Late 1975 saw the beginning of what is now a TV institution. And yet Saturday Night (Live) almost never happened if this biopic is anything to go by. Following the 90 minutes immediately before it went on air producer Lorne Michaels was juggling some much – a comic who was yet to sign his contract, a running order that was far too long for the allotted time slot, a head writer gone rogue, an arrogantly egotistical lead comic, TV execs with a hidden agenda, desperate attempts to drag people off the street to be the audience and a studio with crashing lights and an unfinished set.
Director Jason Reitman and co-writer Gil Kenan are self-confessed uber-fans of Saturday Night Live as it would become known (Reitman had briefly worked as a writer on the show himself) and this is something of a love letter to a longstanding staple of US TV that has had terrific peaks with equally catastrophic troughs – when the show is bad , it’s been really bad. It’s a whirling dervish of a film initially as the camera chases the producer around the studio corridors and offices trying to make it alright on the night with a cast that included Chevy Chase ( Cory Michael Smith), John Belushi (Matt Wood), Dan Aykroyd (Dylan O’Brien) Gilda Radner (Ella Hunt) Jane Curtin (Kim Matula), Laraine Newman (Emily Fairn) and Garrett Morris (Lamorne Morris). Those first three are brilliantly captured by the actors channelling Chase’s arrogance, Belushi’s randomness and Aykroyd’s smartness but it’s very much to the detriment of the female characters who are very much on the periphery and Gilda Radner’s genius is given little time to make an impact.
It’s a cast supplemented by fleeting cameos too – Matthew Rhys as George Carlin and Nicholas Podany as Billy Crystal along with Nicholas Braun as Jim Henson ( along with also playing Andy Kaufman) are on the money too. And all overlooked by Willem Dafoe as the exec who can pull the show for a pre-recorded Jonny Carson tape and a loathsome lecherous Milton Berle (J.K.Simmons playing it on the nose) with an ego to equal Chevy Chase. It’s Berle and Chase who have one of the better scenes in the film as their egos battle with Berle’s years of experience ad libbing and old school one liners (one here taken from Jimmy Carr) putting Chase in his place. A scene with Michaels being told the truth by his own head of department about what’s going on with the execs behind the scenes rings true and it’s matched only by a scene between George Carlin and the show’s head writer who refuses to flatter the stand ups ego.
Anyone who has worked on live TV will recognise the adrenaline rush before a show goes on air but programmes certainly don’t have what happens here going on in the run up to transmission with this falling on air with the cast and crew taking a, ‘hey, let’s all pull together’ ethos right at the very last moment. The turns as the stars are a highlight but there’s little sense of them having their own crisis apart from Belushi and Michaels as the ringmaster trying to keep all his plates spinning.
Quite how factual all of this is debateable but there’s an enjoyable nostalgia to what has become an institution that gave us Bill Murray, Eddie Murphy and the late and truly great Norm MacDonald along with so many others.
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Here’s the Saturday Night trailer …….
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