39/11
Dan Aykroyd was the only original SNL cast member who read the script
Scenario
At 11:30pm on October 11th, 1975, a ferocious troupe of young comedians and writers changed television forever. Find out what happened behind the scenes in the 90 minutes leading up to the first broadcast of Saturday Night Live (1975).. Matt Wood stars as John Belushi in Saturday Night, check out the rest of the cast and their real-life counterparts.
Doorman: The whole night?
As the show goes live they have John Belushi coming into frame 39 seconds late through a door. In reality he came on immediately.. Lorne Michaels: Look, my name is Lorne Michaels, I’m the producer of “Saturday Night”.
Lorne Michaels: [sarcastically] Yeah, the whole night
The movie opens with a quote from Lorne Michaels: "The show doesn't go on because it's ready, it goes on because it's ready; at 11:30.". Featured in Eddie Murphy, the black king of Hollywood (2023). Ixoo ‘Chickenweed’ ChawzWritten by Don Cento and Martin GarnerPerformed by Don Cento and Martin Garner.
Smith as Chevy Chase (maybe the most interesting character as laid out in terms of how he’s set up and treated by other characters like Milton Berle) and the guy playing Dan Aykroyd probably come off the best and most engaging
Saturday Night has some entertaining scenes and moments, and even around the first half is fairly engaging as this pot-boiler biopic about the night of the first SNL (90 minutes to be exact since the film shows us the clock, a mistake I' ;ll get back to), and Lorne Michaels being swept up in every bit of the chaos that he had before him with a show that he wasn’t even fully sure what it was going to be. Unfortunately, Reitman has that problem that comes upon directors of biopics sometimes – and in his case he probably knew one or two of these guys when he was in diapers – where this feeling that this subject matter is SO important and what happened in this case would have reverberations throughout the history of modern comedy and pop culture and television as a Medium….. well one, we *get* it, especially after the first time you lay it all out (and by the third fourth or fifth time I lost count in the last third of this, especially everything with the Willem Dafoe character (he tries his best but this guy is like many others here is a one note joke), and two, if you happen to be coming into this only with a very casual admiration of Saturday Night Live, it can feel all the more grating I have that insight seeing this with my better half, who has never watched a full episode of the 70s show (probably not many of you have either, let’s be real,.
I know I didn’t see any until the DVDs came out some years ago), and came away not only unimpressed but finding depictions like for John Belushi totally grating and for Jim Henson outright insulting
I get it as well, since unlike with Chase we don’t fully get a sense (outside arguably a Weekend Update moment) of what Belushi had as a mad comic genius about him, so he comes off like a rancid lump of a human being (no shade on the actor Matt Wood), and once it gets to that ice skating in Rockefeller center bit (in October, huh) Reitman has settled into sentimentality that is just garbage and is not affecting. If you feel the emotion coming from the last sections of this, I get that since it’s easy to drink up as it’s come after Reitman has already re-shaped and re-formed so much history into this one-night-OMG-athon so some may need that release. I found that these moments where Reitman and company look at this story with the "Wow This Was GROUNDBREAKING You Guys" glasses takes away from what really works here which is showing the smaller moments and process – again, when you are showing us how deranged and confrontational people could get BTS and the myriad problems that came with making things for TV in 1975 as opposed to telling us – and building up real character dynamics, which are hit or miss.