it’s the Saturday Night cast and Jason Reitman on the behind-the-scenes race to bring the series debut to life • Journal • A Magazine • , Life in canada

How Reitman’s SNL stint informed Saturday Night

Long before starting Saturday Night, during Juno’s award-season run of late winter 2007, Reitman was a guest writer on Saturday Night Live, which he calls “a childhood dream.” He explains: “I got to write till four in the morning with Simon Rich on a Tuesday. On Wednesday, I had three sketches that went into the table read, and I got to experience the moment where they come out of Lorne’s office, pin a piece of paper on the wall, and you find out if your sketch made it—and one of mine got in. That adrenaline coursing through my veins on Saturday night as I heard the countdown happen was unlike anything I’d ever felt before.”

This experience of working in Lorne Michaels’ writers’ room was the starting point for Saturday Night. While the film counts down to airtime, it also mixes in rehearsals of classic early SNL sketches performed by the film’s cast. These weren’t a part of the first show, but would go on to define the program as it found its subversive legs.

“We interviewed anyone we could find that was in the building on October 11th, 1975,” Reitman explains. “Writers, actors, crew people, band members, Lorne. What we’re dealing with is a collection of memories—memories from before, memories from after. For example, Rosie Shuster, out of nowhere, just started talking about the hard hat sketch and what that meant to her and the women on the cast.” In Saturday Night, Hunt as Radner teaches women construction workers how to objectify a man walking by—O’Brien’s Aykroyd—and Sennott’s Shuster oversees how short his denim shorts really are. “We were allowing the people who were there to define what memories they had that were important to them from that moment,” Reitman says.

As expected, there are already plenty of thirst reviews that note their appreciation of seeing O’Brien in booty shorts. “That scene where we get to objectify Dan Aykroyd in a pair of short shorts was one of my favorite days shooting on anything I’ve made,” Hunt adds. “It was interesting to learn about the first women of SNL—Gilda, Laraine Newman, and Jane Curtin—all of them talking about how a lot of men in the space didn’t think that there was a place for women in comedy. They didn’t even know the strides they were making. They were [just] seizing the opportunity to be a bit transgressive, a little bit bad.”