‘It felt so special. It felt like the Oscars.’: Why Jason Reitman just had to make ‘Saturday Night’

The New York Times TV listing for 11:30 p.m. on Oct. 11, 1975, teased more than it told about the new NBC variety show “Saturday Night.”
Comedian George Carlin would host. Musicians Janis Ian and Billy Preston would appear. There would be guests. And it would be broadcast live, a rarity for a non-news program.
Nobody really knew what to expect from the show, soon renamed “Saturday Night Live” and destined to make global stars of unknown young talents — including Chevy Chase, Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, Bill Murray and John Belushi — as it shaped comedy for the next half century (and counting).
Filmmaker Jason Reitman (“Juno,” “Up in the Air”) wasn’t even born until two years after the launch of “SNL.” Yet his lifelong love of the show, which included a 2008 stint as guest writer, led him to co-write and direct “Saturday Night,” a cinematic salute to the first episode’s chaotic launch. (The film opens Oct. 4 in Toronto theatres; “SNL” returns to TV Sept. 28.)
“I’ve always said there’s the age you’re allowed to drink, there’s the age you’re allowed to drive, and there’s the age your parents let you stay up and watch ‘SNL,’” said the Montreal-born Reitman, 46, in a recent interview during the Toronto International Film Festival, where the film had its Canadian premiere.
“What I remember from being a kid was feeling they do this every week. It felt so special. It felt like the Oscars. It felt like something that should only happen once a year. And the idea that there was 90 minutes of sketch comedy every Saturday, that is what I couldn’t wrap my head around.”
That’s high praise coming from the son of the late Ivan Reitman, a comedy master in his own right, who put “SNL” stars into films he directed and/or produced, including Murray and Aykroyd in the “Ghostbusters’’ franchise and Belushi in “National Lampoon’s Animal House.”
Jason Reitman and co-writer Gil Kenan centre “Saturday Night” on Lorne Michaels, its Toronto-born creator and producer who is played by Vancouver’s Gabriel LaBelle (“The Fabelmans”).
As the clock ticks toward 11:30 p.m. on launch night — the film is structured like a countdown thriller — Michaels contends with everything from a rebellious Belushi (who balks at signing a contract) to cynical NBC bosses expecting failure (Willem Dafoe personifies the corporate sneer) to a crashing stage light that nearly hits two members of the Not Ready for Prime Time Players.
The deep Canuck content of “Saturday Night” is no accident: “Are there accidents?” Reitman muses. It accurately reflects how many Canadians were involved in the creation of “SNL,” among them actor Aykroyd, writer — and Michaels’ then-wife — Rosie Shuster and musicians Howard Shore and Paul Shaffer. The fascinated outsider status felt by Canadians in the U.S. is like how everybody who lives outside New York views America’s biggest and most bustling city, Reitman said, sitting on an interview set made to look like the cluttered “SNL” dressing room.
“There is something about the way we all look at New York City, whether you grow up in Toronto, Chicago or Los Angeles. New York inspires all kinds of feelings in all of us, and there’s an idea of what we think a night in New York City is. Lorne Michaels was able to articulate what it feels like to be alive.
“A whole generation seemed to look at what had been happening for the last 30 years as just a stale evolution of vaudeville to radio to what qualified as television. Lorne knew that there was an opportunity to do something that represented not just comedy, but comedy, music and everything else … Being from Toronto gave him that perspective and that point of view that allowed him to change everything.”
Michaels harnessed the “generational shift” — now several generations — of comedy and music and put it into a live TV show that was socially aware and distinctly different from the cornball antics of early television. In one partially factual scene, dismissive TV pioneer Milton “Mr. Television” Berle (J.K. Simmons) shows contempt for Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith), the show’s first breakout star.
A major task for Reitman in making “Saturday Night” was casting actors to conjure the original seven Not Ready for Prime Time Players, who besides Chase, Aykroyd, Belushi and Radner included Garrett Morris, Jane Curtin and Laraine Newman. (Murray joined in 1976 after Chase left to start his movie career; Billy Crystal was cut from the first show but became a regular years later.)
Did Reitman want note-perfect recreations or just really good impressions? It turned out to be a little of both.
“For each actor it was different. For Belushi, I wanted someone who looked just like him. And I was really lucky: Matt Wood walked in the door, and I was like, ‘Oh, my God, here we go.
“With Chevy, I think it was Corey Michael Smith who understood the physicality, how to move — it’s how you move your eyes, your eyebrows, your jaw, your neck. How do you do the falls? He got the physicality (of Chase), as opposed to Ella Hunt with her Gilda, where it was all about voice.
“And then with Dan Aykroyd, with Dylan O’Brien, it’s about cadence. You know, his Dan Aykroyd likes to talk, and he just got that cadence and the verbosity of it.
“So, oddly, (for each) there was a different piece of the essence that was required, that made you feel like you were in their presence.”
Watching the film can be a strange experience for original fans of the show — we’re watching a recreation of our youth — but Reitman said every generation has its own special connection to “SNL.”
He’s old enough to barely remember the Eddie Murphy era of the early 1980s. But he really got into the show a few years later, when Jon Lovitz, Nora Dunn and Kevin Nealon were stars “and then things started to get exciting when Dana Carvey, Mike Myers and Adam Sandler showed up, and also Will Ferrell and Cheri Oteri.”
Reitman is feeling the passage of time, too, as the abundant grey in his still-shaggy hair attests.
“I can’t believe I brought my first short film (“Operation”) to Toronto 25 years ago,” he said. (It’s actually 26 years, but who’s counting?)
“Saturday Night” is in the conversation for potential Oscar notice, a waiting game the four-times-nominated Reitman knows well. But what had him holding his breath, as he awaited his movie’s festival premieres, were the reactions of “SNL” kingpin Michaels and original cast members. It would have broken his heart if they didn’t love the picture. To Reitman’s huge relief, he seems to have won over the “SNL” legends who have seen it.
“They’re all fans. Chevy’s seen it, Laraine’s seen it. Billy Crystal came to see it, Garrett came to see it. I think it’s a highly emotional experience for them to watch themselves in their twenties at a moment where everything is in flux, where they’re about to become who they are.”
And how about Michaels, the paternalistic and slightly pompous boss who can make or break careers on a whim? Michaels once grandly described “SNL” as “defiant, abstract, avant-garde yet blue collar — an opportunity to explore our possibilities as humans.”
Michaels evidently likes the film (he sent Reitman a congratulatory note), even though he’s generally not one for nostalgia trips.
“Lorne is someone who has no rear-view mirror,” Reitman said. “He’s constantly trying to innovate, constantly trying to be on the bleeding edge of comedy … so he doesn’t like the idea of trying to encapsulate the history of ‘SNL’ in a book or a documentary or whatever.
“But he seemed tickled by this idea … that it had to do with exactly what it felt like 90 minutes before air.”
For diehard “SNL” fans, one feeling matters above all. It’s the surge of anticipatory adrenalin when you hear the show’s classic introductory exhortation, “Live from New York, it’s ‘Saturday Night’!”