Saturday Night Live will celebrate its 50th Anniversary next year, and there will surely be a bevy of famous faces showing up this Fall and next year to pat themselves and the show on the back. It’s easy to be cynical about this, considering the dismal state of SNL in the past decade, and just as easy to forget how iconic the show once was. A new movie from director Jason Reitman (Juno, Ghostbusters: Afterlife) is going to remind us of all that, and it’s being released on the exact date that the very first episode of Saturday Night Live premiered, on October 11, 1975. Read the synopsis below:
“At 11:30pm on October 11th, 1975, a ferocious troupe of young comedians and writers changed television forever. Directed by Jason Reitman and written by Gil Kenan & Reitman,
Saturday Night
is based on the true story of
what happened behind the scenes in the 90 minutes leading up to the first broadcast of Saturday Night Live
. Full of humor, chaos, and the magic of a revolution that almost wasn’t, we count down the minutes in real time to the famous words: “Live from New York, it’s Saturday night!”
The ensemble cast of Saturday Night includes Gabriel LaBelle (as Lorne Michaels), Dylan O’Brien (as Dan Aykroyd), Cory Michael Smith (as Chevy Chase), Rachel Sennott (as Rosie Shuster), Lamorne Morris (as Garrett Morris), Nicholas Braun (as Jim Henson), Finn Wolfhard (as an NBC Page), Jon Batiste (as Billy Preston), Ella Hunt (as Gilda Radnor), Cooper Hoffman (as Dick Ebersol), Andrew Barth Feldman (as Neil Levy), Naomi McPherson (as Janis Ian), Willem Dafoe (as David Tebet), J.K. Simmons (as Milton Berle), Kaia Gerber (as Jacqueline Carlin), among others.
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Jason Reitman Grew Up Connected to Saturday Night Live
Based on the plot synopsis, it seems as if Saturday Night could be a Birdman-style one-shot film about the behind-the-scenes chaos of a strange production. Whether it’s filmed in one take (which is unlikely) or not, there are certainly enough cast members and background subplots to navigate across the 90 minutes leading up to the television show itself.
Jason Reitman is an excellent choice to direct and co-write the film, considering he grew up among many of the famous Saturday Night Live stars of the ’70s and ’80s. There are stories of his misbehavior as a child on the set of the original Ghostbusters (with its multiple SNL stars) thanks to his father, Ivan Reitman. Ivan was the famous producer and director behind many projects from the cast of Saturday Night Live, including Stripes, Animal House, and Ghostbusters.
The film is produced by Jason Blumenfeld, Peter Rice, Jason Reitman, and Gil Kenan. Executive producers are Erica Mills and JoAnn Perritano. Gil Kenan was a writer on Ghostbusters: Afterlife and Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, and worked with Bill Murray on his film City of Ember. Reitman trusts him enough to co-write this behind-the-scenes biography of the birth of a cultural institution.
Saturday Night
hits theaters Oct. 11, 2024 from Columbia Pictures.
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