'SNL' Movie Coming Out on 50th Anniversary of Premiere

[Mark Jeffries]

What was called "SNL 1975" is now called "Saturday Night" (the original title of the series--well, technically "NBC's Saturday Night"), but it's still Jason Reitman's telling of the hours before that first telecast--and Sony will release it to theaters on Oct. 11, 50 years to the day of the series premiere:

https://www.thewrap.com/jason-reitman-snl-movie-title-release-date-saturday-night/

Although the cast is mostly unknowns (including the guy playing Lorne), Jon Batiste will be donning an Afro wig to play first musical guest Billy Preston and Willem Dafoe will play NBC executive in charge of talent schmoozing David Tebet. And Marousek and Sikula will pan it unless it has a scene of Lorne molesting collies.

[Kevin M.]

We recently watched the 2020 Belushi documentary where they animated sequences where they only had audio. It was generally well done and I feel does a good job portraying all sides of the man, but — as usual — Lorne Michaels doesn’t get enough blame for creating a harassment filled drug den that is at least partly to blame for the premature deaths of people such as Belushi and Farley. 

Kevin M. (RPCV)

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[Mark Jeffries]

I believe you, Kevin. I've seen and read enough "SNL" behind the scenes books and docs that I do not consider Lorne a great producer.  And I've always held that from the beginning "SNL" has been erratic as hell and it's primarily, of this whole "write the show the same week" structure that's been there from the beginning and is why you have the harassment and drug den atmosphere that seems to easily permeate the place (although I'm sure that it's not as bad as it used to be, although wait until we hear about another death long before their time of a cast member). And that's why my "SNL" watching these days is selected YouTube videos.  I would hope that if the show continues after Lorne is gone that a lot of things on how the show is put together get changed, but I honestly think that once Lorne dies (and he will not retire, although I would think the 50th anniversary would be a good time), the show dies too, because it's become too expensive for NBC and like everything else in television, it's not generating the revenue it used to.

Mark Jeffries
Saints Spotlight Editor
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[Tom Wolper]

There was a narrative about rock music that went music was stupid and boring and was played by square people for square people. Then one day some white boys plugged their electric guitars into amps and brought forth rock and roll, which was and is awesome music, and freed everybody’s minds, and then Woodstock and so on and so on.

As time passed and the artists and audience matured, a much more introspective and complex narrative emerged. It’s a lot more satisfying to read and watch and it really points out the shallowness of the previous narrative.

There is a parallel narrative for comedy where comedy was square until SNL came along and made it awesome. There has been a smaller amount of introspection and those of us who are dreading the SNL movie feel that as long as Lorne is in charge the shallow narrative is the only story that will be allowed to air.

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[Kevin M.]

One day there will be a narrative that is, by today’s standards, politically incorrect. Specifically, just as some/many athletes use drugs to enhance their abilities (often to the delight of fans), writers/performers also benefit creatively through drug use. 

Substance abuse was the worst kept secret in the entertainment industry. Culture seemed to accept premature death as the price we paid to be entertained. Michaels, as SNL’s producer, allowed Chevy Chase to belittle the other cast members, he allowed others to drink and do drugs to excess, he created a toxic environment where the writers and the cast felt compelled to live in their dressing rooms and offices… to stay up all night for days at a time writing for their lives. Viewers got a lot of great comedy from those early years… but at a tremendous cost to those who generated it. 

I recently watched the Netflix documentary on the making of We Are The World (featuring interviews and archive footage of two of my former bosses), and though it was a well done look back at the recording session, they made light of a few of the celebrity participants who were wasted out of their minds that night. It was a source of comedy that professional singers were so out of it that they couldn’t sing. Because, yeah, of course they drank and did drugs. 

Kevin M. (RPCV)

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[Dave Sikula]

The only thing I'll say about that is that it's guaranteed to be funnier than SNL. I realize that's the lowest of bars.

--Dave Sikula

[Dave Sikula]

For me, the biggest problem with SNL isn't that it's not funny (and, of course, it isn't), it's that Lorne's questionable sense of humor has come to be the mainstream model for American comedy by inflicting people like Murray, Sandler, Farley, Farrell, Wiig, and McKinnon on the American and world public and making them the standard.

When he goes -- and that day can't come soon enough -- that model will hopefully fade away.

I'm reminded of what Stella Adler said to her class the day Lee Strasberg died: "A great man of the theatre died today: Lee Strasberg. (Pause.) It will take the American theatre fifty years to recover from what he did to it."

--Dave Sikula

[PGage]

So, I can agree with part of this. I mostly like Murray’s comedy, but not Sandler or Farley, about half of Farrell, and McKinnon but not Wiig. I see these and so many other SNL performers to have real differences, and am often puzzled by the broad brush you use to dismiss almost all of them (except, inexplicably like the French with Jerry Lewis, Keenan Thompson).

Can you put your finger on some of the common elements you see in this brand of comedy that you dislike? Sandler/Farley is kind of low brow, but I don’t really see Murray or Fey or Hartman that way. I’m thinking what it is you don’t like about the Lorne Michaels comedy culture (maybe because you have said this before?) is it’s kind of smart alecky, sarcastic, disparaging tone - is that part of it? That maybe could be a kind of common thread in SNL style comedy, though it hardly seems unique to Lorne Michaels, and is a criticism that could be made of groups like the Pythons as well.

I agree with the criticism of LM for running a simultaneously indulgent and abusive shop over the years. And he seems to have realized early on that putting on a new live 90 min show every night was just too hard, and so he has relied on a relatively small set of pre fabbed set ups and stock, repeatable characters that stifle creativity and innovation as much as they allowed strung out, overworked, exhausted and often traumatized writers and performers get a show on in a week.

But I think he has also identified and attracted an unusually high level of comic talent to work for him over the years. While early on most of that talent went on to make broad, mass appeal comic films of questionable quality, his alumni have also gone on to produce some of the highest quality work in television after leaving him, or if not leaving him, at least SNL (Chris Rock, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Bill Hader, Jason Sudeikis). Even without giving him any credit for folks like Julia Louis Dreyfus or Larry David, who he whiffed on, it’s a pretty impressive record.

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[Dave Sikula]

For me, it's less of a commonality of styles than it is "Lorne finds this funny." That's fine on its own, but I don't think mass entertainment should depend on the tastes of one person, no matter who that is. Sure, there are variations between these performers' styles, but I don't find "comedy" as varied as it was in the years before SNL.

I deliberately left off the likes of Hader and Fey because I think their voices would have evidenced themselves even without the SNL boost. (And, as you note, David and JLD certainly traveled that route.)

--Dave Sikula

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[PGage]

Totally agree with the criticism of the Comedy Cult of Personality they have over there. It’s not that he has a crappy sense of humor, but by definition that will be a narrow window that leaves out too much. It would have been nice over the last  50 years to have the same ratio of crappy to genius comedy coming through two or three or ten other filters.

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[Mark Jeffries]

And for the five years that Lorne wasn't there, Jean Doumanian was trying to keep status quo with a new group of people and failed and Dick Ebersol just wanted to mainstream the show and succeeded (although he did hand over the comedy reins to Michael O'Donoghue, who has never been Mr. Mainstream).  O'Donoghue tried to make big changes to the format (drop the cold open, fire Don Pardo, replace the Edie Baskin New York-as-paradise titles with the New York-as-hell titles, not have a guest host every week and generally go as dark and anti-establishment as he could with Ebersol's dictum to have Joe Piscopo and Eddie Murphy in as many sketches as possible), but that was difficult to pull off and an ultradark "SNL" would still be on the air in 2024.  (I almost think that he did the Fear booking and the "Silverman in the Bunker" sketch to get fired on purpose--and succeeded.)  And every format change that O'Donoghue all went back to the way they were--including Don Pardo.

Yeah, it would've been nice that after Lorne came back to get the show back in shape that he would've taken the money, left and started trying other things, leaving "SNL" in other hands to sink or swim.  If, if, if...

Mark Jeffries
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[Jim Ellwanger]

Turns out the subject line here is a year off, and this actually went wide on the 49th anniversary of the premiere. I made use of my AMC A- List subscription and watched it so you don't have to...

The big issue is that they took a lot of stuff that happened in the weeks and months leading up to the premiere, along with a few anecdotes that happened at other points during Lorne's original tenure... and set it ALL within the 90 minutes leading up to the premiere going live. So if you've read any one of the books about "SNL" that have come out over the years, or if you know anything about TV production, you will be cringing.

I thought the actors ranged from acceptable to good, although Gabriel LaBelle as Lorne Michaels didn't really capture his unique voice and cadence (you know, which every person who's ever worked with him does an impression of).