Saturday Night and the Real History of SNL: What Is True and What’s Invented?

Saturday Night Live is so old that it predates being called “Saturday Night Live.” Originally, the show was known simply as Saturday Night. That’s a half-forgotten factoid which Jason Reitman’s new film—also simply Saturday Night—leans into when a young and sharply dressed antihero named Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle) tells an incredulous NBC security guard that he’s the producer of Saturday Night. “The whole night?” the guard asks with more than a hint of condescension.

It’s this early scene in Reitman’s new movie which forces every viewer below the age of 60 in a strange place: a world where SNL was not a perennial TV institution as omnipresent as the weather report. There was a period, though, when Saturday Night wasn’t just a part of the culture, but felt something more akin to the counterculture hitting the airwaves—if only insofar as TV standards and practices would allow. Even within those limitations, it was subversive, exciting, and a moment of upheaval.

“SNL was the Woodstock moment of television.” Reitman tells us after he recently stopped by the Den of Geek studio. “What The Graduate and Five Easy Pieces and Harold and Maude were to cinema, SNL was to television. It was the first time you had a show that reflected the generation who grew up on TV, and who wanted to see themselves on TV.”

All of that is captured in Reitman’s incredibly watchable and crowd-pleasing entertainment, a film that banks on the allure of a young fresh faced cast harkening back to the original series’ famed “Not Ready for Primetime Players.” Nonetheless, by nature of the narrative filmmaking beast, things always need be changed, others omitted, and yet more aspects condensed. For example, the movie does not explain that the cast was called the “Not Ready for Primetime Players” because there was ANOTHER Saturday Night Live, with the full title, that premiered in the same season on primetime at ABC. Howard Cosell was its permanent host. So… what else is true and what is not?

The Real Opening Night Jitters

Reitman’s central conceit for Saturday Night is to allow audiences to peek behind the curtain at the insanity going down in Studio 8H on any given Saturday evening ahead of a new episode of SNL airing. To achieve this seminal night in TV history, Reitman tells us he and his writing partner Gil Kenan “interviewed every living person we could find who was in the room on Oct. 11, 1975. [We] spoke to Lorne Michaels, we spoke to Rosie Shuster, we spoke to Dick Ebersol, we spoke to all the writers, and all the cast. People in the production design, costume design, members of Billy Preston’s band, we really tried to gather as many stories as we could.”

And you might be surprised by just how much of what’s in the movie did occur in some form that night…

John Belushi Almost Didn’t Go Live Due to Contract Disputes

One of the running gags/conflicts in the movie centers around Lorne’s increasingly harried attempts to get John Belushi (Matt Wood) to sign his contract literally hours, and then minutes, before he goes on air. This includes eventually threatening him with being unable to perform on live TV without signing the dotted line.

What Really Happened: The real-life Michaels and Belushi had a complicated relationship, beginning with simply getting John to join the cast. Initially, Michaels, who came up in his 20s by producing several comedy TV specials, was not necessarily endeared by Belushi’s holier-than-thou attitude toward television. In James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales’ Live from New York: The Complete Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live, Judith Belushi, the wife of the late comedian, said, “In John’s first interview with Lorne… he said ‘my television has spit all over it.’” That disdain led to Belushi turning down other gigs before SNL, including appearing on The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

Perhaps it was this acrimonious instinct that led NBC to bizarrely pressure Belushi with an ultimatum on the night of the first show to lock into his curiously unsigned contract or not appear in the sketches he rehearsed. In Live from New York, producer and talent agent Bernie Brillstein recalled, “Five minutes before the first show, I came through the backdoor 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 got to sign your contract. NBC won’t allow you on the air until you do.’”

According to Brillstein, it was he who convinced Belushi to finally sign in the final moment by promising to become his agent, as he was Michaels’. Brillstein even sweetened the pot by promising he helped craft the contract, which wasn’t true. “At the time, I didn’t know how great Belushi was, so I just said yes to get him to sign the goddamned contract.”

Billy Crystal Lost His Chance to Be an SNL Star in the ‘70s

One of the few times LaBelle’s Michaels is depicted in a slightly less-than-flattering light is how cold he is when at the very last moment, he asks if young Billy Crystal (Nicholas Podany) can get his sketch down to two minutes. When Crystal insists he needs at least four minutes, Lorne says “you’re cut.” The next time we see Crystal, he is slinking off in a cab alone at night before airing. He obviously would not become a fixture on SNL for another nine years—and after Lorne Michaels (briefly) left the series.

What Really Happened: While Crystal’s sketch getting cut didn’t really happen at the last minute, it was a slow-motion wreck of instincts and egos that led to a years-long estrangement between Michaels and Crystal. According to Crystal, Lorne first spotted him in a comedy club and offered him the chance to become a “resident” (similar to Andy Kaufman or the short films produced by Albert Brooks), with Crystal appearing in six episodes of the first season, and then going on to become a host in later seasons.

Then came the first episode. During a Friday night rehearsal (and the first time Crystal was allowed to perform his sketch all week), Crystal apparently won over the audience with some of the biggest laughs… but the sketch ran over six minutes long. Afterward, Michaels sent a note: “I need two minutes.” At first, Crystal thought he was being asked to cut two minutes out, but Michaels followed up with “no, I need two minutes. All you get is two minutes.” At that point, Crystal’s manager Buddy Morra got involved.

In Live from New York, Morra still defended his aggressive negotiation tactics that led Crystal to walk off the show on Saturday night. “We took him off the show Saturday because they weren’t living up to what we had agreed to,” he said. “Jack Rollins and I decided if we couldn’t get what we were promised early on, we would take Billy off the show.” Michaels countered that Morra “had no idea what was going on” and was a relic from another era of show business.

Crystal also recalled in the same book an ugly farewell, “I was waiting in the lobby with Gilda for the dress rehearsal to take place at eight o’clock while my managers talked to Lorne… So Buddy [came out] and said, ‘We’re going to go, there’s no time, you’re being bumped and that’s it.’ I had my makeup on! Gilda got all upset and angry. I was totally confused about the whole thing.”

Host George Carlin Refused to Perform in the Sketches

During another intriguing scene in Saturday Night, host George Carlin (Matthew Rhys) goes on a rant about how much he hates the dialogue offered to him by the SNL writers while rehearsing a scene set in ancient Greece. At the last moment, he refuses to perform the sketch or any other touched by head writer Michael O’Donoghue.

What Really Happened: Carlin really was supposed to appear in a long “centerpiece” sketch that would see all of the cast members in togas while Carlin entered as Alexander the Great… returned to Macedonia for his 10-year high school reunion. And as recorded in Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad’s Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live, it was Carlin’s last-minute decision to not appear in the sketch after rehearsal. No reason was given and the sketch was cut. However, in Steven P. Locke’s Little Locke and the Mighty Indians of 1975, it’s said Carlin admitted to “being stoned on cocaine that evening,” which might have had a greater effect on his attitude toward sketch comedy than wishing to ridicule these “no-name” kids.

Chevy Chase Already Moving on Before First Broadcast

One of the most intriguing things about the conflict between the “suits and the youths” in the movie Saturday Night is that even though NBC fixer Dave Tebet (Willem Dafoe) is depicted as secretly expecting and perhaps rooting for the show to fail, he has already pegged Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith) as a star, suggesting he will be the next great gentile late night host after Johnny Carson steps down. Later, Chevy is seen salivating about his next career moves with writer Herb Sargent (Tracy Letts), even though they haven’t gone to air.

What Really Happened: Both the most famous and infamous figure of SNL’s first season, Chevy Chase was also the series’ first star—a fact which reportedly aggravated his other castmates to no end when he took credit for writing most of Weekend Update and the opening sketches where he would fall down each week (Chase would later tell other writers he was misquoted). However, whatever ego boost Chase was on apparently did begin the first night.

In Live from New York, the real Sargent recalled how between the dress rehearsal and air, “Chevy and I went down and had a cup of coffee at Hurley’s Bar downstairs. And Chevy said, ‘What’s going to happen to me?’ Because it was a big moment, you know, for all those people. He says, ‘Where am I going to go from here?’ I said, ‘You’ll probably end up hosting a talk show.’ I was kidding, but it’s strange, you know. He wasn’t frightened—he was very curious…. even before the first live show, he was already thinking about what the next step was.”

While we don’t know if Tebet gave him a tap on the shoulder and dangled The Tonight Show in front of him, network executives apparently walked away from the first episode pondering exactly that. And in a Garland profile on Chase’s career, an unnamed NBC exec remembered Tebet saying, “Chase is the only white gentile comedian around today. Think what that means when Johnny leaves.”

By the time of Chase’s first cover story in New York magazine, he was publicly toying with the idea while also dismissing it, telling the publication, “I’d never be tied down for five years interviewing TV personalities.” Perhaps that attitude, or more precisely Carson’s reaction to it, is why despite unnamed NBC sources floating the idea of Chase guest-hosting The Tonight Show for Johnny in the coming year, Chase never did. He only appeared on The Tonight Show once in the following half-decade… as a guest contractually required to promote an NBC special.

The Censors vs. “the Kids”

In Saturday Night, one particularly dedicated Standards and Practices executive (i.e. a network censor) threatens both head writer Michael O’Donoghue (Tommy Dewey) and George Carlin with the fact that the first episode of SNL would be on a three-second delay and she would have her finger over the button to bleep or mute Carlin if he said anything too risqué.

What Really Happened: There was indeed some fighting between NBC executives and Lorne Michaels/Dick Ebersol about what to do regarding Carlin, with network brass initially requesting a six-second delay. In Live from New York, associate producer Craig Kellem recalled Dave Tebet, Willem Dafoe’s character in the movie, “reading the Riot Act about the prerequisites for Carlin’s performance. And they included, ‘He’s going to have to get his hair cut and have to look neat.’” Tebet demanded Carlin also wear a suit, the compromise was Carlin wore a T-shirt with a nice sport coat.

With that said, Michaels/Ebersol won the fight over the delay, which was never implemented… against Carlin. Perhaps tellingly about executive attitudes toward race, NBC won the fight of implementing a three-second delay later that year on the episode hosted by Richard Pryor. Intriguingly, all those fears about Pryor saying something offensive to white viewers were not matched with any hesitation about a sketch in which a character played by Chevy Chase calls Pryor the N-word.

NBC’s Contingency Plan

In Saturday Night, the highest level of conflict comes from Lorne Michaels fearing Tebet will essentially cancel the show before it even airs and instead play a rerun of The Tonight Show. We’ll have more on that subplot in a lower section, however there is at least some truth about NBC and Lorne Michaels pursuing a contingency plan.

What Really Happened: According to Craig Kellem in Live from New York, “We almost didn’t get on the air because dress rehearsal went so poorly. I remember Lorne seriously asking the network people—or having me ask them—to have a movie ready to go, just in case. And I don’t think he was kidding.”

A NIGHT THAT FELT LIKE A COUPLE OF YEARS

Of course Saturday Night is not a documentary: it is a narrative feature that takes advantage of its “real time” construct where supposedly everything we watch happens inside of 100 minutes. It’s a clever way to avoid the usual pitfalls of short-form, biopic storytelling. Nonetheless, Reitman and Kenan didn’t ignore the ability to condense some events that did happen before or after Oct. 11, 1975.

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Belushi vs. Chevy

Perhaps one of the most provocative elements for fans of comedy legends is Saturday Night’s depiction of John Belushi and Chevy Chase coming to blows while in costume because of petty jealousies and ego trips.

What Really Happened: While I’ve heard of no stories about Belushi and Chase coming to blows, particularly on the first night, there is no denying the two had a love/hate relationship (which veered much more toward the latter by the end of the first season). As per Garland’s profile, Chase once snarked that he made Belushi as fit as he could be for civilization by “shaving his back and teaching him how to eat with a fork.” Belushi, in turn, apparently during the first week of writing on SNL picked up a photo of Chase’s then-fiancée Jacquelin Carlin (Kaia Gerber in the movie) and said, “Oh, you have one of those too? You’ve got the regular one. I’ve got the one with the donkey dick.”

While the two probably never fist fought, it seems Belushi is partly responsible for the most legendary brawl in SNL history when during the third season Chase came back to host the series he once was a cast member on—and ended up in a brawl with his replacement Bill Murray.

In Live from New York, Chase said he didn’t realize how envious Belushi was of him until he came back, and Murray ended up escalating a tension into a physical confrontation while musical guest Billy Joel was performing the cold open on stage. “It was John [who] caused that fight with Billy, but we both ended up hitting John by mistake,” Chase said. He added, “Billy was out of line. I’d been out of line to some degree—certainly in Billy’s mind, initiated by the things Lorne later told me about.”

In the same book, Murray does not necessarily dispute that Belushi, among others, might’ve urged him to take a swing at Chase: “I got in a fight with Chevy the night he came back to host. That was because I was the new guy, and it was sort of like it was my job to do that. It would have been too petty for someone else to do it. It’s almost like I was goaded into it, but you know, I think everybody was hoping for it.”

Dan Aykroyd and Rosie Shuster’s Office Romance

Another major story thread weaved throughout Saturday Night is how Lorne Michaels is handling the fact that one of his young cast finds, unknown Dan Aykroyd (Dylan O’Brien), is dating his wife Rosie Shuster (Rachel Sennott), who is also a writer on the series. Michaels is accepting of it since their marriage is essentially over, but… it’s still awkward.

What Really Happened: While Aykroyd and Shuster definitely had an office romance, it was not ignited during the first episode or necessarily the first season of SNL. In fact, during the earliest days of the show Lorraine Newman (Emily Fairn in the film) recalled having a fling with Aykroyd—who also dated Gilda Radner (Ella Hunt in the movie) years before they were both on Saturday Night. Still, the longest lasting of Aykroyd’s SNL liaisons was with Shuster, who he ended up living with for a time. At least initially, however, this would have been news to Lorne Michaels.

According to SNL writer Tom Davis in Live from New York, “When Rosie and Danny first started dating, Danny was sure 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.’” Davis said it got increasingly ridiculous when Michaels eventually came up to him and said, “Danny and Rosie sure are hitting it off.’” 

Lorne Michaels Walks into a Bar…

Another surreal scene in the movie Saturday Night is when with less than 30 minutes before showtime, Michaels walks into a random bar and hears a terrible Long Island comic butchering good material. He then finds the guy who wrote the jokes, young and insecure Alan Zweibel (Josh Brener). Lorne offers him a job on the spot to come start writing for television in the next five minutes.

What Really Happened: While it was not during the first night of SNL, believe it or not that that is pretty much what occurred. In the lead up to the first season, Michaels walked into the bar that hosted young comics. One included Zweibel, a deli employee by day who was moonlighting as a comic writer for “Borscht Belt” comedians who paid him $7 for a gag.

Zweibel later told The New York Times, “I was 21 years old and these guys were 50. I wanted to write about marijuana and they wanted me to write about paving driveways. It was like writing for my parents’ friends.” So he tried performing his own material to very little applause. Afterward, he went to the bar where a guy named Lorne sat next to him.

“You’re the worst comedian I’ve ever seen,” Michaels apparently told Zweibel. “Your material’s not bad. Do you have any more I might see?” He hired Zweibel right there, including for a joke that wound up in the first Weekend Update (the one you see in the movie).

Big Bird Got Lynched

While fans of The Muppets Show have taken some umbrage online at how the film depicts pioneering Jim Henson (Nicholas Braun in the movie) as the put-upon “square” of SNL’s first episode… his genius certainly wasn’t appreciated at the time in 30 Rockefeller Center, even though he already had success thanks to Sesame Street.

What Really Happened: For starters, and according to Alan Zweibel in Live from New York, the writers really did try to hang Big Bird during the first season, if not the first episode. “Whoever drew the short straw that week had to write the Muppet sketch,” Zweibel explained. “The first time I met O’Donoghue, I walked into Lorne’s office, and Belushi’s there, Aykroyd’s there… and I look in a corner of the room and there’s a guy I learned was Michael O’Donoghue. What was he doing you ask? He had taken Bird Bird… and the cord from the venetian blinds, and he wrapped the cord around Big Bird’s neck. He was lynching Big Bird. And that’s how we all felt about the Muppets.”

Reitman tells us, “It’s funny because Jim Henson is brilliant and has touched all of our lives, but he was not a good fit at Saturday Night Live. They just didn’t get along.”

For Zweibel the final straw came when he was forced to write a Muppets sketch one week. While going over the material, Henson drew a red line through Zweibel’s joke, explaining, “Oh, Skred wouldn’t say that,” Skred being one of the muppets SNL writers were encouraged to look at as castmates.

Milton Berle, the Old School Host Packing an Anaconda

One of the most surreal, and gross, moments in Saturday Night is when “statesman” of TV shows gone by, Milton Berle (J.K. Simmons), corners Jacquelin Carlin, Chevy Chase’s fiancée, and then forces her and Chevy to look at his apparently quite large dick. This is the culmination of a generational tension between Berle, who is seen taping another special on 30 Rock that night, and Michaels’ instincts.

What Really Happened? Milton Berle was not in the building on Oct. 11, 1975. But a real culture clash did occur when Berle hosted an episode in season 4 that was so notorious Reitman and Kenan decided to get it into their movie. Berle, whose career went back to the 1930s and before television, was definitely a product from a different time, even in ’75. It didn’t help that he ignored the writers and notes from the producers, including Lorne asking him to stop doing spit takes in poor attempts to steal scenes from Gilda Radner. He would apparently pat Lorne on the shoulder after every note and say, “I know, it’s ‘satire.’” When Rosie Shuster was sent to give him another of the notes Berle apparently ignored, she found him pacing in his dressing room wearing only boxers.

“Thank God they weren’t briefs, because it was already too much information,” Shuster said in Live from New York. Alan Zweibel got it worse though. While writing for Berle in the latter’s dressing room (Berle was only in a bathrobe), Berle asked if he’d ever seen his cock. “Uh no, I don’t believe I did,” Zweibel said. “Would you like to?” Before he could protest, Berle uncovered his bathrobe right as Gilda Radner opened the door to talk to Zweibel. “It’s like an I Love Lucy sketch,” the writer remembered.

So Who’s Working on Weekend Update?

Finally, one more thing condensed for dramatic tension is the idea that right up until about three minutes before broadcast, Lorne Michaels intended to be the Weekend Update anchor, going so far as to even perform the gig during dress rehearsal. While things were not cut that close, it was among the juiciest things Reitman discovered in his research.

“That’s something I never read, I never heard,” Reitman tells us. “And Lorne said it, Chevy confirmed it.”

What Really Happened:  The truth is that while Michaels originally fancied himself as something of a comedic talent for the show, even entertaining the idea he would be a cast member, he decided early on it would be awkward for him to both be the employer and talent on the show. As Reitman surmises, “Lorne used to be a performer, but in doing Saturday Night Live, he had to realize ‘I’m the producer now. I’m Dad.’”

Speaking with Deadline in 2014, Michaels said, “I think [I did consider being a cast member] in the earliest presentation because I’d done the equivalent of Weekend Update in Canada. But as we got closer to the air show, I began to realize that I didn’t think I could be the person who cut other people’s pieces and left my own in. So I gave Weekend Update to Chevy, who was not a cast member but a writer at the time. And that’s how all that happened.”

THAT’S SHOWBIZ

Saturday Night is, again, not a documentary—and at the end of the day it’s goal is to entertain audiences with as compelling a narrative as possible. Sometimes that can even mean by way of depicting things that never happened.

Johnny Carson’s Feelings About SNL

The potentially most problematic element of Saturday Night in terms of historical veracity stems from its central conflict: We are told more than once that NBC higher-ups want SNL to fail because they view it as a bargaining chip with Johnny Carson. In one scene, even the voice of ol’ Johnny calls Lorne Michaels up an hour before the show to tell him, in so many words, that he is doomed to fail and that Carson will have Saturday night back under his control soon. That’s showbiz, kiddo.

What Really Happened: In actuality, the main reason SNL even exists is Johnny Carson wanted more time off—and that meant vacating Saturday nights where NBC affiliates had the option to air reruns, aka The Best of Carson, every weekend. As it turned out, Johnny wanted to innovate the idea of airing more reruns during weekly late nights, which would allow him more vacation time.

It was because Carson wanted to stop airing clip shows that NBC felt obligated to come up with a Plan B, which became Saturday Night Live. As for Carson, he was initially wary of this Saturday Night show, but only insofar that he worried it would compete for talent. So he had Dave Tebet summon Michaels and executive producer Dick Ebersol (Cooper Hoffman in the movie) to Burbank, California where Carson successfully intimidated the young guns into agreeing not to book any host at least a month before they appeared on The Tonight Show and or a minimum of two weeks after they appeared on Carson’s couch.

After Ebersol and Michaels agreed, Carson gave the show his tacit blessing, albeit he regretted it. Later in the ‘70s, he told The Washington Post that it was all drug jokes and cruelty, and the cast could not “ad-lib a fart at a bean-eating contest.”

NBC and Dave Tebet’s Feelings Toward SNL

In addition to the film depicting Carson as viewing Saturday Night as a pawn in his dealings with NBC, Dave Tebet is depicted as Johnny’s righthand man who is in 30 Rock on Oct. 11 to make sure SNL doesn’t make it to air. It is suggested the plan is to always really just write the series off as a noble failure and still air a rerun of The Tonight Show—something NBC was contractually obligated not to do by that point.

What Really Happened: Those who knew him described Dave Tebet as the “Don Corleone” of NBC because of his severe demeanor and sharp dress attire. However, he was not strictly speaking Johnny Carson’s guy, though it was his job to keep NBC’s biggest star happy. Tebet was in fact described by SNL’s earliest writers and producers as cautiously supportive of the show, even if he didn’t personally care for the humor.

With that said, the series did have its doubters laced throughout the network, although I do not know if they were secretly setting up the series to fail. In Live from New York, Ebersol recalled a presentation he was forced to give by NBC’s top brass without Michaels. Afterward Bill Rudin, the then head of research, was asked by his boss what he thought. As per Ebersol, Rudin said, “I don’t think it’ll ever work because the audience for which it’s designed will never come home on Saturday night to watch it.”

Michaels apparently threatened to quit on several occasions in order to get NBC to renovate Studio 8H to the show’s needs. Associate producer Barbara Gallagher said in Live from New York, “They thought we were a joke at the beginning. Trying to get through the red tape really took a lot of time. We couldn’t even get stationary with the show’s name printed on it. They had no faith in us at all.”

Reitman tells us: ““Everything I got from my interviews was the sense that the folks at NBC did not want to see this show succeed. The show was a pain in the ass. Everything that Lorne wanted to do was to upend how they did television. That goes for even the details of bringing in a Russian designer who had only worked on Broadway who wanted to lay down an actual brick floor on the stage, down to the amount of mics they wanted to record the band, to the way they wanted to take command of master control and decide when they cut to commercial and back to program within their own control room.”

Garrett Morris and Andy Kaufman Save the Day

Finally, much of the conflict between Michaels and Tebet in the movie comes down to a series of last-minute showstoppers where, right before broadcast, Tebet is convinced to let the series go to air because, first Garrett Morris (Lamorne Morris) finally proves his comedy bonafides by singing about shooting the white people (an unlikely gambit with someone like Tebet), and then Andy Kaufman (Nicholas Braun) and Chevy Chase do performances of their famous sketches just for NBC and the live audience with seconds to spare.

What Really Happened: Almost needless to say, there was no last-minute proof of concept performances used or needed to get on the air. Kaufman’s Mighty Mouse sketch was always a winner, but wasn’t performed just for Tebet that night. Meanwhile Garrett Morris was a professional playwright and musical theater actor who would go on to sing a variety of songs on SNL, including opera, but as far as I’m aware never sang about getting past the inherent racial limitations placed on him by the series. Although it is worth noting he largely became a cast member because while initially being hired as a writer on SNL, he struggled getting his ideas on the air.

He’s told the story more than once how the one idea that did end up in the first show was stolen by an unnamed white writer on the series. In Live from New York, Morris said, “The guy stole from me and then told Lorne I couldn’t write. Lorne’s response was even-tempered. He wasn’t necessarily stroking me like I was a pet, but he was fair. When the challenge came to get rid of me as a writer, Lorne let me audition for the Not Ready for Primetime Players. He did not fire me, and to this day, I am thankful for that. So I got with the Not Ready for Primetime Players, and the look on the guy’s face for the next four years was the only thing that saved me from jumping on him.”

Saturday Night is playing in theaters now.