Sony is ramping up its award campaign plans for filmmaker Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night Live movie, a dramatic recreation of the 90 minutes leading up to the iconic NBC show’s first episode in the mid-1970s.
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The studio announced late Thursday that it will release Saturday Night in select theaters on Sept. 27 in New York, Los Angeles and Toronto, followed by another expansion on Oct. 4. It will then open nationwide on Oct. 22 as originally planned.
The move gives Sony and the filmmakers a chance to use word of mouth to build anticipation for the movie, which was one of the most buzzed-about titles at the Telluride Film Festival, which is considered ground zero for assessing the awards landscape.
It’s stuff of legend how showrunner Lorne Michael and an insanely talented troupe of young comedians and writers changed television — and culture — forever. Reitman directed from a script he co-wrote with Gil Kenan.
“It used to be called a “high concept” movie, back in the days when Saturday Night Live was the hottest thing on television. Make a movie about the origins of that late-night comedy show, but not over a period of weeks or months — just in the 90 minutes before the first episode went on the air in October of 1975. We follow the stresses of the show’s creators and watch the stars practice their sketches while the musicians rehearse and the NBC executives fret,” writes Stephen Farber in his review for THR .
A teaser trailer for the film highlights the chaos that transpired over the course of the final 90 minutes prior to the start of that first-ever episode. This includes a tense exchange between series creator Michaels (played by Gabriel LaBelle) and NBC executive Dick Ebersol (Cooper Hoffman).
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Ebersol says in the footage, “Lorne, 90 minutes of live television by a group of 20-year-olds who have never made anything? Do you every stop and wonder why they said yes [to] a counterculture show starring total unknowns, with zero narrative and even less structure? They want you to fail.”
This leads Lorne to respond, “We just have to make it to air.”
Reitman and Gil Kenan wrote the screenplay for Saturday Night based on their interviews with living cast, writers and crew about the launch of the show that is currently heading into its 50th season. Reitman, Kenan, Jason Blumenfeld and Peter Rice are producers on the film formerly known by the working title SNL 1975 . Executive producers are Erica Mills and JoAnn Perritano.
Portraying SNL’ s inaugural players are Dylan O’Brien (as Dan Aykroyd), Lamorne Morris (Garrett Morris), Cory Michael Smith (Chevy Chase), Matt Wood (John Belushi), Ella Hunt (Gilda Radner), Emily Fairn (Laraine Newman) and Kim Matula (Jane Curtin).
Other castmembers include Willem Dafoe (David Tebet), Nicholas Braun (Jim Henson), Matthew Rhys (George Carlin), Kaia Gerber (Jacqueline Carlin), J.K. Simmons (Milton Berle), Jon Batiste (Billy Preston), Andrew Barth Feldman (Neil Levy), Naomi McPherson (Janis Ian) and Finn Wolfhard as an NBC page.
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