There used to be a false rumor about where “Saturday Night Live” creator Lorne Michaels was born. Apparently, it was widely shared that the Canadian comedy maven was born on a kibbutz in mandatory Palestine.
That’s not true. Michaels, whose birthname was Lorne Lipowitz, son of a Jewish furrier, Abraham Lipowitz, was born in 1944 at Toronto General Hospital. He celebrated his bar mitzvah in November of 1957 at Beth Sholom Synagogue. And in 1975, he made comedy history when he created NBC’s “Saturday Night,” the show that soon became “Saturday Night Live.”
Almost half a century (whew) and 156 Emmy nominations later, that first live show is the subject of “Saturday Night,” a biopic from celebrated filmmaker Jason Reitman, co-written with his “Ghostbusters” collaborator Gil Kenan, who, unlike Michaels, did spend part of his childhood in Israel (both creators are, like Michaels, Jewish).
Now, the first trailer for the movie, which comes out this October, is here, and it looks pretty excellent. Actor Gabriel LaBelle, a Canadian Jew like Michaels, is infinitely charming as the TV producer in the thrilling glimpse of the film, which appears to be about the nerve-wracking process of creating that first episode as a young 20-something comedian trying to reign in the chaos around him and make his new show a success. “NBC is lucky to have something as relevant as this show,” you can hear him say in the trailer.
Cooper Hoffman, son of Philip Seymour Hoffman, plays a stressed out Dick Ebersol, director of Weekend Late Night Programming, who tries to convince Lorne to pan that first episode and tells him that the NBC honchos are not at all rooting for him: “A counter-culture show, with zero narrative and even less structure — they want you to fail.” David Tebet, the NBC executive played by Willem Dafoe, seems to agree with Ebersol, saying, “Look around, Lorne, you haven’t locked a script, your crew is in open rebellion.” But Michaels is determined.
The trailer is mostly centered around Michaels during 90 minutes that evening the first episode aired, but we get a glimpse of other comedians who made the show so iconic. “Succession” star Nicholas Braun is pretty hilarious in the trailer as Jim Henson (he also plays Andy Kaufman), who laments that the writers for the show hung Big Bird from his dressing room door. The excellent Cory Michael Smith of “Transatlantic” plays Chevy Chase, who we see on Weekend Update telling jokes about tripping over his own penis. Matthew Rhys plays a temperamental George Carlin, the show’s first-ever guest. Lamorne Morris of “New Girl” and “Call Me Kat” plays the show’s first Black cast member, comedian Garrett Morris, who Michaels hired as a writer for that first show.
While we don’t get to hear them speak, we do get a glimpse of the three big Jewish women involved in that first episode, three women who made the show what it is today: Gilda Radner, Laraine Newman and Rosie Shuster, the latter being a writer for SNL and Michaels’s first wife. None of them are played by Jewish actresses. Radner is played by Ella Hunt of “Dickinson” fame, who seems to embody the comedian’s explosive energy, Newman is played by British actress Emily Fairn (“The Responder”) and Shushter is played by “Shiva Baby” star Rachel Sennott, who looks harried in the trailer as she, like Michaels, tries to make this show happen.
Shuster, the writer behind some of the show’s most iconic sketches — including Radner’s Barbara Walters parody, Baba Wawa — is one of the people we can credit for the fame and glory of Lorne Michaels. Lorne was her tutor in high school, and after his father died when he was just 14, Rosie’s father, one half of the famous Canadian comedy duo Wayne and Shuster, became a surrogate father figure for him. It was Shuster and his wife who urged him to change his name to Michaels, convinced he wouldn’t be able to make it in Hollywood as Lorne Lipowitz.
“Saturday Night” doesn’t seem overly concerned about authentic casting, though the casting of LaBelle for Michaels is both authentic and perfect. It’s not likely the movie will touch on much of the Jewish history of the show, but it still looks like it might be an incredibly compelling film about a group of talented comedians, many of whom were Jewish, who changed the history of comedy and TV forever.
“Saturday Night” premiers in select theaters on October 11 — the same date that the first episode of the show aired 49 years years ago.
