Saturday Night, the SNL documentary that James Franco made over four years ago looks like it might actually be getting a release. Franco shot the movie as an NYU grad school project, following the creation of an SNL episode hosted by John Malkovich in December of 2008. When asked about the unreleased project by the Huffington Post, Franco revealed that he recently sold the rights to Focus Features:
“That poor thing … it’s something I’m very proud of and it got a great response at the festivals we took it to … I realized I had all of this access that people had never been granted before. And I thought, Well, heck, I’m not just going to waste this as a class project. This could be something interesting about comedy and creativity and the show. So, we shot a feature and put it together – and then we had to go back and first get all of the performers to sign off, which they did. And then Lorne to sign off. But then we had to get NBC to sign off. And then NBC has some big turnover of executives, so the people who had signed off before were no longer there – so we had to get new people to sign off. Then, we sold it to Oscilloscope. And then, really sadly, Adam Yauch died, so then all of the projects with Oscilloscope were kind of tied up in a weird way. So, now we’ve sold it to Focus Features …Inteviewer: Which has the same ownership as NBC and Universal …So maybe that’s in our favor. So we’re just working out the final logistics, and it will come out. I don’t know if anyone who is featured in the documentary is still on SNL [laughs], but there’s a few – Hader – a few people hanging on. But it’s still a very interesting view into that world.”
Fred Armisen, Bill Hader, Seth Meyers, Jason Sudeikis, Kenan Thompson, and Bobby Moynihan are the only cast members still with the show who were still on it when the documentary was made. We’ll see who’s still left when the movie finally comes out.
