SNL’s Chaotic Opening Night Captured in First Trailer for ‘Saturday Night’

The chaotic first night of Saturday Night Live — and how the show was almost dead-on-arrival — is the focus of the upcoming “thriller-comedy” Saturday Night , which depicts the hours leading up to the premiere broadcast.

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“At 11:30pm on October 11, 1975, a ferocious troupe of young comedians and writers changed television – and culture – forever,” Sony Pictures Entertainment said in the film’s synopsis.

“ Saturday Night is based on the true story of what happened behind the scenes in the 90 minutes leading up to the first broadcast of Saturday Night Live . Full of humor, chaos, and the magic of a revolution that almost wasn’t, we count down the minutes in real time until we hear those famous words…”

Directed by Jason Reitman, who also co-wrote the film with Gil Kenan, Saturday Night boasts an all-star cast portraying SNL ’s all-star cast and crew, with Gabriel LaBelle leading the way as Lorne Michaels. Rachel Sennott (as SNL writer Rosie Shuster), Cooper Hoffman (as future NBC exec Dick Ebersol), Nicholas Braun (as both Jim Henson and Andy Kaufman), Finn Wolfhard (as an NBC page struggling to fill the live audience), and Matthew Rhys (as first-ever SNL host George Carlin) are also among the cast.

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“Ninety-minutes of live television by a group of 20-year-olds who have never made anything. You ever stop and wonder why they said yes to a counter-culture show starring total unknowns with zero narrative and even less structure,” Hoffman’s Ebersol tells Michaels in the trailer. “They want you to fail.”

As Reitman recently told Vanity Fair of Saturday Night , “It’s a thriller-comedy, if you can call that a genre. I always describe this movie as a shuttle launch, and the question was, ‘Would they break orbit?’”

Saturday Night arrives on October 11, exactly 49 years after SNL ’s debut episode.

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