Saturday Night Trailer’s Rachel Sennott Moment Teases Legendary Dan Aykroyd Gossip

When Saturday Night Live (or just “Saturday Night” in its first season) debuted in 1975, it was like an atom bomb went off in the American zeitgeist. It is hard to remember half a century later with the series still going strong as a landmark piece of institutional broadcast television, but back in ’75 it was as if the counterculture had invaded TV. That was its appeal to younger Baby Boomer viewers of its era, and that is the excitement which Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night looks eager to rekindle next month.

The new backstage dramedy is set on the evening of Saturday Night (Live)’s very first episode and attempts to cram all of that first season’s infamous backbiting and brilliance into a taut 90 minutes. Having already played at Telluride to mostly positive reviews, it seems like the movie might get there, even if it is likely to condense events into just one night on the show. And in the latest trailer, we get a hint of that as Saturday Night teases an infamous bit of backstage tea that has been spilled about Not-Ready-for-Primetime-Player Dan Aykroyd (Dylan O’Brien in the movie) and SNL writer Rosie Shuster (Rachel Sennott).

“These can’t be the right size,” O’Brien’s Aykroyd complains about a pair of oh-so-tiny denim shorts in the trailer. “Yeah, you’re right,” Sennott’s Shuster drawls out, “they should be a little bit smaller.”

Out of context, it’s a little bit of flirtation apropos for a film about young people putting on a show. But if you do know the context about SNL’s early years, then you’d realize that scene is of the still-not-famous Dan Aykroyd flirting with the wife of Lorne Michaels… the show’s producer and Ayrkoyd’s boss. Yes, Dan Aykroyd and Rosie Shuster definitely had a thing going on during Saturday Night Live’s golden years, even as she was still technically married to the show’s creator. And it’s the kind of gossip that any biopic should be eager to spread.

“I wasn’t actually in a couple with Lorne when the show started,” Shuster told authors James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales in the book  Live from New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live. “That’s the real folly of it, but I never actually got divorced from him, I don’t think, until like 1980 or something. I just didn’t want to deal with that.”

Be that as it may, fellow SNL writing alum, Tom Davis, recalled in the same book the awkward tension around the show at the time.

“When Rosie and Danny first started dating, Danny was sure that Lorne was going to kill him because Rosie was his ex-wife. I was very close to Danny, and he was like, ‘Don’t tell anybody, Davis, don’t tell anybody.’ And of course everybody knew anyway. Finally Lorne said to me, ‘Danny and Rosie sure are hitting it off,’ and it was like why are you going through all this hiding and charade kind of thing? I mean, Danny and Rosie and I went on vacation together. But somehow, Danny was sure that Lorne was going to kill him.”

Everyone seems to speak about the “charade” with good humor now. It was, after all, a part of their youth and SNL‘s romanticized “wild and crazy guys” era. This includes cast and crew meeting up at the after-after-party at “the Blues Bar,” a dive Aykroyd and John Belushi bought in downtown Manhattan and turned into their Blues themed bacchanal destination.

“I was going with Aykroyd at that point in time,” Shuster said, “so it was kind of amazing watching the whole scene—the Blues Bar and everything—take off. It was kind of like boys’ fantasies of the blues, and then heavy saturation of the blues, and then, having played out all these different fantasies in TV sketches, suddenly there was this manifestation and they inhabited these characters. You could see the whole thing start to unfold in the Blues Bar.”

It would seem that Reitman’s Saturday Night will tap into some of that fantasy. Of course whether any of that energy, or even that spark between Shuster and Aykroyd, occurred during the first night SNL went on the air is a little less clear. But that’s the thrill of compressing a movie to a single narrative evening: you get to distill the reality into the fantasy.

Saturday Night opens in theaters on Oct. 11.