Back in the early 1990s, late comic/actor Garry Shandling made TV paydirt with The Larry Sanders Show. This was back when HBO was still considered a hack premium pay cable network that’s only success in original programming was the 1st and 10 and Real Sex. The TV show was about a satire of Hollywood and sitcoms in general as it focused on a fictional late-night talk show called The Larry Sanders Show.
Featuring real celebrities appearing as themselves, sometimes in an unfavorable light, it showed the difficulties of many people having to make a nightly TV show while dealing with famous people who had been reading their own press. Unfortunately, the novelty wore out by the second season and the final episode in the sixth season showing Jim Carrey showering Shandling’s Sanders with praise on-screen then insulting him during a commercial break was basically was as fresh as a joke about airline food.
Jason Reitman was just a young middle school teen when that show premiered but I’m sure his father, Ivan, told him some stories over the years. But I really doubt everything could go as wrong as it did in the 90 minutes or so that fills up the majority run-time of Saturday Night, a fictional look at the first episode of the variety sketch show that would go on to become Saturday Night Live or just SNL.
Part of the problem is that when movie is filmed in “real time,” there’s always countless dialogue drops when someone mentions how much time is left or we see repeated Title Cards telling us or the time. In the first five minutes of Saturday Night, a character says it twice. It was at this point I knew I wasn’t going to like this movie at all.
Reitman directs the script he co-wrote with Gil Kenan which never does capture what would make the long-running show so famous. It goes without saying for those who have seen it that the first episode is pretty terrible to sit through. The jokes don’t work as much as they probably did during cocaine-fueled script readings at 4 a.m.. It’s obvious they’re throwing in too much content to even find its tone and style. The Muppets segments never really worked. Neither did the Albert Brooks short movies. Andy Kaufman with his record player blasting The Might Mouse tune as he stands not speaking is pretty funny but funny because it’s short. And it was never done again.
Nicholas Braun plays Kaufman but does more of a parody. He also plays Jim Henson as a wimpy hippie. Henson was known to have a crazy sense of humor but his style never gelled with the writers of Saturday Night. Mainly, it’s because the writers intentionally sabotaged the sketches by making them bad. Many of the writers and stars of the SNL had wrote for the National Lampoon magazine, National Lampoon Radio Hour, or National Lampoon Lemmings play. This makes it look like everyone was new to each other.
I know some movies takes liberties but every scene of this movie has someone arguing with another person and insulting them. You never do care about what happens, especially since you already know the outcome. Milton Berle (J.K. Simmons) appears briefly as someone who insults Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith). Dick Ebersol (Cooper Hoffman) is constantly berated and insulted especially by NBC network executive David Tebet (Willem Dafoe). I’m guessing this is because many people blame Ebersol for SNL‘s rough patch during the early 1980s.
No, what happened was Lorne Michaels (Garbielle LaBelle) left voluntarily in 1980 as executive producer. The movie makes Michaels and his then wife, Rosie Shuster (Rachell Sennott), the main characters as they rush around Rockefeller Plaza trying to get everything together. Fights break out a lot. Lights fall down during a rehearsal. The union workers, mostly older men, stand around mocking and joking. Every 10 minutes or so, someone comments the show will be quickly canceled after a few weeks.
The feel of Saturday Night was they were doing something that hadn’t been done before which made it legendary. Actually the 1970s saw an explosion of variety shows and specials. The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour was doing risky topical humor many years earlier. Even Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In was pushing the envelope every now and again even though it did appeal to mainstream America. There’s references made to Saturday Night being the show for the counterculture movement but by October 1975, the counterculture movement was ending. Even George Carlin (Matthew Rhys) had lost a lot of his thunder which leads to Michael O’Donoghue (Tommy Dewey) to insult him saying he was riding Lenny Bruce’s coattails as Carlin refuses literally at the 11th hour to appear in a skit.
Yet, Carlin had never really wanted to appear in the skits. This was already discussed. Alan Zweibel (Josh Brenner) wasn’t found by Michaels in a dive bar down the street 10 minutes before airtime. He had been writing skits for months. Also, Chase wasn’t a last-minute replacement for Weekend Update as Michaels flubbed it during rehearsal. Chase and writer/producer Herb Sargent (Tracy Letts), had created the segment while formatting the show.
I don’t know why Reitman has a burr in his ass to make a movie like this. Maybe it’s because several of the comics associated with SNL had a rough beginning with his father, Ivan, as reported in the National Lampoon documentary Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead. Lampoon co-founder Douglas Kenney and Ivan Reitman never got along and Kenney was close friends with Chase. Actually, the movie has the same style of Chris Farley Show “Remember when” mentality that movie A Futile and Stupid Gesture which was about the formation of the magazine. Yet that movie also seemed a mockery of biopics in general as it listed all the inaccuracies.
There’s too much of a cast here. Only Dewey seems to find the real vibe for O’Donoghue, who was known for dark humor and vicious demeanor. O’Donoghue, who probably burned a lot of bridges, appeared in the first skit along with John Belushi and spoke the first dialogue. As of Belushi himself, Matt Wood does a foul parody of the comic. The only take-away you get is that Belushi was an asshole. Yes, he was. But he could still be funny. Seeing Wood recreate Belushi’s skits is more painful than when Michael Chiklis did it in Wired. At least Chiklis tried to capture Belushi’s persona.
Dylan O’Brien does a good Dan Aykroyd impression and I’m certain Aykroyd probably would be upset with the prop master for giving him the wrong model pistol as there would be audience members who would know the difference. Lamorne Morris plays Garrett Morris (no relation) but his whole role is him going up to one person after another questioning why he was cast since he was older and trained at Julliard. Mainly Morris and Jane Curtain (Kim Matula) were the normalcy to balance out the craziness of the rest of the cast and they worked. Comedy works best when it does have some order and seriousness. Here, they are just throwaway characters. The same goes for Laraine Newman (Emily Fairn) and Gilda Radner (Ella Hunt) who giggle mostly like high school girls making googly eyes at the creepy 20-somethings at a restaurant.
Also, Billy Crystal (played here by Nicholas Podany) was never told just before airtime his sketch would be cut if he couldn’t shorten it. Crystal had known this by 8 p.m. as his manager had been discussing it with Michaels and other producers. Yes, facts are sometimes very boring. But at least it’s not as insulting as this. The Crystal character spends most of his scenes wondering over and over if he’s going to be on the show. Of course, Crystal was brought in during the Ebersol years for a season which is considered one of the best. But it feels like Reitman is doing the equivalent of a creep in a bar telling a woman she has a nice ass and then saying, “I meant it as a compliment” when she rightfully gets offended.
There’s so much wrong with this movie, I’m glad I decided to wait until it went to DVD or streaming. I totally agree with the real Chase saying Reitman should be embarrassed. Aykroyd may have liked it but Aykroyd also thought Nothing But Trouble would be a great movie. If nothing more, this is just a love letter to Lorne Michaels. Yet, Labelle is too young to really make him the appropriate mediator between the new kids on the block and veterans.
I got the feeling this is nothing more than a middle finger from a spoiled nepo baby to the people who are responsible for his family’s success and they just don’t want to admit it.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 