In 2008, director Jason Reitman lived his “SNL” dream.
He was fresh off the success of “Juno,” which earned Reitman a Best Director Oscar nomination and the film a Best Picture nomination. His agent reached out to Lorne Michaels and relayed Reitman’s wish — to do a guest writing stint on “Saturday Night Live.” And, incredibly, it happened.
“It was like getting to suit up for the Los Angeles Lakers for one night,” Reitman told TheWrap. He and “SNL” writer Simon Rich stayed up until four in the morning on a Tuesday night working on ideas. On Wednesday, they took their three sketch ideas to the table read. “And then later that afternoon I got to be there for the moment when they come out of Lorne’s office and pinned a piece of paper to the wall,” Reitman said. That’s when he found out that one of his sketches — “Death by Chocolate” — had actually been picked to air.
The experience of working at “Saturday Night Live,” even for a week, stayed with Reitman. “From the first moment I ever sat at ‘SNL’ and watched that thing go live, there was a part of me that wanted to capture it,” he said of the origin story for his new film “Saturday Night,” which chronicles the making of the first-ever “SNL” episode in real time, where everything that can go wrong does. The film, which stars Gabriel LaBelle and Cooper Hoffman, opened in theaters Friday.
For Reitman, the idea of anxiously waiting for a piece of paper to emerge from behind a closed office door brought to mind being in middle school and sweating to find out whether or not you’ve made that year’s play.
“That’s how it feels when you’re there. It doesn’t matter how old you are or how many years you’ve put in, they’ve never changed the 17th floor,” Reitman said, about the floor in 30 Rockefeller Plaza in New York City where “Saturday Night Live” is made.
“It looks and feels like it did 50 years ago, and now I think that’s all on purpose,” he said. “That’s meant to evoke a feeling, so that the people who work there understand you’re still a kid. Lorne is still dad, and every Monday you start from zero. Just because you had a sketch that killed two days ago doesn’t mean that on Monday you’re not just another writer trying to get a sketch back on. And I think it pushes people to be great and it pushes people to constantly evolve.”
When he was younger, Reitman would watch the bumpers in between sketches “where for three or four seconds you would see the cameras moving around and sets flying out and you’d hear the countdown as they went to commercial or to the next sketch,” he recalled. “And I thought, I want more of that.”
Years later, it hit him — a movie that would be focused on the first-ever taping of the show. “It just clicked,” Reitman said. He began telling people about his idea. The response was always the same: “That’s a great idea. But how the hell are you going to cast it?”
Caricatures and real-life relationships
By Reitman’s own account, there are 80 speaking parts and as many as 80 constantly rotating background performers in “Saturday Night.” LaBelle, a breakout in “The Fablemans,” leads the cast as a young Lorne Michaels, with “Licorice Pizza” star Hoffman as NBC exec Dick Ebersol.
“When we started doing auditions, a lot of people came in doing caricatures of Lorne Michaels and of Chevy Chase and Dan Aykroyd, and we were never after that,” Reitman said. “The movie is meant to evoke an essence of each of these characters, one detail of each character that captures who they are, and it’s the culmination of them, because obviously, it’s a movie about disparate people who come together to get this show on the air. We needed Chevy’s ego and Garrett [Morris] feeling lost and [John] Belushi’s genuine fear of being a star.”
Cory Michael Smith plays Chevy Chase, Ella Hunt is Gilda Radner, Dylan O’Brien essays Dan Aykroyd, Emily Fairn is Laraine Newman, newcomer Matt Wood plays John Belushi and recent Emmy winner Lamorne Morris plays Garrett Morris. Willem Dafoe shows up as NBC network executive David Tebet, with cameos from Matthew Rhys as George Carlin and J.K. Simmons as Milton Berle.
What made the process trickier was that Reitman has interacted with the real-life “SNL” performers, particularly as the guardian of his late father Ivan Reitman’s “Ghostbusters” franchise, which includes Aykroyd as one of its bigger contributors.
“It’s funny because I know them all as 70-year-olds,” Reitman said. “So to suddenly think of them as kids in their early 20s … I’m a much different person now than I was when I was 23. We’re making a movie about a time, an era and a moment — the 1970s — where people were challenging the status quo in every way. It’s not only what they were doing on screen, it’s what they were doing off screen, too. This was the first time where all the writers and actors were just smoking dope up on the 17th floor as they wrote.”
Reitman and co-writer Gil Kenan, his collaborator on the two most-recent “Ghostbusters” films, spent a long time researching those early “SNL” days and relied on that research to fill in the blanks of the show’s well-known characters. They interviewed as many people as they could who were there for the first taping – “every writer, every actor, every crew person, musician, NBC pages, Lorne himself.”
Reitman said that he had to learn how to do an interview. Every person they talked to contradicted each other, of course. “But through their stories, through their memories, we were able to get a sense of what it was like to be in the building that night,” Reitman said.
A “real interest in organized chaos”
In order to properly capture the chaos, Reitman embraced a you-are-there immediacy in both camerawork (shot in jittery 16mm) and in the way that people are constantly talking over one another. Reitman also let the movie unfold in real time, dramatizing the 90 minutes that immediately preceded the taping of the first episode.
“I’ve been wanting to make a movie that took place in real time for a long time,” Reitman said. He recalled seeing “Victoria,” German filmmaker Sebastian Schipper’s 2015 film that is captured in a single, continuous take, and thinking, Oh my God, they did it. Reitman said he has an “obsession with those films and a real interest in organized chaos.” He looked to Michael Ritchie’s films – “Smile” and “Downhill Racer” and “The Candidate” – because “you feel like you are dropped into the situation.”
“You may not know exactly what’s going on or who everybody is, but you feel the energy of it,” Reitman said. “And I wanted people to feel that at ‘SNL.’”
The movie “Saturday Night” feels, in some respects, like an aesthetic evolution to what he had first attempted in his 2018 film “The Front Runner,” where Hugh Jackman played Democratic presidential candidate Gary Hart.
“With ‘The Front Runner,’ we were learning how to use the technique,” Reitman explained, referring to the way of shooting and editing that leaned into the chaos. “It just turned out that as a subject matter, nobody gave a shit about late-‘80s politics, so I picked a subject that I thought people cared a little bit more, which was the birth of ‘Saturday Night Live.’”
And with that shift in subject matter, Reitman also amped up the frenetic style of “The Front Runner,” capturing snippets of dialogue or half-formed thoughts as his camera roamed the halls of their recreated 30 Rock.
The frantic pace of the movie matched the pace of making the movie. Reitman admitted this was “the fastest I’ve ever made a movie.” After his crew interviewed everyone, he and Kenan “built a very complicated murder board of where everybody was in the building at any given moment.” He described the board as “‘True Detective’-like, with yarn and pins.” They had to rack where every single person was at any given moment. “Because anytime someone walks into a hallway or a stairwell or a room, you need to know who is there and where that continues them in the journey so they can be at the right place at the right time,” Reitman explained.
When he and Kenan actually got down to business, it poured out of them. “We wrote the original script in three days,” Reitman said. “And then once we got cooking, it was this very meticulous, choreographed prep where we were constantly rehearsing and shooting scenes with stand-ins and moving through the space.”
They shot the movie from March to May. That meant there were just a few months to get it together for the premiere, on Aug. 31, at the Telluride Film Festival. “Everything had been choreographed in advance” he said of the “freight train”-like edit. “Everything had an order to it,” Reitman said. The movie is full of long, unbroken takes. “We painted ourselves in a corner. If we had gotten it wrong, it was going to be bad news.”
While it happens to be coinciding with the 50th season of the show, Reitman said that the timing wasn’t consciously planned. “Making movies is hard and you have to make a lot of sacrifices,” Reitman said. “The only reason it’s possible is because you become obsessed.”
There was something true to “Saturday Night Live” about the frantic pace that Reitman’s team made the movie.
“That’s the way they make ‘Saturday Night Live,’” he said. “You start on a Tuesday, and Saturday at 11:30 you’re going live and that’s it. There’s a fuel to making something that way, to not having all the time in the world, to not second-guessing your choices, but rather trusting each other and rocketing forward.”
Reitman hopes that audiences feel it too. “You feel a movie that was made at a breakneck speed, because everything is just so propulsive. Even the way the music happens, the fact that the music was recorded live in real time, that Jon Batiste was creating these rhythms and these melodies on set in real time, it all lends to this sense of a freight train,” Reitman said.
Of course, there was a brief pause, before production began on “Saturday Night,” when Sony told him, Reitman joked, “OK but one more ‘Ghostbusters’ movie first.” (That would be “Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire,” which Reitman co-wrote and produced and Kenan directed, which hit theaters earlier this year.)
Reitman said that there is “definitely more ‘Ghostbusters’” on the horizon and that he recently attended Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios Hollywood, where there is a maze devoted to “Frozen Kingdom.” He loved seeing everybody dressed up as the characters, both old and new. “It fills my heart and makes me think about my dad,” Reitman said of his late father, who birthed the “Ghostbusters” franchise.
Reitman said he is overwhelmed with the early positive reviews of “Saturday Night.” New York Magazine called the movie “spiritually true” and IGN said it was “chaotic in wildly enjoyable ways.” Sony seems bullish about its awards prospects — the studio shifted to a platform release to capitalize on the buzz.
“When you love something as much as ‘Saturday Night Live,’ all you want to do is honor it,” Reitman said. “Make a film out of love. You want people to feel what it’s like to be on the floor of 8H, and to see the exhilaration of people as they walk out of the theater makes me really happy.”
It’s enough, while watching “Saturday Night,” to make you long for a follow-up. What about dramatizing the lead-up to one of any of the hallmark seasons of the show going live? As it turns out, Reitman has been thinking about that too. “Every day on set someone would come to me and be like, can we do ’77? Can we do ’82?” Reitman said. “It broke all our hearts when we had to tear down that set. The Friday we wrapped, we could have started on Monday on the next film, and everyone would have shown up.”
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