There are a lot of great glimpses of young John Belushi, George Carlin and Chevy Chase (“tripping over his penis”), but the heart of Sony’s trailer Thursday for Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night, about the first broadcast of SNL, is Gabriel LaBelle’s Lorne Michaels. You’ll remember LaBelle as the young Steven Spielberg in The Fabelmans.
In the lead-up to the first airing of Saturday Night Live, we see the early days of Michaels as his battles Rockefeller Center security to get up into elevator to Studio 8H, argues with Dick Ebersol (Cooper Hoffman) over the show’s aesthetic, and locks horns with NBC programming suit David Tebet (played by Willem Dafoe).
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“You haven’t locked the script, your crew is in open rebellion,” Dafoe’s NBC suit tells Michaels.
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Ebersol tries to get Michaels to punt and go with the dress rehearsal. Michaels will have no business with that. “They want you to fail,” Ebersol tries to rationalize to Michaels.
“NBC is lucky to have something as relevant as this show!” exclaims Michaels.
The movie recounts the final 90 minutes leading up to the first airing of SNL on Oct. 11, 1975 at 11:30 p.m.
There’s plenty to relish here from Matthew Rhys’ F-bombing tirade as Carlin, to Nicholas Braun’s sublime deadpan portrayal of Jim Henson complaining about how the late-night sketch show’s writing staff “tied a belt around Big Bird’s neck and hung him from my dressing room door.”
Sony is super-charged about the movie, and has set an October 11 theatrical release date.
Pic also stars Rachel Sennott, Cory Michael Smith, Ella Hunt, Dylan O’Brien, Emily Fairn, Matt Wood, Lamorne Morris, Kim Matula, Finn Wolfhard, Andrew Barth Feldman, Kaia Gerber, Tommy Dewey and Oscar winner J.K. Simmons.
Here’s the first poster: