The first thing to director Jason Reitman want you to know about Saturday Night is that it may be about TV’s comedians and writers but this film is not going to be a comedy. “Saturday Night” plays out in real time over the course of about 90 minutes, starting at 30 Rockefeller Center at 10 p.m. on October 11, 1975, and culminates with the first-ever broadcast of Saturday Night Live. What unfolds is a ticking-clock suspense movie. “It’s a thriller-comedy, if you can call that a genre,” Reitman says “I always describe this movie as a shuttle launch, and the question was, ‘Would they break orbit?'”
The first trailer for the film’s offers glimpses of the movie’s young versions of SNL legends Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith), John Belushi (Matt Wood), Dan Aykroyd (Dylan O’Brien), Gilda Radner (Ella Hunt), Garrett Morris (Lamorne Morris), and, of course, the man himself, Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle). “This is about not only the first seven actors, but the writers, the art department, and everybody who came together at the last second to change television,” Reitman says.
The ensemble also features Nicholas Podany as Billy Crystal, Nicholas Braun as Jim Henson, Kaia Gerber as Jacqueline Carlin, Rachel Sennott as Rosie Shuster, Cooper Hoffman as Dick Ebersol, Jon Batiste as musician Billy Preston, Willem Dafoe as David Tebet, and J.K. Simmons as Milton Berle. Finn Wolfhard also appears in the movie as an NBC page; the cast also includes Andewe Barth Feldman, Tommy Dewey and Matthew Rhys.
In the trailer we see a conversation between Michaels and NBC exec Dick Ebersol, “I mean, we are 90 minutes of live television by a group of 20 year olds who have never made anything,” says Dick as a montage of chaos that is unwravelling backstage simultaneously. “Did you ever stop and wonder why they said ‘Yes’? A counterculture show starring total unknowns with zero narrative and even less structure? They want you to fail.” Lorne then ends the trailer with the line that sets up the film, “we just have to make it to air,” he concludes. “This is a movie where the villain is time. It’s like our Sauron. Our Darth Vader is a clock, and you feel its presence at all times.” Says Reitman
Watch the trailer below:
“Saturday Night“ hits theaters Oct. 11, exactly 49 years after the first SNL broadcast.
Fangirl and Writer with a huge passion for entertainment.
