How Much of Saturday Night Is True? What the Movie Got Right and Wrong About SNL's Opening Night in 1975

Saturday Night is a fast-paced, head-turning movie recounting the 90 minutes before Saturday Night Live first aired on Oct. 11, 1975, but not everything is 100 percent accurate in the film.

Directed by Jason Reitman, the movie focuses on Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle) as he attempts to pull together a show just over an hour before showtime with the pressures of a fighting cast, a doubtful studio and a badgering staff weighing against him.

The movie recounts several stories that have since become notorious, including how the late comedian John Belushi (Matt Wood) still hadn't signed his contract before the show and that Billy Crystal (Nicholas Podany) was originally supposed to be in the first episode, but his scene got cut.

However, other stories were more fabricated, like Michaels heading to a bar and hiring a writer on the spot 20 minutes before the show went live. Reitman told PEOPLE that being entirely accurate wasn't necessarily the goal. Rather, it was to encapsulate the moments before the show became the behemoth that it is.

"The chief takeaway was that on Oct. 11th, 1975, at 11:29 PM, none of these young people knew what was about to happen," he said. "None of them knew that their lives were about to change, culture was about to change. They were just trying to put on a show."

So how much of Saturday Night is true? Here's everything to know about which of the tales are fact or fiction.

Did the show really almost not go to air?

For the entire 90 minutes before the live performance portrayed in Saturday Night, Michaels faces the worry that the show won't be ready to go to air between a battling cast, production mishaps and doubtful network executives. During the climax of the movie, Dick Ebersol (Cooper Hoffman), NBC's vice president of late-night programming at the time, tells Michaels that the network is expecting the show to fail and does not have his back as much as Michaels thought they did.

Michaels also faces NBC head of talent David Tebet (Willem Dafoe), who seems to subliminally be threatening to pull the show the entire evening. In reality, Michaels recalled in the SNL oral history book Live From New York that Tebet was much more supportive but was concerned about host George Carlin's appearance as he refused to wear a suit.

"The major focus of the night, weirdly enough, was over a directive we got that Carlin had to wear a suit on the show," Michaels said. "He wanted to wear a T-shirt. The directive came from Dave Tebet; he was head of talent and very supportive of the show, but he was also trying to anticipate."

Did Garrett Morris really sing a song about killing White people at soundcheck?

As one of the only Black members of the cast and with a background more in theater than comedy, Garrett Morris (Lamorne Morris) struggled to find his place in the show. His arc in the movie depicts him having an identity crisis and going around asking the cast and crew what his purpose on the show is. All this culminates in Morris singing a song during soundcheck with the lyric, "I'm gonna get me a shotgun and kill all the whities I see."

Though this did not happen before the first show in real life, Morris did sing the song in episode 11 of the first season during a sketch in which he auditioned for a jailhouse production of Gigi.

In 2012, Morris told Emmy TV Legends he got the idea for the song from one of Harry Belafonte's singers who told him a story of how a woman on Art Linkletter's TV show wrote a racist song that she actually performed, inspiring Morris to make a parody of it.

Was Milton Berle walking around set and did he flash Chevy Chase after flirting with his fiancé?

Milton Berle (J.K. Simmons), the legendary TV comedian known as "Mr. Television," is portrayed in a malevolent light, stalking around the SNL set and being aggressive toward the stars. In one scene, he flirts with Chevy Chase's (Cory Michael Smith) fiancée, Jacqueline Carlin (Kaia Gerber), and when Chase calls him out on it, Berle pulls his pants down and flashes him in an effort to demean him.

In reality, this did not happen on opening night nor to Chase, but per Live From New York, Berle did flash writer Alan Zweibel in his dressing room in 1979 when he was set to host the show. Zweibel recalled that he was explaining to Berle that he'd gotten his start writing penis jokes, and Berle responded by showing his genitals just when costar Gilda Radner walked into the room.

"She opens the door to his dressing room just in time to see me looking into his d--- saying, 'Yeah, it's really, really nice,' " Zweibel said.

Did Chevy Chase and John Belushi actually get into a fight?

Chase did get into a physical brawl before a show once — but it wasn't with Belushi. In Live From New York, cast and crew members recalled how when Chase came back to host an episode of the show in season 2, after leaving following season 1, he got into a fight with Bill Murray, who was new to the cast that season.

"I got in a fight with Chevy the night he came back to host [in 1978]," Murray recounted in Live From New York. "It’s almost like I was goaded into that. You know, I think everybody was hoping for it ... I think they resented Chevy for leaving, for one thing. They resented him for taking a big piece of the success and leaving and making his own career go."

Belushi did end up getting hit in the fight as he got in between the two men, and the Community actor even blamed him for starting the argument.

"In a sense, John caused that fight with Billy, but we both ended up hitting John by mistake," Chase said in the book. "I was sure upset, but I noticed John when I was going into Billy’s dressing room, and John was like the Cheshire Cat — sitting there like 'mission accomplished.' "

Did John Belushi actually refuse to sign his contract until he was on ice at Rockefeller Center?

Yes, this story was reportedly (mostly) true as Belushi didn't sign his contract until moments before the cold open due to his hesitancy over the show and joining TV in general. Five minutes before the show was set to start, Michaels' manager, Bernie Brillstein, was begging Belushi to sign or NBC wouldn't let him go on, he recalled in Live From New York.

"He said, 'Okay, I'll sign the contract if you manage me,' " Brillstein said. "I swear to God, it was five minutes before showtime ... At that time, I didn't know how great Belushi was, so I just said yes to get him to sign the goddamned contract."

In the movie, Belushi exits the studio only for Michaels to find him on the ice skating rink in Rockefeller Center, attempting a tricky skating move while decked out in his bee costume. It was only after he fell and Michaels rushed to help him that Belushi signed the contract. While that story is untrue, Belushi was part of the Bees skit, one of SNL's first recurring characters, which did appear in an ice skating sketch later in the season.

Was Dan Aykroyd actually having an open affair with Lorne Michaels' wife Rosie Shuster?

Michaels was married to Rosie Shuster (Rachel Sennott) for nine years before their divorce in 1980, and their relationship was mostly accurately captured in Saturday Night. Though the two were married in 1975, they were more childhood friends than husband and wife, with Shuster even struggling to decide whose last name she'd use in the opening credits of the show (which did not happen in real life).

In both the movie and real life, Shuster was having an open affair with Dan Aykroyd (Dylan O'Brien), who was also dating Laraine Newman after previously going out with Gilda Radner.

Director John Landis reflected on the nature of the relationships on the SNL set in Live From New York, recalling how, after seeing an attractive woman, he asked Belushi who she was.

"John says, 'That’s Rosie Shuster. That’s Lorne’s wife and Danny’s girlfriend.' Which is true. It was wild," Landis said.

Did Lorne Michaels leave the set covered in blood and go to a bar where he hired a writer on the spot?

In a moment of desperation and seeming failure in the movie, Michaels leaves the NBC studio entirely — covered in fake blood after a trick exploded on him — and goes to a bar across the street, hoping to find Belushi but also with a desire to drown away his sorrows. Sitting next to him, he finds comedic writer Alan Zweibel who tells Michaels he'd written the jokes for the stand-up comedian performing on stage now and only got paid if the audience laughed.

Michaels reads one joke by him and hires him on the spot, bringing Zweibel back to 30 Rock, where he gives Chase one of his zingers: "The post office is issuing a stamp commemorating prostitution in the United States. It's a 10-cent stamp, but if you lick it, it's a quarter."

In reality, Michaels did meet Zweibel at a bar, but it was the writer who was performing the awful stand up set and it took place a year before the premiere. Michaels approached him and told him his material was "not bad," and Zweibel went home and wrote up "1,100 of my best jokes" which he presented to Michaels two days later, he told The New York Times in 2004.

Michaels hired him after reading just the first one, as he did in the movie, and the iconic Chase joke was used in the premiere episode.

Was Big Bird actually hung in Jim Henson's dressing room?

Played by Nicholas Braun, Jim Henson is portrayed as starkly defensive of his Muppets in the movie and complains to Michaels that not only has he not gotten a script, but one of his most cherished characters, Big Bird, was hung in his dressing room.

Though this didn't happen in the premiere episode, it is true that the writers hated coming up with material for Henson because of how protective he was of the Muppets and how much he argued about what they would or wouldn't say, Zweibel recalled in Live From New York.

And though Big Bird was never hung in Henson's room specifically, Zweibel said head writer Michael O'Donoghue did indeed mockingly behead the character when they first met.

"He had taken Big Bird, a stuffed toy of Big Bird, and the cord from the Venetian blinds, and he wrapped the cord around Big Bird’s neck," he said. "He was lynching Big Bird. And that’s how we all felt about the Muppets."

Was Lorne Michaels originally supposed to be the Weekend Update anchor instead of Chevy Chase?

Originally set to perform one of SNL's most iconic sketches to this day, Weekend Update, Michaels is awkward and not very funny in the movie as he rehearses it. At the last minute, he tosses it over to Chase, who famously performed it throughout the season.

However, in real life, Michaels knew he was handing over the bit to Chase ahead of time — though he did originally conceive it with himself in the role.

"I’d done the equivalent of Weekend Update in Canada," Michaels told Deadline in 2014. "But as we got closer to the air show, I began to realize that I didn’t think I could be the person who cut other people’s pieces and left my own in."