The SNL Biopic Does a Real Injustice to One of the Show’s Greatest Stars

Movies Saturday Night knows that the show didn’t start out great, so it punches down at other comedy legends. By Sam Adams Sept 12, 20243:10 PM As the clock ticks down toward the inaugural broadcast of the show not yet known as Saturday Night Live, an exasperated NBC executive asks producer Lorne Michaels (played by The Fabelmans star Gabriel LaBelle), “Do you even know what the show is?” That question, posed in slightly different forms, recurs several times throughout Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night, which screened at the Toronto International Film Festival on Tuesday night. The movie, which Reitman co-wrote with his Ghostbusters: Afterlife collaborator Gil Kenan, covers in more or less real time the chaotic 90-minute stretch on Oct. 11, 1975, before the cameras went live, and it takes Michaels most of that time to come up with an answer, preoccupied as he is with wrangling a temperamental and inexperienced cast, his skeptical bosses, and the stone-faced network affiliates who will ult...