Very early on in Saturday Night Live‘s history it became apparent that the show couldn’t be readily contained within ninety minutes on a Saturday night. Most experts pin this moment to when The Blues Brothers film grossed nearly five times its $27 million cost in 1980. Since then, there have been a number of SNL spinoff films, some food, some not so good. And there have been a number of proposed SNL-related movie projects that never quite got in front of the cameras. Here is a sampling of just a few –
The Saturday Night Live Movie
At some point in early 1990, someone at Saturday Night Live got the idea of not just moving a popular character from the show to the big screen, but the whole format of the show itself. I say “someone,” because not very much is known about the script titled simply The Saturday Night Live Movie. It has gone unmentioned in every book that charts the history of the show as well as any cast and crew memoirs. But a look at the credits on the screenplay’s cover reads like a who’s who of the show’s writing staff up to that point – Future Senator Al Franken, his writing partner Tom Davis, Greg Daniels and Jim Downey representing the old guard writers whose various associations with SNL stretch all the back to the show’’s earliest days while Conan O’Brien, Robert Smiegel and George Mayer representing the then new young turks of the show. The script is overstuffed with 18 sketches in its 133 pages, though presumably some of those would have gotten cut if the project had moved forward through development. (You can read a complete rundown of the individual sketches in our script review here.) It is unknown as to why the project never moved forward, but hopefully someone will speak on the record about it someday.
Hans And Franz: The Girlyman Dilemma
Inspired by a low budget exercise show Dana Carvey and Kevin Nealon saw while on the road doing a standup tour, thickly-accented Hans and Franz were two of the biggest Saturday Night Live characters of the late 1980s. With a catch phrase promise to “Pump! You up!” and turn their viewers from “girly men” into muscle men, Hans and Franz immediately muscled their way into the pop culture zeitgeist. As SNL was starting to enter a period of spinning off characters to feature films and Hans and Frans were among those tapped for a potential big screen treatment. Carey and Knealon joined with SNL writers Robert Smiegel and Conan O’Brien to craft a screenplay. The result was a story which brought the weight-lifting brothers to America to visit their cousin Arnold Schwarzenegger filled with a number of surreal gags such as a staircase composed of StairMaster exercise machines. Ultimately, the project fell apart when Schwarzenegger pulled out in the wake of the failure of his action comedy The Last Action Hero. In 2023, fans finally got an idea of what madness lied within the script as O’Brien brought Carvey, Nealon and Smigel onto his Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend podcast to read and perform portions of the screenplay.
Dieter
Another SNL character who would have been uprooted from their European setting to journey to the United States in a film was Mike Myers’s German talk show host Dieter. The host of the stark expressionist German show Sprockets in which he would exhort his guests to touch his monkey Klaus before declaring that it was time to dance. The screenplay developed for a Dieter film, co written by Myers and SNL writers Jack Handy and Michael McCullers would see Klaus being monkey-napped and Dieter traveling to America to find him with the help of his American cousin, to be played by Will Ferrell. Unfortunately, with just a few weeks to go before shooting was to begin in the summer of 2000, Myers suddenly walked from the project, declaring that the script wasn’t good enough. (We disagree.) A flurry of lawsuits and counter-lawsuits erupted between Myers and studio Universal ultimately ending with an agreement for Meyers to write his next original character based comedy as a co-production for DreamWorks and Universal with Imagine Entertainment producing. While Myers would never create such a project for Universal – his only other new original character comedy, The Love Guru, was produced at Paramount – he would go on to star in a new version of The Cat In The Hat for Universal in 2003.
Coffee Talk
But Dieter was not the first Mike Myers SNL character to get close to getting a movie before the project would be cancelled. A few years earlier, he was working on developing Coffee Talk, a feature length version of the series of sketches that saw Myers in drag as Linda Richman, the host of a local afternoon talk show. Not much more is known about the film’s plot and in the wake of the disappointing box office for SNL spinoff films It’s Pat and Stuart Saves His Family, NBC issued an edict that for the time being, no new movies based on show characters.
Gap Girls
By 1997 or so, NBC must have loosened up on its “No character spinoff films” edict, because that is around the time that David Spade stated SNL creator Lorne Michaels suggested taking his “Gap Girls” sketches to the big screen. There were six “Gap Girls” sketches that ran between 1993 and 1995, and they featured Spade, Adam Sandler and Chris Farley as Cindy, Christy and Lucy, three employees at a shopping mall Gap clothing store. Michaels recommendation was probably at least in part spurned on by Farley and Spade already had two comedy film hits in Tommy Boy and Black Sheep and in part by Michaels having a production deal with Paramount that needed projects in the pipeline. The thing that put the kibosh on the film happening was Spade himself, or more accurately, his feeling that the characters might not be able to support a story for a ninety-minute long movie. As he admitted in 2022, “I was running out of sketch ideas that were four minutes long.”
Stefon
Another popular character whose potential big screen transition never got past the talking about it stage was Bill Hader’s Stefon. The ultimate club kid, he would appear on the “Weekend Update” segment of the show to talk about all of the new and bleeding edge trendy hot spots in Manhattan. Of course, they all had ridiculous names and goings-on at them. Hader created the character with SNL writer John Mulaney, and they originally had him appear in a sketch. While the character didn’t pop with audiences in that first appearance, it was when the pair repurposed him as a Weekend Update correspondent that Stefon really took off. So naturally, with that popularity, Hader and Mulaney briefly pondered the idea of taking the character to the big screen before abandoning it. As Hader explained to talk show host Larry King, “We talked a little bit about an idea for a movie and then we were like, ‘I don’t think it will work.’ We did have one funny scene which was making John and I laugh, which was Stefon coming out to his family, and his parents are blue collar people from the Bronx.” And Hader and Mulaney probably have a point. If the character couldn’t hold up a regular sketch, how could he hold up an entire movie.
The Ambiguously Gay Duo
Robert Smigel’s animated “The Ambiguously Gay Duo” cartoons that have shown up in SNL‘s TV’S Funhouse segments are a fairly simple joke. Playing off the accusations quack psychologist Frederic Wertham aimed at Batman And Robin comics of the 1950s in his book Seduction Of The Innocent, superheroes Ace and Gary friendship leaves their villainous rogues gallery to wonder if there isn’t something more there. So is that enough to support a full feature-length film done in live action? Smigel thought so and when Gary voice actor Steve Carrell mentioned to his Bruce Almighty co-star Jim Carrey about it, Carrey was enthused enough to become attached to the potential project. Universal, who owned the rights to the characters as they originally were created for the short-lived Dana Carvey Show owned by the studio, was convinced enough to commission a script. Smiegel and Stephen Colbert, who voiced Ace in the cartoons, sat down in the few months Cobert had between leaving The Daily Show and launching The Colbert Report on Comedy Central, and hammered out a screenplay in 2005. But that is all the further that the project got, with interest from either Carey or the studio disappearing. We did get a glimpse at what a live action version of what a live action version of the Duo could have looked like in the 2011 SNL episode in which Jon Hamm hosted. Hamm played Ace with SNL cast member Jimmy Fallon as Gary, while Colbert and Carrell stopped by to play villains Bighead and Dr. Brainio.
