What’s Fact and What’s Fiction in Saturday Night?
Saturday Night — director Jason Reitman’s dramatized retelling of the 90 minutes leading up to Saturday Night Live’s October 11th, 1975 premiere episode — is often, quite literally, a portrait of insanity. There are llamas, a stage catches fire, you see meltdowns and fistfights and crying and a lot of fake blood. That Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle) survived that night (let alone 50 more years’ worth of similar Saturday nights at Studio 8H) feels like, well, something a movie might make up. So we went and compared some of the film’s key plot points to a few of the definitive SNL texts, including Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller’s Live From New York and Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad’s Saturday Night, to see what’s real history, what’s fiction, and what falls somewhere in between.
After the show’s disastrous dress rehearsal, NBC exec David Tebet nearly pulled Saturday Night Live right before it was about it air.
HALF TRUE: The movie suggests that, until the last possible second, network hands hovered over a button that would throw on a Johnny Carson rerun in place of the first SNL episode. While that detail is fictionalized, the reality of whether the show would air did go pretty much go down to the wire: there was a disastrous dress rehearsal, the stage was still in progress (yes, the production team spent that first night laying real bricks), and NBC fretted about what might come out of George Carlin’s mouth. According to Live From New York, Tebet was mostly concerned with Carlin — his casual attire, his foul mouth — and not what would become SNL itself. As portrayed by Willem Dafoe in the film, Tebet lingers around like a threat, eager to sniff out blood and throw the show out if it can’t live up to expectations.
John Belushi refused to sign his contract.
TRUE: John Belushi (played in the film by Matt Wood) put off signing his contract, skeptical not only about the enterprise of SNL but of being on TV in general. Per Live From New York, an oral history of the show, Belushi finally signed his contract five minutes before the show was due to air, and only because Bernie Brillstein, who soon after became Belushi’s manager, lied and said he’d written it himself. Belushi wasn’t the only contract skeptic, though; Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith) never signed a performer contract, only one for a head writer.
No one could decide how Rosie Shuster should be credited.
NOT TRUE: Michaels and Michaels’s then-wife Rosie Shuster (Rachel Sennott) waffle on how to credit her as a writer on the opening show, specifically whether they should use her last name or his. There’s no mention of this in Live From New York or anywhere else; Shuster appears to only ever have been credited with her own name.
Dan Aykroyd was hooking up with everyone.
TRUE: The Canadian comedian was everyone’s favorite cast member, per both the movie Saturday Night and the show’s core texts. Ever-flirtatious and obviously funny, Aykroyd (Dylan O’Brien) struts around the office with easy-going sex appeal. During the run-up to the first episode and during the early years of the show, Aykroyd was dating Shuster (who was still married, at least on paper, to Michaels), but he was also briefly involved with Laraine Newman (Emily Fairn). Though Saturday Night’s take on Newman makes her out to be something of a doe-eyed yearner, waiting for Aykroyd to throw her a bone, their relationship IRL was much more laid back. In Live From New York, Newman describes him as “adorable and irresistible,” which makes O’Brien’s casting perhaps all the more apt.
Lorne was maybe supposed to do Weekend Update himself.
NOT TRUE: Weekend Update was always a Chevy Chase joke vehicle. Lorne’s sweaty take on the segment seems to have been invented for the film, in order to make Chase’s take seem all the funnier by contrast — not that he needed the help.
The malevolent Milton Berle stalked around Studio 8H being an asshole ahead of the premiere.
NOT TRUE: Berle — or “Mr. Television” — was one of SNL’s early hosts in the 1970s and proved himself so unpleasant to most of the cast and crew that Michaels banned him for years after. But he didn’t actually stalk around the studio, waiting for the show to fail on opening night. (He did flash SNL writer Alan Zweibel during his hosting gig, not Chevy Chase, as the movie suggests.)
The cast didn’t want to do product placement.
NOT TRUE: Dick Ebersol (Cooper Hoffman) runs around Studio 8H trying, against Michaels’s wishes, to get a cast member to hold a Polaroid camera in one of the sketches. While the matter of product placement doesn’t come up in Live From New York, the original cast seemed otherwise game to do commercials. “Belushi did them because he wanted that money, and fast,” said producer Craig Killem.
The sketches “Wolverines,” “Trojan Horse Home Security,” “Hard Hats,” “The French Chef,” and the bee costumes all made it to air.
MOSTLY TRUE: The show’s first-ever sketch — which starred Belushi and writer Michael O’Donoghue (Tommy Dewey) — involved a language lesson known as “Wolverines,” and the show’s core members cast did frequently appear in bee costumes for early parts of the first season to differentiate them from guests and hosts. We see the cast in rehearsal for what would become “Trojan Horse Home Security,” which also aired that first night. But “Hard Hats,” in which the female cast catcalled Aykroyd, didn’t happen until Lily Tomlin hosted a few weeks later. We also get a glimpse of writers Al Franken and Tom Davis figuring out the physics of fake blood for what would eventually become “The French Chef,” a sketch in which Dan Aykroyd played Julia Child having a workplace accident. Backstage easter eggs like the llama, showgirls, and Abe Lincoln were never part of sketches that made it to air so much as they were a running gag that started with Eric Idle-hosted episodes in the late ’70s.
Garrett Morris had an identity crisis.
KINDA TRUE: Per Live From New York, Morris (Lamorne Morris) struggled to find his place among the early SNL cast because he came from the world of theater and not underground comedy. That was more of an ongoing struggle than it was a night-of meltdown, though.
The SNL writers hung Big Bird.
KINDA TRUE: In the movie, Jim Henson (Nicholas Braun) pulls Lorne aside to complain: not only did the SNL writers neglect to write him a sketch for the Muppets, but they also hung a Big Bird plushie in the writer’s room. This did happen — but not before opening night. In general, the SNL writers didn’t like writing for the Muppets due to Henson’s protectiveness over what his fuzzy friends would (or more likely, wouldn’t) say on television.
Lorne met and hired Alan Zweibel at a bar.
KINDA TRUE: In the film, as the minutes tick down ahead of the premiere, Michaels takes himself for a walk and pops into a bar to see a bad older comic (Brad Garrett) stumbling through otherwise strong material written by a nebbish comedian named Alan Zweibel, whom Michaels hires on the spot. This did more or less happen — Michaels saw Zweibel himself tanking, not another comedian using his one-liners — but long before the show went to air.
Neil Levy got too high.
KINDA TRUE: Michaels’s cousin Neil Levy (Andrew Barth Feldman) helped out in production on the early seasons of the show, and in the film, smokes too potent a joint and gets so high he panics and locks himself in a room. This also did happen, according to Levy per Live From New York, just not the night of the film’s premiere. It was Aykroyd, ever the mensch, who got Levy to come out of the room, easing his paranoia with a couple of good jokes.
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