How the ‘Saturday Night’ editors balanced truth and myth to create the real-time comedy thriller

“Saturday Night” is a ticking clock film like few in recent memory. The new movie, directed and co-written by Jason Reitman, is about the first-ever broadcast of “Saturday Night Live” on October 11, 1975, and the story unfolds in real-time during the 90 minutes before showtime. 

“Jason described it really well: You’re balancing truth and myth. But the main takeaway that you want is the feeling of what it might have felt like that night,” co-editor Shane Reid tells Gold Derby about the film. “So the constraints of time are something that we’re conscious of and using, but we’re not allowing it to dictate the way that you want to feel in the film.”

Starring Gabriel LaBelle as “SNL” creator Lorne Michaels and featuring a parade of young talent playing the famed Not Ready for Primetime Players (including Cory Michael Smith as Chevy Chase, Dylan O’Brien as Dan Aykroyd, and freshly minted Emmy Award winner Lamorne Morris as Garrett Morris), “Saturday Night” is based on several interviews Reitman and co-writer Gil Kenan conducted with several people involved in the sketch comedy show’s first broadcast. 

“What’s interesting is that, when we started asking people their memories, they start sharing stories that are all around that night,” Reitman told Indiewire of the process. So, for example, while Michaels did find future “SNL” writer Alan Zweibel in a bar, it happened months before the first “Saturday Night Live” broadcast, not just minutes before the show went live on NBC.

“It was this fun challenge, where I think the way that Jason and Gil wrote the script and the way cinematographer Eric Steelberg shot the film, it just lived and breathed that tone,” co-editor Nathan Orloff explains of the process. “It was up to us to try to do our best to live up to what they were doing on set. When we were off that train, and things were not at that level, we could always default back to the tone they put together originally.”

“Some things might overlap in time. Some things are happening on separate floors. So we did the best we could to sort of stay on course,” Reid says. So one of the things he and Orloff added in the edit was time stamps that show the audience where things stand as 11:30 p.m. looms as the hardest of deadlines. At the world premiere of “Saturday Night” at the Telluride Film Festival, those visual gags, where the clock slowly ticks from one minute to the next, received some of the biggest laughs. 

“It was a device that we did our best to stick to in terms of the real-time clock. But there was a little fluctuation based on what we might have needed,” Reid says.

“Saturday Night” has one of the largest ensembles in recent memory, with several characters bouncing around the reconstructed halls of Studio 8H inside 30 Rockefeller Plaza (recreated on an Atlanta soundstage by Oscar-nominated production designer Jess Gonchor). For Orloff and Reid, one of the biggest challenges became making sure each character and performance stood out and had emotional beats that Reitman and Kenan were sure to land in the script’s third act.

“It was unlike any other film I’ve ever worked on,” Orloff says. “There’d be times where we’d trim a scene down, and only when we watched the entire thing top to bottom did we realize that now we’ve under-serviced a particular character. You wouldn’t know that character was lacking and how it was functioning until you saw the whole thing because of the giant ensemble. So that was a very interesting challenge. Because normally you sort of can dial it in on a smaller scale. But here, it was like, ‘Oh, this is now ringing false, because in the two scenes later, when we pick up with Garrett, for example, it’s got to match this thing that just happened.’”

The third act of “Saturday Night” ties off several emotional loose ends and concludes the many character arcs – including things like Garrett Morris feeling adrift in his role on the show or John Belushi (played by Matt Wood) signing his talent contract to appear on the broadcast. But while the viewer might expect these plateaus to slow the film down, it never happens. Orloff and Reid – and the script – manage to keep the pace rolling while letting the beats breathe just long enough to make an impact.

“I always look at editing as similar to how you edit writing,” Orloff says, adding that if you have a paragraph where every sentence is the same length, it becomes an uninteresting read. “The more things vary, then, it creates this dynamic within us that is just more human about storytelling. So I look at scenes the same way, where you can dip into this emotional beat between Rosie Shuster (Rachel Sennott) and Lorne, and then bam, you’re on the go again. It was just a matter of us dialing that in and not letting it linger too long. But that’s also a testament to the writing. They didn’t overwrite these scenes.”

It’s also a testament to the ethos of “Saturday Night Live.” The film opens with the famous quote from Michaels: “The show doesn’t go on because it’s ready; it goes on because it’s 11:30.” 

“The tension is still there,” Reid says of the third act. “The audience is aware that we have to keep moving because time is the enemy.”