John Mulaney Roasts New ‘Saturday Night’ Movie
The trailer for Saturday Night, the movie about the pressure-packed 90 minutes leading up to the first-ever episode of SNL, dropped last week and John Mulaney is tingling with anticipation. “I’m very excited about this movie,” the comic told Seth Meyers last night.
To be clear, Mulaney has nothing to do with the film about his comedy alma mater — “Zero.” But watching those tense two minutes of trailer taught him a lot about his former employer. “Now, I worked for five years at Saturday Night Live,” Mulaney deadpanned, “but I had no idea the kind of pressure cooker that it was. Apparently, it’s high stakes.”
The movie’s preview had “a lot of really interesting moments. Like what we know now, you’re like, ‘Oh, if only they knew then,’ right?” Mulaney said to a cackling Meyer.
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What other secrets could Mulaney learn about what it’s like to work at SNL? He hasn’t seen the entire movie yet, but as a Hollywood insider, he was able to get his mitts on a copy of the Saturday Night script. He asked Meyers to read the part of a cab driver to give the Late Night audience a sense of the film’s flavor. “When you hear it,” Mulaney cautioned, “your hair will stand up on your neck.”
EXT. NEW YORK CITY STREET — NIGHT.
Young LORNE MICHAELS gets into a cab.
LORNE
Take me to Rockefeller Center. I'm gonna go do Saturday Night Live, a new show on NBC.
CABBIE
TV at night? That’ll never work!
LORNE
(Bleep) you, you (bleep) dumb cabbie. It will be so famous and good at sketch comedy.
That tense interaction on the streets of Manhattan is just one more example of what’s got Mulaney so excited about the film. “The stakes!” he reiterated. “The stakes are high!”
Mulaney is pointing out the obvious here — with 50 years of Saturday Night Live specials, oral histories and tell-all books, is there anything left to say about the show? Even a casual fan knows the show is live and hard to pull together with just a few days to prepare. Mulaney shined his comedy flashlight on the biggest challenge facing Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night — “What we know now, if we only knew then.”
We know all about SNL now. Is there anything left for the movie to tell us about then?