Kimberly Matula has been casted as Jane Curtin in Saturday Night, an upcoming film about the beginnings of the legendary Saturday Night Live. Alongside Kim, this movie boosts a cast that includes the likes of Finn Wolfhard, William Dafoe, Dylan O’Brien, J.K. Simmons, Matthew Rhys, & Lamorne Morris.
The first thing director Jason Reitman wants people to know about Saturday Night is that it may be about funny people— writers and performers who unquestionably redefined comedy— but it’s not intended to be a laugh riot. The movie plays out in real time over the course of about 90 minutes, and there are certainly uproarious moments, but even more tense and fraught ones.
The story starts at 30 Rockefeller Center at 10 p.m. on October 11, 1975, and culminates with the first-ever broadcast of Saturday Night Live. What unfolds is a ticking-clock suspense movie. “It’s a thriller-comedy, if you can call that a genre,” Reitman says of the film, which arrives in theaters on October 11th. “I always describe this movie as a shuttle launch, and the question was, ‘Would they break orbit?’”
“Saturday Night” tells not just Michaels’s story, but virtually everyone’s from that opening night cast and crew. “This is about not only the first seven actors, but the writers, the art department, and everybody who came together at the last second to change television,” Reitman says. “What was so unusual about this show was not only that it was live, but the format was unlike anything anyone had ever seen before. You had sketch comedy, you had two musical guests, you had a live band, you had stand-up comedians, you had Andy Kaufman, you had the Muppets, you had a film by Albert Brooks…”
Many of the movie’s central characters were unknowns who became household names: Matt Wood plays the human hurricane that was John Belushi, Dylan O’Brien is a pertinacious (look that word up while you’re at it) Dan Aykroyd, Ella Hunt is the fairy-like Gilda Radner, and Cory Michael Smith achieves armor-piercing levels of sarcasm as Chase. Meanwhile, Emily Fairn’s Laraine Newman layers costumes atop each other so she can hop within seconds into the next sketch, and Kim Matula’s Jane Curtin and Lamorne Morris’s Garrett Morris bond over their shared uncertainty about what this show could be and whether they belong.
Each of the Not Ready for Prime Time Players has a different arc in Saturday Night, but they end up at the same destination—together. “The whole movie is the story of people trying to figure out what their identity is on the show,” Reitman says. “The story we tell is the moment each of these comedians find the way they coalesce as a group, which I think is the reason the show eventually was the success that it is.” The movie also delves into the behind-the-scenes wrangling of the NBC team that brought SNL into America’s living rooms, including Willem Dafoe as imperious NBC executive David Tebet, who must decide whether the show is fit to air live. And Nicholas Podany plays aspiring comic Billy Crystal, who’s heartsick at being cut from the first show just before it aired. “The way it’s always told is that he took the train back home and got there just in time to tell his family not to watch,” Reitman says. “This is a movie where the villain is time. It’s like our Sauron. Our Darth Vader is a clock, and you feel its presence at all times. And Billy loses to the clock.”
Saturday Night originated in the same lifelong curiosity. “Anyone who is a self-described comedy nerd—you’re interested in the weird chemistry of what makes something funny,” he says. endless number of books and articles have been written about SNL, but Saturday Night is not based on any of them. Reitman and cowriter Gil Kenan researched their script by picking the brains of more than 30 original sources. “We interviewed everyone we could find that was alive from opening night,” Reitman says. “Every living cast member, every living writer, people from the art department, costumes, hair and makeup, NBC pages, members of Billy Preston’s band—I mean, anyone we could find.”
I think this is the best way to end this post with the way that ends every SNL cold open, “[…] And this is Saturday night.”