What ‘Saturday Night’ gets right and wrong about the late-night sketch comedy show’s chaotic first broadcast

Fact: Dan Aykroyd did have relationships and flirtations with multiple “SNL” cast and crew members.

In the movie, Aykroyd (played by Dylan O’Brien) flirts with Laraine Newman (Emily Fairn), who gets jealous when she sees him acting chummy with Gilda Radner (Ella Hunt). In another scene, Aykroyd flirts with Shuster, who is still Michaels’ wife at that point (a minor plot point throughout the film is whether Shuster wants to use her maiden name or married name in the episode credits).

In reality, Shuster and Michaels weren’t together by the time “SNL” premiered. But legally, they were still married.

“I wasn’t actually in a couple with Lorne when the show started; that’s the real folly of all of it,” Shuster said in the “Live from New York” oral history book. “But I never really actually got divorced from him, I don’t think, until like 1980 or something. I just didn’t want to deal with that. And so I didn’t.”

Aykroyd shared similar comments, saying that it was “over” between Shuster and Michaels by the time he got involved with her.

“They might have been married in name and all that, but he was seeing other people,” Aykroyd said of Michaels. “There was definitely separation there.”

As the movie alludes to, Aykroyd also had a relationship with Radner, but this happened prior to “SNL.”

“I was in love with her,” Aykroyd said in the “Live From New York” oral history. “But that was in the early days of Second City in Canada. Our romance was finished by the time ‘Saturday Night Live’ happened. We were friends, lovers, then friends again. By the time we came to New York, we weren’t involved by any means.”

In the same book, Newman said that she “had a thing with Danny for a while.”

“He was just adorable and irresistible and we had a lot of fun,” she said.

“I was talking to Dan’s daughters, and we were joking, actually, about the amount of women that Dan slept with at ‘SNL,'” Reitman told The Hollywood Reporter.