Billy Crystal reflects on saving ‘SNL’ premiere script after being cut: ‘One of the hardest nights’

Billy Crystal saved the script for the first episode of Saturday Night Live, but he doesn’t remember the premiere night fondly.

The When Harry Met Sally star reflected on his experience getting cut from the first-ever SNL ep — which is dramatically recreated by actor Nicholas Podany in Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night — in an interview with Hoda Kotb on Today. “It was one of the hardest nights in my young career, to be bumped from the very first show, because my piece was a little long,” he recalled. “The first show was hectic and I ended up not being there, and it just set my career off in a different way. So to sit through the movie and see someone play me on a hard night was a little hard!”

Crystal also confirmed that he helped supply the Saturday Night filmmakers with an essential piece of SNL history. “I actually had the script,” he said. “Jason Reitman, who’s a wonderful guy and a friend, he said, ‘Do you have the script? They never saved the script.’ I said, ‘I have it.’ I’m the one who wasn’t on the show and I had the script.”

He continued, “The thing about it was George Carlin was the host, and on my script, the page says ‘George Carlin introduces Billy Crystal,’ his line was ‘People wanna know where the young comics are coming from — Billy Crystal is coming from over there!’ Well the page in the script says ‘monologue to come,’ and it’s a blank page. So it never came! I gave them the script.”

Reitman and his writing partner Gil Kenan previously told Entertainment Weekly about how Crystal’s script helped aid the production. “Every time we would ask someone for a copy of the premiere script, nobody had it,” Reitman said. “One person had it, and it was Billy Crystal, the last person we expected to want to hold onto a memory of that night.”

Kenan recalled Crystal’s revelation with fondness. “It happened so dramatically — we didn’t know he had it,” the screenwriter said. “It was one of the few in-person interviews we did, and we asked about the script as a sort of passing question like we did to everybody. And he said, ‘Hang on a second,’ walked into a study, came back out and just dropped it on the table in front of us.”

Reitman said that Crystal jokingly reminded them of his failure to appear in the episode. “He flipped through and pointed to a blank page and said, ‘That’s where I was supposed to be!'” Reitman said. “And he allowed us to scan it. Gil immediately scanned the whole thing into his iPhone. And as a result, every time the characters in our movie are holding a script of any kind, it’s Billy’s script.”

Saturday Night shows SNL creator Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle) cutting Crystal moments before the premiere went to air on Oct. 11, 1975 after previously asking the comic to cut his act down to two minutes. In the SNL oral history Live from New York, Crystal confirmed that Michaels asked him, “I need two minutes,” to which he asked, “Cut two minutes?” before Michaels responded, “No, I need two minutes. All you get is two minutes” — essentially the exact conversation that plays out in Saturday Night. 

However, in reality, Crystal’s own team pulled him from the show after unsuccessfully trying to persuade Michaels to instead cut Andy Kaufman’s Mighty Mouse lip-sync segment. “I was upset — mad, I guess — because I had wanted to be there,” Crystal said in the book. He ultimately made his SNL debut in episode 17 of the first season in April 1976.

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Watch the full conversation between Crystal and Kotb above.