How ‘Saturday Night’ editors dialed up the anxiety onscreen

“Saturday Night” is the story of a team anxious to meet a deadline. It’s Oct. 11, 1975, and a band of misfit comedians, crew members and musicians sweat through the 90 minutes leading up to the first episode of “Saturday Night” (the word “Live” wouldn’t enter the title until the 1977-78 season). Overseeing the madness is producer Lorne Michaels (played by Gabriel LaBelle), who has no idea how or even if this show will work. Anxiety wafts through the air along with pot smoke.

Meanwhile, another behind-the-scenes “Saturday Night” deadline was at work — this one involving postproduction of the movie itself. As film editors Nathan Orloff and Shane Reid recall, director Jason Reitman and his cast and crew began shooting “Saturday Night” in March and finished in May. The film was slated to premiere at the Telluride Film Festival in August. “The deadline was real for us,” Reid says, reflecting on the parallels between the frenzied dash to finish both the film and the show it depicts. “The show has got to go on at 11:30, and the movie has got to play at Telluride.”

Orloff and Reid had two things going for them, one of them obvious: There were two of them. Simple math would indicate this helps when it comes time to assemble a film. Then there was the tone and pacing of the movie — frantic, jagged, adrenalized. Urgent. As it turned out, the duo’s under-the-gun cutting was a perfect match for what ended up onscreen.

“The unusualness of everything worked so much for the benefit of the film,” Orloff says. “It needed that energy from us.”

Heading into “Saturday Night,” Orloff and Reid weren’t strangers to each other, or to Reitman. Reitman (and his late father, Ivan Reitman) worked with Reid on a TV commercial a few years back; Jason also chose Orloff to edit “Ghostbusters: Afterlife” (2021) with Dana E. Glauberman. Orloff recalls Jason Reitman singing Reid’s praises even before he helped pair the two cutters for the first time on this year’s “Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire,” directed by “Saturday Night” co-writer Gil Kenan, on which Reitman was a writer and producer. “Jason really loved having two editors on ‘Frozen Empire,’ especially because of the speed of it, and he decided he would need two editors on ‘Saturday Night’ as well,” Orloff says.

The movie’s signature editing sequence comes near the end, as the clock prepares to strike 11:30. Actually, there are many clocks, and as Michaels appears to be careening ever closer to a nervous breakdown, images of timepieces and bricks still being laid for the set and the cork board showing a proposed layout of sketches flash before our eyes, one after another after another.

Nathan Orloff and Shane Reid (Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times)

“We just found the percussive element of that scene, and we wanted the audience to understand that Lorne is at the breaking point,” Reid says. “Sometimes some evocative editing and sound design can make you feel more uncomfortable than the scene might’ve been originally laid out.”

In this instance, editing also helps create character. For the entire film up to that point, Michaels has more or less kept it together while the likes of John Belushi (Matt Wood) and Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith) indulge in ego-driven self-destruction. Now, as the minutes disappear, the controlled chaos of the editing suggests that Michaels’ cool exterior is masking abject panic.

“Lorne is the one enigma in the movie, where he’s trying to keep everyone together,” Reid says. “He’s trying not to let anyone in to see how nervous he is and how scared he is. So in the edit, we discovered that that’s the window we really needed to crack and get a peek inside his head, because he won’t let anyone else in. But the audience needs to get in, and that’s what I think these edits help construct.”

Both editors acknowledge that the postproduction experience and the finished work come back to the person at the top. “Jason really gives us the time on our own to discover, but he’s also there for us to figure something out and crack something,” Reid says. “It’s this wonderful balance. I’ve worked with directors that go too far in either direction, either very hands-on or hands-off.”

And when Reitman doesn’t like how things are going? He’ll let you know about that too. “I really appreciate his honesty,” Orloff says. “You trust when things are working, and you can feel when things are not. In some ways, he’s a difficult man to impress and to please. He comes from a long line of that with his father. With a guy like Jason, you have to earn the trust, and you have to work hard for it.”

Sometimes, at breakneck speed. The show, after all, must go on.