Saturday Night Live origin movie casts its young Lorne Michaels

Live from New York… it's an origin story.

Filmmaker Jason Reitman is developing SNL 1975, a movie at Sony Pictures about the earliest days of Saturday Night Live, and the project has found its Lorne Michaels.

EW has confirmed that the SNL co-creator and head honcho will be played by Gabriel LaBelle, who’s no stranger to portraying young versions of legendary entertainment moguls — he's best known for playing a character inspired by Steven Spielberg's childhood in The Fabelmans.

Meanwhile, Licorice Pizza star Cooper Hoffman will play Dick Ebersol, the NBC exec who helped shepherd the development of SNL, and Rachel Sennott (Bottoms, Shiva Baby) will play Rosie Shuster, the longtime SNL writer who was married to Michaels from 1971 to 1980. Deadline first reported the news.

Reps for SNL, Michaels, and Ebersol didn't immediately respond to EW's request for comment.

The movie will focus on the behind-the-scenes drama leading up to the very first SNL broadcast on Oct. 11, 1975. Reitman, who once directed a three-part digital short for SNL, is writing the screenplay alongside Gil Kenan. The duo conducted extensive interviews with cast and crew members who worked on SNL in its first year.

Kenan and Reitman's next project, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, stars original SNL cast member Dan Aykroyd as well as Bill Murray, who joined the series in its second season.

Further details on the project are scarce, but it's safe to assume that cast members like Akyroyd, Chevy Chase, John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Jane Curtin, and Michael O'Donoghue will all be depicted at some point in the project.

Some of those names were previously portrayed in 2018's A Futile and Stupid Gesture, which chronicled the glory days of The Harvard Lampoon in the 1970s. In that project, Armen Weitzman played Michaels, Joel McHale played Chase, John Gemberling played Belushi, Jackie Tohn played Radner, and Thomas Lennon played O'Donoghue. Lonny Ross also briefly appeared as Reitman's father, Ivan.

There's no word on a release date yet, but it would be fitting if the film was ready sometime next year, as SNL will celebrate its 50th anniversary in 2025.

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