Danny Glicker thought he was done with the ’70s. The Oscar-nominated costume designer was wrapping up work on HBO’s The Sympathizer—which takes place near the end of the Vietnam War—when he got a call from Jason Reitman that would transport him right back to 1975.
Glicker and the Saturday Night director/co-writer/producer share a long history, having previously worked together on Ghostbusters: Afterlife, Thank You for Smoking, Labor Day, and The Front Runner. “I love working with Jason,” Glicker tells LateNighter. “He is, creatively, like coming home for me.”
Reitman had first mentioned Saturday Night to Glicker “many, many years ago, and I would always think about it in the back of my mind,” he said. “I was working on The Sympathizer, and I made a joke about it being my last ’70s thing. I was like, ‘This is my big ’70s swan song.’ And he goes, ‘Danny, we’re doing Saturday Night.”
For Glicker—whose other credits include Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale and Mother! and Gus Van Sant’s Milk (which is the film that earned him an Academy Award nomination)—joining Saturday Night was a no-brainer.
Glicker is a self-described “late-night and comedy nerd” who also happens to be a “huge fan” of Saturday Night Live—particularly its early era. Which meant that, even before signing on to Reitman’s film, he had already read every SNL-related memoir he could get his hands on, including those by Martin Short, Gilda Radner, and writer Alan Zweibel.
“I had already immersed myself in this world,” Glicker explained. “When I got this screenplay, it was not a shock. I was coming home to these people that I’d already spent so much time adoring.”
Saturday Night centers on the chaotic 90 minutes leading up to the premiere of SNL’s very first episode, which aired on October 11, 1975. The biographical comedy-drama film stars Gabriel LaBelle as Lorne Michaels; the stacked cast also includes Rachel Sennott, Cory Michael Smith, Ella Hunt, Dylan O’Brien, Emily Fairn, Matt Wood, Lamorne Morris, Kim Matula, Nicholas Braun, Cooper Hoffman, Willem Dafoe, Matthew Rhys, J. K. Simmons, Jon Batiste, Andrew Barth Feldman, Tommy Dewey, and Finn Wolfhard.
Reitman—a four-time Oscar nominee best known for Juno and Up in the Air—directed the film and penned the script with Gil Kenan (Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire).
Ahead of Saturday Night’s wide theatrical release on October 11, Glicker hopped on a Zoom call to chat about all the tiny details that went into each character’s costume, which scene required a whopping 14 shirts for one character, and the “gorgeous” reindeer sweater that sadly didn’t make the cut. (Note: Minor spoilers ahead!)
The following interview has been condensed for length and clarity.
LateNighter: You’ve worked on a lot of high-profile TV shows and films, yet Saturday Night feels pretty different from your other work. What drew you to the project?
Danny Glicker: I was just really fascinated about tackling this project with Jason [Reitman], knowing that he was approaching the material with an enormous amount of research behind it. But also with an incredible sense of adventurousness and a great deal of affection for everyone that we were depicting.
What’s interesting about Saturday Night is that even though some of it takes place in the exact same year as some of The Sympathizer, it’s such a different world. The life and death stakes that I was dealing with in The Sympathizer are life and death to the people within the world of Saturday Night, but in a different format. And visually, the worlds could not be more different. Saturday Night is all New York: gritty, grimy, dirty, stinky, slept in; The Sympathizer was all about this very cracked view of California not being what it was promising to be. So I got to approach the material from a fresh angle.
When it comes to portraying real people like the original Saturday Night Live cast members, where do you start with styling their wardrobes?
It all starts with an enormous amount of research, carefully broken down into what I call ‘books’ or ‘worlds.’ Every character has their own book; every world has its own book. Even something as quick as the inside of a bar will have its own book. I want to know what the people look like inside of the bar, I want to know what the people in the street look like.
It’s world-building, right?
It’s total world-building! Every character has their own detailed book where I have everything that’s referenced in the movie, but also a ton of things that are not referenced in the movie. I’ll be like, ‘Oh OK, Dick Ebersol loves Gucci.’ That is the reason why he has a vintage Gucci belt buckle in the movie.
There are little pieces that I pick up, and I start assembling each person from the clues, like a detective. I’m assembling them and coming up with a consensus and a concept for each person. In the case of Saturday Night, the two biggest goals were to tap into something that was authentic and truthful to each character—to really connect them to the thing that immediately resonated with the people who loved them (both their fans and people who loved them in their own lives), and to also do so in a way that was visually impactful in this very chaotic canvas.
It was really important that we had a trademark for every single character where, no matter how quickly you looked around the room, you’d say, ‘I know who that is. That’s where they are. I can spot them. I know what they’re about. I know what their stake in this disagreement might be.’ It was always about creating a trademark that helped us identify them, but in a way that was utterly respectful and authentic to the original source people, and was the embodiment of their spirit as opposed to a reduction.
How did you go about styling Lorne Michaels in particular?
It was really about honoring the authentic Lorne, right down to his rings and duck pin. One of my favorite secrets is that Lorne, in a lot of the research, had cowboy shirts, and we recreated this cowboy shirt for him. I love the idea that we’ve been seeing him in the shirt and vest the whole time, and it comes off, and he’s just in a shirt. But the shirt is more interesting than we thought it was going to be, so suddenly, we have something new that’s fun for our eyes. Then he’s thrown into the “Weekend Update” look, and that cowboy shirt actually becomes an important basis of a metaphor, which is showing you how threadbare the illusion is—suddenly he’s a newscaster, but under this newscaster outfit is a shirt that is not at all appropriate for that outfit.
When Lorne is in his final look, there’s a bit of movie magic. He emerges from his worst, lowest moment, and Rosie [Shuster (played by Rachel Sennott)] magically changes him in the elevator. She’s basically saying, “It’s time for your change.” In that moment, he changes into the iconic Lorne Michaels; he changes into this man that we’re like, ‘Oh, he’s been through the fire.’ He emerges like a fully realized man: the corduroy blazer; the fresh, crisp shirt; and, most importantly of all, the duck pin that she affixes on him. In my mind, the pin is a metaphor for his presence leading the way; you have the mama duck with all of her ducklings.
Another thing that was a big consideration was in the beginning [when Lorne is] surrounded by so much chaos, giving him a look that was going to be a grounding force. I had explored busier looks. I had located an incredible vintage reindeer sweater, which was an exact match to a sweater that Lorne really wore. It’s gorgeous, but it turned out that it was too busy—we wanted to give him a look that would always make him the resting spot for your eye in this world of just pure chaos.
You mentioned Rosie Shuster, and I wanted to talk about her outfits as well. It felt like her fashion was sort of in sync with Lorne’s, but not totally. Was that intentional?
I love, love, love that you got that. Rachel Sennott was such a delight. My first fitting with her, she came in and we both, practically at the exact same moment, were like, “Rosalind Russell in The Front Page!” We wanted this snappy, fast, movable [feel]; but also, Rosie’s slightly more elevated than Lorne in her professionalism. She has an outfit where she could be comfortable all day, but the second the execs come in, she has a nice blouse on.
We did a lot of work together on movement. I gave her these fantastic heels, which were these ’40s platforms, because in the ’70s they were obsessed with the ’40s. The platforms were really, really high, and I was like, ‘Rachel, are you going to be OK?’ And she’s like, snapping down the hallway, clicking down the hallway. For me, it was really about giving her an outfit that gave her power.
But as you point out, there’s this thing going on where, when Lorne and Rosie are together, we see them as these kind of bookends or mirror images. I think that’s one of the more complicated ideas that Jason so beautifully explores in the movie. There’s no question as to whether or not Lorne and Rosie love each other, that is a given; but what that love is is kind of a question mark.
I love the idea that when we see them together, they are seeing each other through a mirror. They’re seeing each other as kindred spirits, as equals. I think that Lorne certainly views Rosie at least as equal—I think he looks up to her—and I wanted that to be evident in how she is presented. Back in the day, they would be referred to as carbon copies of each other. They’re the same, but different. They might not be in a marriage that’s working in a conventional way, but their souls are totally connected.
Nicholas Braun plays both Andy Kaufman and Jim Henson. How did you juggle the costumes for these two very distinct characters who are played by the same actor?
When I’m working with one actor playing more than one character, I find it’s really important to create fittings for them that are completely isolated and unique to that one character. Sometimes I’ll do fittings in separate fitting rooms; it creates a whole new headspace for that actor. In the case of these characters, we focused exclusively on Andy Kaufman in the beginning, because he was up first. So, we wanted to get Andy up and running and make sure he was perfect—we played with proportion and movement and tone and feel.
Jim was a really fun character. I created a pattern in homage to a famous image of Jim Henson, and also a pattern that Nicholas and I felt expressed the sense of chaos and unbalance. I specifically put a pattern on him that was aggressively asymmetrical and off-balance to create the sensation of feeling the lack of center, the sense of panic that Jim is feeling when he’s working on this show and his talent is not being recognized by his co-workers.
The first day that Nicholas was in the Jim Henson outfit with the hair and makeup, he opened his dressing room door, and it was mind-blowing. I was like, ‘I don’t even know what the hell’s happening right now, because this is not the person that I walked in with!’
I also want to touch on Dan Aykroyd for a minute. Dylan O’Brien plays him, and he does a great job. But it’s so funny because he’s best known for roles like Teen Wolf and Maze Runner, these teen idol roles—and here, he really transforms into Dan. How did you go about styling him?
I don’t bring any baggage into my fittings; I leave all of my preconceptions at the door. When Dylan came in, the only person I saw was Dan Aykroyd. Jason had shown me [Dylan’s] audition; his audition was sensational. And I had worked with Dan Aykroyd on Ghostbusters: Afterlife. So, the second I saw Dylan as Dan, I was like, ‘That is Dan Aykroyd.’
The thing that I loved about working with Dylan was his commitment is just in every molecule of his body. He would come in as pure Dylan, and the second he started to get in these Dan Akyroyd shapes, he was moving with that cocky walk. He was bringing that sort of hyper, wonky pattern that Dan speaks with; it’s kind of like a scientist who’s rapping. His command of the language was so ingrained into his body language. Honestly, my fittings with Dylan as Dan were a joy. He brought that sense of fun and adventure. He just was a wonderful, committed actor.
The movie features John Belushi’s famous bee costume, and there’s also this chaotic moment where we see a bunch of other cast members running around dressed as bees. Can you tell me about what went into the bee costumes?
A lot of what you see in the movie is the background of this high-concept sketch called “Bee Hospital.” It’s a really sweet sketch where the whole joke is all the dads are waiting for the delivery of their baby bee. And they all are like workers, you know, the worker bees. It’s done like a soap opera—it’s kind of making fun of General Hospital, but it’s “Bee Hospital.” I think that the bee costumes became so iconic for early Saturday Night Live, because they didn’t really know what to do with them, so they kept changing them up. In later episodes, they turned into the Killer Bees. It was so funny, because people on set every now and then would refer to them as the Killer Bees, and I’d be like, ‘No, no, ‘Bee Hospital.’ I don’t even know about Killer Bees. We end on October 11, 1975 right? We are ‘Bee Hospital!’’
I put every actor in a mockup of the costume, which was just a white blank body suit; then we would measure them and do all the poses. I had to build over 30 [costumes]. I put a lot of effort into making sure that the bee costumes expressed the quality of early SNL. We worked really hard to create a really poor-looking bee costume while working with the top fiber artists in the world. We bled out all the stripes so they looked bad, we saturated and desaturated segments of the yellow so it looked like the dye was uneven and not perfectly done. They couldn’t look dirty, but we did make them look grungy.
How did you decide on Chevy Chase’s outfits? I was fascinated by the denim and red Hawaiian shirt combo that he wears.
It was very much about giving us that pop of his cockiness—about really pushing that moment that he walks on camera and we’re like, “He has arrived.” I think that’s how he sees himself. What was so much fun about working with Cory [Michael Smith] on Chevy is how much posture work we did. We did all sorts of sneaky details about the length of a hem and the length of his sleeve to give him this lankiness. Because in addition to being a brilliant wisecracker, Chevy also was a brilliant physical comedian, so we wanted to give him that physicality. We were playing with everything from heel height to hand length to sleeve length.
Who was the most fun character to style?
I have done a million movies with J.K. Simmons, and whenever I’m working with Jason, my favorite part is always when it’s time to dress J.K. At this point, he’s part of the Reitman family, and he’s the person I most look forward to on every Reitman movie. Like, “When do I get J.K.?!”
To dress him as Milton Berle, I went deep, deep, deep into the research, down to the crazy little lace that’s running down the front of his shirt with the black ribbon behind it and the ruffles on the sleeve. I love that the shirt was a little campy, because it communicated that Milton is trying very hard to remain relevant, which, of course, creates a lot more attention for his character within the piece.
I loved contextualizing Milton with his backup dancers, who I was heavily influenced by The Golddiggers from The Dean Martin Show. I wanted to show this mindless, unquestioned sexism that was pervasive at that time, and to ask ourselves, ‘Why is this OK?’ The women who portrayed them were fantastic, because they understood how it worked within the context of our story.
It was really important to go on to the sixth floor [of NBC Studios], because what we were seeing was the kind of synthetic polyester, milquetoast, middle-of-the road crap that the world was seeing [on TV at the time]. In that moment, you’re beginning to understand, as Lorne does, what this fight is about. And what this fight is about is something that’s real and authentic.