Saturday Night writer Gil Kenan reveals how much the production talked to SNL creator Lorne Michaels, who is also a main character in the film, while creating the new movie about the iconic comedy show.
The movie follows the chaotic 90 minutes before SNL, or NBC's Saturday Night as it was known at the time, aired its first live episode in 1985.
The cast of characters featured in it is insane, following iconic names such as Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle), Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith), Gilda Radner (Ella Hunt), Dan Aykroyd (Dylan O'Brien), and more.
Saturday Night Writer on Consulting SNL Creator Lorne Michaels for New Movie
In an exclusive interview with The Direct’s Russ Milheim, Saturday Night writer Gil Kenan spoke about how they consulted with Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michaels about the new chaotic re-telling of that fateful night.
Kenan revealed that he and director Jason Reitman "started this process with a call to Lorne Michaels," who the writer described as "a Rolodex, both of information and of people:"
"And so [me and Jason Reitman] started this process with a call to Lorne Michaels, and that was both an illuminating conversation because we went right to the source. Still, it also ended up being a really helpful one because speaking to Lorne meant that we had access to a Rolodex, both of information and of people. We just started to put together a map of every person who was still alive, who we could reach, who was there that night on October 11, 1975, so we're talking like a really exhaustive list."
Despite Lorne Michaels' role in the creation of the actual Saturday Night Live show, "he had no creative control" over the new movie, but he "trust[ed] Jason Reitman as a filmmaker:"
"He was really cool about being a source of information for us, but he had no creative control over this process. He trusts Jason Reitman as a filmmaker and, from the beginning, understood that what we were going to be creating was our own interpretation of the events of that night."
Kenan made sure to note that they "never claim it's a factual telling," but it is "an authentic one:"
"So we never had to get a sign-off on the script or anything we made the movie that we wrote... [which] was the story that we heard, obviously synthesized through our storytelling mind, press and underline and heighten certain moments eliminate others. But we never claim it's a factual telling of that story, but it is, in many ways, an authentic one."
As for who else they talked to behind the scenes, it included Chevy Chase, Jane Curtin, Loraine Newman, Garret Morris, and more:
"And it went from all the cast members who are still around to so that means Chevy Chase. It means Jane Curtin, Loraine Newman, Garrett Morris, it went out to like Eugene Lee, the production designer. We got to speak to a bunch of writers, some of whom have passed away since Anne Beatts. We spoke with what's left of the band that was playing that night. I got some really good cocaine stories, and then we ended up talking to, like, the PA."
One of the people they spoke to was Eugene Levy, one of Lorne Michael's cousins who happened to be a PA that night:
"It turns out that Lorne Michael's cousin Eugene Levy was a PA that night, basically Lorne's assistant, and we thought it was just going to be a case of completing the picture, but what we ended up learning was every person had a story... You know what they say, that everyone is sort of the protagonist of their own film."
Kenan went on to further explain how talking to each and every person they could started to make it feel like they "were gorging on really great bits of information:"
"It really does work that way when you're trying to tell the story of one pivotal night in everyone's life because a lot of them have gone on to do really tremendous things that aren't associated with 'Saturday Night Live,' but it to the person this remains a singular event in each of their lives. And so it meant that they were able to remember to paint a picture. And we just started feeling like we were gorging on really great bits of information."
When asked if there was a particular scene that really happened that audiences might not believe, a scene featuring J.K. Simmons' Milton Berle "displaying his dominance" did occur, though, technically it went down a few episodes later when he was hosting his own episode:
"The Milton Berle scene... I don't want to spoil that scene, but we heard from multiple people that that moment, a variation on that moment of Milton Berle displaying his dominance, happened and was witnessed by a lot of folks who were there. So it didn't happen that night. Milton Berle hosted an episode a couple of shows later. It was a little bit further down in the season."
They made sure to include the moment because Kenan felt it "illustrated one of [their] core themes:"
"It was a picture-perfect moment that illustrated one of our core themes, which is the sort of battle between the new and the old, the sort of establishment, and this new wave of comedy that was trying to find a way to get into the building. That's fundamentally the core theme at the center of this story."
One the other end of that, commenting about what moments in the movie might not have been true at all, Kenan admitted that "[John] Belushi, ice skating is a bit of a flight of storytelling fancy," a moment that occurs later in the movie right before NBC's Saturday Night is set to live:
"Belushi, ice skating is a bit of a flight of storytelling fancy. He did disappear that night. There was a desperate race to try to get him to sign his contract. And as soon as we started hearing those stories told from the folks we were interviewing, we understood that that created a really nice sort of narrative engine for us to follow. "
The amount of strings that Lorne Michaels was trying to hold was a key aspect of the narrative, and the John Belushi string was arguably the biggest one:
"Part of what we kept hearing was Lorne was really trying to hold all of the strings [to] his show that he couldn't quite articulate, but he knew what it was going to be. You could feel it. He was trying to hold these strings together, and they just kept trying to pull out of his hands. The [John] Belushi string was a big one because everyone there understood that Belushi was a singular comic voice, [who] was part of what was going to make 'NBC Saturday Night,' as the show was called, something that a fresh, young audience could really hold on to, but there was no guarantee that he was actually going to be there when the cameras rolled."
"We definitely dramatized that story," Kelen admitted, but noting that it was in a way that aided the film thematically:
"We definitely dramatized that story, and we did it in a way that both acknowledged the chaos of the moment but also thematically tip the hat towards both the quick-fire fragility of brilliant comic minds. And we've seen this too many times, not just with that era of the show, but in subsequent eras."
Continuing, the writer mentioned that it allowed them to also explore "the opportunity and the tragedy" behind a "comic brilliance that burns so hot" but "doesn't sustain:"
"I grew up in the Chris Farley era of the show. Every once in a while, you have a comic brilliance that burns so hot, so fast that it doesn't sustain. We wanted to be able to explore both the opportunity and the tragedy of some of that genius. And so a sequence on the ice rig allowed us to do that."
The conversation then shifted to the large ensemble cast, where Kenan talked about keep track of the many characters who are running around throughout the movie:
"We were very meticulous about tracking the characters across time and space... One of the things that helped us is we had a fixed, sort of 90-minute story window, so we knew the beginning, and we knew the end, and across the path of the narrative, we ended up getting––it almost started resembling like an 'NCIS' scene where they put up the wall with who was where. You can try to track the characters across the eighth floor, the ninth floor, the 17th floor, and the street outside of The 30 Rock building."
Eventually, they realized that the key to the movie was keeping Michael Lorne as their "gravitational core" who was "trying to hold all of this together:"
"And by the end, what we started to realize is that as long as Lorne was our kind of gravitational core, he's the one. It was trying to hold all of this together. We were starting to find a path to illuminate the arcs that a lot of characters have."
One of the strongest elements of the movie is the chaotic energy that flows through its veins at every moment, all the way through the very ending.
On what made that chaotic energy really work, the first thing that Kenan pointed to was "Jason Reitman's extraordinary direction of this film:"
"Jason Reitman's extraordinary direction of this film [is one of the keys behind maintaining that chaotic energy]. You can only do so much on a page. It's a really helpful blueprint, but ultimately, it's about the director, the performers, and the extraordinary casts we have in this film that are going to bring that thing to life. There was an energy on set that I've never experienced."
He continued, elaborating on how they engineered the script from the start to have a "propulsive narrative drive on the page:"
"It all felt like it had this sort of spirit of chaos and invention and speed and creativity. So, definitely, that existed on set... We were [also] shooting on 16-millimeter film... But we did engineer this from the beginning to have a sort of propulsive narrative drive on the page, and we did that in a few ways. One is we crammed a lot of characters and a lot of story and a lot of real estate into these sort of 90 minutes of storytelling."
"We wrote this thing like maniacs," Kelen explained:
"But we also did that by doing months and months of meticulous research and then three feverish days of writing where we almost tapped into the spirit of how the show itself is written. We wrote this thing like maniacs. We just went at it."
Finishing his thoughts, he concluded that if they hadn't written Saturday Night in the same frantic fashion that they did, it might not have "had the same level of danger or chaos:"
"We were devouring pages back and forth with each other, and that, I think, was actually really critical to the kind of nature of the thing. I think if we had spent months laboring on it and and the balance had tipped between research and writing it, we would have ended up with something that would have probably checked a lot of the same boxes, but wouldn't have had the same level of danger or chaos."
Saturday Night starts playing in theaters everywhere on Friday, October 11.
