Saturday Night — director Jason Reitman’s dramatized retelling of the 90 minutes leading up to Saturday Night Live’s October 11th, 1975 premiere episode — is often, quite literally, a portrait of insanity. There are llamas, a stage catches fire, you see meltdowns and fistfights and crying and a lot of fake blood. That Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle) survived that night (let alone 50 more years’ worth of similar Saturday nights at Studio 8H) feels like, well, something a movie might make up. So we went and compared some of the film’s key plot points to a few of the definitive SNL texts, including Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller’s Live From New York and Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad’s Saturday Night, to see what’s real history, what’s fiction, and what falls somewhere in between.
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