“What is clam-diving?” asks the NBC standards woman, a conservative Maiden Aunt type whose job it is to approve the script and stop the goddamn dope-smoking beatniks of Saturday Night Live from poisoning the airwaves.
Writer/comedian Michael O’Donoghue (Tommy Dewey) reviews her suggested re-writes: “I’d rather butt-fuck cancer than make these changes,” he says. And then he sets the pages on fire and tosses them out the window of 30 Rockefeller Plaza into the streets of New York.
Saturday Night is the origin story of SNL, told through the imagined “true story” of the build-up to SNL’s first show. But park the truth, forget the plot and just enjoy the ride. Jason Reitman's film is a free-flowing, sweaty-palmed, embolism-inducing rock’n’roll jam, with long tracking shots and a relentless backing track. It's like the-kids-from-Fame-go-feral – the story of how the rock’n’roll generation (those oft-despised Boomers) seized a tiny bit of control from the generation before them.
The scene: 1975. America is basting in bland entertainment. The country might have been through tumultuous change – Vietnam, the Civil Rights Movement, the rise of drug culture, the Watergate scandal – but American TV is all sweetness and light-entertainment. It's like rock’n’roll never happened, nevermind the 60s.
Occasionally someone popped a hole in the facade – a band on Johnny Carson, an edgy comedian – but on October 11, 1975, SNL kicked the windows in. It gave a regular voice to a new generation: punk kids, ex-hippies and stoners, long-haired deviants with no respect for their elders and a love of bad-taste humour, fostered by Mad magazine and National Lampoon.
The movie’s unlikely hero is producer Lorne Michaels (played by Gabriel LaBelle, last seen in Spielberg’s The Fabelmans), a head-strong kid with the dress sense of prime Neil Diamond. We join him 90 minutes before showtime. SNL is about to go live but they don’t have a running order, the cast are unpredictable and mostly high – alternately fighting, flirting, or trying to upstage each other – and the old school studio bosses (Willam DaFoe as a vampiric exec) are circling, waiting for them to fail and order to be restored.
A new generation of comics swirl in and out of shot – Chevy Chase, Dan Ackroyd, John Belushi, Bill Murray, Gilda Radner and Andy Kaufman – as Michaels pinballs through the studio, his wife and writer Rosie Shuster (Rachel Sennott) by his side, flattering and fixing as she goes. Around that framework, chaos unfurls.
Belushi (Matt Wood) spends the movie wild-haired and livid – he thinks he’s a future Marlon Brando but SNL has him dressed as a bee. It's one of several references in the movie that requires a bit of background: A running joke in the show was how much Belushi hated the bee costume. When Rob Reiner guest-starred, he pretended to be disgusted at having to share screentime with the bees. “I’m sorry, Mr Hollywood big shot!” ranted Belushi. “We don’t have the writers you do! We’re just a buncha actors looking for a break! What did you expect, The Sting?”
(It wasn’t all groan-inducing puns: Belushi and Ackroyd performed Slim Harpo’s I’m A King Bee in bee outfits with the house band and it laid the ground for what would become The Blue Brothers.)
Milton Berle, brilliantly portrayed by J.K. Simmons, pops up as the sleazy "ghost of television past" whipping his cock out to humiliate Chevy Chase, one of many scenes that are only half-true. (Berle really did get his dick out on the set of SNL, but not then and not for Chevy Chase. “It was enormous,” said writer Alan Zweibel. “He goes, ‘What do you think of the boy?’”)
In many ways, Saturday Night is like Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown – an almost-true story of hip youth triumphing over an out-of-touch old guard – except with less generation-defining genius and far more people dressed as bees.
It is fast, daft, forgettable fun. I mean, what did you expect – The Sting?
Saturday Night is at UK cinemas from Friday 31 January and available to stream on Netflix in the US.
