Back to the ’70s, Sweet and Sour

Last week I finished up my most concentrated siege of moviegoing of the year: the Hamptons International Film Festival, an 11-day showcase for international festival winners, Hollywood Oscar hopefuls, and a potpourri of indie features and documentaries, both foreign and domestic. 

I should probably rave here about my favorite film of the festival: Emilia Perez, a startling, original, and totally winning new film, a musical set in the world of Mexican drug cartels, from French director Jacques Audiard. But you will surely be hearing plenty more about it as Oscar season ramps up.  

Instead, I want to talk about two films that cater, in very different ways, to our nostalgia for the 1970s. One struck me as overdone and shamelessly pandering. The other was a bit of a revelation. 

First, the bad news. Saturday Night, the new Jason Reitman film about the frantic night that Saturday Night Live first went on the air in 1975, may please many fans of the celebrated show, now marking its 50^th season on the air. But the mythologizing of the show’s now legendary history has gotten totally out of hand. 

Saturday Night Live was, to be sure, a bold experiment at the time: an effort to bring the irreverent, anti-establishment satire of the counterculture — from places like the National Lampoon and the Second City improvisational troupe — to mainstream network television, then dominated by innocuous comedy-variety shows. 

Reitman and his crew have cast the film well: the mostly unknown actors who portray familiar stars like John Belushi, Chevy Chase, and Dan Aykroyd are pretty spot-on. (Gabrielle LaBelle, as upstart producer Lorne Michaals, maybe less so.)  And they have certainly studied all the SNL lore, from the many books, articles, and oral histories that have chronicled the show since. But they have jammed all of it into an absurd “real-time” re-creation of the 90 minutes leading up to the very first “Live from New York … It’s Saturday Night!” 

Some of it actually happened. Billy Crystal was, indeed, booked to appear on that first show, but got cut at the last moment for time. Guest host George Carlin was wasted on drugs.  But sketches being written, sets still being built, and actors going AWOL with just minutes to go before airtime? Patently ridiculous. The film jams in references to favorite bits that wouldn’t appear on the show for months or years (e.g., Dan Aykroyd’s impression of Julia Child), simply to elicit smiles of recognition. In the middle of the countdown to airtime, Lorne Michaels even leaves to get a drink at a local comedy club, where he discovers writer Alan Zweibel.  Poetic license? I call it docudrama malpractice.   

Worse, the film insists on turning virtually everyone who not part of the show’s inner circle into cartoon villains or outright buffoons. Willem Dafoe plays a pompous NBC exec who makes Robert Duvall in Network look like a model of corporate responsibility. Michaels gets a pre-show phone call from Johnny Carson (whose Saturday-night reruns SNL is replacing), full of bile because he’s afraid the show will cut into his own popularity. There’s even a gratuitous visit from Milton Berle (who guest-hosted the show in its fourth season, an episode that Michaels always hated),  so he can bad-mouth the young whippersnappers who are threatening the old comedy guard like himself. Saturday Night Live was irreverent, but never so vicious.

How much more appealing the ‘70s look in Daytime Revolution, a modest documentary directed by Erik Nelson, which had its world premiere at the Hamptons festival and is starting a limited run in a few theaters. 

The film is a chronicle of the nearly forgotten week in February 1972 when  John Lennon and Yoko Ono were co-hosts with Mike Douglas on his daytime talk show. Douglas was a bland, square talk-show host of the pre-Oprah era, who liked bringing on celebrities for weeklong co-hosting gigs, and his willingness to let two icons of the ‘60s revolution join him for five shows, pick their own guests, and expose his mainstream daytime audience to the counterculture was quite a gutsy one.   

They bring on guests like Yippie co-founder Jerry Rubin, Black Panthers leader Bobby Seale, and consumer advocate Ralph Nader. Lennon joins rock legend Chuck Berry in rousing rendition of “Memphis, Tennessee.” Even the more typical daytime self-help guests had a counterculture tinge, like a macrobiotic chef and an expert on biofeedback. Interspersed between the five episodes, we get news clips to remind us of the tumultuous political climate at the time, as Vietnam continued to divide the nation and Richard Nixon was headed for a landslide reelection.  

The real revelation of Daytime Revolution is how charming and companionable Lennon and Ono are. No hint of condescension or preachiness; they both seem genuinely eager to communicate their world view in a palatable way to a Middle American audience. John is cheerful and voluble, opening up to Douglas about subjects like his difficult relationship with his father. Ono, far from the Beatles-busting harridan of popular myth, genially adapts her avant-garde sensibility to the language of daytime TV. On the first show, she displays a shattered coffee cup; glues another piece of it back together every day; until by the end of the week the cup has been reassembled. 

Douglas (despite his syrupy opening rendition of “Michelle” — a McCartney song!) deserves a lot of credit for orchestrating the whole thing with aplomb and sincere interest, turning radical guests like Rubin and Seale into surprisingly candid and amiable conversationalists. By the end of the week, when John performs his most famous post-Beatles number, the lyrics — “Imagine all the people/Living life in peace” — seem to carry fresh meaning.  

To analogize to our current fraught political moment: Saturday Night is the Trumpian film, pushing a mean-spirited, us-versus-them mentality, mythologizing our heroes and demonizing all outsiders. Daytime Revolution sincerely wants to bridge the divides, to look for connections. Call it the politics of joy.