‘You can take the temperature of America by watching that show’ – The Irish Times

The release of Better Man, the monkey-centric biopic of Robbie Williams, has led to much debate about pop culture that cannot cross the Atlantic. They don’t know Robbie. We couldn’t care less about Grand Funk Railroad or Dave Matthews Band.

You could reasonably place Saturday Night Live as the most conspicuous American television phenomenon that the Irish and British just don’t understand. To be fair, efforts to broadcast the show here have only been sporadic. But when clips do come through, they are generally met with confusion. This broad, self-congratulatory guff? Is this an institution?

But no one can dispute that as a source of American comedy talent the show has no equal. Dan Aykroyd, Bill Murray and Gilda Radner in the 1970s? Eddie Murphy, Billy Crystal and Julia Louis-Dreyfus in the 1980s? Will Ferrell, Mike Myers and Adam Sandler in the 1990s? Who knows? The people who impersonated Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson in the infamous 2023 red carpet sketch may yet become media giants.

All of which goes some way to explaining why, as the series prepares to celebrate its 50th anniversary, Jason Reitman, the versatile director of Juno and Up in the Air, brings us a kinetic, dizzying recreation of the behind-the-scenes mayhem of the first broadcasting. .

Saturday Night stars Gabriel LaBelle as Lorne Michaels, the show’s creator. Elsewhere we see versions of Aykroyd, John Belushi, Jim Henson, Chevy Chase and George Carlin.

“Until this show, Saturday night was considered probably the worst slot on television. It was assumed that there was no way young people would organize their evenings watching television. The idea was that on Saturday night you were out, ” says Reitman.

“With the birth of the show, young people organized their Saturday nights around being in front of a television at 11:30 p.m. Not just because they liked the show, but because they felt they saw themselves there.”

Reitman, although born two years after the first broadcast, in October 1975, has a close personal connection to the project. The son of Ghostbusters and Kindergarten Cop director Ivan Reitman, he grew up with Murray, Aykroyd and other SNL alumni knocking around the house.

In recent years, Reitman has taken over his father’s most popular creation with titles such as Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire. Dylan O’Brien creates a largely generous portrayal of Aykroyd in the new film.

“Yeah, it’s funny because obviously I grew up with Dan Aykroyd,” Reitman says. “I feel like I know him very well. I directed him in my last film. I don’t know why, but you can know someone at 70 and still think of them as a 23-year-old – as a completely different person . I know Dan Aykroyd. But when I think about 23-year-old Dan Aykroyd, it still feels like someone I’m trying to understand.”

There is an interesting Canadian connection to all of this. Ivan Reitman, who died in 2022, was born in what was then Czechoslovakia before moving with his Jewish parents – his mother survived Auschwitz – to Canada as a refugee when he was four years old. His son was born in Montreal, but spent a good part of his growing up years in Los Angeles. Lorne Michaels, writer and broadcaster before creating Saturday Night Live, was born and raised in Toronto. Aykroyd is Canadian, as were later cast members such as Myers, Phil Hartman and Norm Macdonald. What do we make of this?

“Look at the original Saturday Night Live cast—the writers, the musicians—and it’s Torontonians and people from Chicago. The improv troupe (in Chicago) is called Second City. There’s a reason it’s called that. There’s always been an eye on New York, and when you’re not in New York City, you can’t help but say, ‘Why can’t I be in New York City?’ There is a sense of a little brother attitude,” says Reitman.

Reitman is in Toronto as we speak. His first short film played at the city’s film festival 25 years ago. Thank You for Smoking, his debut film, premiered there in 2005. In 2007, he starred in Juno, his breakthrough hit about a young woman negotiating an unexpected pregnancy, en route to four Oscar nominations and a win for Diablo Cody’s screenplay.

So he must still feel Canadian, right? “I really do. My parents were both Canadian. I feel like they have Canadian sensibilities. They have a Canadian sense of humor. I’ve come back and shot three movies up here and it always feels like home,” he says. .

So back to the enigmatic phenomenon that was (and is) Saturday Night Live.

Daniel de Visé’s recent book about The Blues Brothers — originally an SNL skit with Belushi and Aykroyd — makes the point, echoed in Reitman’s film, that the cast were among the first people in television who had grown up with the medium. It was in their glands. They no longer considered it a stranger in the living room. They felt more comfortable tearing up the newly established conventions.

( The Blues Brothers by Daniel de Visé – Dismissive celebration of a confusing American comedy phenomenonOpens in new window )

“Up until that point, there had been a slow evolution of vaudeville through radio and into television,” says Reitman. “The kind of variety shows you saw on TV were representative of that. It was an old-fashioned sense of humor. Woodstock was when a generation claimed that music had changed.

“The early 1970s in cinema saw the generation that said movies would be different. When you saw The Graduate, when you saw Shampoo, when you saw Harold and Maude – or Easy Rider or Five Easy Pieces – you knew you, that you listened to a new generation.

“The television moment is Saturday Night Live. You have a group of people in their early to mid-20s who said, ‘There should be something on television that actually looks and sounds like us.'”

It comes out in the film. The early 1970s was when the generation gap really hit. It was when the baby boom mob began to seize power and shake off the cultural torpor of the 1950s.

It was a close thing with SNL. As Reitman’s film tells it—in something like real time—Michaels was forced to furiously improvise on a show the network didn’t really want. We’re told bosses had a repeat of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson ready to run if the apparently chaotic production failed to air.

What did Michaels, still running SNL at 80, make of Reitman’s plan to turn the first night into a movie?

“He was kind of tickled by the idea, honestly,” says Reitman. “I think he enjoyed the concept. If I told him I was making a movie about the entire history of Saturday Night Live, or the year leading up to its creation, he probably would have been bored. Lorne Michaels is a man without a hindsight. But he really loved this concept of relating the 90 minutes to showtime. It was about the urgency.”

You can’t blame Saturday night for the urgency. The film was shot on 16 mm in cinéma-vérité style. Eric Steelberg’s camera races down corridors and up stairs to capture miked actors already deep in furious conversation. Chevy Chase has a confrontation with Milton Berle. John Belushi is never where he should be. Henson, the creator of The Muppets, doesn’t seem to know what he’s doing there. I bet there is good planning in this disorder. There are fewer accidents than we might assume.

“Absolutely. This is a cinematic journey that probably started with me on The Front Runner,” he says of his underrated 2018 film about Gary Hart’s run for the US presidency, “and my love of 1970s cinema and directors like Michael Ritchie .I’ve always loved filmmakers who can create organized chaos on screen. And then you can make it appear chaotic effort in it. I’ve tried to train myself how to do it.”

( Paul Mescal on Saturday Night Live review: Gladiator II star spiders America’s bizarre view of Ireland )

It is a remarkable story. So much popular culture in the 1960s and 1970s felt ephemeral at the time, but ended up stubbornly sticking around decade after decade. Saturday Night is about the challenge of surviving until the next morning. As it happened, SNL continued through the disco years, Reaganomics, the Monica Lewinsky embarrassments, and Florida’s hanging chad and deep into the current century. It has become the establishment. If you live long enough, someone will erect a statue in your name. How have they managed it?

“Every part of the show felt representative of their generation,” he says. “And then Lorne was able to evolve with the times, decade after decade. The Adam Sandler-Mike Myers cast. The Will Ferrell cast. The Kristen Wiig cast. Each cast has found a way to represent the identity of the existing generation, whether it generation was nastier, more tender, or more meme-based. You can take the temperature of America by watching that show.”

Reitman is a difficult filmmaker to pin down. After the early critical success of Thank You for Smoking, he developed a reputation for well-made mainstream films that dealt with a topic of the day. The first talked about the tobacco lobby. (Good title, you’ll agree.) Juno took such a nuanced line on teenage pregnancy that no one could quite tell if it was coming from a conservative or liberal perspective. (There was no reason for it to be either.)

It could be argued that some of his best films slipped under the radar. Tully, from 2018, starring Charlize Theron as a stressed-out new mother, and Young Adult, from 2011, with the same actor as a distraught writer, were both sharp and moving—thanks in large part to scripts by Diablo Cody—but neither of the films were found. the audience it deserved.

“It’s an extraordinary thing to find another creative person — someone as brilliant as Diablo — who sees the world the same way,” he says. “When you find those people, stick with them.”

He must have regretted those who got away.

“You can swing for the money or you can swing for the fences,” he says. “And I like to make different films. I like to make films that are cheaper so I can try things that really challenge me.

“When I think about Tully and Young Adult, I have no regrets. I’m going to do two movies with Charlize Theron. I’m really proud that I got them done. I am proud to be able to tell those stories. Would I love more people to see them? Yes.”

It is an unforgiving business.

Saturday Night is in cinemas from Friday 31 January