Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire director Gil Kenan is venturing back to New York City. However, this journey will be a unique view at Saturday Night Live in the year 1975.
Co-written by Kenan and director Jason Reitman, the upcoming film SNL 1975 will take us behind the scenes at the staple sketch comedy series 90 minutes before one of the original episodes. The spin this film is taking? It will present these events in real-time with a 90-minute immersive film.
In a new Collider interview, the writer says the film will be a mostly accurate take on the hectic lead-up to creating the live experience that’s been around for nearly 50 years.
Kenan reveals in the interview: “It’s the 90 minutes leading up to the show starting. I think Jason’s already said that. I want to be careful not to jump the gun before because I want Jason to be able to properly set this one up when he’s ready to come out and do press, but I’m so excited about it. It’s an absolute love letter. For us, that was comedy school growing up, was SNL. So, yeah, we’re beyond thrilled and honored to be able to tell that story.”
“Oh, there are absolute liberties. I mean, we took themes and events that occurred across several months of the mounting of that show and were able to weave them into the architecture of the events of that first night,” he said of SNL 1975. “It’s a love letter to the changing of culture and of comedy that happened in 8H in 1975. The experience of interviewing those writers and crew members, cast members will go down in my lifetime as one of the high-water creative experiences.”
“We would finish each of those interviews, and Jason and I would just stare at each other for minutes after it, just processing the stories we just heard, and filled notebooks with them,” Kenan continues. “By the time it came down to writing that thing, we just exploded. We had so many stories, so many moments we were bursting to put on camera. We just couldn’t wait to do it.”
The film features Gabriel LaBelle as Lorne Michaels, Cooper Hoffman as Dick Ebersol, Kim Matula as Jane Curtin, Ella Hunt as Gilda Radner, Finn Wolfhard as an NBC page, Dylan O’Brien as Dan Aykroyd, Rachel Sennott as Rosie Shuster, Lamorne Morris as Garret Morris, Nicholas Braun as Jim Henson, Matt Wood as John Belushi, Cory Michael Smith as Chevy Chase, and Nicholas Podany as Billy Crystal.
SNL 1975 has yet to set a release date.
