Saturday Night (2024)

We thoroughly enjoyed this dramatization, in real time, of 90 minutes before the first episode of Saturday Night Live in October 1975. Gabriel La Belle is an adorable Lorne Michaels and has sweet chemistry with Rachel Sennott, who plays his then-wife Rosie Shuster. For those who don't know, Michaels has been producing SNL since that first show and Shuster was a writer on it for the first thirteen years.

The enormous cast features Cory Michael Smith as Chevy Chase, Lamorne Morris as Garrett Morris (no relation, although Lamorne used to say there was when he was a kid), Nicholas Braun as both Jim Henson and Andy Kaufman (the copious trivia tells me that Braun was tapped to play the second role of Kaufman after another actor had to drop out), Cooper Hoffman as executive producer Dick Ebersol, Michael Rhys as George Carlin, Tommy Dewey as Michael O'Donoghue, Willem Dafoe as network exec Dave Tebet, and J.K. Simmons as Milton Berle in a scene that was apparently taken from a much later event.

Jason Reitman, whose late father Ivan directed movies starring many of the SNL Not Ready for Prime Time Players, keeps the action tense as we get closer and closer to 11:30. He co-wrote the script with Gil Kenan and they apparently shot many versions––following different characters and editing them together later. Shout out to editors Nathan Orloff and Shane Reid.

Jon Batiste's original (and adapted from traditional SNL riffs) soundtrack can be streamed on Apple Music. He recorded the score live on the soundstage with several original SNL musicians and appears on screen as Billy Preston playing Nothing from Nothing, which is among the many songs to be heard. Another is musician Naomi McPherson performing beautifully At Seventeen as Janis Ian.

After we watched the movie we watched that premiere episode with our subscription to Peacock. Not every sketch holds up but, hey, they can't all be winners. There have been 978 episodes, including one airing tonight!

LaBelle was last blogged for The Fabelmans, Sennott for Bottoms, Lamorne Morris for Game Night (before he was so good in sixteen episodes of Woke and seven of Fargo), Braun for Zola, Hoffman for Licorice Pizza, Rhys for It's a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, Dafoe for Kinds of Kindness, Simmons for Being the Ricardos, Reitman for The Front Runner, and Batiste for acting in The Color Purple and for scoring Soul.

Smith played one of Julianne Moore's character's children in May December and I particularly liked Dewey in 44 episodes of Casual, among his dozens of credits. Kenan is new to me, as is Reid, and Orloff co-edited Plan B

Rotten Tomatoes' critics aren't quite ready for prime time, averaging 78%, while its audiences are more so at 84. We rented it on December 7 from Apple TV.