Saturday Night (2014)
Filmed in 2008, premiered in 2010 and officially released in 2014, I'm surprised that I had never even heard that this movie existed until today.
"Saturday Night" is a fly-on-the-wall documentary that follows the cast and crew of "Saturday Night Live" for the production cycle of one episode (one week). The host (John Malkovich) is introduced on Monday and from that point they have 5 days left to write and produce an hour and a half of live television.
This movie is exactly what I was expecting and exactly what I wanted. You always hear the lore of SNL - about how the writers stay up all night to try to squeeze out sketch ideas, how sketches can be killed by one bad rehearsal, how no one can memorize the lines because rewrites are happening right up to the time of going live - but you ONLY hear about it, there's never been a way to see it up close. In fact, most of the inner workings of SNL seem to be pretty well shrouded in secrecy. This movie really takes you inside and places you in the middle of everything that's happening.
Directed by James Franco, the film is extremely low budget but I get the feeling that that has more positives, in this case, than negatives. For one thing, I think a full documentary crew would be seen as too intrusive to the show and wouldn't be allowed access to begin with - better to have a few people with handheld cameras. But it also helps to shed the weight of being "a documentary". I don't need an interview about what Chevy Chase did in 1976 and I certainly don't need the backstory of how the show began. The movie is simply: how are these people going to get a show to air this week? Will it be funny? And the handheld cameras, unsteady as they may be, suit the stressful, hectic feeling perfectly.
7/10.
This movie is very hard to find (I thought) except that while writing this review, I found it's on Hulu. That was easy. You can watch it (with commercials) here.
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