‘Saturday Night’ Fact-Checked: What’s Right (and Wrong) About the New Movie Chronicling the First-Ever ‘Saturday Night Live’
In general, I don’t have a problem when movies based on actual events fudge the facts. Filmmakers should be allowed some leeway when trying to craft a compelling story, and besides: If they make things up, you can always research the true story to find out what’s been exaggerated or left out. It’s hardly a mortal sin.
But in the case of Saturday Night, the backstage comedy-drama that follows a young Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle) in the 90 minutes before the launch of his new variety show Saturday Night — it would later be renamed Saturday Night Live — it’s a history so many people think they know. There have been multiple books about SNL’s early days, as well as countless interviews over the years from the show’s many cast members. To be a fan of SNL is to be obsessive about its legacy, conversant in all the rumors and gossip that have spread since its launch on October 11, 1975. Directed and co-written by Jason Reitman, the film is an Aaron Sorkin-like portrait of the behind-the-scenes tension, and the movie does take a few creative liberties along the way, despite presenting its story with a you-are-there docudrama immediacy.
So what’s real and what’s invented?
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Here’s a handy fact-check of some of the movie’s most memorable moments, excluding some plot points that have already been discussed in detail, such as its treatment of Jim Henson. (But be warned: There are major spoilers in this article, so don’t read it if you don’t want to know what happens in Saturday Night.)
The Scene: George Carlin (Matthew Rhys) is unhappy to be on the show, refusing to be in a sketch because the writing is terrible.
What Really Happened: Carlin was the host of that very first episode, although he had reservations about doing anything other than his monologue. According to Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live, “During the hour between dress and air, George Carlin told Lorne he’d decided once and for all he wouldn’t perform in the show’s centerpiece sketch. It was an elaborate costume piece, written by Michael O’Donoghue, in which Alexander the Great returns to his high school reunion, having conquered the known world. No matter; his classmates still consider him a jerk. The sketch was cut.”
In the film, we see Carlin throw a fit about that very sketch, telling O’Donoghue (Tommy Dewey) to his face why it sucks. In real life, Carlin would later admit to being stoned for that first show, which the film shows when Rhys’ character has lockjaw right before he’s supposed to go on to deliver his monologue.
The Scene: Garrett Morris (Lamorne Morris, no relation) wonders why he’s been cast on the show, not having a comedy background.
What Really Happened: Morris will always have a special place in SNL history because he was the first Black cast member. But when the show began, he also stood out because he was easily the oldest (and most accomplished) of the Not Ready for Prime Time Players. Already in his late 30s, Morris was a playwright and had performed on Broadway. Initially, Michaels hired him as a writer, but in a 2021 Hollywood Reporter interview, Morris admitted, “I didn’t know how to write for a three-minute sketch. So word was getting around that I wasn’t producing. There were people who didn’t want me as a part of anything, including (late writer) Anne Beatts and the second-in-command, a Harvard guy who stole a sketch idea from me and didn’t give me credit.” (I’m fairly certain he means Al Franken.)
Convinced he was about to get fired, Morris was instead asked to be part of the cast after Michaels and the actors saw him in the 1975 film Cooley High, impressed with his chops. In that same interview, Morris accuses O’Donoghue of being “a racist motherfucker,” and although we don’t see Morris experience overt racism in Saturday Night, we can definitely understand why this serious actor-writer felt a bit at sea on a comedy show.
The Scene: John Belushi (Matt Wood) won’t sign his contract, putting his likelihood of being in the first episode in doubt.
What Really Happened: This subplot is perhaps the most movie-ish element of Saturday Night, but it’s fairly accurate. Belushi did, indeed, not want to sign. In the book Live From New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live as Told by Its Stars, Writers, and Guests, Bernie Brillstein, who was Belushi’s manager, said, “Five minutes before the first show, I came through the back door where the food and coffee was and there was Belushi, sitting on a bench with Craig Kellem, who was the associate producer, and Craig was saying, ‘John, you’ve just got to sign your contract. NBC won’t allow you on the air until you do.’”
That moment isn’t shown in the movie, and neither is Brillstein’s assertion that what ultimately got Belushi to sign on the dotted line was Brillstein’s agreement to represent him. (Brillstein was only managing Michaels, but Belushi wanted him to be his manager as well.) “At that time, I didn’t know how great Belushi was,” Brillstein said, “so I just said yes to get him to sign the goddamned contract. It worked out great, and he turned out, obviously, to be one of my best friends.”
In Saturday Night, it’s made to appear that a heart-to-heart between Michaels and Belushi at the ice rink at Rockefeller Center got the reluctant actor to finally play ball. Also, the film suggests that Belushi actually quit the show in that 90-minute span before SNL went to air, which doesn’t seem to have any basis in fact — although, if you’re not going to sign your contract, you sorta are quitting.
The Scene: Belushi and Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith) despise one another, getting into a physical altercation backstage.
What Really Happened: The two had been rivals since they both appeared in the National Lampoon show Lemmings in the early 1970s, so it was unsurprising that this animosity carried over to their SNL days. As best as I can tell, they never actually got into a shoving match like they do in Reitman’s movie, but the anger was definitely there. In their SNL book Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live, Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad write, “The first day Belushi arrived on the 17th floor he walked into Chevy’s office and pointed at the picture of (Chevy’s fiancée) Jacqueline Carlin on Chevy’s desk. ‘Oh, you have one of those too?’ he said. ‘You’ve got the regular one. I’ve got the one with the donkey dick.’ Chevy always claimed he was responsible for making Belushi as fit as he was for civilized company by shaving his back and teaching him how to eat with a fork.”
The Scene: The NBC brass are so impressed with Chase, even before the first show, that he’s told he’s being looked at as a possible replacement for Johnny Carson down the line.
What Really Happened: Chase would become SNL’s first breakout star, but in the film it appears that the network is already utterly enamored with him. That may be exaggeration, but the rumblings about him maybe taking over The Tonight Show eventually did materialize. According to the book Saturday Night, by December 1975 “Chevy was now one of the biggest stars NBC had, and despite the network’s denials, reports he was being groomed as the heir apparent to Johnny Carson were true. One executive privy to the network’s higher counsels says (NBC executive) Herb Schlosser was definitely thinking in those terms, and the same executive quotes Dave Tebet (played by Willem Dafoe in the film) as confiding, in his hoarse whisper, ‘Chase is the only white gentile comedian around today. Think what that means when Johnny leaves.’” In the movie, Tebet compliments Chase on being a gentile.
The Scene: NBC producer Dick Ebersol (Cooper Hoffman) is obsessed with the idea of getting Saturday Night to do product placement for this hip new technology called the Polaroid camera, a notion that offends the no-sellout ethos of Michaels and his cast.
What Really Happened: As far as I can tell, this is invented. Of course, Ebersol, who was most crucial for NBC in guiding its sports coverage over the decades, would become infamous in SNL lore as one of the people who tried to steer the ship in the early-to-mid-1980s once Michaels temporarily left the show. But Ebersol was also the one who initially brought Michaels into the NBC fold.
“Lorne and I hit it off, and we made him an offer to come to NBC,” Ebersol recalled in 2022. “I did not fancy myself as a comedy writer … nor was I really a comedy producer. I was a guy who knew how to mount television shows. Whether I could mount a television comedy show wasn’t, in my mind, a question. But luckily, from Day One, I formed this relationship with Lorne that really worked for both of us. So we sort of became a perfect match.”
The Scene: In passing, we hear Dan Aykroyd (Dylan O’Brien) talk passionately about his belief in the existence of UFOs.
What Really Happened: In the last few decades, the one-time Blues Brother has become most notable for his advocacy that extraterrestrials have visited our planet on a regular basis. He has claimed to have witnessed four such incidents — technically, four UFOs over three encounters — but was he talking about such things in 1975? I couldn’t find any hard evidence to support that — which, ironically, puts me in the same position as those trying to prove that flying saucers are real.
The Scene: Michaels discovers young comedy writer Alan Zweibel (Josh Brener) in a bar writing jokes for a hacky older stand-up.
What Really Happened: Early in his career, Zweibel (who later went on to co-create It’s Garry Shandling’s Show) did write jokes for other comics. But Saturday Night’s version of his meeting with Michaels isn’t factually accurate. In a 2004 New York Times profile, Zweibel recalled struggling as a stand-up at a show in Des Moines, then going to the bar afterward, where he ran into a man who told him, “You’re the worst comedian I’ve ever seen in my life. Your material’s not bad. Do you have any more I might see?” That guy was Michaels, who was traveling around the country looking for new comics for his nascent show.
According to New York Times writer Jill P. Capuzzo, “Zweibel headed home that night and ‘typed up 1,100 of my best jokes,’ which he presented to Mr. Michaels two days later at the Plaza Hotel. After reading the first joke, Mr. Michaels offered him a job. The joke, used during the first Saturday Night Live show, went like this: ‘The post office is issuing a stamp commemorating prostitution in the United States. It’s a 10-cent stamp, but if you lick it, it’s a quarter.’”
The movie simplifies that history, but we do get to hear the joke.
The Scene: Milton Berle (J.K. Simmons), who reportedly had a huge penis, pulls out his member to wow Chase’s fiancée Jacqueline Carlin (Kaia Gerber) and shame Chase.
What Really Happened: It’s been well-documented that Berle was a terrible SNL host, but it sounds like he never whipped out his penis in front of Chase and Carlin. However, Zweibel did see it: As he told Live From New York authors James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales, the week that the aging comic hosted the show, Berle took a moment to “(open) his bathrobe and he just takes out this — this anaconda. … It was enormous. It was like a pepperoni. And he goes, ‘What do you think of the boy?’”
The Scene: Billy Crystal (Nicholas Podany) is anxiously waiting to hear word that he’ll get to perform a monologue during the broadcast, eventually being told by Michaels that it will need to be shorter or it’s getting cut. Crystal refuses to compromise, and he’s sent home.
What Really Happened: If things had worked out differently, Crystal would have made his big TV debut on SNL’s first show. But as Hill and Weingrad explain in their book Saturday Night, since the episode was too long, Michaels had to ask him “to trim a five-minute routine down to two minutes,” which is how it plays in the movie, too. The difference is that, in real life, “Crystal’s manager, Buddy Morra … vehemently resisted the change,” whereas in the film, we only see Crystal turn down Michaels’ request. According to Hill and Weingrad, “Crystal and his people stormed out in a huff. Instead of making his network television debut, Crystal was soon riding a train home to Long Island, his face pressed against the window, wondering how things could have gone so wrong.”
The Scene: Michaels initially was going to be the host of Weekend Update, deciding at the last minute that Chase should do it instead.
What Really Happened: I couldn’t find any info to back up this plot twist. In the movie, Michaels is shown to be very uncomfortable on camera, which is why he realizes Chase would be the better choice. In reality, Michaels has been a regular presence on Saturday Night Live, although my favorite appearance remains when he tried to coax the Beatles into reuniting.
The Scene: Lorne’s wife Rosie Shuster (Rachel Sennott) and Dan Aykroyd are having an affair. Nonetheless, she stands by Lorne as he braves this intense build-up to the broadcast.
What Really Happened: I’ll refer you to the lede of Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker piece on Live From New York, in which he sets the stage for one of the book’s juicy tidbits: “One day when the show was still young, an assistant named Paula Davis went to Shuster’s apartment in New York and found Dan Aykroyd getting out of her bed — which was puzzling, not just because Shuster was married to Michaels but because Aykroyd was supposedly seeing another member of the original SNL cast, Laraine Newman. Aykroyd and Gilda Radner had also been an item, back when the two of them worked for the Second City comedy troupe in Toronto, although by the time they got to New York they were just friends, in the way that everyone was friends with Radner.”
For Shuster’s part, she told authors James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales, “I wasn’t actually in a couple with Lorne when the show started. That’s the real folly of it, but I never actually got divorced from him, I don’t think, until like 1980 or something. I just didn’t want to deal with that.” Legendary SNL writer Tom Davis added, “When Rosie and Danny first started dating, Danny was sure that Lorne was going to kill him because Rosie was his ex-wife. I was very close to Danny, and he was like, ‘Don’t tell anybody, Davis, don’t tell anybody.’ And of course everybody knew anyway. Finally Lorne said to me, ‘Danny and Rosie sure are hitting it off,’ and it was like why are you going through all this hiding and charade kind of thing? I mean, Danny and Rosie and I went on vacation together. But somehow, Danny was sure that Lorne was going to kill him.”
The Scene: Johnny Carson lets it be known from Burbank that he thinks Saturday Night will fail, showing no respect to Michaels. Ebersol tells Michaels that the show only exists as a negotiation tool for NBC to use against Carson.
What Really Happened: As our own JM McNab wrote earlier this month, SNL really owes Carson, who wanted more vacation time, creating a need on NBC’s part to create new Saturday evening programming. Still, Carson clearly wasn’t a fan, criticizing the show’s reliance on drug humor and refusing to book any cast members until 1983 — and that was Gilda Radner, after she had left SNL.
The Scene: When NBC executive David Tebet (again, Willem Dafoe) is ready to pull the plug right before the broadcast, convinced the show is going to be a failure, Andy Kaufman (Nicholas Braun) saves the day by doing his Mighty Mouse routine, proving to Tebet that Saturday Night could be great.
What Really Happened: Kaufman’s routine was, indeed, one of the first episode’s best moments, but it appears he never performed it ahead of time in order to win over the NBC bosses. His head was elsewhere. In the Kaufman biography Lost in the Funhouse, writer Bill Zehme notes that “he became a fixture around the show’s 17th-floor production offices in the weeks before the October premiere. He did not fraternize so much as lurk. Relatively few staff or cast members knew who he was or what he was or what he was supposed to do — although John Belushi had become an early true believer after having seen the conga-crying in clubs.”
On the Friday night before the show, Kaufman reluctantly rehearsed the routine, but that wasn’t for the NBC suits: According to Zehme, “(H)e almost didn’t because rehearsals dragged on interminably and he had yet to perform a run-through of Mighty Mouse for the crew and finally he said he had to leave.” SNL writer Anne Beatts recalled, “(H)e said, ‘No, I have to go if I’m going to make the last train back to Great Neck.’ Lorne told him, ‘No, Andy, we need you here.’ So he said, ‘Well, I guess I could get my mother to come pick me up….’”
The Scene: When Saturday Night finally does hit the air, it’s a sensation from its first sketch.
What Really Happened: Most SNL junkies know how the debut episode began, with O’Donoghue playing a snooty man trying to teach an immigrant (Belushi) how to speak English in a more cultured, refined way. The phrases he gives the immigrant are bizarre — lots of talk of wolverines — before he unexpectedly drops dead of a heart attack, which prompts the immigrant to follow the man’s example and pretend to pass out as well.
In Reitman’s film, Michaels watches the sketch and turns to the in-studio audience, which is eating it up. He’s done it: His dream is going to become a TV phenomenon! He’s a big hero! Maybe that’s a bit much, but the truth is, the audience did seem really into that first sketch. The movie Michaels has reason to be optimistic — and, look, it makes for a nice ending.