Playing a real person is never easy. When they’re alive and can comment on your performance, things get even trickier. If that person is a comedy legend who made TV history, the role becomes overwhelming. That’s where Lamorne Morris finds himself as he takes on the role of Garrett Morris (no relation) in the new film, “SNL 1975,” which chronicles the first taping of the long-running sketch comedy series “Saturday Night Live.”
At Sunday’s American Black Film Festival Honors, Garrett revealed the advice he gave Lamorne about bringing this difficult chapter of his life to the big screen.
“We talked about it. He has to be a guy who’s dealing with some young people,” Garrett told People. “When I was inside in that life, I was 39 years old and the rest [of the cast], they had just come out of high school and college.”
If you’ve ever watched the first season of “SNL,” it’s clear producers wanted him to just be “the Black guy” who plays supporting characters for John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Chevy Chase and Dan Aykroyd. Being stuck in the background is something he specifically discussed with Lamorne, because it was a major element of his early days on the show.
“The Black thing is you take longer to do what the younger white people do, and you usually have to do it two or three times as good,” he said. “We talked about that, and he already told me he’s going to play it like that—an older Black guy who’s dealing with these younger guys. I said, ‘Wow, man.’”
Garrett calls his early time on “SNL” “very hard,” noting that he was always “fighting to get somebody to write for me.” He explained that it “took me a long time to get a couple of people to actually write for me.” He did say that Chase and Alan Zweibel (”Curb Your Enthusiasm”) were two of the people who eventually wrote for him, but it turns out “some of the other writers were—strangely enough, in the show that was advanced and most people got it on the racial level, some of the writers were not as progressive as they should be.”
With the movie set to follow the first-ever taping of the show, I hope there’s time to get these aspects of Garrett’s story in the film. While Black audiences have always been aware of the comedian’s genius, it feels like he’s never gotten the celebration and accolades of his co-stars. This is a chance to finally give him his flowers as someone who helped make the weekly comedy show a TV staple.