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A Box Office Flop -- But Boomer Nostalgia and Likeable (SPOILERS ON THE CAST)

posted a month ago by roger1 (3612)
6 replies | jump to latest

I chose to go to the theater to see "Saturday Night." Not only have I watched the show off and on for the entire 50 years, but I've read a number of the books about its making(notably an "oral history" by Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller) and its sort of like all the books about the making of Hitchcock movies that I read -- one feels one KNOWS these people, and just as I felt I was "right there in the room with Hitchcock and the screenwriter" writing Psycho, I felt like I was "right there backstage at 30 Rock watching Lorne Michaels and his team make SNL." In both cases , I WASN'T of course -- I would be kept out by security guards if I tried. But good journalistic writing PUTS one there...

...and "Saturday Night" (largely using anecdotes from the Shales/Allen book) is like living the reality just like...wait for it...."Hitchcock" (about the making of Psycho) was in 2012 and "The Offer" (about the making of The Godfather) was a coupla years ago.

Both "The Offer" and now "Saturday Night" are better than "Hitchcock" for one key reason: while Universal and the Hitchcock Estate wouldn't let Fox use much of ANYTHING about the making of Psycho in THAT movie, "The Offer" and "Saturday Night" give the makers free reign to use EVERYTHING about the making of The Godfather and the first SNL (yes, I know it was called Saturday Night that year because Saturday Night Live was a short-lived Howard Cosell show.)

Imitations and lookalikes becomes a growing concern across these three biopics:

Hitchcock:

We need people to play(and sort of look like and sort of sound like)
Alfred Hitchcock
Alma Hitchcock
Janet Leigh(the biggest actor's role and the biggest star: ScarJo.)
Anthony Perkins(barely seen)
Vera Miles (seen a bit more than Perkins - seemed wrong to me)
John Gavin(pretty much an extra)
Martin Balsam (VERY much an extra)

and non-stars:

Joe Stefano (screenwriter)
Peggy Robertson (Hitchcock's assistant)

"The Offer" required a lot MORE imitations:

Brando
Pacino
Caan
Duvall
Keaton
Coppola and Puzo(paired togehter as a kind of overweight Tweedle Dee/Tweedle Dum of great intelligence)

and

Paramount chief Robert Evans(HE came to life)
His assistant Peter Bart
His boss Charles Bluhdorn

But with "Saturday Night," the number of imitations increase "multi-fold"

The cast:

Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith)
JohnBelushi (Matt Wood)
Dan Ackroyd (Dylan O'Brien)
Garrett Morris (LaMorne Morris)
Gilda Radner (Ella Hunt)
Jane Curtin(Kim Matula)
Laraine Newman (Emily Fairn)

The host:

George Carlin (Matthew Rhys -- the Russian spy from The Americans)

A guest star ON the show:

Andy Kaufman (Nicholas Braun)

A participant IN the show:

Jim Henson(with his early muppets) (Nicholas Braun -- YEP, the same guy who plays Kaufman. And how easy to do: Henson's voice was KERMIT's voice.)

A fantasy guest star OFF the show:

Milton Berle(played by Oscar winning great JK Simmons -- who, just like he did with his Oscar-nommed William Frawley in the Lucy movie -- is at once the character AND JK Simmons at the same time)

The execs:

Lorne Michaels himself -- now an 80 year old, then a 30 year old) (Gabrielle LaBelle who played Steve Spielberg under another name in The Fablemans)
His friendly foe Dick Ebersol -- who ran SNL for a few years in the 80's while Michaels was "away" (Cooper Hoffman -- Phillip Seymour's son -- from Licorice Pizza and getting plenty of screen time here -- not sure he'll be a star but now he's got TWO long roles under his belt.)
His unfriendly foe Dave Tebet (Willem Dafoe of the strange face and weirdly accessible manner --crucial to this fictionalized story as the Man Who Can Turn SNL Off in a Quick Decision right before air -- a Carson re-run tape is on the spool ready to go.)

The TV show director:

Dave Wilson(I've been reading about this secret hero of the first series for years -- how fun to see Robert Wuhl from Batman 1989 in the role.)

Two key writers:

Michael O'Donaghue -- A famously raging , hates-everybody rebel who certainly comes across as such here. (played by Tommy Dewey here.) Pitted against a middle-aged NBC censor (Catherine Curtin -- relation?) who demonstrates both naivite ("What's a golden shower?") and power ("My finger is on the delay button" she says to George Carlin, who makes a sex joke in response.) Note in passing: O'Donaghue died at age 54 of a cerebral hemmorahge after a lifetime of migraines. All that rage seemed to blow his head up.

Herb Sargent (the estimable Tracy Letts, husband of the estimable Carrie Coon) ,the seasoned old NBC writer who tells Chase "I slept with Gloria Steinem."

Al Franken and Tom Davis(they hired two perfect lookalike actors and one smiles -- "hey the 1980s are going to be the Al Franken decade, and he's going to become a US Senator and..he's gonna quit cuz of MeToo." You can see Franken's future before him.)

And...I'm still missing LOTS of characters in this movie and the actors who play them.

CONT

[–] roger1 (3612) a month ago

For instance, there is an out of nowhere, very touching moment -- amidst all the chaos -- where some woman playing(lip synching) musical guest Janis Ian starts singing the very sad "At 17," and you can feel the movie going into "nostalgia overdrive" -- shit, its 1975! -- because they pretty much let this actress sing the whole song -- until a power outage seems to end it but..she just keeps strumming her guitar.

---

I linger on this big, big cast because as the movie went on I found myself just sort of marvelling at it. The "main event" is looking to see if the guys and gals playing the "7 Not Ready for Primetime Players' match their originals(well, the MEN do), but as all these OTHER well-known faces and good actors(JK! Matthew Rhys! Tracy Letts!) started popping up -- hey, wait, I forgot Brad "Everybody Loves Raymond"' Garrett's cameo as a mean, failed nightclub comic who torments writer Alan Zweibel(a REAL writer known to us SNL fans) until the latter is saved by Michaels.

Yep, now that I've seen "Saturday Night" (which bowed to very unimpressive numbers in "The Weekend of Terrifier 3") --its got my "placeholder slot" for my personal favorite movie of 2024.

Now, there are reasons it might NOT make it at the end of the year as my personal fave. It has "biopic disease" -- a rather continual "cramming in" of brief references to everything famous about that first year ("land shark") and sketches that did NOT happen that first year(Ackroyd as Julia Child accidentally slicing "her" wrist with a knife, blood sailing everywhere.)

CONT

[–] roger1 (3612) a month ago

But they were sophisticated in other ways. We don't see Belushi do his "Samarai"(too politically incorrect today?) but we DO see him do his routine(NOT from the opening night show) about how "March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb" and comparing this to other nations ("..it comes in like a water buffalo and goes out like a gnu.") Hell, THAT episode was IN March, not October when the show debuted.

They give Garrett Morris more to do in this movie than he did on the original SNL. Morris was certainly in a quandry of sorts as the sole black player on the show that first season AND ten years older than the cast. But what I remember about Morris was that he couldn't ACT too good. That is remedied in this version, in which they cast an actor who CAN act(with cool charisma) as Morris, and which they make sure to include Morris's song rendition(from a much later episode) of: "I'm gonna get me a shotgun and kill every whitey I see."

CONT

[–] roger1 (3612) a month ago

Indeed "Hitchcock" and the "biopic problem" IS relevant to Saturday Night in one particular way:

"Hitchcock" postulated Alma Hitchcock in "too cozy a relationship" -- nearly an affair -- with screenwriter Whitfield Cook even as Hitchcock was filming Psycho. Well, that relationship(which just may have BEEN an affair) was documented as taking place TEN YEARS EARLIER -- when Hitchcock was filming BOTH Stage Fright and Strangers on a Train, long-term.

The "Hitchocck" makers just figured -- "hey, that affair is a big deal, let's MOVE it to 1960." Creative license.

"Saturday Night" is filled with creative license as sketches and sketch ideas appear on that first episode that did NOT-- the Julia Child sketch would air in 1978; Milton Berle didn't host SNL (horribly) until 1979.

Speaking of Milton Berle: in the Shales/Miller book, Alan Zweibel speaks about how host Milton Berle , behind closed doors, remarked how he had one of the largest penises in show business -- and proceeded to pull it out and lay it on a table. THAT scene doesn't make it into Saturday Night, but i instead they have Berle (JK Simmons) pull it out(tastefully shown only partially) to intimidate Chevy Chase while Berle hits on Chase's pretty fiance (played by Cindy Crawford's daughter Kaia Gerber -- MORE interesting casting here.)

Again -- they "move things around in time to meet the biopic dictates of getting all the good stories into one setting."

CONT

[–] roger1 (3612) a month ago

About that Berle/Chase scene:

ONE: The Real Dan Ackroyd -- always a great cheerleader for all projects related to him, good for him -- sent out some sort of viral message praising "Saturday Night" the movie, highly and noting "I was there that night, that's how it was."

TWO: The Fictional Chevy Chase -- the one in the movie played by Cory Michael Smith -- is attacked, at length and viciously, in long speeches by two characters based on real guys: Milton Berle ("Mr. Television from the 50s" in the 70s) and Tracy Letts as veteran SNL writer Herb Sargent.

Both characters tear into Chase and at least one of them predicts his REAL career rise and fall. (We can be certain that the scene between Berle and Chase didn't happen and I'm doubting the one with Herb Sargent, too.)

Methinks somebody out there wanted to get their revenge on however badly the REAL Chevy Chase treated people back in his SNL heyday.

Unlike as with Mr. Ackroyd, there has been no comment from Mr. Chase...yet.

CONT

[–] roger1 (3612) a month ago

I'll cut to a quick summary of the plot -- not bad and pretty well known by now:

The movie starts at 10:00 pm on the night of the first broadcast of SNL on October 11, 1975. Then, High Noon style, the clock keeps ticking down from 90 minutes to the first minutes of broadcast and the first time somebody yelled "Live from New York, its Saturday Night." The ticking clock suspense works pretty good (though the movie runs 109 minutes -- exactly the length of Psycho!)

There is fast moving camera work(not always hand held and -- shot in 16 mm?) , breakneck dialogue, breakneck introduction of characters - whoops, I forgot, some guy does a perfect version of BILLY CRYSTAL who got cut from the broadcast that night. I found myself more than willing to excuse the film's "biopic cliches" and to embrace that damn CAST and the excitement of the night as recreated (honestly, that sudden cut to Janis Ian singing "At 17" was an emotional blow out of nowhere to me.)

There is a nice, totally fictionalized scene out at night on the ice rink at 30 rock between -- Belushi and Gilda Radner -- nicely bonding as WE realize: those are the two from Saturday Night who will DIE FIRST. (Belushi in 1982 at 33, Radner in 1989 at 42.) So they get a scene together.

CONT

[–] roger1 (3612) a month ago

I don't know any of the actors who play the 7 "Not Ready for Prime Time Players" but I'll cover them best I can here: The men match up better than the women, because the men "get facial props" --the moustache Ackroyd wore in the first season; Belushi's beard(at first) and hair without it(later on) -- and CHARACTER props -- Ackroyd's famous high speed technical motormouth skills, Belushi's overbearing manner, Chase's smarmy smug bit(the actor at one point EXACTLY gets Chase's smile down right.) The Garrett Morris actor gets to wear a duplicate of a stylish suit Morris wore on the show; and as for the women: sometimes the woman gets Gilda's smile right, the gal playing Laraine Newman is of the "proper type" (and gets a great running gag about putting three sketches worth of costumes on her body piled atop each other.)

The woman playing Jane Curtin plays into Curtin's "rather too staid and square for the room" quality well enough -- she looks nothing like her but is certainly pretty in her own way(a bit more than the real Curtin.) "Fake Curtin' gets a scene to reel off an off-color TV commerical narration I guess to prove "she wasn't that square."

And speaking of pretty women: an actress named Rachel Senott plays Rosie Shuster, a "behind the scenes writer" on SNL who -- all REAL photos of the time attest -- WAS the prettiest woman either in front of or behind the camera at the time. The movie gets into how Schuster was Lorne's estranged but supportive wife at the time SNL was going on air -- and how she slipped into an affair with Ackroyd around the same time(the movie doesn't get too much into the recorded fact that ALL the SNL actors and writers seemed to carry on affairs with some of each other all the time.)

Senott plays her role for beauty, wit AND leadership. If there is a new star to be found in this movie, I think its her.

PPS. As I recall, Lorne Michaels asked his close friend Paul Simon NOT to host or appear on the first broadcast of SNL. Michaels wanted that first broadcast to be a 'rough rehearsal of the show to develop." Simon hosted the second show. Or maybe the third. Dressed up like a turkey for Thanksgiving and saying "Everyone says I'm soooooo serious and I should do this. I"m humiliated." So this movie is really about a broadcast almost INTENDED to be not much of a big deal -- a "starter test."