Saturday Night
Directed by Jason Reitman
Written by Gil Kenan and Jason Reitman
Starring Gabriel LaBelle, Rachel Sennott, Cory Michael Smith, and Lamorne Morris
Release Date October 11th, 1980
Published October 11th, 2024
Do not approach Jason Reitman’s new movie Saturday Night as if it is a documentary style recreation of the actual events in the final 90 minutes before the first episode of Saturday Night Live, then known as NBC’s Saturday Night, went on the air. The film likely will not withstand the scrutiny of historians or those who demand complete verisimilitude. Rather, the correct approach to Saturday Night is as a collective pop culture memory of what that night was like at 30 Rockefeller Center.
Saturday Night Live, especially the first through fifth season, have been rhapsodized and mythologized for 5 decades and those myths have coalesced into that classic movie born aphorism from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, “When the Legend becomes fact, print the legend.” Indeed, the first night of Saturday Night Live is legendary and the memories of that night have become myths that have been filtered through hazy memories into what is now Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night, a flawed but completely fun and watchable take on how we like to think that first episode came to be.
Find my full length review at Geeks.Media, linked here.
