If you’re familiar with its source material, it’s easy to spend large portions of Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night drawing mental comparisons. The story the movie tells — about the 90 minutes leading up to Saturday Night Live’s 1975 premiere — is already the stuff of myth, which the movie draws inspiration from more than it seeks to re-create faithfully. But more distracting than the historical record is the fact that Saturday Night is either unwilling or unable to escape the influence of Aaron Sorkin.
The obvious comparison point is Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, Sorkin’s 2006 NBC misfire chronicling the behind-the-scenes happenings at a live sketch-comedy show loosely based on SNL. Naturally, there are moments when both tackle similar subject matter. A scene in Saturday Night, for example, when Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle) corrects a crew member who uses the word “skit” rather than “sketch,” calls to mind a famously melodramatic moment in Studio 60, when a show’s cast member tears into his well-meaning mother for committing the same faux pas. But echoes like this are trivial compared to the more obvious areas of overlap between Sorkin’s oeuvre and Saturday Night. The structural devices, aesthetic flourishes, and writing tics that Reitman and co-writer Gil Kenan crib — intentionally or otherwise — from Sorkin make the film a fascinating showcase for all of the latter’s screenwriting strengths and weaknesses. Here are six of Saturday Night’s most glaring I-Can’t-Believe-It’s-Not-Sorkin-isms:
The “Minutes to Showtime” Framing Device
Given that Sorkin has written multiple television shows (Studio 60, The Newsroom, and Sports Night) and one movie (Being the Ricardos) set behind the scenes at television productions that tape and/or broadcast live, he’s used a frantic scramble to showtime on a number of occasions to create dramatic tension. This was the subtext of nearly every Studio 60 episode, which featured a visible countdown clock in head writer Matt Albie’s (Matthew Perry) office, constantly reminding the audience how much time was left before the big show. Reitman and Kenan mimic this framing device in Saturday Night, down to their use of a clock in interstitial title cards. The Sorkin adaptation the film feels tonally closest to, though, is 2015’s Steve Jobs, which plays out largely in the moments leading up to three of Jobs’s most famous keynote addresses. There’s a direct line between Jobs, backstage at the 1984 Macintosh unveiling event, unsympathetically yelling at his engineers about the computer’s malfunctioning voice demo as the minutes to showtime tick down, and Saturday Night’s Michaels yelling at his stage techs for their inability to meet his lighting and audio demands.
The Walk-and-Talks
Sorkin doesn’t lay sole claim to the walk-and-talk, but he does use the device frequently enough that it’s the first thing people parody when skewering his work. (See: this 2014 Late Night With Seth Meyers sketch.) And just as President Bartlet’s staff picks up and drops six different conversations as they make their way from one engagement to the next in Sorkin’s The West Wing, Michaels walks around Studio 8H at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in Saturday Night putting out fires one ten-second-long interaction at a time. Intricately choreographed by Reitman and captured via long tracking shots, these on-the-go conversations have a dizzying effect that adds to the movie’s intended feeling of chaos.
The Overreliance on Dialogue Quips
In a famous scene from The Social Network — David Fincher’s 2010 movie about the origins of Facebook written by Sorkin — Mark Zuckerberg’s girlfriend Erica tells the future tech CEO that she can’t keep talking to him because she finds it exhausting. “Dating you is like dating a StairMaster,” she says. It’s a great joke that doubles as a good summation of what it feels like to listen to Sorkin’s dialogue at its most indulgent. When it lands — which it does frequently — his ping-pong repartee is his writing’s greatest strength. But when it doesn’t, it undercuts dramatic moments and character development by not allowing them adequate space to breathe. Saturday Night has a high hit ratio in this regard. In one scene, Dick Ebersol (Cooper Hoffman) pleads with Michaels to get John Belushi to sign his talent contract before air: “It’s a formality,” Lorne tells him. “They’re pretty formal here,” Ebersol replies. Reitman and Kenan’s emphasis on banter is appropriate: Comedy legends like Chevy Chase and Dan Aykroyd should be depicted as quick on their feet. But in some instances, like with Tommy Dewey’s Michael O’Donoghue, the movie could have benefited from pulling back a little. In one scene, he tells SNL’s censor that he’d rather “butt-fuck cancer” than make the changes to the script she’s suggested. He’s less like a three-dimensional person than a glib vessel for quips and barbs — Deadpool if he were the head writer of SNL.
The Heavy-Handed Metaphors
Saturday Night does not suffer from an excess of subtlety. In its most overt example of symbolism, a set designer builds the show’s stage one brick at a time because, you know, Michaels & Co. built this show from the ground up. In another, a disgruntled Belushi is figure skating and insists he wants to try a triple axel rather than a single axel, because he lived his life to the extreme. Overly precious metaphors like these are a page ripped straight from Sorkin’s playbook. Consider the scene at the end of his Moneyball script, when Brad Pitt’s Billy Beane calls himself a failure because his revolutionary approach to baseball roster-building didn’t result in a championship in its first year, and his protégé Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) shows him a clip from a baseball game to reassure him. In the clip, a baseball player hits a home run without realizing it — that’s Brand’s way of telling Beane that he is failing to recognize his accomplishment, because Brand tells Beane directly that the player “hit a home run and didn’t even realize it.”
The Thinly Characterized Women
Of the seven original SNL cast members depicted in Saturday Night, it’s undeniable that the three women cast members — Gilda Radner (Ella Hunt), Laraine Newman (Emily Fairn), and Jane Curtin (Kim Matula) — get the least to do. Broadly speaking, they get one character trait apiece: Radner is a whimsical oddball, Curtin is concerned she’s only on the show to be an attractive spokesperson, and Newman is secretly in love with Aykroyd. It’s indicative of a broader theme in Reitman’s work. The best women characters in his films (Juno MacGuff in Juno and Mavis Gary in Young Adult) are from scripts written by Diablo Cody. Sorkin, too, has struggled in the past with this limitation. From Donna Moss on The West Wing, who exists at times to be an audience surrogate to whom other characters can explain complex things, to MacKenzie McHale on The Newsroom, an accomplished war journalist who apparently gets flustered using her email, the women in his scripts are rarely well rounded.
Still, the Sorkin female-character trope most evident in Saturday Night is that of the mother/sex-kitten hybrid whose primary purpose is to help broken genius men with their neuroses. It’s the relationship Sarah Paulson’s Harriet Hayes has with Albie in Studio 60, it’s the relationship Kate Winslet’s Joanna Hoffman has with Jobs in Steve Jobs, and it’s the relationship Rachel Sennott’s Rosie Shuster has with every man she speaks to in Saturday Night. Shuster was a writer in real life, but Saturday Night never shows her writing. Instead, we see her trying to coax a reluctant Belushi into wearing a bee costume and shave his beard. She does everything but bat her eyes at him and say, “Won’t you do it for … me?”
The “Visionary Genius” Protagonist
Between Zuckerberg, Jobs, and Albie, Sorkin loves writing flawed masterminds who have a vision only they can see. Saturday Night’s version of Michaels is cut from this same cloth. Throughout the movie, he’s asked repeatedly to define his vision of the show and fails to articulate it. At one point, in a meeting about integrating product placement to offset some of the budget overages, Michaels asks Ebersol how they can be over budget when “we don’t even know what the show is yet.” It’s reminiscent of a scene in The Social Network when Zuckerberg tells his business partner Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) that he doesn’t know whether they should start advertising on Facebook because they “don’t even know what it is yet.” That both characters use the same phrasing is likely a coincidence, but that they both express the same sentiment speaks to their shared DNA. Men — be they industry disruptors or screenwriters — are rarely as unprecedented as they think.
