Just yesterday I said we should get a trailer soon for Saturday Night, Jason Reitman’s film about the first broadcast of Saturday Night Live, and behold, here it is, said trailer. I’m into it. I mean damn, the casting is SPOT ON. Gabriel LaBelle as Lorne Michaels isn’t doing anything to look or sound like Lorne, but there’s something about his intensity and the increasing amount of crazy in his eyes that speaks to the sheer determination it took to get SNL on air.
And don’t even get me started on Cory Michael Smith as Chevy Chase. The ego, the assholery, it’s perfect. He’s SUCH a dick, you immediately hate him. And then there’s Brian Welch doing a killer impression of longtime SNL announcer Don Pardo, and Nicholas Braun showing up as Andy Kaufman and as Jim Henson saying, “The writers on the 17th floor tied a belt around Big Bird’s neck and hung him from my dressing room door.” I am DEAD. It’s all too perfect.
“Jim Henson” is, of course, referencing the now-infamous incident in which SNL’s first head writer Michael O’Donoghue, who was also a performer on the show and said the first words in the first sketch on the first night (“Good evening”), hung a stuffed Big Bird toy. Many of the first season writers and cast didn’t like Henson’s puppet sketches, O’Donoghue was just particularly vocal about it, announcing, “I don’t write for felt.”
Then there’s Cooper Hoffman as Dick Ebersole and Willem Dafoe as David Tebet, both executives at NBC, and both coming at Lorne with different attitudes, Ebersole trying to be supportive while Tebet is openly contemptuous. I am VERY into all the clashing egos and attitudes.
What I love the most about this trailer, though, is that you really do get a sense of the time crunch, that ticking-clock element Reitman talked up in the Vanity Fair article, and you can feel the chaos surrounding SNL’s first night on air. Even fifty years later, SNL remains famously chaotic behind the scenes, with long hours, exhausted staff, and often, desperate brain-fried pitches that end up leading to comedy gold. You get a sense of that here, of the chaos and the sheer newness of SNL leading to something special.
This trailer reminds me of the trailer for Marielle Heller’s Mr. Rogers biopic, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. That trailer captured in just a couple minutes the essence of Mr. Rogers’ kindness and empathy, and while this trailer for Saturday Night has a totally different tone, in just a couple minutes, it gets at the elements we recognize as quintessentially SNL—the chaos, the egos, the mad dash to air, Lorne staring at the wall bearing the lineup of sketches. I think Saturday Night just became my #1 most anticipated film of the year. I REALLY hope it’s at TIFF next month.
