Everyone knows Saturday Night Live has lived on to become a mainstay in pop culture but the 90 minutes leading up to its very first episode made it seem like it would never make it to air. Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night documents those chaotic moments the audience never saw. Offscreen Central had the opportunity to talk to film editors Nathan Orloff and Shane Reed on the strategic use of sound and music as a guide, adding in clocks to maintain a sense of real-time urgency, and balancing multiple storylines and characters for a satisfying final montage.

Jillian Chilingerian: In this movie, we are thrown into just a specific point in time, as the audience, and we are trying to catch up to who these characters are and their relationships. When you first approach the project knowing that there’s so much of this chaos in there, how do you start mapping that out?
Nathan Orloff: I think a lot of that is especially in that first long shot is sound, and choosing the dialog that we want to hear and carve out and creating, just like the visual that Eric did, creating an auditory journey and path of we want your eye and your ear to go over here, and now you want to be hearing this. There are little things in there I think you can watch that one or so many times. Lorne’s talking to Neil about the page outside and in the background, you can hear Dick Ebersole say “What the hell is this?” and it’s the giant shark head. There are things in there that it was all a choice about, do we need to hear this and register it as a story, or do we need to hear this and its texture? There are moments of breath you need to create as well for the comedy beat to land and create a space.
Shane Reed: I think it’s also paired with this cool shot that Jason came up with, which was in the affiliate’s room, you don’t know who anyone is you see these legs moving around. There’s a buzz going on in that room, and the audition tapes are being played, almost for them to understand who their performers are, and, in a way, that’s immediately voyeuristic, because you feel like you are in a room and space, and it’s not cutting, and it’s allowing you to catch up to who some of our cast is, and so when you’re thrust in after being on the streets you then sort of feel like you’re grounded in some space and era, and then you can sort of absorb the next big oner that we’re going to do.

Jillian Chilingerian: I love that explanation, because it’s right when you enter the building and you’re amid the floor and you feel like you’re there, and you are seeing the behind-the-scenes of the rooms, and all the rooms come to life. I want to hear about making each room have its aura as you go in and you hear these one-off conversations. It never feels like it’s starting and stopping we’re just continuing on this journey as the rush is on to beat the clock.
Nathan Orloff: Early on, there was an instinct to add a lot of sound to do that thing but we found it was about removing and making subtle choices so that when you do go into the control room, the chaos of the hallway is quiet and recurring whispers. Another way to do that tone shift is with music and the music is the stuff that’s telling you that these things are different, or now we’re rushing, or now we’re anxious, and or now we’re this, and that creates the space of all of 8H both floors feel like one large space, but the music, story-wise, is telling us things are moving forward.

Jillian Chilingerian: I want to touch upon the music in guiding. How was interweaving and following those different cues that Jon created? I was also reading about, how he did the score, and I was like, it’s insane.
Nathan Orloff: It’s cool, right? It’s, it’s really, really cool. In Jon’s score recorded on set after looking at our assembly cuts on a laptop, we came back to LA and Chris Newlin was able to chop these up into chunks that we could then, oh, now we need to dive down and listen to this dialog and now we want to explode to get back to a part of the song that was busier and, for instance, cutting between O’Donoghue and the light boom and the tension of getting to the light boom fall is a beautiful example of something that Jon recorded for that part of the movie, but we were able to construct in conjunction with music around and with the edits.

Jillian Chilingerian: I know they’re going to succeed, but your pulse is rising because you’re like, how are we going to get this together? That brings me to the inclusion of the clock, where it just breaks those scenes where so much happens, and then it moves up one bit. In the theater, those were some of the biggest laughs we just experienced this insanity of these people trying to put this show together, and then only one minute had passed by. I’m curious about that aspect keeping it in the feel of time. Sometimes you watch movies and you’re like, this feels a lot longer than the given time period we know that they have. This does a good job of keeping it in line with there are 90 minutes to go.
Shane Reed: It’s interesting how dense 90 minutes can be, you know, and especially when you’re when you’re gearing up for a live television show, all the elements are coming together. A lot was going on at that time and Jason talked to us very early on about how the villain in this is time, and he captured clocks on set, and in the script, there are things like Neil Levy coming in and saying 45 minutes. Those are fun ways to interject the urgency but I think that in the language of cinema, there’s not much that you see that takes place in real-time and so you do as an audience, I think, lose a sense of of time, like you’re talking about. I don’t know if this has been three hours now, five hours. How long have we been in here? Time became important, and Jason bought some extra clocks on eBay we were going to do some pickup shots of maybe the inner workings of a clock that make a clock move. We’re going to do this sort of Run Lola Run idea where we had tight frame shots of the minute clock, and they didn’t feel entirely in the language of the film, which is not stylized in that kind of way. It does feel more organic. We started to play around with these, with this clock that might have been over the whole film, and then we played with it coming on in these giant waves and taking up the whole screen. I don’t remember the first time we did it, but at some point, we did this, just a black card with some film grain underneath it, and a little time stamp. It felt in the language of the titles that we had already developed in the beginning we’re working on for the end of the film. It started to make us laugh and I remember when we put it on Lorne smashed the glass, he walked in, he dropped the pole down the camera found the peacock logo, and then you move on. We then cut to the clock, and it just punched a lot more, and it made us laugh. We were aiming to keep the audience aware of the time, but also as a device, it became like a great additional character.
Nathan Orloff: When you had chaos on top of chaos, you kept furthering that and you lost a perspective and came a little numb to it. We noticed that the clocks gave the juxtaposition to have a break was not only like what you needed to enjoy the next section, but again, it also like made you laugh and you’re right, and the idea was oh my god, only 12 minutes have passed, and then you can get back in and build back up again.
Shane Reed: It gave us little chapter breaks too, like then we could, we could start over and build and ramp this tension and have something to work backward from so that we knew how we wanted to keep pressing the gas. I can feel it when I’m watching the movie still. I know when I’m about more than five minutes away from another timestamp because you can just really feel the tension ratcheting and the audience enjoys getting built up and then, like, letting go and then building back up.

Jillian Chilingerian: There are good breaks, and it prepares you to go through another one and you’re like, what more could happen? What else is wrong when you’re like, Okay, maybe we’ll get it together. It continues to go down this rabbit hole of SNL as a whole. We even get these moments of easter eggs of what is to come in the history of SNL with Billy Crystal, or the Julia Child skit.
Nathan Orloff: I think in the script process, Jason knew he didn’t want to be beholden to just the sketches in that first episode so the mechanism of Lorne throwing all the cards in the ground and ditching a lot of stuff, which was accurate to what happened that night, in terms of, they were going to be over, and they had to remove a lot of stuff, but it allowed them to write into these scenes a lot of these iconic things that were to come. To highlight the creativity of, the roles that people like Al Franken behind the scenes trying to win Lorne’s approval and pitch on a sketch. It was this fun little tour of the things that were percolating in the building, and that was absolutely by design. It was to edit those things because it freed us from being so tied to exactly that first episode.

Jillian Chilingerian: You see the amount of creativity that’s just brewing behind the scenes, outside of this one episode coming together. I admired that because we know that this one show has given us so much in pop culture, and you can see it in this film a lot.
Shane Reed: I think one of the storylines that is my favorite and breaks my heart the most is Billy’s storyline because of the heartache it must feel to have a sketch that you’re like ready to go with, that you’ve even done the dress rehearsal on, and succeeded that just doesn’t make it for time. The idea that there’s this list that Lorne’s got in his head. I’m going to put that on a special list, and maybe we’ll bring that back one day, and maybe we won’t. The tension that creates around the performers and the writers, like, when can I bring that backup? So I think the way that they infuse all those ideas into the script also just shows you that that’s probably what it’s like week to week to week is pitching. It’s unpredictable and that’s what I’ve always found the most interesting about Saturday Night Live is that there are certain people who have a really amazing time handling that, and there are people who do not. Trying to give you an insight into what that experience is like on both sides, people who are overly confident, people who are just reeking of insecurity.

Jillian Chilingerian: There are so many, little stories within the overarching story, obviously the relationship between Lorne and his partner, and then you have him, and the Johnny Carson Show, and then you have, like, the Chevy Chase sequence, where we know what he becomes. How is it to balance all of these different threads giving the audience enough understanding without it just feeling like it’s a string from how it all comes together for the large tapestry of who these people were?
Nathan Orloff: I think the trick was to treat it like any other film, that this needed to work on its own, that these characters in this film, you needed to feel earned, and you needed to feel sympathy, even if for someone that has, massive ego that is being destroyed in front of our eyes, like Chevy Chase, we had to treat these characters like real people, and almost at least for me, forget the reality of what they become. My head was very much around making this movie work in a bubble versus considering it in a historical context.
Shane Reed: Yeah, it’s also a lot of that work is done in the script, and how much they balance those arcs. I’ve worked with a lot of montage elements, a lot of montage films, and a bit of documentary. There is a formula that starts to be created about how you introduce someone, set them up, revisit that, and then pay that off and you can feel in the film because there was some modulation. We would move a few things around to keep the train going, especially when the timestamps came in and then we were able to be like, Oh, why don’t we put this here to kick this off, but you could feel when you were too distant from someone or too close to someone so it’s trickier. It’s tricky, but a lot of that work was in the script, and the motivation for the characters was there. So it was just really us trying to balance it as best we could.
Jillian Chilingerian: Yeah, because it’s such a great ensemble of so many actors that I like and I haven’t seen them in a comedic role. They are so different, and you get the time to spend with their psyches and how they’re processing this as the character and then spending with the ensemble as a whole.

Jillian Chilingerian: My last question, I want to talk about the sequence at the very end where it’s that lightning in a bottle, Lorne finally says, this is what the show is about. The whole movie feels like it’s after hours, these people are just running wild and trying to figure things out. We see everyone get it together finally, and they’re laying the bricks. We’re going to try this scene, we know our marks and how it’s coming together. What was the process of putting that together? Watching that was, like, the most impactful part of seeing everyone’s grasping what this is, and the kinetic energy of it all finally coming together, as opposed to how much of the chaos that we saw before.
Nathan Orloff: That montage set to Nothing from Nothing, played by Jon Baptiste as Billy Preston, was, to me, one of the most important sequences in the film and a joy to put together. It was, to me, the candy that you’re supposed to get for dessert after you’ve been anxious for 90 minutes, and it was incredibly intricate and tricky to put together. That’s his performance, we needed to earn all of those beats. It’s the culmination and the moment that everyone feels inspired the bricks start being put down, and people are helping. I love that moment when Chevy jumps in and helps, and you’re cutting from things going wrong, like George Carlin to getting the lockjaw to everyone starting to clap, and you’re just, like, this absurd. That was the goal, is to try to, hopefully, have a smile on your face that entire time, because it’s, you’re starting to see it all gel and come together.
Shane Reed: It’s like a kitchen film. It’s got these ideas that at some point this has to land somewhere. This isn’t, we’re just leaving everyone off on their journey like this lands and plating that, all of that chaos that feels like a sketch, which is so great to see Lorne seeing it come together, and feeling it come together, and the way that you start that montage with that empty room, and by the end, it’s just full of life is very indicative of the of what the process of what it feels like, probably week to week. That feeling of accomplishment among creatives, and hopefully, it seemed there’s a payoff for everything that has come before it.
Jillian Chilingerian: It’s the part where everything just really comes together. I want to thank you both for this time to dive into your work, because it’s truly such a thrilling film of chaos and the additions of just the clock, always feeling it. I’m sure it was a lot of fun to put this together.
Shane Reed: It was, thank you.

Saturday Night is available to watch on PVOD.
You can read our review of the film here.