Jason Reitman | Saturday Night / 2024

sound, sight, and mind

by Douglas Messerli 

Gil Kenan and Jason Reitman (screenplay), Jason Reitman (director) Saturday Night / 2024

 

I kept expecting at any moment while watching the first 15 minutes of director Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night that suddenly Rod Serling might reappear out of the lost world of past TV series to comment: “On this long-ago night an entire cast of a TV entertainment show collectively lost their minds...or did they? You unlock this door with the key of imagination, beyond it is another dimension. A dimension of sound, a dimension of sight, a dimension of mind. You’re moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas, you’ve just crossed over into the “Twilight Zone.”

     Fortunately—or as some might argue, unfortunately—the innovative director of the TV series which had its premiere in 1959, never appeared. What Reitman presented us with instead is an absolute chaos in the making.

      As Monica Castillo, writing on the Roger Ebert site, nicely summarizes the situation:

 

“Director Jason Reitman and co-writer Gil Kenan plunge the audience into the deep end of the chaos with just 90 minutes to go before showtime. Reitman and cinematographer Eric Steelberg keep the camera in motion alongside Michaels, trailing him almost constantly at a dizzy speed, running through the hallways past llamas, flying dress racks, and NBC pages. The movie itself was filmed on 16mm (not the magnetic tapes the show was filmed on in its early days) which gives the ’70s color palette a deeper hue and texture, sometimes making the background wood paneling and dressing room lights look especially warm and inviting. But don’t get too cozy, no scene lasts too long before Michaels is once again on the move to calm executives’ apprehension or look for missing cast members. However, in the fast-paced rush to pull the show together, sometimes the lighting doesn’t catch up to the characters, leaving them in the dark or underlit, similar to how Gordon Willis shot “The Godfather.” It looks too dramatic for what the movie is going for, and it loses some of the actor’s comedic reactions when we can’t see their eyes or face. Much of the film’s aesthetic is dedicated to playing up the tension leading up to showtime, and its frenetic pace is unrelenting.”

 

     Zooming in and out of disaster with his handheld camera,  Steelberg, accompanied with a score by Jon Batiste—who after performing with numerous music legends, became the bandleader and musical director on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert from 2015 to 2022—eventually introduce us to the film’s epic-sized ensemble cast including not only the original “Not for Prime Time Players,” Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith), Gilda Radner (Ella Hunt), Dan Aykroyd (Dylan O’Brien), Laraine Newman (Emily Fairn), Jane Curtin (Kim Matula), and the truly problematic figures, John Belushi (Matt Wood) and Garrett Morris (Lamorne Morris), as well as a selection of the show's guest performers from that memorable night of October 11, 1975, including George Carlin (that night’s guest host performed by Matthew Rhys), Jon Batiste (Billy Preston), and Andy Kaufman and Jim Henson (both portrayed by Nicholas Baun).

    These figures are almost all convincing us, despite their brief on-film appearances, of the look and essence of the originals, Smith as the cocky, self-possessed Chevy Chase already doing one of his famous pratfalls (“I’m sorry, I tripped over my penis”), and O’Brien’s Aykroyd (busily slapping his female colleagues’ asses until the rehearsal for his own skit as a young man dressed in a pair of short-cut Levi’s who is harassed by female construction workers).

      Like many other critics, I’d argue that the famous female comics of the show, Curtin, Newman, and most notably Radner, as performed by Matula, Fairn, and Hunt serve mostly as a trio of friendly giggling friends, not fully revealing the formidable comics they were on the show itself. Mayhem evidently does not fit Kenan and Reitman’s notions of these female figures' involvement , although the TV show’s undesignated "co-director" Rosie Shuster (Rachel Sennott)—daughter of the famed Canadian comedian Frank Shuster and wife of the TV Saturday Night’s creator Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle), nee Lorne Lipowitz, from 1967-1980,* clearly knows just how to cope with the chaos.

     What Reitman somewhat grudgingly admits is that this calm center in the midst of the vortex—writer and creator of the Killer Bees, the later Todd and Lisa, and Roseanne Roseannadanna sketches, as well as co-writing the much later Baba Wawa's and Church Lady spoofs—is just how important this woman was to the far less stable Michaels and the numerous Madhatter-actors surrounding her, many of whom she had brought together as a performing group. A side-issue in this film is how she will be billed, whether as Mrs. Michaels or Rosie Shuster. Misogamy clearly had not yet been expunged from the seemingly forward-looking comedy show.

     Nor had racism been entirely removed from the writer’s warren, as Lamorne Morris playing Garrett Morris wanders about the narrow halls as if he has escaped from a Beckett play, uncomprehending why he, as a talented black man who once worked with Harry Belafonte and had sung major musical roles on Broadway is being asked to do basically secondary roles and versions of what might be described as contemporary updates of minstrel comedy. Reitman permits his actor a remarkable moment in which he suddenly looks into the future by spontaneously breaking into song as he performs Morris’ later breakthrough number from the show’s 11th Episode of the same year, “I’m Goin’ to Get Me a Gun and Kill All the Whity’s I See,” performed as his audition number for the prison production of Gigi—a song which Morris swears was created after a composition of an elderly black woman forced to sing her most noted song on The Art Linkletter Show.

    Wood (as John Belushi) doesn’t get many lines, but is asked to play the tempestuous self-inflated talent, who Vulture critic Bilge Ebiri describes as a “tempestuous savant,” refusing to even sign his contract, particularly since he is now being asked to play a bee. The Belushi character soon after disappears, late in the movie to be rediscovered by Michaels at the Rockefeller Center skating rink where Belushi attempts a “triple axel”—symbolic of course of what Michaels is himself attempting to do with this visionary new TV series—before falling flat on his ass.

     Yet as Castillo rightfully reminds us, that scene overall is not only rather “maudlin” but quite unbelievable:

 

“Hunt’s performance feels flat considering Radner was such a vivacious physical comedian in the troupe and was one of the show’s earliest breakouts. Hunt’s Radner has her longest scene talking with Belushi about nostalgia and coming back to 30 Rock with their kids mere minutes before showtime. This saccharine moment feels especially maudlin, as neither Belushi or Radner would have the chance to return to their workplace with their kids because of their early deaths–not to mention the first episode had yet to air. Who knew it would survive the next few years, let alone 50?”

 

    The major characters in Reitman’s version are not the TV performers, but as one might imagine emanating from the vision of a director, the director of the show Michaels represents; he and others of his ilk become the true center of this movie. Coming directly from his first major work as the young boy, Sammy, fixated on filmmaking in Steven Spielberg’s The Fablemans (2022), LaBelle is able to indicate the terrifying mix of youthful imaginativeness and hubris that Michaels represents.

     It’s apparent throughout that Michaels has attempted to create a show that is wildly original without a clue of how it all might come together. Like the figures he has gathered, he is an absurdly manic being who lives in a world, just as Rod Serling argues, exists only in a dimension of sound, sight, and mind, without any logic whatsoever. Forced time and again to even describe what he imagines his show to be, Michaels punts, creating a brilliantly student thesis-like response created on the spot to satisfy the local NBC affiliates all trucked in to watch the sure-to-be disaster. The New York Times critic Manohla Dargis describes that event, “The straight-faced Lorne responds with an amusing, self-aggrandizing analogy involving Edison, the lightbulb and electricity. Who are you in this metaphor, the baffled exec asks.”

      In Reitman’s fable, his two enemies are producer Dick Eberson (played by the truly likeable Cooper Hoffman, the look-a-like son of the renowned actor Philip Seymour Hoffman) and NBC’s head of talent David Tebet (acted by the always brilliant Willem Dafoe, who should surely get an Oscar acting nomination of his performance).

       Dafoe, pretending support, in Reitman’s version is actually counting on the new comedy show to be a failure in order to negotiate a better deal with the same time-slot’s Johnny Carson. Under Dafoe’s control his character oozes charm and understanding while at any moment is ready to cut off the youthful experiment with sophomoric comedy with a tape of one of Carson’s older shows.

       Eberson is the friend who finally is forced to reveal to Michaels the truth of the situation, that Tebet and others want him to fail so they can prove to Carson just how necessary it is run their tapes on weekends. That painful revelation, made on the steps between the floors Michaels has been madly racing in his search of both a new sound and light man, is a torturous encounter between the dreams of a young man and the disdain and dismissal of an older generation, the son finally realizing that he must rise up against the father and slay him if he is to move on with his dreams.

       When Tebet finally pins him down, Michaels goes into a wonderfully imaginative extemporaneous trance, describing his show’s audience to be every fresh-faced young man or woman who has ever arrived in New York City to experience their first Bodega and sex in a telephone booth. Tebet demands he show him. As quick as that, Andy Kaufman goes into a rehearsal of his truly Dadaist “Mighty Mouse” song (I can’t explain this; you have to see it; please, if you haven’t, check it out).* Demanding to see more, Tebet is shown one of the most truly surreal performances ever to appear in the TV series, the skit, the very first on the original telecast, about an immigrant (John Belushi) attempting to learn English by being taught (by the series head writer Michael O’Donoghue) the phrase, “I would like to feed your fingertips to the wolverines.”

      Both get such good laughs from the cast and onlooking local broadcasters, that Tebet finally cannot, in good conscience, repeat a taping of the past with Carson, particularly after another oldie performer, Milton Berle, stops by to wish the new show bad luck.**

      As Ebiri importantly points out, a great deal in this film is imaginary:

 

“When Willem Dafoe is introduced halfway through the film as NBC’s gravel-voiced, authoritarian head of talent David Tebet, we might wonder why such a person is appearing right before airtime on a show he doesn’t seem to know anything about. Well, that’s because he didn’t; by most accounts, Tebet was a champion of SNL and had been involved with it for months. When Lorne Michaels gets an angry phone call from Johnny Carson calling him a “benchwarmer” and “a stalking horse,” that too might feel a little off to those familiar with this history. SNL was in fact created because Carson didn’t want NBC airing any more of his reruns on weekends; he wanted to do reruns on weeknights to give himself more time off. So, SNL was there to make Carson’s life easier, not to compete with him. (Though, being Carson, he did reportedly have an adversarial relationship with the show.)”

      Later in the film as Michaels almost gives up on his dream, visiting a local bar only to discover there a writer composing jokes by the minute whom he immediately hires to spice up the comedy of his own show, Ebiri again corrects the record:

 

“Isn’t it crazy that Lorne Michaels had to wander out into the streets of New York 30 minutes before showtime and pull a random, impoverished joke-writer named Alan Zweibel out of a bar where a stand-up comic was butchering Zweibel’s jokes in a back room? Well, yes, it is crazy, and it does not appear to have happened: In the real world, Zweibel came on board well before SNL first aired, though he was indeed writing cheap jokes for Borscht Belt hacks while also working a deli counter.”

 

      But the lore swirling around this somewhat earth-shattering vision of living-room comedy is understandably rich with exaggeration and myth-making. And as Ebiri argues and with which I agree, Reitman’s film still gets the tone, the sensation, the mad rush of those hours just before Chevy Chase shouts out “It’s Saturday Night Live!” that the cinematic shifts and slight exaggerations don’t really matter. From all reports thereafter, every Saturday night episode that has appeared in the half-decade since has been in nearly as much turmoil as its very first explosion onto the screen.

 

*Perhaps the only thing I resent about Reitman’s film is its portrayal of Kaufman is being little more than a clueless naif, when in fact, as Miloš Forman revealed in his 1999 movie Man on the Moon, the comedian was a truly savvy if problematic performer.

**Berle later hosted the show, but was so out of touch with its audience and cast members, and so dreadfully boring that he was banned from any later appearance.

 

Los Angeles, October 8, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (October 2024).