It all began in 1974, when Johnny Carson told NBC that he wanted the network to stop airing reruns of The Tonight Show on weekends by the following summer. NBC president Herbert Schlosser hired Dick Ebersol away from ABC Sports and gave him one year to create an original program to run at 11:30 on Saturday nights. Ebersol met Lorne Michaels, a 28-year-old Canadian-born television writer who had worked on Laugh-In and Lily Tomlin’s specials for CBS, and Michaels won Ebersol over with his idea for a show that would assail the tired conventions of variety television and reflect the language and attitudes of America’s youth. Schlosser proposed that it be broadcast live from Studio 8-H in Rockefeller Center.

Lorne Michaels, executive producer: So much of what Saturday Night Live wanted to be, or I wanted it to be when it began, was cool. Which was something television wasn’t, except in a retro way. We wanted to redefine comedy the way the Beatles redefined what being a pop star was. That required not pandering, and it also required removing neediness, the need to please. It was like, We’re only going to please those people who are like us. The presumption was there were a lot of people like us. And that turned out to be so.

Dick Ebersol, NBC executive: We were walking through the rain one night after dinner, sort of going from awning to awning, and Chevy [Chase] ran ahead. A couple hundred feet away, he goes into a pothole, does a complete ass over teakettle into this immense pothole, and comes out of this thing just soaked. And he walks back, and he and Lorne look at me and say, “Now, how could you say no to somebody who was crazy enough to do that?” So Chevy became a cast member.

Paul Shaffer, musician and performer: Gilda [Radner] and I had both worked on the National Lampoon Radio Hour here in New York, so we became friendly with John Belushi and Doug Kenney and this cast of characters associated with the Lampoon. I remember Gilda was trying to get Belushi hired for Saturday Night Live. A lot of people were telling Lorne he had to hire Belushi. And I remember seeing Gilda with Belushi one day, and she said, “We’re sitting shivah because Lorne won’t hire John.”

Chevy Chase, cast member: In fact, Belushi was an afterthought. I mean, he had told Lorne at some point that he was not enchanted with TV per se and he didn’t want to do TV. And Lorne didn’t particularly care if he saw him or didn’t see him. Then John did an audition, and Lorne said, “Well, he’s funny, and we could use somebody who looks like him.”

By the fall of 1975, Michaels had assembled the historic first cast, which included Chevy Chase, Gilda Radner, John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Laraine Newman, Garrett Morris, and Jane Curtin. George Carlin was the host when the show—then called NBC’s Saturday Night—premiered, on October 11.

Steve Martin, host: I do remember when I first saw the show. I was living in Aspen, and it came on and I thought, They’ve done it! They did the Zeitgeist, they did what was out there, what we all had in our heads, this kind of new comedy. And I thought, Well, someone’s done it on television now. I didn’t know Lorne at the time. I didn’t know anyone.

Lorne Michaels: The only note we got from the network on the first show was “Cut the bees [a skit in which cast members were dressed in bulbous killer-bee costumes].” And so I made sure to put them in the next show. I had them come out and talk to [host] Paul Simon. He says, “It didn’t work last week. It’s cut.” And they go, “Oh,” and just walk off.