The opening shot of Saturday Night (2024) is a black screen and a single quote from Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michaels:
“The show doesn't go on because it's ready; it goes on because it's 11:30.”
On October 11, 1975, a new late-night comedy show was 90 minutes from airing its very first episode on NBC. The clock is clicking, and everyone is freaking out; lights are falling, actors are falling, there's a llama, and some poor assistant is having the worst trip ever. It's chaos, but it's "controlled chaos", ineloquently defined as a situation that can appear to be a riot or a complete shit show, but in reality, it is under control. The result is a show that has just celebrated fifty years on air.
In the ninety minutes before going live, Saturday Night shows so much of what it's like backstage on opening night: complete havoc mixed with excitement. The buzz of being in the middle of Manhattan way past bedtime intensifies that chaos. There is a reason this show was born in New York City and could not become what it had become anywhere else in the world.
In this film, we learn the truth of what makes Saturday Night Live so unique through its origins. The disorganized unpredictability that trickles in from the NYC streets and breathes city life onto the stage.
Throughout the film, we follow Lorne Michaels (Gabriella LaBelle) through the NBC studio with a series of tracking shots. Each of these sequences reiterates the film's tone and the status of Saturday Night as the clock counts down. Everything is falling apart around him, yet he continues to maintain course. He controls the chaos, or at least he wants everyone to think things are under control. Furthermore, every scene is just one of the many circumstances of chaos, and the characters either challenge chaos or become it. It's a men vs society conflict.
When Michaels assembled "The Not Ready for Primetime Players" for the show in 1975, he sought artists he defined as "enlightened amateurs." He wanted talented renegades from the 1970s underground comedy scene of NYC who were contemptuous of everything network television stood for at the time. Giving these unfiltered hooligans a stage on national television is asking for trouble. They were the chaos, challenging network television.
This contempt is felt in the showdown between writer Michael O'Donohue (Tommy Dewey) and Joan Carbunkle (Catherine Curtin), the NBC censor. Her red pen is the sword that protects America from "Vulgarity, sex, communism, and hedonism.". To Joan, these young heathens are a chaotic threat, and she must take up arms against them so it does not spread to the rest of America. To his credit, O'Donohue does not falter; he remains both chaotic and even-tempered. He does not skip a beat in verbally stripping Joan of her moral superiority and bible built armor.
A young Neil Levy(Andrew Barth Feldman) is affinity given a hit of trumpet players' grass. He locks himself in a dressing room, and the players make him feel better; when a production assistant calls places, it begins Levy's chaos. He is swept away by the players like the tide pulling him out to sea. These players, being the "talented renegades" they are, exude the chaos that they bring to the stage, that they have brought to the stage with their comedy in the NYC underbelly. Levy is showered by the radiant chaos of these five actors.
But much like a night out drinking, when all the chaos becomes too much, you know what you do? Step outside for a smoke and some quiet.
Here, that "smoke break" occurs at the climax of act two, after Dick Ebersol (Cooper Hoffman) slaps Michaels in the face with the cold hard truth that the executive producers want the show to fail. Utterly dismayed and losing all hope, a (fake) blood-smeared Michaels takes a walk to the bar down the street. Of course, this is the middle of Manhattan, so no one bats an eye; they've seen weirder.
He returns to find John Belushi(Matt Wood) in a bumblebee costume, ice skating in the center of Rockefeller Plaza. Mind you, at this time in the film, it's less than 30 minutes before they go on air. This is the worst time to take a break, yet there they are because that break is much needed. The erratic Belushi also needed a moment away from the chaos to breathe, even if, for most of the night, he was the chaos happening inside. He started most of the physical altercations tonight.
Belushi looks up at the big, grand, golden statue of Prometheus and asks Michaels, “Who’s that asshole?” Lorne tells him how Prometheus, a friend of mankind, stole from the gods the ultimate authority to give us science and the arts.
As Michaels described, Prometheus chose to wreak havoc, throwing the scales of power between mankind and the Greek gods.
In the same way that Prometheus defied the gods by taking the fire, Michaels defied the old order at NBC by making something unlike mainstream network television at the time. They took air time the same way the gods kept the power of their fire.
Saturday Night was so unlike anything else on network television at the time, being run by people who had never worked in television before this. Of course, such a vast undertaking would invite the kind of chaos anonymous with the youngsters of 70s NYC.
So, in Reitman’s mind, a young Michaels is Prometheus, stealing air time from the old generation and gifting us Saturday Night. It's a little egregious, but sure.
It is a tranquil break from all the chaos in Studio 8H. And in this quiet moment of the evening, with less than 30 minutes to go, Michaels takes a beat and returns with a new writer he picked up in a bar and a fresh set of eyes (and a fresh shirt because the other one got fake blood on it).
Alas, Michaels finally has an answer to the question that Ebersol had been asking throughout the film: What is the show? What is it about? There is a moment to breathe within the chaos, and that breathing brings clarity.
So when executive producer David Tebet (William Defoe) demands Michael's answer, he's ready.
After watching a whole hour of things go wrong, Michaels looks Tebet in the eyes and declares that Saturday Night is chaos, specifically New York City's unique brand of chaos.
"It's an all night in the city. It's catching Richard Pryor at a drop-in or finding Paul Simon strumming in the back of a dive bar. It's meeting a girl outside a bodega and getting lucky in a phone booth.
It's everything you think will happen when you move to the city. That's our show. That's Saturday Night."
Finally, as we head into the descending third act, Billy Preston (Jon Batiste) and his band play "Nothing from Nothing," everything that's been falling apart over the film's events starts to fall into place.
As the audience filters in, Billy Preston (Jon Batiste) and his ban play "Nothing from Nothing," and we're swept into another wave of chaos. But unlike before, when this tense set of crescendoing percussions accompanied the chaos, the 70s funk gives the atmosphere new life, one that's more celebratory.
Unlike the chaos leading up to it, everything now seems optimistic. The loose ends are tied up, Joan has put down her red pen, and the bricks are all laid out.
An hour and a half ago, lights were dropping from the ceiling, and the lighting director quit in a rage. But everything that had gone wrong becomes worth it when Chase stands centerstage and screams, "Live from New York! It's Saturday Night!"
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