” Reitman says. “I’ve never been able to properly articulate how thrilling and scary it was in those minutes before airtime.”

Saturday Night, which is out Friday in Toronto and opens across Canada next week, takes place at 30 Rockefeller Center at 10 p.m. on Oct. 11, 1975 — 90 minutes before the first-ever broadcast of Saturday Night Live.

Reitman and his writing partner Gil Kenan penned the screenplay for the film after interviewing cast members and crew about the premiere episode of the series that just embarked on its 50th season.

The then-unknown Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle) arrives at 30 Rockefeller Center missing one of his stars, struggling to complete an unfinished set and trying to figure out how he’ll whittle three hours of material down to 90 minutes.

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“I always felt like the villain of the movie was a clock,” Reitman says. “When I started reading stories and interviewing people for this film, every story surprised me. The idea that they were laying real brick for home base in the moments leading up to air. The idea that Lorne had to steal a lighting director from a different floor. The fact that they borrowed a sound system from Madison Square Garden. All the way up to Milton Berle pulling out his penis. Every story I heard was more insane than the next.”

Many of the characters portrayed in the movie became household names in the months after the premiere episode. But when we meet Michaels; his ex-wife and former SNL writer Rosie Shuster (Rachel Sennott);  a self-assured Dan Aykroyd (Dylan O’Brien); the cocksure Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith); a frantic John Belushi (Matt Wood), and the other faces that featured in the show’s inaugural season (Succession cousin Nicholas Braun also pops up in dual roles as Andy Kaufman and Jim Henson), they were all unknowns.

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“It’s not about how Lorne Michaels met everybody and pulled them all together. It’s literally just the behind-the-scenes cacophony of chaos before the first episode,” Vancouver-native LaBelle says.

“None of the cast members knew what this show would turn into,” says O’Brien. “I feel like Dan is so unbothered, in a way. He’s in his own world, kind of doing his own thing.”

The bedlam that ensues as the cast and crew race against the clock — and an arrogant NBC exec (played by Willem Dafoe) ready to pull the plug — before going to air is something that still exists to this day, Reitman says.

“If you go to a taping of SNL, you’ll see them painting till the last second, hammering nails, pinning wigs, hemming clothes,” Reitman says, smiling. “It’s a show that comes together at the last second.”

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A self-described “comic nerd,” Reitman, who also directed Juno, Up in the Air and Ghostbusters: Afterlife, says that watching SNL “defined who I am today.”

“Every week, I found myself laughing, but also my brain growing on what comedy could be,” he says. “It’s from seeing everything from Steve Martin in the 1970s to Will Ferrell crawling around like a cat on a table to the Lonely Island guys to the Please Don’t Destroy guys; they’re always broadening my sense of what comedy can be.”

Reitman was keen on meticulously recreating the sets of that first episode, but he encouraged the film’s ensemble cast to avoid meeting their real-life counterparts prior to production.

Still, O’Brien relentlessly practised trying to nail Aykroyd’s voice. “I would talk to myself a lot as Dan and I would record it. If I ever was thinking I was in the zone, I wanted to capture it. Then I would listen to it on set and think that it was awful. Then I would shoot,” he laughs.

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LaBelle, who got his big break playing a character modelled on a young Steven Spielberg in the director’s 2022 biopic The Fabelmans, eventually did meet the real-life Michaels at a taping earlier this year.

“It’s so great to see how it all comes together,” he says. “People moving the sets and the energy from everyone.”

LaBelle read books about the early years of SNL and watched old interviews with Michaels, but made sure not to look at anything after its first season.

“I really just focused on the first season, and nothing past that. Because these characters didn’t know what happens after the first episode,” he says.

Sennott spoke to Shuster on the phone to get a sense of what she was going through, navigating her breakup with Michaels and the crushing expectations that came with writing for a nascent show.

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“She talked a lot about how right before the show blew up, they were just all in this really special bubble, creating something together,” she says.

One heartbreaking scene in the film shows aspiring comic Billy Crystal (Nicholas Podany) learning his bit has been cut from the first show just before it airs.

Reitman’s experience as a guest writer all those years ago was slightly less bruising.

“I brought three sketches to the table read, and one got selected for air and it did go to air,” he chuckles. “So I was one of the lucky ones.”

After spending so much time chronicling SNL’s birth, Reitman isn’t surprised the show as stood the test of time.

“I don’t think Lorne Michaels has a rearview mirror. I think he only looks out the windshield,” he says. “He’s not there thinking about self-reverence or what they did last week. He’s constantly looking at the ways the world is changing and the ways comedy is changing and as a result, Saturday Night Live has been fresh and relevant for 50 years.”

Saturday Night is opening in Toronto Friday. It opens everywhere next Friday.

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