Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night paints the 90 minutes leading up to SNL’s very first broadcast on October 11, 1975 as total chaos. “The writers are inebriated,” the biopic’s official poster reads. “The set is on fire. The sound system is wrecked. The actors are physically assaulting each other. The crew is in open revolt.”
However, Chevy Chase has a different recollection of that fateful night. Speaking with The New York Times ahead of SNL’s Season 50 premiere, the actor/comedian said the NBC show’s first broadcast was “not pandemonium at all.”
“We were all prepared—at least I was, and Lorne [Michaels] was prepared for how it would go,” the OG “Weekend Update” anchor said. “There was no way we were going to do a show without running it over a few times.”
Chase added that neither the cast nor the behind-the-scenes crew were scrambling to figure out their roles for the live show at the last second, noting: “We were very controlled about who was to do what.”
Chase was initially brought onto SNL as a writer, but quickly also became a breakout cast member. While the show undoubtedly launched him into stardom, he told The New York Times that he and his fellow cast members weren’t particularly worried about whether the show’s first broadcast would be a hit.
“I don’t think it concerned us one way or the other,” he explained. “We were going to do what we do, and if you laugh, great, you laugh. You’ll tell somebody else about it, and they’ll laugh the next time.”
In Saturday Night, Chase is portrayed by Cory Michael Smith. Speaking with TheWrap at the Toronto International Film Festival earlier this month, Smith described filming as “truly controlled chaos.”
“We were just unleashed animals on set,” the actor explained. “Because we always knew that Jason [Reitman] knew exactly where the camera was going to be and what it was catching.”
Saturday Night—which had its global premiere at the Telluride Film Festival on September 1st—begins its platform release today in New York City, Los Angeles, and Toronto. It will have a limited theatrical release on October 4, followed by a wide release on October 11 (49 years to the day since SNL broadcast its first episode).
