I've received several messages about the Saturday Night movie. Here's one from Graeme Burk…
Long time reader, probably first time commenter…Your opinion of Saturday Night pretty much tracks with mine. While I don't have any TV industry experience, I went through a real deep dive about the history of early SNL 20 years ago or so and read everything about it… and I have probably (mostly by accident) seen the first episode of Saturday Night Live 7 or 8 times. I was really skeptical about seeing the film and its depiction of the first SNL broadcast.
But while I completely agree with everyone that the correlation to what actually happened on October 11, 1974 is less than 15%, I loved it. It's brilliantly shot and realized and absolutely captures the chaos and overall feel of "being there" in the early years that was described through books like Live From New York. The performances are brilliant and totally capture all the principals (every line Tommy Dewey says as Michael O'Donoghue is gold). By the end credits (which are done like the original opening titles of SNL with the old version of the theme) I was cheering — even though nothing in that climax happened at all in real life. Saturday Night might well be my favourite film of 2024 and I certainly wasn't expecting that going in.
Yeah, it won me over too. And I found myself wondering if somewhere, in some ethereal plane, Michael O'Donoghue isn't watching and realizing that he'd badly underestimated people like George Carlin and Jim Henson back then. Or that Milton Berle isn't wondering, "Don't the people of 2024 know anything about me other than that I had a big dick and liked to show it off?"
Some of the historical distortions were a bit too distorted for me — like Franken and Davis trying to insert a new, never-rehearsed or blocked (or I think, even written) sketch into a seriously-overlong live show twenty minutes before air. Or Lorne deciding minutes before air to give Weekend Update to Chevy Chase. Or Lorne hiring Alan Zweibel and using one of his jokes at the last minute. Or Lorne waiting as long as he did in the film to decide which segments to drop. Or — well, you can list those things just as well as I can.
But I liked the way it all came together, semi-fictional though it may have been, in the end. And I liked that the movie didn't hit us over the head telling us about the seismic shift that occurred in show business as a result of that program. The film presumed we knew all that. I would have liked to have seen more of the ladies and less of Lorne's wife trying to decide what her last name was…and I suspect the real Lorne Michaels was a lot more in command that night than the film depicted.
Still, it's the best movie I've seen this year…which is not much of a compliment, I know. Because I think it's the only movie I've seen this year.