The 1998 ‘Saturday Night Live’ movie caught up in a sordid sex scandal: “Wow, what a great idea!”
There’s really only one of two ways for a feature-length movie based on a Saturday Night Live sketch to go, because it’s not as if the multiplex has been overflowing with mediocre efforts: they’re either great, or they’re shit, with very little in between.
At one end, you’ve got Wayne’s World, The Blues Brothers, Bob Roberts, and maybe even Coneheads, if you want to stretch the definition of “great” a little further than usual. At the other end, you’ve got The Ladies Man, Stuart Saves His Family, and It’s Pat, with the latter script doctored by Quentin Tarantino.
Somewhere, near the very bottom of the pile, lurks 1998’s A Night at the Roxbury. Mostly notable for being Will Ferrell’s first leading role in a film, he and Chris Kattan reprised their roles as ‘The Roxbury Guys’, Steve and Doug Butabi, a pair of clueless, bumbling idiots who fancy themselves as hot shit.
Remarkably, despite being unanimously panned by anyone unfortunate enough to lay eyes on it, the abysmal comedy turned a tidy profit at the box office. In the aftermath, Ferrell would go on to become one of Hollywood’s biggest and highest-paid comedic actors, whereas Kattan would not. However, when the latter released his memoir, Baby, Don’t Hurt Me: Stories and Scars from Saturday Night Live, he had a revelation to make.
In his book, Kattan alleged that A Night at the Roxbury producer and SNL head honcho Lorne Michaels pressured him into having sex with Amy Heckerling. The filmmaker, who originated the project when she asked the skit’s co-creator Steve Koren to write a script, didn’t helm the picture, but she did produce it.
According to Kattan, the Clueless helmer was initially attached to direct, and in an effort to keep her in that position, Michaels encouraged him to seduce her. “Chris, I’m not saying you have to fuck her,” he claimed he was told. “But it wouldn’t hurt.” The actor said he acquiesced and consensually accepted Heckerling’s advances, although he was “very afraid of the power she and Lorne wielded over my career.”
Kattan also wrote that Heckerling suggested they had sex on Michaels’ desk. “Wow, what a great idea!” he sarcastically penned. “I said a polite, ‘Fuck no!’ to that, so we ended up going to her office and having sex on… yep, you guessed it, the casting couch.” Obviously, that’s his version of events, but when pressed for comment, an SNL statement simply said, “This did not happen.”
When Heckerling was asked about the claims, she had a few choice words. “He’s a nut,” the director responded. “I have no interest in helping his book sales. I don’t even want to know or hear the dumb shit he came up with. No, I have nothing to say about him or his idiot book. I don’t feel like helping him at all.”
Now, the conspiracy theorists among you might happily point out that Heckerling neither confirmed nor denied Kattan’s claims that he’d been coaxed into sleeping with her or that their dalliance had even happened, or that no legal action was taken against him by either SNL, Michaels, or Heckerling for making false or defamatory statements or accusations, but at the end of the day, it’s a case of one person’s word against another’s, and it’s one against two in this case.
