Adapting a true story into a narrative film inherently requires a certain artistic grace to entertain. This is often the challenge in creating a great biopic – finding the heart of the story, which may not be the same as the chronological facts.
This challenge becomes even more difficult when the subjects or their families are still alive and may have opinions on the matter (or be harmed by the release of the project).
and saturday nightJason Reitman (thank you for smoking, Ghostbusters: Afterlife) faced the challenge of adapting a relatively recent event in pop culture history: recording the first episode of what has come to be known as saturday night live October 11, 1975, 30 Rockefeller Plaza.
The 2024 Winter Writers Summit will be held December 6-9, 2024.
looking for inspiration saturday night
In 2008, he directed “Diablo Cody” to great success Juno, It earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Director, and Reitman was given the opportunity to guest-write. Saturday Night Live.
According to the Wrap , Reitman stayed up until 4 a.m. on Tuesday night, working with saturday night live Writer Simon Rich. The next day, after a reading and much deliberation by Lorne Michaels, one of his sketches, “Death by Chocolate,” was selected for airing.
“From the first moment I sat on the chair saturday night live Watching that thing come online, part of me wanted to capture it,” he said of the origin story for his new film. But it has been on the air for nearly 50 years. What story should we choose for a feature film? Reitman chose to be who he is now saturday nightinstantly recording the first ever saturday night live plot, everything that can go wrong does.
“Documentaries and narrative features are different things,” Reitman told the National Post. “The purpose of a narrative feature is to feel something. My guiding truth is: How did it feel in that moment before this show aired, when it seemed impossible?
Read more: 5 things screenwriters should learn when watching movies
“Saturday Night” (2024)
conduct research
When Reitman first signed on to write the project, he started by interviewing everyone who was in the building that day, from NBC pages to writers, actors, crew, musicians, to Lorne Michaels Me, Lorne Michaels himself was the creator of what was then called the project. NBC Saturday Night Show.
“We try to understand every story … not only to understand what happened, but most importantly to understand what it was like to be in the room,” he said. “As we interviewed each person, we learned that none of their stories were consistent and that they all contradicted each other.”
This is often the technique in creating biopics – primary source material is subjective. Sure, you probably know the facts (the air date is October 11, the host is George Carlin, and the musical guests are Billy Preston and Janice Ian), but it takes a convincing story There, people will want to watch 1 hour and 49 minutes, such is the artistry of the screenwriting.
“Between all of them, we discovered a truth about what it was like to be there, what it was like when this generation of twenty-somethings took television away from the previous generation, and what it felt like to do Something that had never been done before,” Reitman said of the core of his story.
“Saturday Night” (2024)
Get to the heart of the story
Reitman began writing the script with Gil Kennan (monster house, poltergeist). They spent three frantic days writing the script after creating what Reitman called a “murder board” depicting where all the characters would be at any given time in the first two hours of release.
“Once we started cooking, it was a very detailed, choreographed preparation, and we were constantly rehearsing and filming scenes with stand-ins and moving around the space,” Reitman recalls.
But that doesn’t mean some artistic license wasn’t taken.
While many of the film’s key obstacles are based on real events – Lorne Michaels was originally scheduled to become the anchor of Weekend Update before handing it off to Chevy Chase – they didn’t necessarily happen before the show. 90 minutes. But the heart of the film is capturing all the chaos of the first episode and inserting it into the timeline of their story, which, as anyone who’s ever done a live show knows, is the ninety minutes before they step into the spotlight.
The heart of the film leads the way: the chaos of trying something new live There, mistakes are seen and remembered. The excitement of comedy and performance. Of course, in hindsight, they knew they were going to succeed in launching a show that would become a cornerstone of the American pop culture zeitgeist. These were the guiding lights that led Reitman and Kennan to create the script in three days.
“Saturday Night” (2024)
—
If your biopic strays too far from the truth, viewers may feel cheated and frustrated. In other words, it’s the writer’s job to decide how to portray humans in the story–friendly, disapproving, sympathetic?
Writers have to choose what is central to that historical moment or character, and what modern audiences can learn from it, and use that to guide the narrative – and Jason Reitman does that without a doubt.
Learn more: 101 Story Prompts Based on True Events
Shannon Corbeil is a writer, actor, and U.S. Air Force veteran based in Los Angeles who has appeared in SEALs and rookie. She is also a 2023 DGE Television Writing Program finalist and her scripts have entered various competitions. You can learn more about her on her website or come hang out on Instagram, twitter!
