As you may recall, I liked the second half or so of Saturday Night, the movie about the first telecast of the show we now know as Saturday Night Live. The first half, I was too distracted by (a) noticing how much the actors did or did not replicate the real people they were playing and (b) tallying how many times the movie departed from what had really happened or even could have happened that night. I said here, "One of these days when I can do so without paying Amazon Prime another twenty bucks, I intend to watch the movie again with the proper mindset from the beginning."
Last night, I did. I received one of those FYC free links from the studio because they hope if I watch, I'll vote their way for some award. So I watched…with a friend who is too young to have seen the show the first night or even in its first two dozen years. She was born about the time Chris Farley died so after the film, I had to explain to her what the show represented to the world of comedy…and entertainment in general. I kinda like that the film ends the moment Saturday Night Live starts but that doesn't mean a lot if you don't know what it became in the years that followed.
(Then again, my friend didn't sit there comparing that John Belushi to the real John Belushi or that Chevy Chase to the real Chevy Chase…and she doesn't know a lot about how TV shows are made. So maybe she had more of a chance to enjoy the film than I did.)
This time around, I enjoyed it more than I had before because I was resigned to the premise that it was a fantasy in much the same way that Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood didn't pretend to show us what really happened to those Charles Manson disciples. I agree with those who felt Saturday Night could have trimmed out about nine subplots and still had more than enough. If they'd done that, they might have had time to focus a bit on Gilda, Jane and Laraine. (Or was the point that the real show often neglected them so the movie had to?)
I'll try to do this with as few spoilers as I can. There's a moment when NBC exec Dave Tebet (played superbly by Willem Dafoe) is challenging Lorne Michaels (played well by Gabriel LaBelle) to explain what the show is about. If Michaels doesn't give a satisfactory answer, Tebet won't let the show go on and they have contingency plans to instead substitute a Johnny Carson rerun. In real life, Lorne Michaels would not have been put on this spot only minutes before the show is scheduled to go live and he would not be having this discussion with Dave Tebet.
But remember: We've decided this is a fantasy so let's go with it. Michaels delivers a speech that goes roughly like this, which I cut-and-pasted from a copy of the screenplay that's online here. That script differs from the film in a great many ways but this speech is roughly what he said in the film…)
It's an all nighter in the city. It's catching Richard Pryor at a drop in, or finding Paul Simon strumming in the back of a dive bar. It's meeting a girl outside a bodega and getting lucky in a phone booth. It's everything you think is going to happen when you move to the city.
That's kinda poetic but it's largely double-talk. Being honest in real life, Michaels might have said something more like this…
It's NBC's chance to corral a segment of the viewing public that is increasingly becoming the most important audience. They're younger and they have tremendous buying power — the kind advertisers crave. Just as they don't want to listen to their parents' music, they want entertainment made for them. They aren't laughing at Alan King bitching about all those crazy dances "those kids today" do. They're buying comedy records by people like our host tonight, George Carlin, and other comedians like Richard Pryor and Robert Klein I expect to have host in the coming weeks…comics who speak to them. They're buying records by performers like our musical guests this week, Billy Preston and Janis Ian, and Paul Simon, who's on next week.
There's nothing wrong with a Johnny Carson rerun but he's not doing a show for that demographic and it's about time someone did. Even if you don't find it funny, Dave, you're not our target audience. You're 62 years old and you're sounding like the people who told Ed Sullivan he shouldn't put the Beatles on his show. Ed wanted to attract those younger viewers so he put on their music. This show is their music and their comedy.
Now to be fair, in the movie, "Dave Tebet" was right to be worried about putting the show on the air because up until this point in the movie, what he (and we) have seen of it has been largely a disorganized mess. But that's the fiction. The real show was rehearsed within an inch of its life before that Saturday evening. It had two highly-professional musical acts and its host, cocaine aside, was one of the most reliable and experienced comedians in the business…a guy who Carson wasn't afraid to put on or even let guest-host. There were also pre-filmed commercial parodies, a film by Albert Brooks and a bit by the Muppets, who knew what they were doing even if there was no one on the premises who wanted to write for them.
I feel sorry for some of the real people depicted in this film but especially for Dave Tebet, a man I never met. But here's something I do know about him: He was for a time the NBC executive in charge of Sid Caesar's Your Show of Shows. Remember the This Is Your Life parody they did where Carl Reiner drags Sid up out of the audience in the sketch a lot of folks think was the funniest sketch ever on television? This sketch?
Well, when Carl goes into the audience, the man sitting in the aisle seat next to Sid is Dave Tebet. Honest to God, that was Dave Tebet. So he knew all about doing wild comedy on live television…and taking risks…and how quickly a sloppy rehearsal can turn into a wonderful show. (And being at NBC so long, he also knew the value of not destroying a pet project of his boss. Saturday Night Live had NBC president Herb Schlosser solidly behind it. No one below him was going to yank it off the air…but you often need a real bad guy to make a real good story.)
But now here I am…letting Reality creep into this discussion again. That's probably a mistake so I'll just say that I liked the Saturday Night movie the second time more than the first. My friend liked it but she liked it more once I'd explained to her how the series became a turning point for comedy in this country, both on television and in the movies. It'll be streaming and more widely available any day now. If you watch it, don't make the mistake of thinking it's a documentary. And if you do make that mistake, watch it again with the right frame of mind.