For all the research the filmmakers behind Saturday Night managed to do, one artifact from the SNL premiere remained an unlikely holy grail—until they discovered it from an unlikelier source.
Before writing Saturday Night, a which follows the 90 minutes leading up to the 1975 series premiere of Saturday Night Live, co-writers Jason Reitman and Gil Kenan sought out every person they could find who was there for the first SNL, from cast members and musicians to crew members and NBC pages.
All in all, over 30 people were interviewed, and some even provided the filmmakers with artifacts from the show. Before his death in early 2023, the show’s production designer Eugene Lee gave Reitman the original schematics of the original SNL set at NBC’s Studio 8H, enabling the writer-director to create a perfect replica of the studio on a soundstage in Georgia.
However, one basic piece of memorabilia from the first-ever SNL eluded the filmmakers.
“When @jasonreitman and I started researching the 90 minutes leading up to that first episode, there was one piece of the puzzle that we just couldn’t crack,” Kenan recounted on Instagram earlier today. “Remarkably, no one had a copy of the first episode’s script.”
How they ended up finding the script is arguably even more remarkable. The only copy they could find came from the person who was famously not a part of that first SNL.
“We’d almost given up hope when we interviewed Billy Crystal and asked him about the lost script,” Kenan said. “He walked into his study and came back with his original draft.”
Kenan shared a photo of the script, which features the comedian’s name penciled at the top of the cover page. Crystal was slated to perform a standup set (as “Bill Crystal”) on SNL’s premiere, but wound up being cut for time. That story is one of the many told in Saturday Night, with actor Nicholas Podany portraying Crystal.
For co-writer Kenan, that outcome made the fact that Crystal saved the original SNL script all the more impactful.
“Holding his teleplay, seeing ‘Bill Crystal’ scrawled faintly on the cover, and realizing that he held onto the thing when no one else has is incredible considering how that night went for him,” he wrote. “The discovery was just one in a journey full of them, one that’s now been brought to sparkling life by Jason and a dream cast and crew.”
Saturday Night is now in theaters nationwide.
