Given Chevy Chase’s infamous sense of humor—and much discussed camaraderie around colleagues—that’s got to be high praise, right? Reitman just chuckles, “Yeah, I know. That’s like a 10.”
Played by Cory Michael Smith in Saturday Night as an unflappable ego ready for stardom, Chase is presented as the one “Player” who arrived at 30 Rockefeller Center fully formed. He’s also just one in a legion of iconic personalities boiled down to their essence in a tight 109 minutes. The concept of the movie is unrelenting, too, with Saturday Night being set entirely in the 90 minutes leading up to and then through the first SNL sketch in history, which was broadcast on Oct. 11, 1975. According to Reitman, the film has more than 80 speaking roles, about half of them with individual arcs or journeys that need to be fulfilled in the breathless grind of live television.
Reitman tells us he never dreamed of the film being anything other than a movie presented in real-time, with the intent to capture some of the pressure Reitman says occurs every Saturday at NBC’s famed Studio 8H (Reitman himself worked as a guest writer in the 2000s on the series).
“My writing partner Gil Kenan and I actually interviewed every living person we could find who was in the room on Oct. 11, 1975,” Reitman says. “So [we] spoke to Lorne Michaels, we spoke to Rosie Shuster, we spoke to Dick Ebersol, we spoke to all the writers, and all the cast. People in the production design, costume design, members of Billy Preston’s band, we really tried to gather as many stories as we could. And this movie Saturday Night is like a weaving together of their memories.”
While knowing many of these people throughout his life and career made the material approachable to Reitman—the director says, “I think it was probably easier for me to portray Dan Aykroyd because I knew him already as a person, and I could call him on the phone and ask him questions”—it was the research that made him fully appreciate the scale of SNL’s success. For instance, one subplot in the movie about Lorne Michaels, the SNL executive producer and co-creator, wanting to be the host of Weekend Update was based on Michaels telling Reitman and Kenan a story they’d never heard: Michaels thought he could be one of the cast until he realized belatedly he couldn’t be a producer and one of the kids. He was “Dad now,” in Reitman’s words. Even so, the show reflected an inflection point in youth culture.
“SNL was the Woodstock moment of television,” Reitman argues. “What Woodstock was to music, what The Graduate and Five Easy Pieces, and Harold and Maude were to cinema, SNL was to television. It was the first time you had a show that reflected the generation that was coming up, that grew up on TV, that wanted to see themselves on TV… It’s really a movie about a generational shift, about the young people who ripped television out of the hands of the elders.”