Over on NBC, the late-night sketch comedy staple Saturday Night Live is celebrating 50 years of entertainment. Singer and Wicked star Ariana Grande will be hosting the October 12 episode, followed by Michael Keaton on October 19. As we are starting to learn, however, none of that would have been possible if Lorne Michaels and his initial cast of hooligans didn’t get the show off the ground way back in 1974… an act of rebellion that’s currently being celebrated by Jason Reitman’s upcoming 2024 film Saturday Night.
The original cast of Saturday Night Live included some heavy hitters in the comedic world, and the strength of Jason Reitman’s new movie lies in the cast he found to portray these icons in their early stages. Succession star Nicholas Braun – hilarious as Cousin Greg – all but steals the show playing both Jim Henson and Andy Kauffman. I thought Lamorne Morris and Ella Hunt were spectacular as Garrett Morris and Gilda Radner, respectively. But the standout is Cory Michael Smith as a young Chevy Chase. He’s cocky. He’s confident. He’s so damn good as young Chevy Chase, I basically want him to start remaking old Chase movies so he can keep doing this impersonation.
During a recent Saturday Night press day, though, when I asked Cory Michael Smith which classic Chevy Chase movie he’d love to remake, he didn’t go with Vacation or Fletch. Instead, the actor told CinemaBlend:
His very first feature was Foul Play, with Goldie Hawn. So cool. And it's a great movie. I don't know that I'd want to remake it. It's a pleasure. But it's really interesting. As I was studying him, and who he was, one of the things that I had to really look for and pay attention to was who is the Chevy that's performing, and who is the Chevy off screen? And I was always looking for moments of nervousness, or vulnerability, most of which I would find in interviews. But I did notice (that) there's a different quality of him in Foul Play than other films. It's his first feature, and you can sort of feel him exploring and figuring stuff out. It's like he's not doing sketch comedy. He's doing a proper Hollywood film, with a star like Goldie Hawn. And I do see moments in that performance of like, ‘Oh, that's an actor doing his first feature. I can see that, and I kind of love that.’
See if you can spot some of those moments in the Foul Play trailer, from 1978:
Two years after Foul Play, Chevy Chase would be part of the all-star ensemble of Caddyshack, one of the best golf movies ever made (and also the funniest). And there would be no looking back, leading to Chase becoming one of the most successful Saturday Night Live cast members to break into Hollywood. Chase would go back to television over the years, notably as part of Community, and also returned to SNL on anniversary celebrations.
But Saturday Night will show you where Chase, and several others, got their start when the movie opens wide in theaters on October 11.
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