‘SNL’ Doc Opens Tribeca Film Fest With Rowdy Premiere
There’s a reason why it’s live from New York, as the opening night of the 2015 Tribeca Film Festival made clear: New York really, really loves Saturday Night Live.
A large portion of the last few months has already been spent feting the venerable sketch comedy series and its 40th birthday, so it’s only fitting that the city’s downtown fest add to the good cheer. The annual Robert De Niro-run celebration kicked off its 14th edition with Bao Nguyen’s Live From New York!, an affectionate and wide-ranging documentary about the importance of SNL as both a cultural and a Gotham institution. Playing to a packed house at the Beacon Theatre, this look at the long-running series was greeted with plenty of laughs and the kind of appreciation that went beyond the usual first-night giddiness.
The premiere’s crowd featured a mixed bag of Tribeca patrons, hardcore Saturday Night Live aficionados, and series alumni that, despite the doc’s reflective tone, seemed to verge more to the current side of things; cast members Leslie Jones, Beck Bennett, and Bobby Moynihan were all spotted in the audience, along with long-time writer Paula Pell. As per tradition, Tribeca co-founders De Niro and Jane Rosenthal were on hand to introduce the first film of the festival, with Rosenthal proving more reflective, billing the doc as “the story of an era.” Her partner, meanwhile, joked that his hosting duties (De Niro has headlined the show three times) only came to him because Alec Baldwin wasn’t available for the gig. The pair ended their truncated welcome speech and introduced the director by yelling out in unison, “Live from New York, it’s Bao Nguyen!”
Despite sharing a title with Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller’s definitive Saturday Night Live tome, LFNY! isn’t at all preoccupied with providing a detailed overview of the show’s four decades on the air. Instead, the documentary is dedicated to an easily digestible hypothesis: The long-running sketch comedy series is an institution prized for its ability to translate the spirit of the times to television entertainment, not just to make them funny. But it still plays more like a greatest-hits collection, arbitrarily zinging and zipping between wide-ranging topics. Each theme could easily make for its own film, from its legacy of political humor and response to September 11 to its longstanding diversity issues regarding the various casts. For fans of the series, there’s not much new to be found here, although the primer might inspire the casual watcher to learn more about the show and its legitimately storied history.