On Saturday, October 11, 1975, I took my new girlfriend/future ex-wife on a date. We were only about three and a half months into our relationship, so still very much in that initial getting-to-know-you phase. She lived with her parents about 30 minutes outside of my hometown in Michigan, and when I picked her up early that evening, I only had one request.
“We can go wherever you want and do whatever you’d like,” I said. “The only thing is that we have to be back at your house by 11:30.” She naturally wondered why we needed to be back at her parents by that specific time, and my answer was both simple and non-negotiable.
“There’s a new comedy show called Saturday Night starting tonight. George Carlin is hosting, and I love George Carlin. I don’t want to miss it.”
If she had been as intractable in our dating experience as she was in our married life (or as I came to know it, “my sentence”), our relationship might not have gotten much further than that evening. But she said, “Okay, sounds like fun.” We drove to town, hit a bar, had a few drinks, danced a bit, and headed back to her parents’ house a little before 11.
Her parents were watching the news when we walked into the house. They quickly said their goodnights and were out of the living room in a matter of minutes; she may well have hastened their departure by telling them before we left that we required the television at 11:30. I never asked, and she never clarified.
The show began with Michael O’Donoghue, a writer and performer I was keenly aware of through his work in the National Lampoon monthly magazine and his weekly involvement in the National Lampoon Radio Hour, a syndicated program which episodically duplicated the magazine’s concept of having a theme for each issue. I bought the magazine every month and tuned into the weekly Radio Hour with something akin to religious zealotry, so my anticipation of NBC’s Saturday Night was fueled by much more than my longtime adoration of Carlin.
O’Donoghue was seated in an upholstered easy chair, reading a newspaper in a nondescript living room setting. A door opened and down a flight of stairs strolled John Belushi, another frequent performer on the Lampoon radio show. He had also had memorable moments on several National Lampoon albums, most notably on Lemmings, the recording of the Lampoon’s stage show that depicted scenes from the Woodchuck Festival. Belushi played the festival’s stage announcer.
Belushi, dressed in a heavy overcoat and earflap hat like a Slavic refugee, carried a paper sack and spoke in a heavy accent when responding to O’Donoghue’s unidentified character with a curt “Good evening.” O’Donoghue repeated his initial greeting back to him, overenunciating each syllable — “Good eve-a-ning” — which led Belushi to repeat his greeting twice in the same manner. “Let us begin,” O’Donoghue intoned after checking his watch.
“Repeat after me: I would like…,” which prompted Belushi to repeat the phrase in his vaguely middle European accent, “I would like…to feed your fingertips…,” O’Donoghue continued. “To feed your fingertips…,” Belushi responded. “To the wolverines,” O’Donoghue concluded, as did Belushi. This bizarre English language lesson followed the same pattern with the incomprehensible sentences, “I am afraid we are out of badgers. Would you accept a wolverine in its place?” and “Haynet exclaimed, ‘Let’s boil the wolverines.'”
O’Donoghue teed up the next phrase, as he did with the previous two, by saying, “Next,” when he suddenly clutched his chest with a tortured expression and fell to the floor, dead from an apparent heart attack. Belushi pondered the situation for a moment, then clutched his own chest and threw himself on the floor, a harbinger of the kind of physical gymnastics he would perfect over the next three years. Chevy Chase, also an alumnus from the National Lampoon stable of album and radio voice talent, wandered into the scene, wearing a headset as if he were a stage manager, and shouted the seven-word phrase that would become a rallying cry in pop culture over the next five decades: “Live from New York, it’s Saturday Night!”
This scene is reenacted by Tommy Dewey as O’Donoghue, Matt Wood as Belushi and Corey Michael Smith as Chase in the fitting final scene of Saturday Night, the somewhat fictionalized and amazingly compelling film detailing the two hours that preceded the debut of one of the longest running and most controversial television shows in American history.
Director and co-writer Jason Reitman has faithfully captured the frenetic pressure cooker atmosphere of the 120 minutes prior to the launch of NBC’s Saturday Night, a show populated by unknowns working within a familiar variety show framework but with a comedic sensibility that filtered everything through the kaleidoscopic prism of unfettered insanity. In an effort to heighten the effect, Reitman — the son of late director Ivan Reitman, who worked with a significant amount of Saturday Night Live (SNL) alumni on a number of film projects — cannily hired a cast of relative unknowns to portray the untested Not Ready For Prime Time Players (NRFPTP).
There are a few familiar faces: Rachel Sennott (Bodies, Bodies, Bodies, Shiva Baby) plays Rosie Shuster, staff writer, fixer and quasi-wife of Lorne Michaels; veteran actor J.K. Simmons plays comedy icon Milton Berle; Matthew Rhys (The Americans, Perry Mason) does a phenomenal job of bringing first-time host and stand-up genius Carlin to life (if anyone is considering a Carlin film, call Rhys now); journeyman character actor Robert Wuhl (Arliss, Batman) as longtime director Dave Wilson; former Late Show bandleader Jon Batiste as musical guest and vaunted fifth Beatle Billy Preston; and the always incredible Willem Defoe is equal to the task of portraying legendary NBC executive David Tebet, who famously brought Berle to the network and saw the potential of a young game show host named Johnny Carson to become the new face of The Tonight Show after the departure of Jack Paar.
The true kamikazes of Saturday Night are the (relatively) fresh faces who play the shows near mythical first cast, the ciphers who almost immediately became avatars of a completely new brand of comedy. The subsequent profiles of the inaugural NRFPTP makes recreating their creative personalities a dangerous wirewalk and exposes the Saturday Night film cast to a broad range of criticism, a lot of which has been heaped on the project in early reviews. As with any biopic, a certain suspension of disbelief is necessary.
In fact, a good deal of that criticism is unwarranted, as the new film cast finds the essence of the television cast, individually and collectively, and brings them into the kind of behind-the-veil focus that was intentionally fuzzy from the start. The most lavish praise must be reserved for Gabriel LaBelle, fresh off his stint as the lead in Steven Spielberg’s autobiographical The Fabelmans, who plays SNL producer Lorne Michaels to perfection. At the start, he’s the eye of the tornadic shitstorm he’s created, zen massaging the staff and the cast, placating the network and promising everyone, including himself, that everything is going to be okay, even when he is presented with the reality that he has storyboarded a three-hour show, and has to cut half of it to fit the allotted 90 minutes (less if counting commercials).
As the clock ticks inexorably to 11:30, LaBelle shows Michaels’ unraveling with almost psychotically wide-eyed intensity. In the face of what Michaels had to pull together in the 15 minutes before he made television history, it is amazing that his head didn’t explode. LaBelle plays both extremes with the patience of a saint and the unhinged backstage madness of the Phantom of the Opera.
Other standout performances include Wood’s Belushi, the true wild card and tormented genius of the original cast, and Smith’s Chase, perfectly executing his smug on-screen persona, which mirrored his smug off-screen persona. Also notable is Lamorne Morris, known primarily for his work on New Girl, as the estimable Garrett Morris (no relation, as it happens). It’s a crafty bit of casting, as both had extensive resumes before entering the Saturday Night crucible. Film Morris does an uncanny impression of Television Morris’ cadence and presence, and his moment of realization just before airtime is transcendently hilarious.
A unique member of the ensemble is Nicholas Braun, who seamlessly transitions from his role as Gregg in Succession to playing not one but two of Saturday Night‘s flagrant weirdos, Andy Kaufman, who also debuted his particular brand of eccentricity on Saturday Night‘s inaugural show, and Muppet puppeteer Jim Henson, who enjoyed Michaels’ work and wanted to expand the Muppets’ reach to include an adult audience with a sketch he and Frank Oz came up with called Land of Gorch. Sadly, the segment only aired during the show’s first season for reasons made plainly apparent in the film.
The real star of Saturday Night is the show itself, which has evolved and devolved, been deconstructed and reconstructed, and teetered on the verge of cancellation. To see Reitman’s vision of the messy birth of one of the most beloved, reviled, lauded, ignored, and contentious shows in television history is absolutely breathtaking for those of us who have followed the show from its early growing pains to its inevitable teen angst years to its role as a spawning ground for young comedic talent. As of this season, Saturday Night Live has presented the talents of 164 cast members, most of whom have gone on to even greater success with other television and film projects. To date, films where SNL alumni had a leading role or were part of a lead ensemble have earned nearly $40 billion at the box office.
In the final analysis, is Saturday Night perfect? God, no. It is exactly like the entity that it documents; perfect within the parameters of its imperfections, brilliant in its stupidity, courageous in its mindlessness. I’m quite certain that many of the criticisms that have been leveled at the film thus far are generated by people very much like the boneheads who have blathered on for the past 45 years that the show was never the same after the original cast left, and then happen to mention as a postscript that they never paid attention to the show after that.
It’s worth noting that the original cast from October 11, 1975, was together for exactly one season. Chase left for a film career (a move he has publicly regretted) before the second season, paving the way for Bill Murray’s addition to the ensemble, and Belushi and Dan Aykroyd departed before the fourth season to film The Blues Brothers. And as someone who watched the show religiously through its many incredible and desultory iterations, I can tell you categorically that there were plenty of sketches performed by the original cast that received an audience reaction in the vicinity of crickets and tumbleweeds.
Criticism is always a subjective proposition, swayed by the critic’s own hard-wired loves and hates, and my adoration of SNL and, by proxy, the new origin story film are perfect examples. I grew up watching typical stand-up comedians on The Ed Sullivan Show, people like Alan King, Jan Murray, Henny Youngman and Jackie Vernon. Some told conventional jokes in a conventional manner, others stepped away from the accepted methodology, but not too far away.
Carlin was an atypical comedian even when he was a clean cut, suit-and-tie comic. His viewpoint and observations were unusual, and I was drawn to that difference. Carlin himself was influenced by the social comedy of Lenny Bruce and the political humor of Mort Sahl. And women were making progress as well; Phyllis Diller, Joan Rivers, Totie Fields and Moms Mabley stood on the shoulders of entertainers like Sophie Tucker and Belle Barth, and went on to influence subsequent generations of comedians.
By the time Carlin hosted the first episode of NBC’s Saturday Night, he had grown out his hair and fully adopted the persona of the counterculture’s hyper-intelligent court jester. He was plugging his seventh album, An Evening with Wally Londo Featuring Bill Slaszo, which I had purchased just like the previous six. When he was announced as the new comedy show’s fledgling host, there was no doubt that I’d be watching.
The added impetus was the writers and performers from the National Lampoon sphere of influence. By the time I began reading the monthly Lampoon and listening to the weekly radio show, I was already a huge fan of ensemble comedy troupes; Firesign Theatre, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Congress of Wonders, the Committee and the Ace Trucking Company had tweaked my radar and softened the ground for the Lampoon’s brand of highly literate and completely anarchic humor.
The idea that Carlin and the Lampoon would be combining their collective energies felt almost too good to be true. This was, after all, network television. What would they be allowed to do? What would inevitably wind up on the cutting room floor? Where would the lines be drawn and how would they endeavor to move those lines as the show moved forward? Would NBC even allow it to move forward?
All of this swirled through my mind as I sat on my future in-laws’ couch next to their daughter (who I would ultimately refer to as Medusa) at 11:29 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 11, 1975. Three minutes later, Michael O’Donoghue, John Belushi and Chevy Chase brazenly set fire to the basic tenets of television comedy and I thought, “God, I hope this goes on forever.”
With the launch of Saturday Night Live‘s 50th season, it seems as though that unlikely wish might come true. The fact that a movie like Saturday Night can find a way to be made five decades after the events that inspired it seems like solid evidence of its relevance, worth and quality, regardless of how many times it has been questioned and dismissed along the way. It will always be live from New York, and God willing, it will always be Saturday Night.
This article appears in Oct 16-29, 2024.