It was October 11, 1975, 10:00 pm, New York, New York, 30 Rockefeller Center, NBC Studio 8H. Ninety minutes to showtime. A group of twenty-somethings, led by an equally as young Canadian-American, Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle; The Fablemans), premiered on a late-night, sketch comedy show that eventually became Saturday Night Live! Or SNL for short. While NBC expected the show to fail immediately, SNL will instead celebrate its 50th anniversary this coming fall and director Jason Reitman offered up his tribute to the half-a-century-lasting show in 2024 with his feature film, Saturday Night. Sony Pictures will release this fictional view of the behind-the-scenes preparations for that first episode of SNL for purchase on Blu-ray on January 7, 2025.
An NBC page (Finn Wolfhard; Stranger Things) stands outside the NBC studios offering free tickets to the opening night show of Saturday Night, when suddenly Lorne Michaels appears on the sidewalk, apparently looking for something or someone. Spotting Andy Kaufman (Nicholas Braun; Succession) in the back of a cab, Michaels grabs him and heads back inside. Dick Ebersol (Cooper Hoffman; Licorice Pizza) ushers them both into an elevator while asking Michaels to describe what Saturday Night is so he can explain it to the NBC heads. Stepping out onto the 8th floor, without getting an answer, Dick is sucked into a vortex of chaos as teamsters are working, wardrobe is fitting costumes, and someone is talking about a llama in the freight elevator. And so it (whatever "it" may be) begins...
What makes Saturday Night work most effectively is the ensemble cast. Actors portray real actors, not only in looks, but in speech patterns and mannerisms, and nail it 95% of the time. Besides LaBelle, Braun, and Hoffman, there is Rachel Sennott (Bodies Bodies Bodies) as Rosie Shuster (Michaels' wife and a writer on the show), Cory Michael Smith (May December) as Chevy Chase, Ella Hunt (Anna and the Apocalypse) as Gilda Radner, Dylan O'Brien (Teen Wolf) as Dan Aykroyd, Emily Fairn (Black Mirror) as Laraine Newman, Matt Wood (Difficult People) as John Belushi, and Lamorne Morris (New Girl) as Garrett Morris. Throw in cameos by J.K. Simmons (Red One) as Milton Berle and Willem Dafoe (Spider-Man) as NBC Executive David Tebet, and you have one hell of a cast who all bring their A-game.
The 1080p video quality is what you would expect, even with the movie shot on a 16mm film camera with Kodak 200T stock to be as authentic to the period as possible. The colors are mostly muted, but some strong lighting adds pops here and there. The DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 captures the essence of the frenetic nature of the 8th floor that night with background noises everywhere (and I mean EVERYWHERE) and cast members speaking and shouting over one another from all angles.
The combo pack comes with the Blu-ray Disc and digital download plus 35 minutes of extras, which are only slightly disappointing as it would have been nice to not only get cast and crew thoughts about their characters and the film but also to have a featurette with the living original SNL cast members' thoughts about that night and the film. The extras include: Filmmaker Audio Commentary, The Making of the Movie of the Show That Rarely Made It, The Look of Saturday Night, Super 8 from Studio 8H, Creating Comedy Icons (Short featurettes on creating the cast, including Chevy Chase, Gilda Radner, John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Jane Curtain, Garrett Morris, and Laraine Newman), John Batiste: Scoring Live, and Sony Previews.
Saturday Night is a loving tribute to the "not ready for prime time players" and the little show nobody thought would "make it" to air. The film is a fictionalized version of what possibly occurred that night and the show that will go down in television history, and that shows no sign of stopping anytime soon (in fact, I'm pretty sure it will most likely, along with the cockroaches, survive a nuclear explosion). The movie has so many moving parts that you need to watch it several times just to catch everything going on in each scene, however, sometimes all those moving parts are also a little bit of its downfall. "Too much of a good thing can sometimes be a bad thing."
Grade: B
