Lo, the enduring miracle of the film awards year. Just when things begin to look hopeless—and it was looking pretty bleak a month ago—intriguing, maybe even watchable, prospects suddenly sprout. The movies are like Osiris, that old Egyptian resurrection god: You just can’t keep ‘em down.
As August arrives, more than a few adult viewers, unattuned to the ongoing fantasy-and-animation boom, are now peeking around the corner at Saturday Night, Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night Live origins story. The film was scheduled last week by Columbia Pictures for release on Oct. 11—the 49th anniversary of NBC‘s first SNL broadcast, back in 1975.
As historical moments go, that may or may not impress the film Academy’s growing body of foreign-based Oscar voters. But for the domestic crowd, especially those in upper age brackets, the birth of an American comedy phenomenon, still alive some five decades later, is compelling. You have to look.
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I certainly plan on it, though I have to admit, I was late to the Saturday Night party. Distracted by the toils of graduate school, I didn’t see an episode of SNL until January of 1977, more than a year after the first show, which seems to be the focus of Reitman’s cast-heavy dramedy.
In truth, what I remember of the encounter—at a late night pizza place in Ann Arbor, Mich., if memory doesn’t fail—wasn’t so much the comedy as an in-show video of Bob Seger performing “Night Moves,” a song supposedly conceived, so to speak, in the fields outside that same college town. Who knew raspy rocker Bob Seger actually had a poet’s soul?
But that loose-jointed, coke-assisted Not-Ready-For-Prime-Time humor, honestly, took some getting used to, especially if you’d already lived and breathed laughs—in books, on screens, on records, and in just about everything you did all day—as most of us who lived in and around the drearier parts of Detroit surely did.
There was a lot of comedy in the culture when SNL was born, far more than now. And almost everything the Saturday Night crowd did—satire, sketch humor, recurring characters, pratfalls, topical stuff, transgressive behavior, musical interludes, whatever—had been done often, and sometimes better, by someone who came before. The litany of predecessors, on screen and off, is long: Jack Paar, Steve Allen, Dick Cavett, Johnny Carson, Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce, Shelly Berman, Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, Bill Cosby, Sonny and Cher, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, The Smothers Brothers, Tom Lehrer, Woody Allen, Don Rickles, Rich Little, Dick Gregory, Lily Tomlin, Phyllis Diller, Jackie Gleason, ad infinitum.
George Carlin and Jim Henson were a bridge to SNL, as the film seems poised to tell. That Was The Week That Was had already shown how funny the news could be. Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In –with Tomlin, Ruth Buzzi, Goldie Hawn, Henry Gibson, Arte Johnson, Tiny Tim, Jo Anne Worley, Eileen Brennan and more—had forged a star troupe arguably as bright as SNL’s Aykroyd, Chase, Newman, Murray, Radner, Curtin, Morris et al.
If John Belushi was unforgettable, so was Ralph Kramden, and Gleason lived longer.
No, Saturday Night Live didn’t invent, or even re-invent, television comedy. Rather, it organized the genre.
SNL gave TV comedy a home, a place to hang out. It was like a Mickey Mouse Club for sophisticates, with drugs. Repetitive, yes. But reliable, always there, and almost always funny. You could depend on it for a laugh. For fifty years, it ran on tracks laid down by creator Lorne Michaels. Somehow, it always managed to scare up fresh talent.
Somewhere in that is the stuff of a great movie; and a lot of us are hoping Reitman managed to find it.
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