If you’re a Saturday Night Live junkie, we know that you have two particular plans on your calendar this weekend: (1) Watching the new episode with Ariana Grande and Stevie Nicks and (2) Buying a ticket to see Saturday Night in theaters. Now, if you’re unfamiliar with the film, it tracks the ninety chaotic minutes before SNL’s very first episode, on October 11, 1975. It stars a legion of Hollywood’s next prospective greats: Gabriel LaBelle (as Lorne Michaels), Dylan O’Brien (Dan Aykroyd), Rachel Sennott (Rosie Shuster), Tommy Dewey (Michael O’Donoghue), Cory Michael Smith (Chevy Chase), and more.
Here’s the thing: I’m not exaggerating when I say that Saturday Night compresses roughly five years of SNL history into one single night. (Director Jason Reitman tells the story in real time, with minutes ticking off a clock as the movie rolls along.) So you’ll find that just about everything in the film is relatively true—it’s just that all of that shit didn’t hit the fan on one single night. Regardless, Saturday Night isn’t the kind of film you finish and never think about again. It’s more like a World War II movie, in that you’ll end up buying a hundred bucks’ worth of books by the next morning.
You need some help. We put together a guide of what to watch and read after seeing Saturday Night, plus a few essential answers concerning the fact and fiction of the whole ordeal. Just don’t go reciting “Mighty Mouse” in your living room or shouting your best “Live from New York, it’s Saturday night!” in the shower. That’s a step too far.
What to Read
The Oral History
If you really want to deep-dive into SNL’s long, complicated, riotous history, you must get James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales’s oral history of the show. It’s a mammoth of a read but entirely worth it. (The interviews are shockingly candid, even considering the personalities involved.) If you want to compare the film with the real-life history for yourself, this will do the trick. Just curious to know what happens after that first “Live from New York, it’s Saturday night!” utterance? You’ll find that here, too.
Live From New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live as Told by Its Stars, Writers, and Guests
The Biographies
You could (literally) spend the next few years of your life diving into all the biographies and memoirs of the stars and creators who brought SNL to life. Here are a few that are deserving of your time, starting with the memoir of the one and only Gilda Radner.
The Esquire Archives
We profiled Saturday Night’s Lorne Michaels: the twenty-two-year-old up-and-coming Canadian actor Gabriel LaBelle. In the piece, LaBelle explains exactly how he nailed the mannerisms of a young Michaels. “I wanted to get the facial mannerisms: how he holds his brow, his mouth, and how he pronounces certain words,” he says. “A lot of people ask me, ‘Are you doing Austin Powers?’ No, he doesn’t actually sound like that.” Check it out below.
Earlier this year, we interviewed Dan Aykroyd himself. “It wasn’t so much my public exposure that I felt in that first year of SNL,” he remembers. “It was Chevy’s. I didn’t get much recognition, but Chevy did. I used to walk down the street with him and they were calling his name out, ‘Hey, Chevy Chase! Chevy, Chevy, Chevy!’ ”
While you’re at it, there are quite a few gems from SNL’s early days in our ranking of the variety show's greatest sketches of all time.
What to Know
This is by no means a comprehensive fact-check, but you should leave this section with one idea: that the early days of SNL were really as batshit as the events in Saturday Night. The following information is from the Live from New York oral history, unless otherwise noted.
Okay, so how big was Milton Berle’s dick? Pretty fucking big. While he didn’t expose himself to Chase and Jacqueline Carlin (at least not that we know of), writer Alan Zweibel claims that Berle once whipped his “anaconda” out without his permission. “He lays it on the table and I’m looking into this thing, right? I’m looking into the head of Milton Berle’s dick,” Zweibel said. “It was enormous. It was like a pepperoni. And he goes, ‘What do you think of the boy?’ And I’m looking right at it and I go, ‘Oh, it’s really, really nice.’ ”
Did Michaels really do Billy Crystal like that? He did! It’s our first (and really only) glimpse of Dr. Evil Lorne Michaels in the film. Crystal was supposed to perform the safari sketch we glimpse in Saturday Night, but Michaels cut it for time. “I was upset—mad, I guess—because I had wanted to be there,” Crystal said. “I was mad at my own managers, because I wanted to do the show. And I didn’t want it to look like I was the guy who stormed off the show. That wasn’t the truth. But my managers were protecting me, and Lorne was protecting his show, which I respect.” The story has a somewhat happy ending, though—Crystal would become a multi-time host and even a cast member from 1984–85.
Belushi really did not want to sign that contract. Bernie Brillstein, who would later become Belushi’s manager, remembers it like this: “Five minutes before the first show, I came through the back door where the food and coffee was and there was Belushi, sitting on a bench with Craig Kellem, who was the associate producer, and Craig was saying, ‘John, you’ve just got to sign your contract. NBC won’t allow you on the air until you do.’ And I just happened to walk by at the time, and I didn’t really know John well at all. I couldn’t believe NBC in its stupidity was pressuring him at such a time. So John said to me, ‘Should I sign this contract?’ and I said, ‘Of course you should sign this contract.’ He said, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘Because I wrote it,’ which, by the way, wasn’t true. But I knew I had to get him to sign it. He said, ‘Okay, I’ll sign the contract if you manage me.’ ”
“Weekend Update with Lorne Michaels.” At one point in Saturday Night, Michaels acts as Chase’s stand-in during a “Weekend Update” rehearsal. In real life, he considered hosting the segment himself. “I think [I did] in the earliest presentation because I’d done the equivalent of ‘Weekend Update’ in Canada," Michaels told Deadline in 2014. “But as we got closer to the air show, I began to realize that I didn’t think I could be the person who cut other people’s pieces and left my own in."”
“Gonna Get Me a Shotgun.” Did Garrett Morris spontaneously break into the “gonna get me a shotgun and kill all the whiteys I see” song in real life? Yes, but not in the way we see in Saturday Night. “I also really liked ‘I’m going to get me a shotgun and kill all the whiteys I see,’ ” said Morris. “Now that was when we were improvising. Lorne actually said, ‘Look, I want to do a thing called the ‘Death Row Follies.’ You be a prisoner, you be so-and-so, you be so-and-so, go away and come back with something.’ ”
Not Big Bird! Yeah, the SNL crew truly didn’t understand Jim Henson. Here’s the story, per Zweibel: “Whoever drew the short straw that week had to write the Muppet sketch. The first time I met O’Donoghue, I walked into Lorne’s office, and Belushi’s there, Aykroyd’s there, people the likes of which had never crossed my path before, and I look in a corner of the room and there’s a guy I learned was Michael O’Donoghue. What was he doing, you ask? He had taken Big Bird, a stuffed toy of Big Bird, and the cord from the Venetian blinds, and he wrapped the cord around Big Bird’s neck. He was lynching Big Bird. And that’s how we all felt about the Muppets.”
Where’s Bill Murray?!? This is an easy one. Murray didn’t join SNL until season 2, when Michaels hired him to replace Chase—who left after one season.
What to Watch
“Wolverines”
At the end of Saturday Night, we see Wood’s Belushi and Dewey’s O’Donoghue deliver a perfectly identical re-creation of SNL’s first sketch.
“Hard Hats”
There’s a moment when O’Brien's (very embarrassed) Aykroyd rehearses the sketch that would become “Hard Hats.” Watch the final product here.
Before They Were Famous
In 1975, Michaels and original SNL cast members sat down for an interview with Tom Snyder. Watch this segment if you want to know exactly how much the Saturday Night ensemble nailed their respective characters. (LaBelle told us he watched this clip dozens of times per day.)
The First Edition of “Weekend Update”
Saturday Night shows only bits and pieces of Smith’s Chevy Chase rehearsing the very first “Weekend Update”—but damn, does the actor nail the phone-call gag.
George Carlin’s Opening Monologue
Here’s a deleted scene I need right now: Matthew Rhys’s Carlin actually delivering his opening monologue. See what the real deal looked like.
The Bees!
I cannot find the first appearance of SNL’s bees (“Bee Hospital”) for the life of me, but this should give you an idea.
Andy Kaufman Performing “Mighty Mouse”
I didn’t expect “Mighty Mouse” to function as this film’s deus ex machina, but I’ll take it! Here it is.
