Saturday Night (2024) (world premiere in the presence of Jason Reitman)

 

Jason Reitman: Saturday Night (US 2024) with Emily Fairn (Laraine Newman), Kim Matula (Jane Curtin), Gabriel LaBelle (Lorne Michaels), Rachel Sennott (Rosie Shuster) and Matt Wood (John Belushi).

Centenary of Columbia Pictures.

50th anniversary of Saturday Night Live in 2025.

Made possible by a donation from Roger Durling.

Viewed at Palm, Telluride Film Festival (TFF), 31 Aug 2024.

In person: Jason Reitman, Gil Kenan. Surprise guest: Bill Murray.

Larry Gross (TFF 2024): "It’s backstage at 30 Rockefeller Center, and the clock is ticking. Two young TV producers, Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle) and Dick Ebersol (Cooper Hoffman), with the writers Rosie Shuster (Rachel Sennott) and Michael O’Donogue (Tommy Dewey), along with their unruly ensemble of twentysomething actors (including Andy Kaufman, John Belushi and Gilda Radner), are attempting something new: live sketch comedy, broadcast to the world. But there’s not enough time, too many vulnerable egos, a resistant old-school production team and a corporate overlord (embodied here by Willem Dafoe) that is at best indifferent to the show. Will their dream be crushed before it begins? Or will the show go on? Writer-director Jason Reitman (JUNO, UP IN THE AIR), co-writer Gil Kenan and the gifted cinematographer Eric Steelberg, who makes nearly every shot an elaborate Steadicam composition, have reconstructed a famous night in inventive, often poignant, often hilarious, dream-like fashion." –Larry Gross (U.S., 2024, 104 min)

AA: Hosted by the festival director Julie Huntsinger, Jason Reitman received a hero's welcome. Reitman in turn introduced a surprise guest, Bill Murray, to standing ovation. 

Murray does not appear in "Saturday Night", nor did he participate in the premiere of the show - he become a SNL member a bit later in 1977-1980. Murray is in Telluride because of another movie, the dog story The Friend by Scott McGehee and David Siegel. 

There is an emotional connection because Murray appeared in several films directed by Jason's father Ivan Reitman (1946-2022). The Centenary of Columbia Pictures logo in the start is also meaningful because Columbia distributed films directed by Ivan Reitman and with Bill Murray, as well as other SNL-launched stars.

I have been a Jason Reitman fan since Thank You for Smoking and Juno, and Saturday Night is a labour of love for him. (The show was known in 1975 as "NBC's Saturday Night", and since 1977, "Saturday Night Live").

The film unfolds in real time in the 90 minutes before the first show. The production looks like a catastrophe. But there is calm in the eye of the storm - the producer-creator-showrunner Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle). He is unable to explain the concept of the show to anyone, but the vision is clear in his mind. The chaos seems so extreme to David Tebet,  NBC's vice president of talent (Willem Dafoe), that to the last minute he is ready to postpone the show and broadcast a Johnny Carson videotape instead.

There is a plot similarity with Fly Me to the Moon, where a representative of the Nixon administration (Woody Harrelson) prepares a soundstage simulation of the Apollo Moon landing in case the real operation fails.

Films are in dialogue with each other at festivals, and in Telluride, we see another live broadcast drama, September 5, about the 1972 Munich Olympics. The ABC Sports Division was in charge of the first global live telecast of the Olympics - disrupted by the massacre of the Israeli team by the Palestinian terrorist organization Black September assisted by West-German Neo-Nazis.

It takes a great cast to personify the fantastic team that revolutionized comedy - and Jason Reitman succeeds in recreating such an ensemble. When David Tenet is about to run his dread videotape, the whole team launches in a chorus of "I am Saturday" as in "I am Spartacus". The generation gap seems unbridgeable, and that is the most fundamental theme of the saga. "We are the first generation who grew up watching television" - and therefore there is a new metalevel in everything.

As Larry Gross states in his program note, the contribution of cinematographer Eric Steelberg is dizzying in his extended takes. And Jason Reitman's mise-en-scène is breathtaking in keeping score of the multiple storylines. It all adds up to great momentum.

The final indispensable contribution is the live perfomance of the band of Billy Preston (Jon Batiste). Like a magician, he brings unity to the chaos - reminding us of the Billy Preston impact in the Get Back / Let It Be project filmed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg and re-edited by Peter Jackson.

While I love the thrill of the Billy Preston element in the finale, I find the preceding hyper-energic score overdone - a precaution for what I call "the pandemic-phlegmatic syndrome" (when in a pandemic year's film all elements are perfect but an engrossing irresistible drive is missing)?