"Saturday Night" Review

 As Saturday Night Live begins its 50th season, it's hard to believe there was a time where the show's existence was hanging by a thread and that the whole thing may've just been a gambit in a contract dispute with King of Late Night Johnny Carson at the time. Thus is the background for Saturday Night, the semi-biographical portrayal of the final 90 minutes before the airing of the first episode on October 11, 1975.

 Gabriel LaBelle (The Fabelmans) stars as Lorne Michaels, creator and el jefe of SNL for most of its half-century run. The 30-year-old Canadian comedy writer and producer had been given 90 minutes of time at 11:30 pm Saturday nights which normally ran reruns of Johnny Carson's The Tonight Show to do something with and he assembled a rogues gallery of writers and performers from the National Lampoon, Second City, and The Groundlings along with short films by Albert Brooks, Jim Henson's Muppets (not Kermit or the Sesame Street ones, but original adult ones), musical performers, etc. Not a typical Seventies variety show, the question of "What is this?" looms over everything.

Told in close to real-time, Saturday Night portrays the countdown as utter chaos with friction between the cast, open rebellion from the union stagehands and technical staff, and a menacing network executive (Willem Dafoe) who has the power to kill the show and air another Carson rerun if he loses faith in Michaels.

Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith, Gotham) is a vainglorious a-hole already plotting his next career move; Garrett Morris (Lamorne Morris, no relation, New Girl) is a Julliard-trained published playwright and at 38, far older than most of the cast and writers and wondering why he's there; Billy Crystal (Nicolas Podany) is looking at show rundown - the dress rehearsal ran three hours - and wonders how he's going to get on the air; host George Carlin (Matthew Rhys) thinks it's all a joke. Chasing after Michaels is Dick Ebersol (Cooper Hoffman, Licorice Pizza), a network exec who's trying to keep him on course, but also trying to shoehorn product placement. (Ebersol would take over as producer of SNL for part of the five-year interregnum where Michaels was away.) Will the show go on in time? Duh.

 There are two major problems with Saturday Night which hamper it despite the energetic direction and go-for-broke efforts of the cast. First off is the real-time conceit where we're supposed to believe all this stuff went on in the 90 minutes before air and I saw this as someone who watched every season of 24 where we accepted that Jack Bauer could get across LA in 15 minutes. To believe the movie is to believe Michaels left the studio, went to a nearby bar and met and recruited writer Alan Zweibel (Josh Brener) about 11:15 pm and the audience was still waiting to be let in five minutes before the show started. If they had simply made it the 5-6 hours before that first show, all those moments would've been infinitely more believable.

The second problem was manifested by the disappointing box office (about $10M gross against a $25-$30M budget) as the question of "Who is this movie for?" isn't answered. Unless you're an older Gen Xer who remembers the OG SNL and/or is familiar with the behind-the-scenes intrigue from one of the two books written on the show, you won't really know what the actual heck is going on, who these people are, etc.

Now, as a member of both cohorts, I was able to keep up with (and sometimes fact-check) what was being portrayed, but with nearly two dozen major characters fighting for time, characterizations are mostly shorthand at best - Chevy's a jerk, John Belushi (Matt Wood) is surly, Dan Aykroyd (Dylan O'Brien, The Maze Runner series) is a motormouth, and so on. It mostly comes down, like so many biopics, to how well the actors imitate their counterparts; the Morris, Aykroyd and Carlin ones are the best matches. J.K. Simmons also has a blast cameoing as Milton Berle.

LaBelle chooses not to imitate Michaels unique tone - which Mike Myers based his Dr. Evil accent on and if you've ever heard anyone tell an anecdote involving Michaels they ALL fall into doing this voice - but perhaps he should have because with not much more time than the rest of the mob to make an impression, maybe doing an impression would've triggered some latent familiarity in the viewer.

While the haters insist "the show hasn't been funny since the original cast left", the show simply couldn't have coasted without regular infusions of new stars like Eddie Murphy, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Dennis Miller, Adam Sandler, Will Ferrell, Kristen Wiig, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Keenan Thompson, Fred Armisen, Jason Sudakis, and countless more for the ensuing 44 seasons. It's been around so long you have to be eligible to join AARP to remember a world without it and the story of how Lorne Michaels cobbled together what turned into a comedic institution is why there are two oral histories in print about it while Saturday Night ends up a rushed, chaotic sliver of how it came to be.

Score: 6/10. Catch it on cable.