Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night is a cinematic speed trip through the 90 minutes before the first broadcast of the iconic comedy show Saturday Night Live. Michael O’Donoghue was the first head writer for SNL and was known for his edgy and sarcastic sense of humor which gave the inaugural shows a unique feeling. Tommy Dewey has built up an impressive resume of film and TV credits, including Casual with director Jason Reitman who cast him as O’Donoghue. Dewey, who is remarkable in the film recently spoke to Immersive via Zoom.
[This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.]
This is certainly a very compelling project. I love the way it was pieced together. Please tell me about how you got involved with it initially.
I’ve known Jason for a long time, going back to a TV show we did together called Casual. I guess he thought I had Michael O’Donoghue’s voice somewhere inside of me. I came in, I grew my beard out for a couple of weeks. I bought some of those wire-rim glasses and came in and we just did a work session on camera. A while later he called me and said, “Hey, you want to come down to Atlanta in a month and play this guy?” It was such a great ride, man. I just had a blast doing this.
It was quite a transformation. I was looking at your headshot and I’m like, wait a minute…he was Michael O’Donoghue in the movie?
I’m so glad and grateful that Jason let me do this kind of character work. My headshot certainly doesn’t suggest that I’m the perfect fit for Michael O’Donoghue. I think one piece of it was that a physical likeness was not as important for O’Donoghue as it was with some of those other characters because we just don’t have the familiarity with him that we do with Chevy Chase.
What was your research like? Did you read the book about him? Did you talk to people who knew him? How did you put together the character?
Yeah, there is a biography of Mike that was very helpful to get a sense of what drove him as a young man. He did performance art and all this avant-garde theater as a young guy. I think the key to understanding Mike is that, yeah, he was funny. He was a great comedy writer, but he was interested in pushing forms forward and he was kind of willing to blow up everything in the process.
I would say the most helpful thing was a meeting I had with Mitch Glaser, who was Mike’s writing partner. Mitch reminded me that I think his words were, just, remember that Mike was always having a good time. Yes, there was a darkness about him and he could be savage, but it was less about hurting the other person and more about finding joy in the back and forth.
The scene with the network sensor was great…
You can see those emotions in that scene. So finding the joy in the darkness was a linchpin thing that I kept coming back to. Also, Bill Murray was at Mitch’s house when I met with Mitch. He had some really helpful stuff including, and I’ll paraphrase this poorly, but he said something to the extent that Mike loved, he would live or die with a big idea. He’d either come out of a room a hero, or he’d be kicked out of that room. I thought that was helpful too. There was a fearlessness about the guy.
How did you approach embodying his persona…
It was looking at the little bit that there is of Mike on the internet and just not trying to do some two-dimensional impression, but making my voice a little more nasal to get a little closer to Mike. He had a physicality. He was almost reptilian in the way he kind of moved around the SNL offices by all reports, so making some physical adjustments based on what I could find of Mike. But as you know, there’s not a ton out there.
He was part of the whole National Lampoon crew in the early seventies before SNL…
I did read a bunch of his Lampoon stuff and it was so creative. I also thought it was important to recognize and sort of digest the idea that Mike was an outsider. The Lampoon crew were a bunch of Harvard guys. Mike was not. I think he was sort of freer as a result of it. He was coming at all that stuff from a different angle, and he was always kind of an outsider at SNL. He kept getting fired and coming back and he was kind of on his planet.
What’s missing in SNL now is Michael O’Donohue. He was truly subversive…
I got hip to that subversiveness for this movie. I had watched the greatest hit stuff with my dad. He had the VHS. When you go back to that first season, there are 15-minute sketches. There’s the sketch that appears briefly in the movie where Michael O’Donoghue stabs 18-inch sewing needles into his eyes, and there’s not a joke in that sketch other than let me completely commit to this and see how the audience reacts. You don’t know that stuff anywhere on TV now…
Absurdist, freeform. Yeah. No, it’s totally of its era but unique in that era, because Johnny and Uncle Miltie weren’t very happy. What was the set like? Seems like it was probably a fun and also possibly chaotic set to be on…
Less chaotic than you think. There was a whiteboard set up every morning for Jason to kind of talk everybody through the choreography. We became this organism that functioned pretty well because we’re just coming to the same fully recreated set every day. Everywhere you looked you saw a three-dimensional 1970s sound stage that is all lit from above.
Excellent. And do you have any favorite scenes in the movie…
The first thing Jason sent me was the scene with the network sensor. It’s so beautifully written, that it captures Mike better than anything else in the movie. I think for one thing, it’s a long scene, but the way he kind of takes her hypocrisy and turns it against her, that was a hell of a day. I just felt like a kid in a candy store with that scene.
It’s kind of a whirlwind film. Did you have any idea what the finished product would look like? It’s a fast 90 minutes of pure cinema…
I didn’t have a sense of how it would be stitched together. I will say the most wonderful surprise was how evocative it was emotionally. When that last piece of music kicks in they open the doors and let the crowd in and you’re building to that sketch.
I didn’t necessarily expect to feel the tension and to be on the verge of tears. There’s such a joy in it when Willem Dafoe finally relents and says, go live. When I watched it for the first time with an audience with my wife, and I looked over and she had tears streaming down her face. I was surprised by how emotional it made me.
Were there any particular challenges? It sounds like just the atmosphere itself kind of helped the performance, but were there any scenes that were say, more difficult than others?
I think the fear was that it was going to be so chaotic that they over-prepared to the extent that they were ready. The days were pretty tight, and the chaos worked. So to the extent a day felt a little off or things were difficult, I think it probably felt that way in 1975, trying to get a show ready in an hour and a half, and in that way, you could just kind of lean into it and use it.
So what are your thoughts on the other end of this? It was very well received by the people who saw it, so that’s encouraging for it to have the perfect movie afterlife where it does continue to find an audience.
I have been totally satisfied with this experience. Jason makes movies for the cinema, and it’s so beautifully shot in that grainy 16-millimeter. It plays well on a big screen. I certainly wish everyone in the world would see this in a big movie theater.
Saturday Night is now available to buy or rent and in theaters.
