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What’s Fact and What’s Fiction in Saturday Night?
There are llamas, meltdowns, fistfights, and a lot of fake blood in this big-screen retelling of SNL’s first episode. How much really happened?
So we went and compared some of the film’s key plot points to a few of the definitive SNL texts, including Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller’s Live From New York andDoug Hill and Jeff Weingrad’s Saturday Night, to see what’s real history, what’s fiction, and what falls somewhere in between. While that detail is fictionalized, the reality of whether the show would air did go pretty much go down to the wire: there was a disastrous dress rehearsal, the stage was still in progress (yes, the production team spent that first night laying real bricks), and NBC fretted about what might come out of George Carlin’s mouth. KINDA TRUE: Michaels’s cousin Neil Levy (Andrew Barth Feldman) helped out in production on the early seasons of the show, and in the film, smokes too potent a joint and gets so high he panics and locks himself in a room.
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