The premier night for the NBC Show "Saturday Night Live" was October 11, 1975 - forty-nine years ago. The new movie "Saturday Night" is about 90 minutes from 10 PM to 11:30 on the unlikely opening night of the show. The way this screenplay tries to describe what Saturday Night Live is a unique and mostly effective idea because it showed a frantic Lorne Michaels played by Gabriel LaBelle, putting out constant fires and fixing arguments, breaking up fights, people leaving the show, equipment almost falling on the cast when they rehearsed, and finally trying to get John Belushi played by Matt Wood to sign his contract.
This movie almost exclusively follows Lorne Michaels around the studios of 30 Rockefeller Center for 90 minutes as he tries to fix one problem after another. In fact, this first show was almost not aired because too many things were going wrong. The plan was to air a repeat of the Johnny Carson show and NBC Executive Dave Tebet played by Willem Dafoe gave the go-ahead to allow the show to go live in the last seconds before 11:30 PM.
Saturday Night Live has always been a last-minute frantic, changing of scripts, and sets and deciding which skits get on the air on the fly. If I wrote this screenplay I would have shown how the show is produced during a typical week that includes the late-night writing sessions as the writers and cast try and get their comedy skit to appear on the show. A high percentage of these skits are rejected and over the years only a small percentage of the skits that get on the show have been funny. This intense level of writing and creative stress late into the night has been an ongoing tradition for Saturday Night for almost 50 years. This is the comedy movie or documentary that I would be most interested in seeing - demonstrating all that goes wrong and right during a typical week of the show.
For the last 50 years, the original cast of Saturday Night Live, including Chevy Chase, Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, Lorraine Newman, Jane Curtin, and Garret Morris has always been considered the most talented cast. Once the original SNL cast left the show in 1980, the following seasons with the new cast were considered weak except for Eddie Murphy, whose comedic talent saved the show. The year 1985 once the second cast and Murphy left SNL, had a strong cast with Billy Crystal and Martin Short.
SNL is still an ongoing American institution mainly because of the few skits that do work, and the arrival of some outstanding performers over the years, including Kristen Wiig, Will Ferrell, Tina Fey, Kenan Thompson, Kate McKinnon, Amy Poehler, Mike Myers, Dana Carvey, and the late Chris Farley and Phil Hartman. For many years the best way to watch Saturday Night Live is to fast forward through the bad skits when necessary, trying to find that one miracle skit that is comedy perfection.
The Rotten Tomatoes ratings for this movie are a solid 80% and I agree with this rating and do recommend Saturday Night.
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