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Saturday Night Isn’t Factually Accurate, But It Feels Spiritually True
The SNL movie plays like an anxiety dream, and the dreamer in this case is Lorne Michaels.
Saturday Night, which depicts the hectic 90 minutes before the live broadcast of the very first episode on October 11, 1975, has the veneer of authenticity to it: Filmed in freewheeling, handheld 16mm, it speeds almost verité style through cluttered studio corridors and crowded stages abuzz with activity, dissension, and doubt. Back in 2018, before he descended into Ghostbusters sequels, Reitman made a film about the disintegration of Gary Hart’s 1988 Presidential campaign called The Front Runner, for which he employed a wandering, Altmanesque camera style that drifted among the characters, catching snippets of conversations and scenes. Saturday Night plays like an anxiety dream, and the dreamer in this case is Lorne Michaels(Gabriel LaBelle), the producer at the center of SNL, who spends the hour and a half before airtime unable to explain to anyone what the show is.
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