In ‘Saturday Night,’ the Milton Berle costume contextualized the theme of the entire movie
Costume designer Danny Glicker goes way back with director Jason Reitman, so much so that Glicker says he considers the filmmaker part of his “creative family.” Glicker first worked with Reitman on the director’s debut feature, “Thank You For Smoking,” and also served as the costume designer on later features like “Up in the Air,” “Labor Day,” “The Front Runner,” and “Ghostbusters: Afterlife.” So the costume designer, an Oscar nominee for “Milk,” perhaps knows best where the new film “Saturday Night” stands within Reitman’s acclaimed filmography.
“This movie felt really special, and I think one of the reasons it felt special is having worked with Jason so long, I kind of could feel the pieces of our previous projects and the lessons that we’ve learned being applied here,” Glicker tells Gold Derby. “From the second he told me this movie was a go to the second I read the script – and I read the script in real-time, breathlessly. It starts on the highest level and it doesn’t stop for an hour and a half – I understood that this would be so much about the sensory experience, the visual experience of just being in that world. And as much as I think we always try to bring our A-game, I think everyone involved in this project, everyone was bringing their A-plus-plus game. That’s partially because we were all super fans of ‘Saturday Night Live’ and partially because Jason was truly inspiring us with his vision to just authentically present this world in the most chaotic and immersive way possible.”
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Based on interviews Reitman and co-writer Gil Kenan conducted with everyone they could find who was involved with the first-ever episode of “Saturday Night Live” – including the show’s living cast members and creator and executive producer Lorne Michaels – “Saturday Night” takes place in the 90 minutes before the first “SNL” broadcast, on October 11, 1975.
“I am such a super fan of that era of comedy, and I have always been passionate about it,” Glicker says, adding that he has read almost every biography and oral history about “Saturday Night Live” and the ‘70s comedy boom. But the challenge of “Saturday Night” was its scale (the film has more than 80 speaking parts and Glicker had to make thousands of costumes) and how to convey its ultimate message through the wardrobe choices.
“What I really wanted to do was to use it as an opportunity to express what it is about that era of comedy and that style of comedy that I loved,” Glicker says. “It was so important that we use this as an opportunity to visually remind people how scrappy, how dirty, and how threadbare that world was at the time. The comedy sketches were being created as a sort of anarchy and reinvention – they were not these slick and polished things. So, as I imagined it, I knew that I wanted to accomplish that emotional texture with the clothes and I just worked with all the incredible research that Jason brought in his beautiful script that he wrote with Gil, and wanted to make sure that I found a way to build this world to show people what comedy was then.”
With no character was the fulcrum of the era more present, Glicker says, than Milton Berle. Reitman cast his longtime collaborator J.K. Simmons as the television legend and he uses the character’s ego and attitude to show that the passing of the torch to “Saturday Night Live” was more like a knock-down, drag-out struggle.
“On any Jason Reitman job, the best part is when I walk into my fitting with J.K. Simmons,” Glicker says. “In the case of J.K. and Milton Berle, we head-to-toe recreated the wardrobe from scratch. Every scrap of clothing on his body is custom-made in homage to the real Milton Berle of that era.”
Simmons has two key scenes as Berle, one where he dresses down a young Chevy Chase (played by Cory Michael Smith) in devastating fashion and another where Berle performs a corny, choreographed dance as part of a glitzy variety show – a stark contrast to what’s happening inside Studio 8H during the lead-up to “SNL.”
Glicker says he created the entire context of Berle’s world, including the wardrobe of Berle’s backup dancers – inspired by The Gold Diggers dancers created for “The Dean Martin Show.”
“It was this kind of garish, polyester, slick, and phony world,” Glicker says about Berle’s side of the building. “I kept thinking that sequence where we sort of see this graveyard of television past – what we were doing was contextualizing the entire movie. So even though it’s a very brief and cheeky scene – kind of fun and naughty – it’s also a very serious idea that we were exploring. What we were saying is ‘Saturday Night Live’ was trying to break through the artificiality of entertainment at that time and take on shows that didn’t have anything truthful to say. That scene is trying to contextualize the entire movie. So I had a great deal of affection for that sequence and what we did.”
“Saturday Night” is out now.
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