SKETCHER ON THE RISE

Opening here in the Valley today; wide October 11:

Saturday Night--The evening in question is October 11, 1975, and we're at 30 Rock in Manhattan, watching the final rehearsal for the very first episode of Saturday Night Live. Out on the sidewalk an NBC page (Finn Wolfhard) is trying to scare up an audience for the show, but passersby aren't interested in free tickets for this moment in broadcast and cultural history. Up in the studio, the camera darts and weaves through the chaos backstage and onstage as the minutes tick down to 11:30 p.m. in something approximating real time.

Through most of the movie, director Jason Reitman follows the frantic pipsqueak Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle) as he scurries from one absurd crisis to another. These range from getting a live llama up from the loading dock to getting bricks laid on the stage while union stagehands refuse to help to getting John Belushi (Matt Wood) to sign his contract.

Belushi is immobilized by anger at having to wear the silly bee costume, until he's taunted by his cocksure castmate and rival Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith), at which point Michaels must keep the two men from pummeling each other. There are also executives and affiliates for Michaels to schmooze, with the diplomatic help of his long-suffering, appeasing Programming Executive Dick Ebersol (Cooper Hoffman), and technical difficulties to solve, and sketches and musical numbers to be cut; the earlier rehearsal ran three hours. And Jim Henson (Nicholas Braun) would like somebody to write a script for his Muppets to perform. 

And so on. At heart this is an old-school "hey kids, let's put on a show" movie, with Michaels in the Mickey Rooney part. But like it or not, this isn't just any show. Even in its formidable best vintages, Saturday Night Live has never been the finest sketch comedy show on TV. But it has almost certainly been the most directly and widely influential, and Reitman's movie makes the case that its very existence was a tenuous fluke, borne of a squabble between the network and Johnny Carson over weekend airings of reruns of The Tonight Show.

The script, which Reitman co-wrote with Gil Kenan, feels romanticized, but it also ingeniously finds ways to incorporate references to classic bits that came on later episodes, like Julia Child's kitchen accident or Garrett Morris singing "Gonna Get Me a Shotgun." When these and countless other iconic gags are spun past us in such a concentrated way, we realize the degree to which SNL has inhabited our generational psyches.

Not everything works, but like the show it's celebrating, Saturday Night barrels along even when jokes fall flat, largely through remarkable acting. LaBelle, from Spielberg's The Fabelmans, is willing to play Michaels as a bit of a pretentious, self-important young ass, which goes a long way toward holding sentimentality at bay. It helps you buy into the hero's determination to get the show on, both because he believes his vision could be great and because he knows this night might be his only chance to take over the asylum.

Rachel Sennott strikes a strategically seductive tone as writer Rosie Shuster, the insufficiently-recognized wife of Michaels. The huge supporting cast includes impressive work by Dylan O'Brien as a handsy Dan Aykroyd, Nicholas Podany as Billy Crystal, Emily Fairn as Laraine Newman, Kim Matula as an alluring Jane Curtin, Lamorne Morris nailing the voice and body language of Garrett Morris (no relation!) and Ella Hunt coming about as close as a mortal could to capturing some of the enchantment of Gilda Radner. Some of these work better than others, but none are embarrassments.

Amusing in smaller turns are Matthew Rhys as George Carlin, J.K. Simmons as Milton Berle, Jon Batiste (who also wrote the score) as Billy Preston, Tracy Letts as Herb Sargent, Willem DaFoe as forbidding NBC exec David Tebet and Robert Wuhl as director Dave Wilson. There's also a startlingly chameleon-esque double role; see if you can spot it.

With Batiste's insistent jazz pushing Michaels along through the halls and dressing rooms, the film often recalls Inarritu's Birdman, from 2014. But I found Saturday Night much more enjoyable than Birdman; it's Birdman with a heart, and without the sour, unearned cynicism.

I'm predisposed to like show-biz stories, and I well remember watching, at 13, that baffling but entertaining first "cold open," between Belushi and headwriter Michael O'Donoghue (Tommy Dewey). So Saturday Night admittedly had an advantage with me. But it wouldn't have held me without Reitman and his cast's skillful execution of Hawksian overlapping dialogue and manic ensemble hum. SNL has turned many of its performers into stars, and this film could do the same.

A REAL TEAMSTER PLAYER

Happy Friday everybody!

Check out my "Friday Flicks" column, online at Phoenix Magazine, this week featuring reviews of A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood...

...and Martin Scorsese's The Irishman.

The Scorsese flick was of special interest to me, as my Dad was a Teamster, and had seen Jimmy Hoffa speak to his local (and was unimpressed, he said), but I was never able to get him to tell me where the body was.

RIP to Michael J. Pollard, passed on at 80. Out of his vast body of work, I have a favorite moment: When he remarks "You sure are good, Melvin" after Paul LeMat, who is driving, refuses his flask in Melvin and Howard.

Happy Thanksgiving week next week everybody!

For nearly twenty years, it’s been a Thanksgiving tradition in our house, once the massive portions of food have been ingested and we’ve collapsed on the couch, to watch the 2000 film What’s Cooking? It’s an ensemble piece, set on Thanksgiving in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Fairfax, which cuts between four families of different racial and ethnic backgrounds—Vietnamese, Hispanic, African-American and Jewish—as they prepare the big dinner and navigate family drama and revelations. Funny, sweet and poignant, the movie is at least as refreshing and meaningful now as it was when it was made.

What’s Cooking? was directed and co-written by Gurinder Chadha, a Kenyan-born Brit of Indian descent. Needless to say, cultural diversity is a recurrent theme in her work. This week another film directed by Chadha was released on video: Blinded by the Light...

...an exuberant coming-of-age comedy-drama-musical set in Luton, England.

Based on the youth of writer Sarfraz Manzoor, it’s the story of teenage boy, Javed (Viviek Kalra), in a traditional British-Pakistani family in the ‘80s who was inspired to a career as a writer through his enthusiasm for the lyrics of Bruce Springsteen. Despite the film’s modest budget, Springsteen allowed the filmmakers to use his music, and Chadha ingeniously turned the Jersey legend’s work into the soundtrack for a Brit adolescence.

I had the chance to chat with Chadha when she visited the Valley recently in connection with the release of Blinded by the Light, and she described the balancing act of her directorial approach:

“I’ve always worked with music a lot in my films; I love music. The challenge here was in making a film about a writer, and making that cinematic. But at the same time I had a big responsibility to Bruce, not only because he gave me carte blanche on his catalog, but also because all those songs mean something to him, and Bruce fans. So my challenge was to direct a movie where I used the music so that it stood up to what the intention was of the songs in the first place, so I didn’t disappoint Bruce, and didn’t disappoint Bruce fans. But at the same there are a lot of people who aren’t Bruce fans, so I had to make sure it wasn’t just about the music.”

Even though she was there to talk about Blinded by the Light, I couldn’t resist asking Chadha about the scene in What’s Cooking? that brings tears to my eyes every year, when we hear a nearly a cappella version of the Beach Boys song “Wouldn’t it Be Nice?”; in the movie’s context the lyrics take on an unexpectedly moving, emotional cultural resonance. Said Chadha:

“I found that version, and I really wanted to play it at the end of the movie. Everyone was like, it’s never going to happen. You’re not going to be able to afford a Beach Boys track. You’ll have to get permission from Brian Wilson…so I wrote him a letter, based on what my movie was about, what I was trying to do. I was trying to show different communities in L.A. Movies show people not getting on; I saw people getting on around me in L.A. It was my first time in L.A., and I saw that and I was struck by that. The letter went out as a fax, and everyone was like, you’d better have a Plan B, and blow me down, I think it was like an hour later, not even a day, we got a fax back saying sure, she can use it. It was incredible. It turned out he’s from L.A., and he really liked the sentiment.”

It seems like a Thanksgiving showbiz miracle, but the current Chadha project experienced a similar generosity; notes Chadha: “The way that Brian responded to my letter was similar to the way we got permission from Bruce on Blinded the Light.”

If you’re looking for a pleasant after-dinner Thanksgiving video double feature, What’s Cooking? and Blinded by the Light might just leave you thankful.