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The 1960s and early 1970s ushered in a sea change in the American comedy scene. Acts by the likes of Bob Hope and Jerry Lewis grew stale; their material, often focused on marriage and stereotypes, failed to excite the maturing baby boomer population. New faces, including Phyllis Diller, Richard Pryor and George Carlin, told radical jokes about sex, race and politics in clubs and theaters across the United States, as well as on best-selling albums. But this seismic shift had yet to be reflected on television sets. “Television was still a safe format, and it was very much trapped in its earliest days, when it had transitioned from radio,” says filmmaker Gil Kenan.
Enter “Saturday Night Live,” the sketch comedy variety show that launched a cultural revolution and the careers of Eddie Murphy, Will Ferrell, Kristen Wiig and Bill Murray, to name but a few of the hallowed actors who have worked their magic at Studio 8H, 30 Rockefeller Plaza.
Since its debut almost 50 years ago, on October 11, 1975, “SNL” has aired more than 950 episodes. It’s difficult to imagine just how different the television landscape was when the show premiered. That was the challenge facing Kenan, who co-wrote Saturday Night, a new movie that details the true story of the 90 minutes before the very first episode of the show, with writer-director Jason Reitman. The pair’s script focuses on “SNL” creator and producer Lorne Michaels (played by Gabriel LaBelle) as he tries to control a rambunctious gaggle of writers and comedians while appeasing network executives who have little faith in the show’s success.
“‘Saturday Night Live’ was the jolt of a new generation that was going to war against this institution and was trying to force something new on it,” says Kenan. The film’s script captures that thrill of something new, balancing historical accuracy with cinematic drama, all against the backdrop of larger-than-life characters. To mark Saturday Night’s arrival in theaters across the U.S., here’s a rundown of how “SNL” came to be five decades ago.
The origins of “Saturday Night Live”
“SNL” owes its start to Johnny Carson’s desire for more time off. In 1974, the talk show host asked NBC to air reruns of “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson” on weeknights instead of weekends, as the network had been doing for years. That way, he could have some extra days off during the week.
NBC President Herbert Schlosser approached Dick Ebersol, the vice president of late-night programming at the network, about creating a live show that could air at 11:30 p.m. on Saturday nights. “Schlosser wanted to try something new in that period,” says Doug Hill, co-author of Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live, a 1985 book that chronicles the first ten years of the show. “He wanted a show that could be like ‘The Today Show’ or ‘The Tonight Show,’ something that had the chance to be on for a long time.”
It was Ebersol who decided to recruit Michaels for the gig. Born and raised in Toronto, Michaels had enjoyed some success in television, starring in and producing the variety show “The Hart & Lorne Terrific Hour,” which ran on Canadian television in 1970 and 1971. Michaels was well aware of the comedy community across the U.S.: Second City in Chicago, the Groundlings in Los Angeles and the Proposition in Boston were popular in their respective cities. “All the clubs spoke the same language and had the same attitude toward conventional network television, which was that it was horrible,” says Hill. “It had nothing to say to them and was completely dishonest.”
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After producing television comedy specials for actress Lily Tomlin in Los Angeles, Michaels found himself frustrated and angry about what he wasn’t allowed to do on the air. “From Lorne’s point of view, and the point of view of the comedy underground scene, they couldn’t tell the truth on television,” says Hill. All Michaels had to do was look across the pond to Great Britain, where “Monty Python’s Flying Circus,” with its mix of absurd scenarios, daring sight gags, sketches without obvious punchlines and unpredictable jokes, had enjoyed great success, to grasp that folks stateside were missing out.
When Ebersol approached him, Michaels explained that he “wanted to make a television show for the generation that grew up on television,” says Hill. More than that, he wanted to bring a modern attitude and point of view to the medium, which had never really been done before in a consistent way. Michaels moved television into a new phase, emerging as “a bridge figure in the sense that he totally understood the comedy underground scene and was a part of it, but he could also speak to the network in a smart and slick way that they could swallow,” Hill adds. “He wouldn’t scare them.”
Over three weeks in late 1974, Ebersol and Michaels decided to make a variety show that appealed to 18- to 34-year-olds by mixing comedy sketches, political satire and musical performances.
But the pair ran into trouble almost immediately. Michaels and Ebersol realized they needed a budget of $180,000 per episode—around $30,000 more than they’d expected. NBC wanted to be even more frugal, saying the budget couldn’t be higher than $134,600, as the network didn’t expect the show to generate much advertising revenue, and it was already risking losing the $20,000 in profit that it earned from airing Carson reruns every weekend. While the showrunners and NBC agreed on the $134,600 figure, each episode of “SNL” ultimately cost more than that.
Some NBC executives doubted that the show would be engaging enough to keep an audience of young adults at home to watch it on a Saturday night. It was Michaels who charmed and convinced Schlosser to give “SNL” a chance. In a meeting, Michaels repeatedly made the NBC president laugh, then said he’d have the right formula by episode ten. Schlosser replied, “I’ll watch show ten,” silencing the naysayers.
Michaels spent the next ten months casting the show, securing performers like Chevy Chase, Jane Curtin and Dan Aykroyd, and lining up the first “SNL” writers’ room, which included Anne Beatts, Al Franken and Michael O’Donoghue.
Even if Michaels didn’t scare the higher-ups at NBC, as depicted in Saturday Night, the rest of the “SNL” cast did terrify them the closer the show got to making its debut. In the film, NBC executive David Tebet (portrayed by Willem Dafoe) is so unconvinced by the disastrous dress rehearsal that he almost doesn’t allow “SNL” to air, while comedian John Belushi (Matt Wood) refuses to sign his contract because he doesn’t want other comedians to see that he’s on television—that’s just how unpopular the medium had become with comics. Both of these are (mostly) true stories.
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Bringing “Saturday Night Live” to the silver screen
Reitman and Kenan, who previously co-wrote Ghostbusters: Afterlife and Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, started discussing how to tell the story of the first night of “SNL” during the Covid-19 pandemic. “We know the extraordinary effort required to bring anything to life in an entertainment space, let alone anything new,” says Kenan. “It was particularly personal for us to write about the battle to make something new, especially in real time.”
After reading every bit of material they could find about the show’s first season, the co-authors began to have conversations with the people who were actually there. Reitman grew up with some of them: His father, Ivan Reitman, directed “SNL” alums Aykroyd and Murray in multiple films, including Ghostbusters.
“We kind of pitched Lorne the idea of the movie that we were hoping to make,” Kenan recalls. “Lorne thought it was interesting and in his own very guarded … way gave us his blessing.” At that point, Kenan and Reitman conducted even more interviews with anyone and everyone who was in the building that night. After they secured Michaels’ approval, most people were more than willing to talk to them.
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Ultimately, the pair spoke to “more than 40 and less than 50” people over the course of a few months, Kenan estimates. This process saw them talk to every living cast member, crew member and writer who was involved in the first episode of “SNL.” Kenan calls creating the film “probably the most journalistic writing process that either of [them] had ever done.”
When quizzed whether this means that every moment in Saturday Night is fact-checked and double-sourced, Kenan can’t help but laugh. “The good thing about being storytellers, rather than actual journalists, is that we have no code of ethics whatsoever and zero journalistic standards,” he says.
Unsurprisingly, the cast and crew told the co-authors competing narratives. “Everyone had slightly different perspectives on that night,” Kenan says. “We used these multiple points of view as fuel for our narrative engine. That really allowed us to dive into the chaotic nature of what it was like to put this thing together in the few minutes they had before it went live. It just added combustion to this lively narrative.”
When it came to casting Saturday Night, the last thing Kenan and Reitman wanted to do was offer an impersonation of each legendary performer. “The idea was to find actors who could really capture that one piece of essence that is required for this movie,” Reitman tells Screen Rant. For Gilda Radner, that meant finding an actress (Ella Hunt) who could capture the comedian’s willingness to sacrifice anything about herself to make someone else feel better. For Chase (Cory Michael Smith), they looked for someone able to embody a man with a huge ego who needed to be taken a down a peg or two.
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For Garrett Morris, the filmmakers looked for an actor who could relate to his identity struggles as the first Black cast member of “SNL,” a performer previously known more for his dramatic work than his comedic chops. As actor Lamorne Morris (who shares a last name with his character but is not related to him) tells the Hollywood Reporter, “I have a very similar walk in my career. I was always called ‘the Black dude from that show.’ For a long time, people didn’t know my name. They just knew, ‘You’re the Black dude.’ So I identified with that for sure.”
Ultimately, Kenan says he and Reitman decided to squeeze stories that happened in the days leading up to the first show, as well as incidents that happened in the weeks and months that followed, into the movie’s 90-minute time frame. “We were trying to create an impression of the experience, vibe and energy of what it was like putting the show on, rather than trying to be too literal about the events that transpired,” he explains.
Several of the movie’s dramatic moments—including set designer Neil Levy getting too high to work; the writers hanging a Big Bird stuffed toy by the neck for their own amusement, much to Jim Henson’s fury; and comedian Milton Berle treating the cast terribly—happened during the making of the show’s first season, just not in the lead-up to the first episode as Saturday Night depicts.
Despite the cast’s antics and the fact that most of its members had never been on television before, all of them “knew their stuff because they’d been performing in the comedy underground for years,” says Hill. “They were talented and funny as hell. Lorne called them ‘enlightened amateurs.’ It wasn’t some sloppy group of people who messed up all the time. They delivered.”
Michaels also charmed the network, helping to paper over these issues and get “SNL” on the air, says Hill. “Lorne is an incredible talker. He could explain the show and weave a spell over the network executives. They’d come out saying, ‘Well, I’m not really sure what he was talking about specifically, but it sounded great.’ He was so impassioned and so determined after he’d had the bad experiences with network television in Los Angeles.”
While Michaels felt he would need ten episodes to find the right formula for “SNL,” Hill believes the cast and crew landed on the correct combination with the fourth episode, hosted by actress Candice Bergen. In that episode, the cast featured in most of the sketches, as opposed to the second episode, which included 11 musical performances by host Paul Simon. The episode was also less experimental: It was the first one in which the cast appeared with the host at the end to wave goodnight. “That’s still the structure of the show now,” Hill says. “Before then, they were overbooking the show with guest comedians and musical guests. But since episode four, it has been the same.”
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The counterculture audience that “SNL” was aiming to attract had been so turned off of television that it took several seasons for them to discover there was actually a show that spoke to them. “The contrast between what ‘Saturday Night Live’ was doing was so dramatic from what had been on television before,” says Hill. “By the third season, the show had become a hit. By the fourth and fifth seasons, it was one of the most profitable shows on NBC.”
Over the past 49 years, “SNL” hasn’t just repeatedly launched the careers of comedians, actors and bands. It has skewered politicians and helped viewers make sense of that week’s news and current events in a funny and engaging manner. As Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller write in Live From New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live, the show has become a “keepsake to be handed down from generation to generation.”
While Kenan admits that it has been terrifying to show the film to the cast and crew of that premiere episode, he says their reactions have been heartwarming. “They have all found things about the film that, for them, are incredibly evocative,” he adds. “For many, it’s been emotional. Even though they’ve gone on to have such incredible careers, this was still their first bright burst. It holds a special place in their lives.”
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