Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night and the Milton Berle of It All

About halfway through Saturday Night, the new film about the ground-breaking, earth-shaking first episode of one of the most iconic television shows of all time, Saturday Night Live, a character appears in a scene who seemingly comes out of nowhere.

The character is Milton Berle, the one-time vaudevillian comic famed for being the medium of television’s first breakout star.

Berle is associated with SNL because he later hosted an episode of the show so reviled by many of the original cast, and especially its creator Lorne Michaels, that it was banned from being re-run for almost 30 years.

Berle certainly did not show up in the studio on the show’s premiere night to bray about his greatness as a comic and television legend, while berating the new show’s young cast, especially Chevy Chase, whose girlfriend Berle is depicted as creepily hitting on.

Nor was the creaky-old variety show being staged elsewhere that night, something called “The Rumpus Room,” complete with dancing girls for Berle to ogle, a real thing.

All of this seems, initially at least, both gratuitous and ludicrous to anyone familiar with the build-up to the show’s actual premiere 49 years ago (Oct 11, 1975). But almost nothing in Saturday Night is precisely as it was that opening night. Much is wildly invented.

Clearly director/screenwriter Jason Reitman was making an entertainment movie; not a documentary. He was not aiming for verisimilitude, but rather a vibe, one that captures the chaos, the excitement, the freewheeling attitude of the TV show that definitively severed television’s connection to a form of American comedy that had stretched back half a century: big, broad, obvious shtick.

The message of the film is summed up in a line uttered by the Michaels character to David Tebet, an older generation NBC executive working for Johnny Carson: “We’re trying to do something innovative for a change.”

It is the singular achievement of SNL, and individually of Michaels, that he and the show knew what they were trying to do from the start, remained devoted to that purpose, and have somehow managed to keep doing it for 50 seasons.

So of course it had no use for Milton Berle.

Berle didn’t host SNL until four years later, April 14, 1979. By then Chase was long gone, so the film’s confrontation scene could not have occurred. It also would have made no sense because Berle’s contemptuous putdowns of Chase in the film for not being a “star” would have sounded ridiculous in light of how big a star Chevy had become by that time.

Still, the Berle scenes—enlivened by a convincingly oleaginous performance by the great J.K. Simmons—work as a not-subtle counterpoint to the rule-breaking comic cacophony going on all around him. Berle had been known as “Mr. Television,” because he got a show—The Texaco Star Theater—early, in 1948, and against virtually no significant competition was able to command a 97 percent share of the audience watching TV on Tuesday nights at 8 pm.

But his form of slap-happy shtick was as dated in 1975 as the Edsel. The contrast comes from the fact that Berle’s comic style had long since run its course before he thrust himself onto a cast that did not know or respect him, some 27 years after his big TV breakout.

SNL has somehow managed to stay hip and relevant for almost twice as long. Berle’s performance as host, which is not portrayed in the movie, seemed intrusive and atonal to most viewers, who by 1979 were in total sync with the now-legendary original cast members.

The Berle character is only one of several Reitman includes as stand-ins for the old TV guard that is about to be replaced. Tebet, who had a special position as Carson’s man at NBC, is portrayed as all but canceling SNL before it even started, with the right to block the premiere from even happening, and a Carson rerun at the ready to replace it.

That also didn’t happen. It’s a bit of a heavy-handed way to underscore the odds SNL faced to blow up the old order. The odds weren’t actually that stacked. The CEO of NBC, Herb Schlosser, was a full-fledged advocate who never flinched in backing the show.

But again, it’s not a documentary.

1 Comment

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  1. Dannel Martin says:

    Don’t worry, the casual viewer of this film, will think it is all real history.

    Looking at this interviews Tom Snyder did with the real cast, before Saturday Night aired, there is no idea that there is a chance Carson reruns were going to be aired instead.

    Good, funny movie, just don’t believe most of it.