The release of Better Man, the ape-centred biopic of Robbie Williams, has led to much debate about pop culture that fails to cross the Atlantic. They don’t know Robbie. We couldn’t care less about Grand Funk Railroad or the Dave Matthews Band.
You could reasonably position Saturday Night Live as the most conspicuous US TV phenomenon that the Irish and British just don’t get. To be fair, efforts to broadcast the show here have been only sporadic. But when clips do get through they are generally met with bewilderment. This broad, self-congratulatory guff? This is an institution?
But nobody can dispute that, as a source of US comedy talent, the show has no equal. Dan Aykroyd, Bill Murray and Gilda Radner in the 1970s? Eddie Murphy, Billy Crystal and Julia Louis-Dreyfus in the 1980s? Will Ferrell, Mike Myers and Adam Sandler in the 1990s? Who knows? The people who pretended to be Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson in that notorious red-carpet sketch from 2023 may yet become giants of the medium.
All of which goes some way to explaining why, as the show prepares to celebrate its 50th anniversary, Jason Reitman, the versatile director of Juno and Up in the Air, brings us a kinetic, dizzying re-creation of backstage chaos at the first broadcast.
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Saturday Night stars Gabriel LaBelle as Lorne Michaels, the show’s creator. Elsewhere we see versions of Aykroyd, John Belushi, Jim Henson, Chevy Chase and George Carlin.
“Until this show, Saturday night was considered probably the worst slot on television. It was presumed there was no way young people would organise their evenings around watching television. The idea was on Saturday night you were out,” Reitman says.
“With the birth of the show, young people organised their Saturday evenings around being at a television at 11.30pm. Not only just because they liked the show, but because they felt they saw themselves there.”
Reitman, though born two years after that first broadcast, in October 1975, has a close personal connection with the project. As the son of Ivan Reitman, director of Ghostbusters and Kindergarten Cop, he grew up with Murray, Aykroyd and other SNL alumni knocking about the house.
In recent years Reitman has taken over his father’s most popular creation with titles such as Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire. Dylan O’Brien creates a largely generous portrayal of Aykroyd in the new film.
“Yeah, it’s funny, because obviously I grew up with Dan Aykroyd,” Reitman says. “I feel like I know him very well. I directed him in my last movie. I don’t know why this is, but you can know someone at 70 and still think of them as a 23-year-old – as a completely different human being. I know Dan Aykroyd. But, when I think about 23-year-old Dan Aykroyd it still feels like a character. It still feels like someone I’m trying to understand. I’m looking through the lens of the interviews I did.”
There is an interesting Canadian connection to all this. Ivan Reitman, who died in 2022, was born in what was then Czechoslovakia, before moving with his Jewish parents – his mother survived Auschwitz – to Canada as refugees when he was four years old. His son came into the world in Montreal, but spent a good portion of his growing-up years in Los Angeles. Lorne Michaels, a writer and broadcaster before creating Saturday Night Live, was born and raised in Toronto. Aykroyd is Canadian, as were later cast members such as Myers, Phil Hartman and Norm Macdonald. What do we make of this?
“Look at that original Saturday Night Live cast – the writing staff, the musicians – and it’s Torontonians and people from Chicago. The improv troupe [in Chicago] is called Second City. There’s a reason it’s called that. There’s always been an eye on New York, and when you’re not in New York City you can’t help but go, ‘Why can’t I be in New York City?’ There is a sense of a little-brother attitude,” Reitman says.
Reitman is in Toronto as we speak. His first short played at the city’s film festival 25 years ago. Thank You for Smoking, his debut feature, premiered there in 2005. In 2007, Juno, his breakthrough hit about a young woman negotiating unexpected pregnancy, played there on its way to four Oscar nominations and a win for Diablo Cody’s screenplay.
So he must still feel himself Canadian, right? “I really do. My parents were both Canadian. I feel like they have Canadian sensibilities. They’ve got a Canadian sense of humour. I have come back and shot three films up here, and it always feels like home,” he says.
So back to the puzzling phenomenon that was (and is) Saturday Night Live.
Daniel de Visé’s recent book on The Blues Brothers – originally an SNL skit with Belushi and Aykroyd – makes the point, reiterated in Reitman’s film, that the cast members were among the first people in television to have grown up with the medium. It was in their glands. They no longer regarded it as a stranger in the livingroom. They felt more comfortable ripping up the recently established conventions.
“Until that point there had been a slow evolvement of vaudeville through radio and into television,” Reitman says. “The kind of variety shows you saw on TV were representative of that. It was an old-style sense of humour. Woodstock was when one generation claimed that music had changed.
“Early 1970s cinema saw that generation saying movies were going to be different. When you saw The Graduate, when you saw Shampoo, when you saw Harold and Maude – or Easy Rider or Five Easy Pieces – you knew you were listening to a new generation.
“The television moment is Saturday Night Live. You have a group of people in their early to mid-20s who said, ‘There should be something on television that actually looks and sounds like us.’”
That does come through in the film. The early 1970s was when the generation gap really struck. That was when the baby-boom mob began to secure power and shake off 1950s cultural torpor.
It was a close-run thing with SNL. As Reitman’s film tells it – in something like real time – Michaels was forced to improvise furiously on a show the network didn’t really want. We are told the executives had a repeat of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson ready to run if the apparently chaotic production didn’t make it to air.
What did Michaels, who still runs SNL at 80, make of Reitman’s plan to turn that first night into a movie?
“He was kind of tickled by the idea, honestly,” Reitman says. “I think he enjoyed the concept. If I told him I was making a movie about the entire history of Saturday Night Live, or the year leading up to its creation, he would have probably been bored by that. Lorne Michaels is a man without a rear-view mirror. However, he really loved this concept of relating the 90 minutes leading up to showtime. It was about the urgency.”
You can’t fault Saturday Night for urgency. The film is shot on 16mm in cinéma-vérité style. Eric Steelberg’s camera races down corridors and up staircases to catch miked-up actors already deep into furious conversations. Chevy Chase has a confrontation with Milton Berle. John Belushi is never where he ought to be. Henson, creator of The Muppets, doesn’t seem to know what he’s doing there. I’m betting there is great planning in this disorder. There are fewer accidents than we might assume.
“Absolutely. This is a film-making journey that probably started with me on The Front Runner,” he says of his undervalued 2018 film on Gary Hart’s run for the US presidency, “and my love of 1970s cinema and directors like Michael Ritchie. I’ve always been enamoured of film-makers who can create organised chaos on screen. To make a film requires choreography and organisation. And then you can make it appear chaotic. There’s a lot of effort that goes into that. I’ve been trying to train myself on how to do that.”
It is a remarkable story. So much popular culture of the 1960s and 1970s felt ephemeral at the time, but ended up stubbornly sticking around for decade after decade. Saturday Night is all about the challenge of surviving until the next morning. As it happened, SNL continued through the disco years, Reaganomics, the Monica Lewinsky embarrassments and Florida’s hanging chads and deep into the current century. It has become the establishment. If you live long enough someone will put up a statue in your name. How have they managed it?
“Every part of the show felt representative of their generation,” he says. “And then Lorne was able to evolve with the times, decade after decade. The Adam Sandler-Mike Myers cast. The Will Ferrell cast. The Kristen Wiig cast. Each cast has found a way to represent the identity of the existing generation, whether that generation was more nasty, more tender or is more meme-based. You can take the temperature of America by watching that show.”
Reitman is a hard film-maker to pin down. After that early critical success with Thank You for Smoking he developed a reputation for well-made mainstream films that engaged with an issue of the day. The first talked about the tobacco lobby. (Good title, you’ll agree.) Juno took such a nuanced line on teen pregnancy that nobody could quite figure out if it came from a conservative or liberal perspective. (There was no reason it should be either.)
A case can be made that some of his best films slipped under the radar. Tully, from 2018, starring Charlize Theron as a stressed new mother, and Young Adult, from 2011, featuring the same actor as a dissolute author, were both sharp and moving – thanks, largely, to scripts by Diablo Cody – yet neither film found the audience it deserved.
“It’s an extraordinary thing to find another creative person – one as brilliant as Diablo – who sees the world the same way,” he says. “When you find those people you have to latch on to them.”
He must have regrets about the ones that got away.
“You can swing for the money or you can swing for the fences,” he says. “And I like to make different movies. I like to make movies that are less expensive so that I can try things that really challenge me.
“When I think about Tully and Young Adult I don’t have any regrets. I got to make two films with Charlize Theron. I’m really proud that I got them made. I’m proud I got to tell those stories. Would I love more people to see them? Yeah.”
It is an unforgiving business.
Saturday Night is in cinemas from Friday, January 31st
