“’Saturday Night’ (The Movie) versus ‘Saturday Night Live’ first episode: fact check

The new film Saturday evening chronicles a significant 90 minutes and changes in television history: the period immediately before the premiere of Saturday Night Live on October 11, 1975. Director and co-writer Jason Reitman used his connections in the film industry (formed by his father, comedy director Ivan Reitman, who worked with many). SNL People in movies like Ghostbusters(and immortalized by his own career as a director) to interview people who were there that night and compile various stories into a fictional version populated by countless real-life characters. The resulting film is bursting with energy and neuroses, as producer Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle from The Fabelmans) struggles to formulate his vision for the show, convinced that everything will come together in the end. And of course it was like that, and it is like that in the film.

Except for the stuff that’s mostly made up.

Yes, of course Saturday evening takes some creative liberties with the TV story to both heighten the tension and provide some signposts that viewers who aren’t well-versed in comedy stories might recognize. Most noticeably, this means tinkering a bit with the content of the episode itself – which is easy to do since only the first sketch is shown in full. This sketch, an absurd bit in which a bespectacled, pipe-chewing teacher (author and short actor Michael O’Donoghue) teaches nonsensical English phrases to a student with an accent (John Belushi), is faithfully recreated in the film. The rest of the episode is only seen in parts before it airs: abbreviated rehearsals, sound checks, and pitches for sketches that the film suggests were in the works around the premiere, but in some cases didn’t appear for weeks/months/ years later. (No, Dan Aykroyd’s famous Julia Child sketch was probably not edited 60 minutes before the first episode and about three years before it actually aired.)

As it happens, the first episode is available in its entirety on Peacock; Because the first five seasons were licensed for complete DVD sets, these episodes tend to be larger and less abridged than many of the following seasons. This makes it possible to carry out a kind of fact check on the hyped film.

The first part of the episode is accurately depicted in the film. George Carlin delivers a brief monologue, followed by a fake ad for “New Dad,” an insurance policy that replaces a deceased father (Dan Aykroyd) with a stand-in (Chevy Chase), and then Billy Preston performs “Nothing from Nothing.” Song that also appears in the film. Janice Ian’s “At Seventeen” is also featured in a rehearsal scene that doubles as a pinprick into the film world. The film takes Andy Kaufman’s famous “Mighty Mouse” performance by having Kaufman (Nicholas Braun) perform it for the suits and crew, as a sort of proof of concept, literally minutes before the show begins; Kind of gratuitous, but fair enough that the film wanted Kaufman to do more than just stroll around the studio.

Contributions from other artists are mentioned in the film; Braun also plays Jim Henson, who created Muppet characters for an inappropriate feature film in the first season. But Henson is treated as a kind of abstract, self-contained nuisance – and even more egregiously as something of a humorless idiot who doesn’t agree with it SNL Writer. It was true that Henson and his fellow Muppet artists (who were prevented from writing their own material by union rules) couldn’t handle it SNL Writers who resented their assignment to develop material for the characters. But the film portrays Henson as slightly humor-impaired and a little appalled by the writers’ provocative sensibilities, when in reality Henson was anxious not to be pigeonholed as a creator of children’s entertainment, and tried hard to do so SNL Appearance. (Given the elaborate technical nature of his multi-actor “Land of Gorch” segments, he probably wouldn’t have wandered the studio halls alone either.) The “Gorch” segment in the first episode definitely doesn’t work That’s all good, but the movie strangely downplays the logistical challenge it would have presented, reducing it instead to Henson nagging Michaels about not getting script pages and hating her when he finally does. The film goes easier on Albert Brooks, another star of the first season who didn’t stick around long; In a cast that is clearly and repeatedly described as being pressed for time, his comparatively interminable four-minute filmed piece never elicits even the slightest grumbling.

But where Saturday evening What really deviates from the reality of the episode that aired is the sheer number of sketches that were supposedly included in the mix for that night’s broadcast. The film attempts to convey the sheer volume of material Michaels had to contend with – multiple comedians and musical guests, fake commercials, sketches, a short film and a Muppets segment – while throwing in both overt and microscopic references along the way future classics that may not have been in the works so early.

Oddly enough, while there are recurring references to a skit about Alexander the Great at his ten-year high school reunion (which, according to Laraine Newman, was actually cut at the last minute); a sketch about female construction workers learning to objectify men (which appeared in the season’s sixth episode); and several Dan Aykroyd segments that didn’t air until his fourth and final season, several short skits that actually aired in the first episode aren’t even seen in the film. There’s a courtroom sketch about a sexual assault, which the film seems to omit entirely, and a sketch about a fake shark bite victim, which the film quietly lets the audience assume is the first appearance of the Land Shark- could be a character who was first seen in a film a few weeks later. Even stranger, the film seems to ignore the existence of George Coe, an older actor who was only mentioned as part of the cast in the first episode, but appeared on camera several times and made further guest appearances in several episodes after that. This is perhaps the most glaring example of Reitman’s print-the-legend approach.

Which the film conveys more clearly than some of the written stories about it SNL is how full the first episode is. Saturday evening keeps circling around the image of a familiar cardboard panel on which Michaels has to decide how to arrange various segments in a 90-minute show that apparently lasted closer to three hours in dress rehearsal. Although the first episode ends up being relatively poor in actual sketch comedy, with several quick commercial parodies and most of the actual sketches well under the three-minute mark, it is also surprising compared to descriptions of how little it resembles today’s series agile. This tends to imply something slower and less confident, less revealing, than it would be as the cast grew into their various weekly roles. But if anything, this first episode is surprisingly brisk, if scattered. In the most recent 49th season (and many before), the show typically includes about a dozen segments: Cold Open; Monologue; Weekend Update; two musical performances; one to three pre-written sketches, music videos, or fake ads; and four or five live sketches. The first episode has over 20 segments. That’s the truth Saturday evening With all its embellishments and exaggerations, it gets to the point: That in 1975 SNL was still clarifying when it aired.

Stream the first SNL on Peacock