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Saturday Night

Director – Jason Reitman – 2024 – US – Cert. 15 – 109m

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A journey through the behind the scenes chaos of the 90 minutes prior to the broadcast of NBC’s first ever Saturday Night Live show – out in UK cinemas on Friday, January 31st

In the mid-1970s, US TV network NBC made a monumental change to its scheduled programming. For the best part of a decade, it had broadcast reruns of The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson on Saturdays and Sundays, and wanted something new which would capture the 19-34-year-old audience demographic, developing a replacement show with young, independent producer Lorne Michaels, the first episode of which was broadcast live on October 11, 1975. The show, which is still running on NBC today, became something of an institution in the US, kickstarting the careers of numerous comedy stars and writers who would go on to achieve considerable success in US film and TV.

Saturday Night is an attempt to put on the screen the chaos of that first night’s preparation, in which no-one quite knows if the show’s broadcast is going to go ahead, or whether the network will flip a switch and play the Carson rerun tape it has lined up in case Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle) can’t get his show together. Historically, he did so, and the result was a great success. We know that history going into the film, yet, curiously, that known outcome doesn’t stop the proceedings being shot through with a “will they / won’t they” feel as he and his cast, writers and NBC’s crew attempt to make everything happen.

This is that rare film that won’t be spoiled in advance by knowing the ending: that moment when, for the very first time, a performer steps out of character in the opening sketch, to proclaim the legend: “Live, from New York, it’s Saturday Night!” up to that point, even though you know this is going to happen, you wonder if it actually will. And to roll credits at that point makes for a strangely satisfying ending.

For all its success, however, the show remains a peculiarly American phenomenon; many of the legendary cast of the first show and the season which followed are far bigger names over in the US than they are here in the UK. The film gets a great deal of mileage out of John Belushi (Matt Wood), whose comic performances appear to come from his failure to manage his own anger, and less from Dan Ackroyd (Dylan O’Brien) who looked (and as the actor playing him looks) almost unrecognisable as the Hollywood star of today.

Reitman knows a thing or two about casting, and has assembled an extraordinary ensemble to play the Not Ready for Prime-Time Players, as the cast became unofficially known: arguably as impressive a bunch of young, contemporary US actors as the characters they play were in real life back in the day. Characters (cast) include: Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith), Gilda Radner (Ella Hunt), Laraine Newman (Emily Fairn), Garrett Morris (Lamorne Morris, no relation), Jane Curtin (Kim Matula) and Jim Henson (Nicolas Braun), there to use his puppet wizardry in a non-children’s show context for the first time who no-one on the show, Michaels included, quite knows what to do with.

Also present are George Carlin (Matthew Rhys), the opening show’s guest host, Billy Crystal (Nicholas Podany), as well as musicians Janis Ian (Naomi McPherson) doing a solo spot and Billy Preston (John Batiste) leading the house band. And playing a major part in the proceedings are Michaels’ then wife Rosie Shuster (Rachel Sennott), the show’s major writer, who is unsure whether to use her maiden or married name on the credits.

The problem with all this for a UK audience, however, is that we simply don’t have the same familiarity with Saturday Night Live here as they do in America. Yes, we’re familiar with Ackroyd and Belushi from The Blues Brothers (John Landis, 1980) and more, and with Chevy Chase from numerous unremarkable movie comedies, but little else. so the film deals in currency more familiar to US audiences than to audiences here. It has much in common with the rather better ‘makers of live television out of their depth’ drama September 5 (Tim Fehlbaum, 2024), released here in the UK next week, which additionally deals with terrorists at the 1972 Munich Olympics, a subject which travels rather better abroad than a domestic US TV show, however groundbreaking.

Although this isn’t one of those films shot in one take like Russian Ark (Alexandr Sokurov, 2002), Victoria (Sebastian Schipper, 2015), or 1917 (Sam Mendes, 2019), numerous lengthy unbroken shots lend Saturday Night a similar feel. It brilliantly captures the chaos confronting Michaels as he tries to get his show to happen amidst the warring egos of his comic cast and the NBC crewmembers who aren’t prepared to try anything new for a show that’s unlikely to last longer than a month if it even gets broadcast at all in the first place. If it isn’t especially effective as a comedy, it more than compensates by running headlong into the pre-broadcast chaos of getting the show on air, a staging as fascinating as it is compelling.

Leaving the best ‘til last, the film provides Willem Dafoe with one of his finest bit parts in years. Dafoe here plays TV executive Dave Tebet who will decide, right up to the last minute, whether or not the broadcast will go ahead. He sometimes seems a member of NBC’s Old Guard, resistant to change, yet at other moments, particularly when he;’’s alone with Michaels, he demonstrates a nurturing side designed to help newcomers believe in themselves and pull off the televisually impossible, even in the face of grizzled objects like himself. If it’s worth seeing for anything, it’s for Dafoe. That said, its constant restless, anarchic sense of energy provides a close second reason to see it.

Saturday Night is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, January 31st.

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