Peter Bart: Is ‘Saturday Night’ Movie Ready For Theatrical Primetime?

“What is the show?”

That’s what a nervous NBC kept asking about its newly conceived Saturday Night Live 50 years ago. Its young producer, Lorne Michaels, never answered. Nor is he likely to now: Saturday Night, a movie about his show, opens wide this week and Michaels says he hasn’t found time to see it.

Will filmgoers follow his example?

“SNL changed comedy and changed our culture,” Michaels said on Today this week. Actually it was Gabriel LaBelle, the actor who plays Michaels in the movie, who said it, not Michaels himself.

Audiences caught a limited glimpse of the movie on 21 screens this past week week, with both the critics and the box office reflecting positivity but not acclaim. Certainly not the acclaim prompted by the launch of the 50th anniversary SNL season.

At 50, there’s agreement that SNL is still a blast, and a mess, its snarky political sketches as blearily hilarious as in earlier years. And as relevant.

So what is it? As a movie, that is?

The critics bestow ambivalence because “the movie is an affectionate yet hollow homage,” says Robert Abele in the Los Angeles Times. The movie “keeps flowing,” observes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times, “but instead it should stagger, erupt or go entirely off the rails.”

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One reason it doesn’t is that director Jason Reitman’s focus is on the behind-the-scenes intrigues of the “late nite” business as much as it is on the artists. Executives at NBC at the time could have safely programmed weekend reruns of Johnny Carson. Indeed, Carson himself, grumpy and remote, emerges as the “heavy”; he’s dubious about Michaels’ new show with its disruptive wannabe stars and improv-styled non-format.

“The late-nite network business is more about danger than laughs,” Joan Rivers once told me. After a long run as Carson’s backup, Rivers dared to start a rival show on Fox that was more classically comedic. Carson declared war.

Given Rivers’ credentials, it seemed unlikely that she would fail where Michaels’ chaos succeeded. “Part of Lorne Michaels’ success is that he’s a cipher, as Reitman portrays him,” says one person close to the movie. “Lorne didn’t grasp the impact of what he was starting so he didn’t get in its way.”

Jason Reitman told Deadline’s Mike Fleming Jr. recently that he thought Michaels’ explanation would run like this: The show is “all the things you think about when you have a wild electric night in the city — that perfect New York night out.”

Forecasts on the fate of the Sony-distributed movie are mixed. With box office down 12% this year, Saturday Night would seem more at home as a streamer, one distributer argues. At least six other movies are opening this weekend, all battling the distractions of election season, so promotion opportunities seem limited.

The ironies are apparent: While SNL was destined to redefine the culture of television, its movie is opening at a moment when the culture of movies urgently needs redefinition.

Or at least some improv.