Jason Reitman On Capturing Lorne Michaels’ Chaotic Triage Preceding 1st ‘Saturday Night Live;’ Watch Reitman-Scripted Skits That Aired: Q&A

In a career that began with the lauded satire Thank You For Smoking and has drawn four Oscar noms for films that include Juno and Up in the Air, Jason Reitman managed the neat trick by creating his own niche, and coming out from under the considerable shadow cast by his iconic director dad Ivan Reitman, and all his blockbuster comic hits. Jason grew comfortable enough to relaunch the franchise hatched by dad with his biggest hit Ghostbusters. Reitman has taken on his biggest challenge as a filmmaker, moving into non-fiction terrain with Saturday Night. Pic covers the 90 frantic minutes before the launch of an iconic TV show that turns 50 next year, Saturday Night mixes facts you never knew about that historic night with a propulsive narrative driven by the challenges that faced creator Lorne Michaels. Judging by the early fest reviews, Reitman has made an exceptional chronicle of that evening in Studio 8H of Rockefeller Center. Sony Pictures begins rolling out the film this Friday in New York and Los Angeles, and it opens wide October 11.

Hard to imagine a better way to see Saturday Night than my Telluride viewing. You introduced the film, and Bill Murray bound onstage. He wasn’t portrayed in the movie because he didn’t replace Chevy Chase until the middle of Season Two. But there was definite connective tissue, his words were touching, and created a rock concert atmosphere…  

Jason Reitman: Tell you what I loved, was Bill saying it was his favorite job he’s ever had. Bill isn’t effusive that way, as you know, and you don’t always get that kind of overwhelming sincerity. He only says what he means, and he certainly meant that.

I didn’t know until I watched your film how much Lorne Michaels’ launch of Saturday Night Live played out like a Mission: Impossible meets After Hours. I remember being 15 and staying up with my sister to watch that first episode. Like The Social Network and Elvis, this was the splitting of a cultural atom. My colleague Pete Hammond saw you wandering around after the Telluride premiere. He said you looked a bit lost and overwhelmed. What was going through your mind?

Reitman: It was my fifth movie to play Telluride, and I’ve had it go both ways there. I’ve been there when they love it, and I’ve been there for… not so much. I came into that screening, rehearsing my speech in my head when I get a tap on the shoulder and it’s Bill Murray. We didn’t plan any of that. He said, ‘Hey bud, should I go up there with you?’ I said, okay, who’s introducing who? And he goes, ‘why don’t you introduce me? That way I could say nice things about you.’ I had no idea what he was going to talk about, and he was really lovely. But what stuck with me the most was him talking about his time at SNL and how important it was to him. It echoed everything that I had heard from all the others about the importance, not only globally as Saturday Night Live changed culture, but for them individually being at the center of what you just described. The moment where an atom is split. For me, culturally, that’s what SNL is. It defines my sense of humor. It defines the way I look at the world. The screening went great, the audience really went for it in a way that I hadn’t experienced before. When Lamorne Morris goes up to sing, ‘gonna get me a shotgun’…the audience is actually cheering. I stepped out of the theater and the first thing I thought about was my dad.

Ivan Reitman, who worked with all those guys directing Ghostbusters and other movies…

Reitman: I looked up at the sky and I thought about my dad, and I told my producers and my friends, I need a moment. I went for a walk and I started crying. Because this is both the last script of mine that my father ever read, and the first movie of mine that my dad will never see. I was very lucky that I ran into Pete and Madelyn because they feel like family to me. I’ve been seeing them at film festivals for two decades now; I get their Christmas card every year. They gave me a hug and I really needed it. It was overwhelming. Of course, I wanted my dad to see this movie and watch the audience respond to it, when the audience is really going for it. I could feel my dad next to me, cheering me on. And to my dad’s credit, even though he and Lorne Michaels were competitive throughout their lives, particularly in their younger years, when my dad read this script, he looked at me and said, you got to make this.

Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd did Ghostbusters with your dad, John Belushi did Animal House, which Ivan produced. Harold Ramis was SCTV not SNL, but he co-wrote Animal House. I’m imaging this hive of funny people at the house, you growing up with all this comedy lore they dropped on you…

Reitman: I wish. Yes, I spent time with them, but they weren’t filling my head with lore because they were just young guys on the make, way more interested in what they were going to do next than talking about what they did 10 years prior. What’s interesting to me about talking to the folks at SNL, it’s not only the actors, it’s folks like Paul Schaffer and Howard Shore, also Torontonians who were in my father’s orbit. Howard Shore and my dad did a musical together in the early seventies. There was something about the outsider nature of being from Toronto or being from Chicago that gave these writers and actors a very particular sense of humor that was perfect for New York.

What sparked you to co-write this and direct?

Reitman: As a storyteller, the impetus began with a week I got to spend in 2008 at Saturday Night Live as a guest writer. One of the great weeks of my life. Anyone who loves SNL, who read all the articles and books about what it’s like going through that Monday to Saturday experience…if you’re a comedy nerd, it’s like reading about the moon landing. You pore over every detail. You want to know exactly what it’s like, what’s the temperature in Rockefeller Center at three in the morning, when these guys are writing on a Tuesday night, and what kind of coffee are they drinking at the table read. And at what point do they finish painting the sets on Saturday morning? We just obsess over it.

So to be there, and to write a sketch and have it at table read and to get it into the show and then sit under the bleachers with Lorne…on Saturday night? If you’re the writer of a sketch, they bring you to Lorne and you sit under the bleachers as your sketch plays, and you listen to the audience above you in the seats, respond to it, and then he kind of nods at you and you walk off. That was the beginning.

And then it’s an obsession I have with real-time films, the ones that drop you into an immersive experience. Films like Michael Ritchie’s The Candidate, or the German Film Victoria, or a lot of Inarritu’s work. Certain directors focus on the immersive experience and it feels like the camera is another person amongst the crowd. I’ve always loved these films and I’ve been chasing this for a while in a few of my films. And for people like Eric Steelberg, my cinematographer, Danny Glicker, my costume designer, this has been a collective journey, of trying to figure out how to do this. And one day it coalesced. The opening night of SNL, when this thing is going to happen for the first time and nobody knows what it is. The more I read about it and more I started interviewing everyone who in the building that night, the more I realized, these young people did not know what they were about to create. They were up against a generation that did not want things to change. And the more I and my writing partner Gil Kenan realized that, we realized we were writing a sports movie, about the underdogs that ripped television out of the hands of an older generation.

There’s this great moment involving Milton Berle, Chevy Chase and his girlfriend. Without getting too graphic, there’s the passing of a baton, a giant baton, an actual baton, a rather famous baton…

Reitman: Oh, you’re the first person to make that analogy and I will steal it.

Tell me the dynamic between those characters that made that scene so watchable…

Reitman: Writing these characters, you have to get down to the essence of who they each are. Chevy, a comedian who is touched by God, and he has an ego that needs to be humbled. And this seemed like the perfect moment for that. And simultaneously, Milton Berle, who is coming off of being the most important comedian in the world in Vaudeville and in radio, and in early television. But it doesn’t matter who you are, you could be Wayne Gretzky; at a certain point, you do have to pass the baton, and in many cases it has to be ripped out of your hands. Milton had famously pulled his penis out in front of many people. I mean, I personally know many people who’ve seen Milton Berle’s dick, and I can’t say that about any other human being. So it felt like a graphic and exciting scene that lives up to the daring energy of Saturday Night Live, but it served as the perfect way to pit the comic star of one generation against the comic star of another. No one has ever said, what you just said though, I’m stealing that, Mike, I’m going to be using that left and right.

Since it will the only time I’ll find myself connected to the legendary prowess of Milton Berle, have at it Jason! Beyond seeing his girlfriend being courted by Berle in such a graphic manner, Chevy Chase his own aura, that we’re the next generation and we’re busting down this door and you’re in the way. And he’s like, well, alright, well, I’ve got this superpower and I’m going to use it to take your girlfriend. You showed us a version of Lorne Michaels we don’t often see. He’s been this guy in the background, like a calm, laid back manager, and then you hear that Mike Myers used him as a model for Dr. Evil, and how he inspired other caricatures. Here, he’s a lot like Griffin Dunne in After Hours, that Scorsese movie where everything goes wrong and the film has a propulsive narrative. You wonder how he’s going to survive the next crisis. It was remarkable he got that show on the air, and that nobody died.

Reitman: I love the After Hours reference. As Gil and I spoke to Lorne and learned about his experience, the more it reminded me of what it feels like to be a director. There’s a movie you want to make, and you’re trying to explain to people what it is, but there’s no way to articulate it until they see it. And that’s what I kept getting from him. Lorne had a vision of how this show would feel, how it would sound, how it would make you laugh, that it was this culmination of culture and music and what he was experiencing in lower Manhattan and at Second City, Chicago and Toronto. But he didn’t know how to actually articulate it until he could just do it.

It is almost a running joke in the movie. He is asked what the show is, and he can never answer. After you spent all this time assembling info, how would you describe that first show that Lorne Michaels couldn’t verbalize?

Reitman: Well, it’s a feeling. Gil and I spent months batting it back and forth, what the hell is this show? It’s not a variety show. Finally, Gil and I came up with this language about it being everything you think is going to happen when you move to the city, and it’s that perfect night out. It’s catching Richard Pryor dropping in at a comedy club; or seeing Paul Simon strum in a guitar in the back of a coffee shop; or meeting a girl and getting lucky in a phone booth. It is all the things that you think about when you think of a wild electric night in the city. And I think for young people across the country, that was almost like a beacon to come to New York. They had an idea of what it would feel like. And for young people across the country, they had not seen anything yet that resembled them, on television.

There are so many moments where you go, could that have really happened? Was there one particular thing that when you found it, you thought, oh man, this movie is going to work. It could be that cold conversation between Lorne and Johnny Carson, or the fact that right up to the end, it was clear many at the network wanted SNL to never make it to air.

Reitman: I wish I could boil it down into one thing. It is Lorne, stealing a lighting director from another show, and borrowing the sound system from Madison Square Garden. It’s him looking for Belushi, who’s in hiding and won’t sign his contract. I guess the visual metaphor that I love most were the bricks.

Someone got the idea that a stage made of brick and mortar would be a good idea, and it plays like a reminder of the ticking clock…

Reitman: When I heard about the bricks, that seemed insane. They were going to literally lay bricks on the eighth floor. Why? It just made no sense. But it spoke to so many things. The bricks spoke to Lorne, chasing reality. He wanted the show to feel real, and everything in television up until then felt like bullshit. And he wanted this to show to feel real. It’s why he hired a production designer straight out of Broadway, this Tony Award-winning production designer who had never done television. The bricks represented the way this crew needed to come together. At the outset you meet this group of young actors and young writers and an old crew that had been working at that stage for decades. They were literally saying, I don’t know why you’re laying bricks. You’re going to be gone in two weeks. And then they laid that floor together. In the moments leading up to the show, when we heard the stories, they said the bricks went down right at the last second, when they finally raised the skylight and chandelier, they were still swaying as they went live. It was that last second.

It felt like 1975. You shot 16mm. How did you shoot to get that specific look and feel?

Reitman: I wanted this to be an immersive roller coaster. I know what it feels like to be on the floor of 8H as they do the countdown. And even if you’re not going on camera, even if you’re just a spectator, your heart’s bursting through your chest like there is five seconds left in the NBA finals. I wanted the audience to feel that; it was more important than telling the story of what happened that night, or giving people a sense of a history of the Saturday Night Live. I wanted the audience to feel how thrilling and terrifying it is to do live television, particularly to pull something like this off, for the first time. And the way we did that was building the entirety of the eighth and ninth floors into this two-story Jungle Gym with 80 background actors and 80 speaking roles, all working at the same time in choreography that was rehearsed over days. Not to mention a camera team that is learning how to weave their way through this building with these long shots. Our sound mixer sometimes had 58 mics, like 58 different channels going simultaneously, so many that he had to bring a second mixing board just to actually mix together that many channels. I would begin each day at home base with a giant whiteboard, like a football coach. I would draw out the plays, where every character goes, where the camera goes. It was the only way to actually make sense out of all the chaos.

What was the most useful thing you got out of the week you spent as a guest writer, in terms of the ticking clock pace the movie follows?

Reitman: So much. I wrote one sketch that had three locations, and one of the writers right before the table read was like, it’s never getting on. I was like, really? It’s funny. And he goes, three locations. Are you kidding me? Three sets. We don’t have room for one set, let alone three. I was like, oh. He was right. It didn’t even get close to making it to air. But to stand on the floor and watch the choreography is like watching the Joffrey Ballet, as performed by heavyset dudes from the boroughs…they’re moving these flats and they’re moving that crane. And then the sound boom actually has its own wheeled platform and it looks like ballet. There are four cameras on camera pads, all moving together. And they do these movies in 60 seconds during a commercial break. It’s breathtaking because they’re stepping over cables, they’re not running into each other, pulling off and dropping sandbags. In the midst of that, the actors are running through, getting chased by wardrobe, people with hair and makeup who put finishing touches and finishing the glue on a wig as the stage manager is doing a countdown. And every time you’re like, there’s no way they’re going to make it. And then sure enough, by the time it goes, 3, 2, 1, boom, everything settles, lights pop on, and they’re live. To watch that is genuinely like going to the ballet.

You got one on the air. What was it about and who was in it?

Reitman: My sketch was fucking insane. I can’t believe it got on. It’s totally absurd. I reached out to Kristen Wiig this week, as I’ve been showing the movie to a lot of former cast members. I said, I don’t know if you remember that week. And she was very sweet. She’s like, remember Death by Chocolate? How could I forget? It made me feel very loved. Death By Chocolate was about a killer chocolate bar who has a taste for murder. Ashton Kutcher played this chocolate bar and he killed various people on the show. Jason Sudeikis was in it, Andy Sandberg was in it. It was just nutty. I shot a couple segments of it before the show, and then one of the pieces was done live on air. And I still can’t believe that I have that. When you look at the history of SNL, there’s a tiny little line somewhere in there, that there exists a sketch that I wrote.

Did it kill?

Reitman: It did. Okay…It didn’t kill. If you were to make a list of the top 500 sketches of all time, it wouldn’t make it, but for me, that’s holding the Stanley Cup. That’s walking on the moon.

Which of those original cast members were most helpful sketching in details of that first night?

Reitman: They were all generous in different ways. The funniest person in the group was Rosie Schuster, by a country mile.

She was Lorne’s wife (played by Rachel Sennott), a writer/producer who used flirtation to get the cast to do what was needed…

The real Rosie made Gil and me laugh, constantly. Rosie wrote lines on the spot that are in the movie. She is a sharp comedian. Dan Aykroyd gave us access to voices from 1975. When we interviewed him, he would tell the story in the voice of the person he was portraying. So if Dan is telling you about Joe Dicso, the stage manager, he’s performing him so you were getting his exact diction, cadence and language. Billy Crystal offered us a sense of drama that no one else did, when he told the story of what happened to him. It was as though it happened yesterday. And Garrett Morris really was able to zero in on what it felt like to be an outsider, which was key to this story because those kids were outsiders. They had never done television before because they were in their twenties. And because for the most part, NBC didn’t want them there. And Garrett was able to really identify what it felt like to be an outsider in a variety of ways.

That show launched a lot of careers, and you may be doing that with the young talent you cast. You tapped Gabriel LaBelle to play Lorne Michaels; we saw him play young Steven Spielberg in The Fabelmans, so he seems to be working his way through playing iconic creatives. Others are fresh faces. Who was toughest for you and your casting director John Papsidera to find?

Reitman: Hardest to cast was Dan Aykroyd. I feel like we spent a year looking for Dan. Easiest was Garrett Morris; when Lamorne Morris came in, he was literally the first audition I watched and I was done. I thought, this is going to be easy. And then Gilda was hard, and Chevy was hard. We got lucky on Billy Crystal. Nick Podany just came in and crushed it. Dan is tricky. He is brilliantly funny, verbose in a way that you just don’t find in other people, his head for detail and language and history. And simultaneously, surprisingly handsome and romantically charismatic. Dylan O’Brien walked in and saved us. I know Dan really well. I grew up with Aykroyd and I’ve now directed him, so I feel like I could write any scene for Dan Aykroyd at this point. I know his voice well enough. And when I gave Dylan a couple keys to find Aykroyd, suddenly it just clicked open and that was the final piece of the puzzle.

Aykroyd was unsung considering he came in with Chevy, Belushi, Gilda Radner. He was one of those backbone guys like Phil Hartman and Kenan Thompson, solid in every sketch, never laughing, and you never tire of watching them. What is Dan’s superpower?

Reitman: It’s a few things. Honestly, one of Dan’s superpowers is he’s so lovable. He’s brilliant and bizarre, but most importantly, he’s lovable. And when the writers would talk about him, they would say, you would pitch Aykroyd a sketch or a character, and he would start doing it in real time, and you just had to write as quickly as possible. He was giving you the final sketch right there. Belushi was the opposite. Belushi would famously give you 10% all the way up through rehearsal. And then when he went live, it’s like someone lit a fuse and he would explode. So much of what made Belushi exciting is how dangerous he was. It was what he was doing physically that was so unpredictable and dangerous. For a writer, that’s really frustrating. Dan, it could be Wednesday and you’d give him an idea and without missing a beat, he’s giving you the sketch and you just have to write it down.

That combustible mix often makes for a great SNL cast. Chris Farley seemed the closest cousin to Belushi. Will Ferrell would do anything for a laugh, but you always felt like he want home after to his family and normal life. Not so with Farley and Belushi.

Reitman: I think Lorne Michaels created an orphanage for wayward comedians. He’s a guy who lost his dad at 14 and then spent the next 15 years of his life figuring out a way to build an orphanage on network television for every oddball unusual comedian and musician who would otherwise not have a home. It’s 50 years later, and to think about the amount of talent that has been launched from that show, the amount of actors and musicians and writers who are known worldwide as a result of Lorne building this house where they could feel safe…it is a place where a guy like Chris Farley could feel safe, where Kate McKinnon can feel safe. These unique voices of comedy who literally, otherwise I don’t know where you could launch these people.

I’ve watched some great talent, say like Martin Short or Dana Carvey, where you felt they might never find another outlet worthy of their outsized talents. Then you had Adam Sandler, Eddie Murphy, Farley, Norm MacDonald, who made it quicker. Who was your favorite Not Ready for Prime Time Player?

Reitman: I feel like every generation has a cast that means something to them. Again, it’s similar to being kind of a sports fan. Your favorite is always going to be that guy who is the captain of the team. When I was 16 and I got my driver’s license, I immediately started going to the Groundlings in Los Angeles. And in that year, ’92, Will Ferrell, Cheri Oteri, Ana Gasteyer, Chris Parnell. They were all Groundlings. I got to see Will Ferrell do the cheerleaders sketch at the Groundlings, in front of 99 people. When he went to SNL, it was like I was a freshman and one of the seniors went to the big show, and then I watched him do cheerleaders on national television. So there was something for me about Will that was always like, oh my God, one of the hometown kids went to SNL and I felt this connection with him. My favorite sketch, the sketch I’ve probably rewatched the most is Steve Martin’s very special Christmas wish. Or Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, who did this game show sketch called Meet Your Second Wife. That sketch murders me every time. It’s gnarly. Massive Headwound Harry, which Dana Carvey would play…

He showed up at an apartment party and had to lay his mangled head on the couch because he was lightheaded from blood loss, and when the dog comes and begins gnawing on his meat covered noggin, Harry notes, “He must smell my dog.” That was Adam Sandler and Rob Schneider who wrote that.  

Reitman: Jack Handey with his Deep Thoughts. He did one about taking your kids to Disneyland. Sometimes I tell my kids I’m taking them to Disneyland, but instead I take him to a burned out warehouse and then I say, oh no, kids, look, Disneyland burnt down.

The show has evolved heading into Season 50, and it’s little like the opening episode you made the movie about. Critics always seem so quick to dismiss the show, but Weekend Update with Colin Jost and Michael Che might be the best they’ve had, even though Norm MacDonald, Seth Myers, Jimmy Fallon and Tina Fey and Amy Poehler left their own stamp. These cynical armchair critics, what are they missing in terms of the difficulty in doing this high wire act every week?

Reitman: The show’s in incredible shape and it’s one of the number one comedies on television. The current cast is fantastic, and so are the writers. I think Che and Jost are now in that small group of top greatest Weekend Update hosts of all time. The way that they screw with each other is great. I think the Please Don’t Destroy Videos are spectacular. They have developed a rhythm of editing and a kind of humor that has allowed them to separate themselves from The Lonely Island. Every generation thinks that their cast is the ultimate cast of all time. So there’s a group out there that says, no one can touch the Adam Sandler cast. For you and I there’s that Phil Hartman, Dana Carvey, Mike Myers moment. That feels untouchable. There’s a group that’s like Lonely Island or Pete Davidson.

Lorne Michaels doesn’t have a rear-view mirror. He only looks out the windshield. He only is thinking about next Saturday’s episode. Any other human being would be settling in and enjoying their legacy. He just refuses to do that. And as a result, you have a show that’s 50 years old and constantly a mirror of culture, politically, musically, comedically. There’s nothing like it. Yeah, every generation is going to be critical and be like, this is not my Saturday Night Live. And it’s like, you’re right. It isn’t your Saturday Night Live. It belongs to a bunch of people in their teens right now, that’s who it’s supposed to belong to.

One last question. Last time I spoke with your dad, he planned to make a sequel to the Arnold Schwarzenegger-Danny DeVito comedy Twins, adding Tracy Morgan as the long lost third sibling. You took the mantle on Ghostbusters. Any chance this would figure into your plans?

Reitman: You started this conversation talking about passing a baton. When it comes to my father’s legacy, there was the moment where he came to me with Ghostbusters and he wanted to pass that torch. I wasn’t ready for it the first time he brought it up. But then I had this story idea and I brought it up to him and eventually I took that baton. What I didn’t realize at the time was I was actually receiving the baton at the last second. I got to actually have that entire experience with my father making Afterlife, watching it with him, with an audience. And nothing will ever touch that. And I can’t imagine attempting something like that again without him.

Now when I work on Ghostbusters, I am obviously thinking about him all the time. When Gil and I were writing dialogue for characters that my father helped invent, we’re writing jokes that my dad will never hear, but I could still hear my father laughing, if that makes sense. Yes. And so now my career is this kind of interesting mix of balancing movies like SNL. Saturday Night for me is very personal and it’s mine. And then there’s the work I do on Ghostbusters, which feels like this connection to my dad. And I think it’s the primary reason why I keep doing it.