FUNNY BUSINESS

NEARLY 50 YEARS AGO, SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE LAUNCHED A REVOLUTION THAT CHANGED COMEDY, TELEVISION, AND THE MOVIES. NOW DIRECTOR JASON REITMAN HAS RE-CREATED THE CHAOTIC HOURS BEFORE SNL'S FIRST EPISODE. LIVE FROM NEW YORK, IT'S 1975!

- ANTHONY BREZNICAN

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 11. “I always describe this movie as a shuttle launch, and the question was, ‘Would they break orbit?’ ”

Nearly 50 years later, we know that the show will go on, of course, but watching the desperate scramble is unnerving nonetheless. Chaos reigns, egos clash, drugs flow, passions erupt, and pressure builds until everyone involved seems ready to feed one another’s fingertips to the wolverines. (Google that classic SNL joke if you don’t know it.) At the center of this maelstrom is the young producer Lorne Michaels, played by Gabriel LaBelle. The actor, who was 21 when he filmed it, was nine years younger than Michaels was when SNL started, which adds to the sense that the character is in over his head. “We meet Lorne as he’s still forming. He is a genius, and he has a vision beyond anyone else there—and anyone his age. It’s a lot for an actor to carry,” Reitman says. “In this movie, everyone gets to kind of screw around except for Gabe, who has to be the metronome.”

This movie’s version of Michaels is not the dapper, seemingly unflappable TV maestro viewers have come to know. Reitman consulted with Michaels during preproduction but dissuaded LaBelle from trying to talk to him beforehand.