SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Jason Reitman's new film, "Saturday Night," ticks down like a time bomb - 90 minutes of chaos till the explosion of the very first seconds of the show now known as "Saturday Night Live."
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "SATURDAY NIGHT")
WILLEM DAFOE: (As Dave Tebet) I heard that you were having some technical difficulties.
GABRIEL LABELLE: (As Lorne Michaels) None that I know of.
LABELLE: (As Lorne Michaels) What the [expletive]?
DAFOE: (As Dave Tebet) I just heard that your writers were stoned. Your actors were physically assaulting each other.
(SOUNDBITE OF PUNCH)
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) Ah.
DAFOE: (As Dave Tebet) The sound system was down.
LABELLE: (As Lorne Michaels) What the hell was happening? What...
DAFOE: (As Dave Tebet) And a fire broke out earlier.
(SOUNDBITE OF CRASH)
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) You want to...
SIMON: That executive, a great William Defoe, informs "SNL" creator, Lorne Michaels, who's played by Gabriel LaBelle, the network is poised to pull the plug, you know, and air a "Johnny Carson" rerun instead. Jason Reitman, who also directed "Juno" and "Up In The Air" joins us now from NPR in New York. Thanks so much for being with us.
JASON REITMAN: It's a pleasure.
SIMON: What made you choose this ticking-time-clock way to tell a story?
REITMAN: You know, after I directed "Juno," my agent asked me what I wanted to do next, and I think he meant what movie. But really, when I was a kid, I had two dreams. I wanted to direct movies, and my other dream was to be a writer for "Saturday Night Live." And I asked him, is there any chance that Lorne would ever let me be a guest writer there? And lo and behold, he said yes and let me come to space camp, as he described it. And then I spent a week at "SNL" as a guest writer and had the time of my life. And that's kind of where the idea was born.
SIMON: Well, I mean, I have to ask, of course, your father directed the first two "Ghostbuster" movies. You must have known Dan Aykroyd.
REITMAN: Yeah. My father directed "The National Lampoon Hour," which was the live show that had John Belushi and Harold Ramis and Bill Murray and Gilda Radner and a lot of the actors that went on to be on "Saturday Night Live" in the early '70s. And my father produced "Animal House." So I feel like I was around these comedians and I was around this kind of comedy from as long as I can remember.
SIMON: Of course, fictional depiction in the film, but you went over a lot of oral histories.
REITMAN: Yeah. And I had to try to do your job for a moment, which was a lot harder than I thought it would be. I'd interviewed every living writer, actor, anyone I could find, frankly, that was in the building October 11, 1975, including Lorne himself and NBC pages, members of Billy Preston's band. And we collected their collective memories, which all contradicted each other, by the way, and tried to weave together myth and legend and truth so that the audience could understand what it felt like in the minutes leading up to the first time Chevy ever said...
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE")
CHEVY CHASE: Live from New York, it's Saturday night.
SIMON: What's it like to pull together a huge cast playing well-known comic legends, including all the names you're talking about?
REITMAN: Well, I think the trick is to not do impersonations. We have a large cast. There's 80 speaking roles in the movie. It's a very chaotic movie but required a lot of choreography to do the dance, 'cause it's 90 straight minutes, and you're following Lorne every single second of it and where you're running into a lot of known people - not only the original cast, but also other people that were in the building that night - Billy Crystal, Milton Berle, Janis Ian, Billy Preston. So there's a lot of recognizable faces and names.
And I think the trick is to get at their essence, to understand that it's not about a Chevy Chase impersonation, but rather - if we boil down to who Chevy is in the movie, he is this comedian who's touched by God, but has an incredible ego that needs to be humbled. While Gilda Radner is this overflowing well of empathy, this fairy dust, a woman who is willing to sacrifice anything to make the person next to her feel better. And Garrett Morris is someone who's deeply searching for his identity on this show. So when you get to the essence of that character, which these actors did brilliantly, you can start to track all of them and not worry about whether you look in at just impersonations.
SIMON: "Saturday Night Live" is a staple now. It's such a known commodity.
REITMAN: Yeah.
SIMON: What was it like in 1975?
REITMAN: Ha. Well, the way it was often described to me is as a Woodstock moment, that what Woodstock was for music, "Saturday Night Live" was for television. It represented a generation that grew up on television but had never seen anything on screen that resembled themselves, not only the sense of humor, but the kind of music, even what they looked like. And what Lorne Michaels envisioned was not just another variety show, but rather this 90-minute experience, which felt like the party in New York City that you always dreamt of going to. And when you got there, you wound up with people like George Carlin and Richard Pryor, and you were listening to cool music and even the location itself. Everything was unlike anything they'd had ever seen on television. And then the most unexpected thing is that it did so for 50 years.
SIMON: Still going on. Your depiction of John Belushi - you glimpse both his genius and his fragility. If you don't know the full story, you probably aren't surprised to know that he'll be gone within 10 years.
REITMAN: Yeah. And I was fortunate enough to speak with his widow Judy, and, of course, I spoke to Dan Aykroyd a lot, who was very close to him. John Belushi was scared to be on television. He was aware of his own talent and had been a genius on stage and had visions of himself being Marlon Brando and knew that going on "Saturday Night Live" and being on television was going to change that trajectory. And the story that I heard about Belushi was that he couldn't be found on that opening Saturday night. He refused to sign his contract. He went into hiding, and Lorne had to look for him. And it was still an unknown of whether he would show up at the last second.
SIMON: With respect, and some reviews have touched on this, I was uncomfortable with your depiction of Jim Henson. He created some puppet characters for the first season. I knew Jim Henson a little. I profiled him. He was not the humorless guy that's portrayed here.
REITMAN: Look, I'll just start by saying, I have a deep respect for Jim Henson. I love the Muppets. We are making a comedy. And I think the truth of that night is that no matter what a genius Jim Henson was, he was not a good fit for "Saturday Night Live, " that for whatever reason, his brilliance, his sense of humor, his creations did not meld well with the people there. And the writers at "SNL" did not know how to write for the Muppets. That's what we wanted to portray.
I think, look, we're making a movie about the tension of live television, how this group of misfits come together at the last second to create "Saturday Night Live." And Jim, while a genius in his own right, was an outlier there. And we had to present how he was an outlier. And you're right. He's very funny. He literally touched the world and touched me as well. But I think the comedy of this movie comes from him feeling like an outsider at "SNL."
SIMON: What's the spark of working live in broadcasting? That's at the heart of this too, isn't it?
REITMAN: Yeah. Well, I mean, when I was at "SNL," I was thrilled and moved by watching this crew come together. When you watch it on TV, you're very aware that this is a show about an ensemble on live television. What you're not as aware of is that there's an ensemble behind the camera. I remember early on, even as a kid, there would be these bumpers in between the sketches where they would sometimes show the cameras moving around and the guys moving the stage flats, and you'd get a sense of how this show came together. And I wanted to know more about that.
And when - the first time I got to see a live episode, I was blown away by what felt like a SEAL team of crew, who within 30 to 60 seconds could move between each one of these sketches. And the more that Gil Kenan, my writing partner, and I did interviews for the film, the more I realized that this was also an invention for this show. The speed with which they were able to move from concept to concept over 90 minutes and reinvent that every single week, that's something that I found really exciting about live television and I wanted to portray on screen.
SIMON: Jason Reitman's new film, "Saturday Night," is in theaters now. Thank you so much for being with us.
REITMAN: Thank you for having me.
(SOUNDBITE OF DELICATE STEVE'S "WALKIN") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
