Live From New York, It’s ‘Saturday Night’ Member Berries!

” The present doesn’t go on because it’s prepared, it goes on because it’s 11: 30″.

—” Saturday Night Live” creator/producer Lorne Michaels, as quoted screen at the beginning of the 2024 picture” Saturday Night”.

We all know a guy who evidently knows every painful fact about the TV show or film company he enjoys. Fans of” Star Trek”   who can explain in detail why NBC rejected the show’s first pilot episode and why the second attempt succeeded. There is at least one website where the author goes into great detail about James Bond’s matches. Fans of” Star Wars” have spotted every digital adaptation of the first three that George Lucas made, as well as their own “despecialized editions” designed to bring back all the original analog glory from 1977 to 1983.

However, are there any such anoraks who focus on the roots of NBC’s venerable picture funny” Saturday Night Live”? Apparently not, since Jason Reitman’s” Saturday Night“, released to celebrate the 50th anniversary of” Saturday Night Live” later this year, only grossed$ 9.5 million in domestic ticket sales, failing to recoup his reported$ 25 million budget, when it played in movie theaters this fall.

( Full disclosure – I almost qualify, in part because of how much I loved the show’s first five seasons, but much more because of how many times I’ve read Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad’s meticulously researched 1986 book,” Saturday Night Live: A Backstage History of Saturday Night“, the best tome on the making of a TV series since Gene Whitfield’s” The Making of Star Trek” in 1968, and far more readable. )

The most significant events depicted in the movie actually took place, but most of them did so quietly and sporadically during the times between the show’s conception and its assembled artistic ability, not all in the storm 90 minutes between dress practice and its first live playing at 11: 30 am on October 11th, 1975, according to a conceit that was recently added to Netflix and available for rent on Amazon Prime Video.

On the Plus Side: Excellent Casting

” Saturday Night” works because of Reitman’s large Robert Altman-style ensemble cast and the movie’s nonstop manic drive. However, while so much of what is available on streaming platforms is based on “member berries,” references to memorable moments we’ve all seen and experienced while watching TV or movies, it assumes that the viewer has a lot of inside baseball knowledge of the show’s early days. The lack of Bill Murray during the first season, the inclusion of Jim Henson’s Muppets. the connection Milton Berle and the show have. Who Dave Tebet was. Who Dick Ebersol is.

However, the casting is what makes the film relatively watchable. Matt Wood portrays a John Belushi who oscillates between angry and soulful, and Gabriel LaBelle is spot-on as a young Lorne Michaels. DylanO’Brien, the actor who portrays Dan Aykroyd, absolutely nails the young Aykroyd’s voice and performing style. Though, &nbsp, as Jim Treacher notes,” all he does is hit on every woman in sight with his ‘ Fred Garvin, Male Prostitute ‘ bit. Why did he create a sketch character years later instead of later? Because it’s that kind of movie, that’s why”. Similarly, Treacher praises Lamorne Morris, who does” an uncanny impression of Garrett Morris ( no relation ), but he only shows up from time to time to complain he’s not in the show enough. Which is really weird, considering it hadn’t even aired yet”.

On the negative side, we are aware of exactly how this will all end.

Catherine Curtin ( apparently no relation to Jane Curtin ) plays” Joan Carbunkle”, a composite of the show’s early censors, when NBC wrestled with the show’s underground comedy style. But based on what Hill and Weingrad wrote, she’s primarily based on Jane Crowley, a member of NBC’s Standard and Practices division the network assigned to the show in its first season – but again, several months after&nbsp, it first aired, when earlier, more relaxed censors let a lot of raunchy material appear on the air:

A bosomy, matronly woman, she wore suits with pleated skirts that hung several inches below the knee, bright red lipstick and nail polish, and a gold necklace that she twisted nervously in her fingers while speaking. She once protested the appointment of news anchorman Chet Huntley as the luncheon speaker for a religious club because Huntley had been divorced. She was such a devout Catholic.

For the majority of the time she spent on the show, the main issue was one of basic communication because Crowley’s frame of reference was so different from that of Saturday Night. She often didn’t understand the jokes, and sometimes let things by that she probably wouldn’t have if she’d understood them. Crowley never questioned, for example, an Update opening that announced,” Brought to you by Hershey Highway: the candy that’s turned America’s taste around for fifty years”. She didn’t know, apparently, that the joke was about anal sex.

The writers ‘ favorite pastime of course was quickly Taunting Crowley. In order for him to sit in the control room and watch Crowley change various shades of red as she scanned his scripts, Michael ]O’Donoghue would lace them with words he knew would never be able to pass. She allegedly nearly leaped over the console to throttle him at times. Al Franken and Tom Davis would double-team her. First they’d write some outrageous line and then say,” Let’s go see what she’ll do”! When she rejected it, they’d start offering even more outrageous alternatives. This game’s objective was to make Crowley run away from the room and throw up her hands.

At one point in” Saturday Night”, the Carbunkle character hisses at Michaels, Franken and Davis ,O’Donoghue ( portrayed by Tommy Dewey ) and the other assembled writers,” You see this? I know it looks like an ordinary red marker, but this one is special. For the better part of a decade, it has kept America safe. It is a weapon against vulgarity, sex, communism and hedonism”.

Like everything else about” Saturday Night”, we all know what Carbunkle’s fate will be. By the Obama era, Michaels ‘ comedic instincts and limousine leftist worldview dominated cable television and late night in this case, she will fail spectacularly in her mission. Michaels, who is 80, still directs Jimmy Fallon’s adaptation of the” Tonight Show” on SNL. ( If Johnny’s looking down from show business heaven, he’s got to be absolutely furious&nbsp, at the thought. ) Jon Stewart’s” Daily Show”, where Stephen Colbert made his debut, is simply Chevy Chase’s” Weekend Update” segment stretched out to a half-hour runtime.

Here’s Johnny!

Despite being the impetus for NBC creating” Saturday Night”, we only hear Johnny Carson in voiceover, phoning in from Burbank to threaten Lorne Micheals, with language such as” It’s my f*cking network, it’s my f***cking night”. But in real life, Saturday night wasn’t &nbsp, his f***ing night: while Carson never liked SNL’s countercultural sensibilities, the show was created because he was feeling overexposed by having” Tonight Show” episodes rerun every Saturday night. ( Carson’s politics were Kennedy-style liberalism, not McGovernite leftism. His musical tastes were’ 40s-era big bands and ‘ 50s-era cool jazz, not’ 70s-era hard rock. )

After Carson’s phone call, Dick Ebersol ( played by Cooper Hoffman, the son of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman ) corners Michaels in the stairwell at 30 Rock and tells him:

EBERSOL: They want you to fail. They’re betting on it. NBC makes more money playing reruns of the Tonight Show&nbsp, on Saturday.

LORNE: So why don’t they?

EBERSOL: Contract dispute. They must show Johnny Carson that the reruns are unavoidable. So they created a show that was certain to fail.

Even though it’s once again a way to build up tension where none existed, pretending that Carson could immediately be back on the air on Saturday night if SNL’s debut failed is probably the biggest lie in the film.

Uncle Dave and Uncle Miltie

Willem Dafoe portrays Dave Tebet, a real-life NBC executive who served on the network from 1956 to 1979 ( when he was appointed vice president of Carson Productions ). He was quick to identify Chevy Chase as a potential potential replacement for Johnny Carson. Early in Chevy’s tenure with SNL, Hill and Weingrad claimed that Tebet really did once muse that” Chase is the only white gentile comedian around today. When Johnny leaves,” Think what that means,” Dafoe quotes from Cory Michael Smith’s Chevy Chase. Despite mentioning Tebet’s name and a few of his actual quotes, Dafoe’s Tebet is actually a composite of all the New York NBC executives who desired Herb Schlosser’s expensive folly to be quickly canceled before it became too expensive a drain on the network.

Dafoe’s character tells Lorne Michaels,” I expect you to be an unbending force of seismic disturbance. Light up the NBC switchboard like a bomb went off…Ebersol, we’re standing in the presence of a prophet. A man with a vision [looks at Lorne ] I want you to take that vision like a Sherman Tank and plow it through any f*** who gets in your way,” allegedly to con him into going so far that his show would quickly self-destruct. It’s difficult to build suspense when we all know when the show first airs, and Michaels hasn’t been on the network since, with Michaels still in attendance for all but five seasons in the early 1980s.

Herb Schlosser, the president of NBC who proposed a live show to replace Carson’s Saturday night reruns and supported Lorne Michaels ‘ vision of the show that would fill that time slot, is oddly absent from the film. Of course, having a champion atop the ozone layer of NBC’s management would completely eliminate the” TV show that barely made it on the air at all” conceit of its script.

One of the film’s most audacious casting choices was J. K. Simmons as Milton Berle. However, Berle’s involvement with the show is never further explained by the possibility to contrast 1950s television royalty with what would follow in the 1970s. At the conclusion of its first season, Berle gave Michaels the Emmy for best comedy-variety show in real life, and he then hosted the show himself, disastrously, in its fourth season. &nbsp, But Berle’s presence in the script does generate some real tension with Chevy Chase, as Giancarlo Sopo wrote in October at NRO’s Corner:

Then there ‘s&nbsp, the&nbsp, scene with J. K. Simmons as Milton Berle, the legendary comedian and Hollywood relic clinging to his crass bravado. In a backstage clash with Chase — both trying to flex their muscles in front of a young female cast member — the generational divide comes into sharp focus: While Chase’s humor is irreverent, Berle’s response is a literal power play, pulling out his, uh, manhood to assert dominance.

Every 20-something’s falsehood is shattered by the exchange because it shows that their generation created transgressive humor. Although the old guard may not have exposed it on television, their audacity was perhaps even more outrageous. The scene serves as a reminder to leave the stage gracefully when you have enough time, and to accept that the next generation should do the same.

DANGER

By the end of its first five years, many members of the cast and creative team had severe cocaine addictions, which was a common theme throughout” Saturday Night Live,” a show that from its beginning was associated with excessive drug use among its cast. Initially, marijuana jokes were a staple of the show’s first couple of seasons. John Belushi of course, died in 1982 from an overdose of cocaine and heroin.

Billy Preston, who and Janis Ian were the musical guests on SNL’s debut, handing Garrett Morris a vial of pharmaceutical grade coke in a scene from” Saturday Night.” Those with knowledge of the show’s history can make the connection that, according to Hill and Weingrad, Morris is said to have developed a&nbsp, massive addiction to freebasing coke by the show’s fifth season. ( Although to be fair, most viewers will at least make the case that almost everyone on SNL would soon have own coke issues. )

The strength of” Saturday Night” is a reminder that during its first five years, SNL excelled because of its strong writing and comedic personalities. Making the transition to live television wasn’t as difficult as it has been for their unknown replacements over the years because the majority of the cast had already made their first appearances as members of the” National Lampoon” and” Second City” comedy troupe. According to Dan Ackroyd, the original SNL cast perceived themselves as “video guerrillas.” ” Every show was an assault mission”, Hill and Weingrad added. Their replacements, having seen the enormous big-screen success of Eddie Murphy, Bill Murray, Ackroyd, Chevy Chase, and Mike Myers, now see SNL as a mere springboard to superstardom and its concomitant mega-wealth. &nbsp,

When MichaelO’Donoghue first appeared on the set of his 1981 debut season as head writer, he began by spray painting the word “DANGER” on an office wall to let his younger cast members know what had been missing since he and Lorne Michaels had left the show. &nbsp,

But “DANGER” has been missing from SNL for decades. It’s become so establishment, the show can phone it in each week because it now exists only to provide Sunday column fodder for Beltway journalists. ( Anne Beatts, the wife of MichaelO’Donoghue, famously said,” You can only be avant-garde for so long before you become garde. ) Political reporters and wire services “love to recap SNL episodes because it allows them to get their biases in print while still maintaining a thin veneer of objectivity,” according to John Hinderaker in early 2017 at Power Line. Respectable “news outlets” like the AP can’t publish absurd comedy skits ripping President Trump of their own accord,” Hinderaker wrote.” However, by covering Saturday Night Live, they turn these meaningless attacks into fake “news.” “

In contrast”, Saturday Night “is a reminder of when SNL actually did&nbsp, have some danger — so much so, that it dramatically changed television’s tone, and in many ways, not necessarily for the better. &nbsp,

The more inside baseball knowledge you have of” Saturday Night Live’s “brilliant first five seasons, the more you’ll enjoy Jason Reitman’s” Saturday Night” &nbsp, movie. When you watch it again for a second viewing, you might wonder why a movie like” Saturday Night” should require this level of insider knowledge to be enjoyable. Its breakneck pacing conceals a lot of its flaws on the first viewing.

It’s not entirely accurate, but to paraphrase the line from” The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” when the legend becomes fact, film the legend – and add plenty of simulated mescaline, to boot.

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