Jason Reitman v Brick Wall

The news recently broke that Jason Reitman's SNL 1975, a movie I'm endlessly fascinated by and am pretty sure I'll hate, will follow the 90 minutes before an SNL episode in 1975. You can guess at the plot by looking at the announced cast, but it doesn't cohere in an especially clear way, i.e. JK Simmons is set to play Milton Berle, a famously terrible host who made cast members look at his penis, went long with his monologue and sang "September Song" to a pre-planned standing ovation, but Berle hosted in 1979, not 1975, and four years doesn't sound like much, but it's a dramatically different show at that point– Chevy Chase is out and has proved you can use Saturday Night Live as a springboard to superstardom, Bill Murray is in, Lorne Michaels has one foot out the door and is about to leave everything to Jean Doumanian.

The Berle debacle actually sounds like a great movie, a perfect moment where one of the biggest stars of an older generation, the self-proclaimed "Mister Television," didn't pass the baton so much as he had it wrenched out of his hand. But I don't think that's what Reitman's giving us.

A few months ago, I was wondering how this thing, created by a self-serious director who's never been the credited screenwriter on a funny movie, would look. I thought there were three options:

1. You have actors recreate original SNL sketches.
2. You write new sketches in the voice of the original SNL creatives.
3. You don't show the sketches at all.

The first one fails, flat out. I don't think much of any period of SNL, but that early stuff is especially hard to sit through. It's slow and obvious and has aged terribly. You put new actors in big foam suits restaging the "land shark" bits or you dress whoever Matt Wood is up as a samurai dancing around in a Saturday Night Fever parody for nine minutes (that is a real Belushi sketch, I am not making that up) and you're going to get an uncomfortably silent theater. You do not want to confront people with how unfunny SNL was.

The second one fails immediately, too, because it's being written by Jason Reitman, whose funniest script is probably Labor Day. This option hits the Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip problem, and as much as I'd like to watch that train wreck, it would get torn apart immediately.

The third one fails because why are we even here? If you're venerating this show, and there's no way soggy muppet Lorne Michaels signs off on a movie that doesn't venerate his show, you need to make it clear to the audience why the show mattered or was good or at least significant or at least worth spending 90 minutes of your life exploring.

It's lose-lose-lose. If you show the jokes, everybody's confronted with how poorly it all comes off 50 years later and if you don't show the jokes, you can't make the case that your characters are making anything worthwhile. (This opens the portal to another kind of film, where you show people sweating over and almost killing themselves for a product that just absolutely sucks, but Reitman isn't as subversive as he thinks he is and wouldn't make that movie. He isn't going to have Lorne Michaels defy a doctor's orders and force John Belushi to perform even though he could die, only for Belushi to risk his life for the sake of something you'd politely smile at. Gilda Radner isn't going to have a Dewey Cox-style recollection of her entire life with maximum gravitas and then go out on stage and say words with extra syllables or whatever, as if she's writing Letter From Birmingham Jail, or at least she won't do it in a film with any self-awareness.)

The "90 minutes to showtime" approach is a smart way to avoid all of this. You don't have to show bad sketches if the film takes place before they're performed. You can pretend SNL is a vicious satire that scared the olds and envigored the youngs without admitting it was merely boring, that Lorne wasn't a tastemaker as much as he was a guy who recognized that National Lampoon had already brought a bunch of funny people together.

But there's something missing there– at least in theory– right? Sometimes you're reading a novel about a brilliant writer or watching a movie about a brilliant musician and the novel's author or movie's crew actively decide to not show you the art that makes all of their story's characters think their protagonist is a genius. It can feel like a cop-out, but it's also smart, and you miss that restraint when you watch somebody go for it and fail, when a real author makes a fake poet sound semi-literate. That's what happens early in Tiny Furniture-- one character recites their award-winning poem to another and it has the emotional intelligence of a vague greeting card. Alex Ross Perry's movie Her Smell, based on the novel concept "What if Courtney Love wasn't interesting?," is full of limp and fake grunge songs that never would have lit the world up had they been released by a real band in the 90s. Scott McCloud's The Sculptor is a comic where a man has the power to sculpt anything and his magnum opus is a giant statue of the twee love interest. McCloud gives his protagonist the power of a god and the imagination of an Intro to Photography student. Every movie about stand-up comedy is full of the hackiest stuff you've ever heard. There is telling people your character is talented and then there's backing it up, and people faceplant on that step all the time.

The remaining issue is the other half of the title: Even ignoring the SNL of it all, you're setting your movie in 1975. I mentioned this earlier, but you'd get more drama out of a film taking place just one year later, when Chevy Chase had blown up, was the first person to leave and the first to return for a winking cameo. He'd begun guest-hosting The Tonight Show by 1976 and was one of the most famous comedians in America and thus the world. Everybody else hated him for it. You set your film in 1976 and you've got a show that has subbed in Bill Murray for Chase and changed the primary underlying audience question from "What will happen this week?" to "Who will break out next?" People who watch SNL regularly are as interested in being there for the next Chase, Eddie Murphy, Will Ferrell or Tina Fey as they are in finding out what the Weekend Update hosts have to say about Coachella or whatever.

Setting your film at the beginning of a 50-year-long story ignores an ego even bigger than Chase's: You're filming a Lorne Michaels character who's had some success but still needs to prove himself. Lorne Michaels the nervous showrunner is like every other nervous person in a showbiz story. He's worried he'll fail and he's mostly just hoping the talent he's imported from the Lampoon will put together good work, which we know the filmmaker thinks he will. Lorne Michaels the institution is so much more interesting, though you'd need some actual conviction to make that story while he's alive and powerful. You couldn't half-ass that one. The most interesting SNL story, I think, includes a Lorne that's already profited well off the backs of the writers and sketch actors he's been playing mind games with. It's a guy who has married his secretary and when presented with enough rope to hang himself, he's thanked NBC and then used it to hang John Belushi, Chris Farley, etc. The most interesting SNL story has to be set late enough that Michaels has left and failed, only to return to a show starring once-in-a-generation talent Eddie Murphy. That's a guy whose empire only makes it out of its first decade-or-so because somebody else had the foresight to hire a lightning bolt, and that's infinitely more interesting to me than "upstart who hopes he's got what it takes."

But then that's the problem with Jason Reitman: Like Michaels, he defers to power while putting on a show that he's speaking truth to it. Thank You For Smoking is about an unlikable Big Tobacco spokesperson whose central moment of reckoning has him admitting the dangers of cigarettes while at the same time arguing– and the movie thinks he's morally right– that tobacco companies don't need to warn people about those dangers because of course everybody already knows that cigarettes are bad. The Up In The Air climax sees the Anna Kendrick character finding out that a person she fired has killed herself, and the movie sympathizes with the Kendrick character to the point that the dead woman seems to have only jumped off a bridge to spite her. It's classic Libertarian bullshit, this feeling like "Yeah, we're the real punk rock" and then immediately getting defensive when anybody genuinely criticizes deeply-entrenched authority. It's no coincidence that Reitman adapted a book where a woman falls in love with the random criminal who's taken her hostage.

You'd hope an SNL biopic would be made my somebody who sees through the bullshit at least as often as he yells "I'm seeing through bullshit right now, guys!" But assholes cover for assholes. Most things that are bad and have been for years got to be that way because assholes have successfully argued that other assholes are acting acceptably. Everything I'm saying I want here would only exist in Todd Field's or Sarah Polley's or Todd Haynes' SNL movie. Jason Reitman couldn't make that film because he believes too deeply in The Way Things Are. His Citizen Kane would end with all the characters sincerely cheering for Charles Foster Kane. To Reitman, Lorne Michaels became what all people hope to become. To Reitman, Michaels is the aspiration, the person who's earned the right to fuck people over. I don't want to engage with any art that thinks that's possible, much less aspirational.