Written by Leo Leslie. Header illustration courtesy of Bella Gallegos (@Byebyebellla)

Live from New York it’s Saturday Night!

You know the last line of this movie before it starts and that’s what kicks off a unique style that serves the story incredibly well. It’s a 90-minute marathon that starts at 10:30 pm on October 11th, 1975, and ends at midnight with the start of the first episode of SNL.

This type of movie is one of my favorites because the technical and storytelling knowledge it takes to pull it off is immense.

I got to hear the writer/director speak twice about this movie and how they managed it.

They spent months interviewing everyone who was on the 17th and 18th floors of the Rockefeller that night, built the set so the camera could do 180’s in the halls without seeing cords and wires, had about 58 actors with speaking lines, and recorded all of the soundtrack as close to live as you can get. You can tell when someone really cares about a project and this was one of them.

With characters constantly popping in to remind Lorne Michaels and the audience how much time is left and him checking his watch you can feel that time is the enemy of the project, and despite knowing how it ends, between the couch fires, speaker breakdowns, missing castmembers, and falling stage lights it’s hard to remember that they managed to get it on the air.

The beginning of the movie reads like a sketch itself as you’re introduced to everyone through the chaos of a busy set. There are problems but nothing catastrophic.

Until about twenty minutes in when we change from a sitcom episode to an all-out comedy of errors. You don’t know where half the cast is, you’re not sure who the other half is, or where exactly we are either. The camera seems to just be putting us wherever it sees fit with little to no explanation and clocks starts quietly filling the backgrounds of scenes as we watch everyone figure out what fire to put out first.

The movie is at its best here because everyone’s the lead. The focus isn’t on any one character. It’s two planning on negotiating how long their sets will last, one trying to figure out why he was hired, Rose still stuck on whose last name she’ll take in the credits, John Belushi has disappeared, and half the cast is high. Every time the camera moves off someone you’re almost disappointed.

You want to hear the whole story.

But there’s no time, and we’re supposed to be following Lorne.

The camera takes small detours like this throughout the rest of the movie with things like practice for the toga sketch or the construction workers one, but there’s always this undercurrent that we’ve lost our focus.

It adds so much to the whole thing. You don’t want anyone to be the lead you just want to watch forever. But we’re following Lorne and he’s gotta go find John, landing us in a random bar. And when John’s not there? Well, they just introduce another character with only thirty minutes left.

Then they give us another carousel of scenes. Between Rose flirting with Dan Aykroyd, Chevy Chase arguing with his fiance, and Lorne still trying to find John, how on earth are they going to wrap this movie up in twenty minutes? There’s so much happening in every scene and there’s not time to process it all.

Then it stops.

The clocks stop in the background, the music changes, and we find ourselves on the ice rink at 30 Rock.

It’s one of many things in this movie that plays with time in an almost indescribable way.

It’s maybe a five-minute scene. It’s just Rose talking to John while he skates in a bee costume.

Without the clocks and the fast-paced music, it feels more like ten minutes.

The difference is so stark that you wonder if they missed the show entirely.

Then, five minutes later, we’re back in it and the chaos restarts as we watch everyone absolutely panic getting through the last few minutes of prep.

But for a brief moment in the middle of a movie about time, time stops.

I think that’s the best way to explain this. This movie could go on forever with how much happens. I wanted it to keep going. But it can only be ninety minutes and they can only afford to freeze the clock for five of them.

Of course, we all know how it ends, SNL goes on the air and becomes one of the most popular late-night programs to exist but it almost doesn’t matter in the context of the movie.

Ultimately, the movie doesn’t feel like it’s about SNL as much as it feels like it’s about character and time. And for that alone it’s really worth a watch.