Chevy Chase Claims That the First Episode of ‘SNL’ Wasn’t Remotely Chaotic
Saturday Night, the highly-anticipated new film from director Jason Reitman, chronicles the frenzied production of the very first episode of Saturday Night Live. Studio 8H was complete and utter chaos on the night of October 11, 1975; there were fistfights, near fatal accidents, contract disputes, at least one incident of indecent exposure, and on top of everything else, producer Lorne Michaels seemed to have no idea what his show was supposed to be.
At one point, Michaels violently tore his scene cards off of the wall out of frustration, and the network threatened to bump the ill-prepared comic upstarts from their time slot, and replace them with a rerun of Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show, mere moments before the show was scheduled to air.
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At least that’s how it happened in the movie. Which wasn’t exactly 100 percent true to life, it seems.
The New York Times recently spoke with several people who participated in that first episode, including four of the original Not Ready for Prime Time Players: Jane Curtin, Garrett Morris, Laraine Newman and Chevy Chase. Interestingly enough, Chase’s account of that night pretty much completely undercuts the entire premise of the movie.
According to Chase, the show that night wasn’t quite as hectic as legend would have us believe. It was “not pandemonium at all,” Chase claimed. “We were all prepared — at least I was, and Lorne was prepared for how it would go. There was no way we were going to do a show without running it over a few times.”
Chase also noted that “we were very controlled about who was to do what.” The movie, on the other hand, includes scenes of performers swapping roles at the last minute, and even suggests that one notable writer was hired within an hour of the broadcast.
While we can’t always trust what Chase says, the truth may lie somewhere in between. Chase is right in saying that everyone was prepared, in the sense that they completed a run-through on that Friday and a dress rehearsal on the same night, which definitely doesn’t jibe with the over-the-top pandemonium we see in the movie. But Friday’s run-through was reportedly “disastrous”; not only was it overlong, NBC staff neglected to ensure the presence of a studio audience, so they had to scramble to recruit people off of the street, meaning that the first ever SNL audience was, per Salon, mostly “homeless people taking the opportunity to spend 90 minutes off the street.”
Worse, the performance was plagued by a faulty sound system, forcing producer Dick Ebersol to try and track down a new one, which he was able to do at 2 a.m., intercepting a sound company as they were dismantling their setup for a concert at Madison Square Garden.
As associate producer Craig Kellem revealed in the book Live From New York by Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller, the dress rehearsal also went “poorly.” And someone did actually suggest replacing the first SNL with alternate programming, but that someone wasn’t a small-minded network executive, it was Lorne Michaels himself.
“I remember Lorne seriously asking the network people — or having me ask them — to have a movie ready to go, just in case,” Kellem revealed. “And I don’t think he was kidding.”
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