This year's Toronto International Film Festival has been full of high profile films with big flashy budgets and star-studded casts. But none have been more highly anticipated than Jason Reitman's Saturday Night, a film about the opening night performance of what would become Saturday Night Live. Over the span of ninety minutes it revealed the pure, unbridled chaos that went into creating one of the most successful TV shows of all time.
Saturday Night opens on October 11th, 1975, where an ambitious young producer named Lorne Michaels must wrangle up his young, inexperienced cast and crew for opening night of his new show. A show that he still barely has an idea of what it's about. To summarize from the theatrical posters: "The writers are inebriated. The set is on fire. The sound system is fucked. The actors are physically assaulting each other. The crew is in open revolt. They have 90 minutes to figure it all out or the network is pulling the plug." It is an incredibly stressful film, and it does a great job putting you in the disorganized, frazzled mind of Lorne Michaels as he attempts to construct a ninety minute program, ninety minutes before it goes on the air.
The producers are eagerly waiting to see him fail, the actors are already one foot out the door, and the current slate of sketches adds up to three hours. The show was originally greenlit to convey the necessity and inevitability of reruns, and to prove that point, NBC approved a show that they were sure had a 100% rate of failure. Saturday Night tells the downright unbelievable story about the start of what would soon become NBC's most successful program. The script goes a mile a minute, it seems like with every new scene there is something else for the crew to worry about. Audiences in the Princess of Wales Theater in downtown Toronto this week were left hanging on the edge of their seats. It's difficult to feel the anticipation of a story that you know ultimately has a happy ending, but Saturday Night had us all holding our breath.
While there are a lot of things to love about Saturday Night, what deserves perhaps the most praise is the casting. With Gabrielle Labelle as Lorne Michaels, Rachel Sennott as Rosie Shuster, Lamorne Morris as Garrett Morris, JK Simmons as Milton Berle, Matt Wood as an uncanny John Belushi, and countless others. There are even a few casting choices that sound doomed to fail on paper, but make for some truly incredible performances such as Dylan O'Brien as Dan Aykroyd and Cory Michael Smith as Chevy Chase.
Upon arriving early to my screening of Saturday Night at the Princess of Wales theater, I was greeted by a queue that extended nearly two streets over. Combined with all of its hype and attention, no film had more pressure on it at TIFF this year than Saturday Night. Not only was it one of the most highly anticipated releases, it's also based on a true story that a lot of audiences are familiar with. Jason Reitman and company encountered an incredibly big undertaking when making this film, it's not every day you get to make film about a cultural staple like SNL. In a way, the making of this film reflects the story it is trying to tell in terms of pressure and expectations.
I'm someone who personally grew up watching SNL every weekend since I was...way too young to be watching it. When I look back on my earliest memories, SNL was there playing in the background on the living room TV. I was somewhat familiar with how the show got its start, but this film made me realize just how little I really knew. It was a beautiful moment this week to sit in the history Princess of Wales Theater at TIFF and witness the origin story of a show that I can't remember a time without.
The film's fast pace script, great performances, and endless stream of comedy makes Saturday Night a good old fashioned great time at the movies! Be sure to catch it when it opens in theaters in the next few weeks!
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