THE REAL OPENING NIGHT JITTERS
Reitman’s central conceit for Saturday Night is to allow audiences to peek behind the curtain at the insanity going down in Studio 8H on any given Saturday evening ahead of a new episode of SNL airing. To achieve this seminal night in TV history, Reitman tells us he and his writing partner Gil Kenan “interviewed every living person we could find who was in the room on Oct. 11, 1975. [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 you might be surprised by just how much of what’s in the movie did occur in some form that night…
John Belushi Almost Didn’t Go Live Due to Contract Disputes
One of the running gags/conflicts in the movie centers around Lorne’s increasingly harried attempts to get John Belushi (Matt Wood) to sign his contract literally hours, and then minutes, before he goes on air. This includes eventually threatening him with being unable to perform on live TV without signing the dotted line.
What Really Happened: The real-life Michaels and Belushi had a complicated relationship, beginning with simply getting John to join the cast. Initially, Michaels, who came up in his 20s by producing several comedy TV specials, was not necessarily endeared by Belushi’s holier-than-thou attitude toward television. In James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales’ Live from New York: The Complete Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live, Judith Belushi, the wife of the late comedian, said, “In John’s first interview with Lorne… he said ‘my television has spit all over it.’” That disdain led to Belushi turning down other gigs before SNL, including appearing on The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
Perhaps it was this acrimonious instinct that led NBC to bizarrely pressure Belushi with an ultimatum on the night of the first show to lock into his curiously unsigned contract or not appear in the sketches he rehearsed. In Live from New York, producer and talent agent Bernie Brillstein recalled, “Five minutes before the first show, I came through the backdoor where the food and coffee was, and there was Belushi, sitting on a bench with Craig Kellem, who was the associate producer, and Craig was saying, ‘John, you’ve got to sign your contract. NBC won’t allow you on the air until you do.’”
According to Brillstein, it was he who convinced Belushi to finally sign in the final moment by promising to become his agent, as he was Michaels’. Brillstein even sweetened the pot by promising he helped craft the contract, which wasn’t true. “At the time, I didn’t know how great Belushi was, so I just said yes to get him to sign the goddamned contract.”