Jason Reitman Receives Screenwriting Award From Mar Del Plata Festival

On Wednesday night the director of Saturday Night accepted an award for his film from Argentina’s Mar del Plata International Film Festival, on a very special day for the South American nation.

Jason Reitman received the Astor Piazzolla Award for Best Screenplay for his dramedy about the launch of the very first broadcast of Saturday Night Live in October 1975. Reitman directed the film and wrote it with Gil Kenan, a co-recipient of the award. Reitman attended the 39^th edition of Mar del Plata last November but had departed the coastal Argentinian city by the time the awards were announced.

The presentation of the screenplay award was made at the Argentinian consul general’s residence in Los Angeles, with the Mar del Plata festival’s co-artistic director Gabriel Lerman on hand, as well as filmmaker Fede Álvarez [Alien: Romulus], who did the formal honors.

“I’m honored to be here with one of the few men in this business who has better hair than me,” Reitman joked, acknowledging Álvarez’s impressive chevelure. “And [he’s] a better shooter.”

“Fede, how many nominations did Alien [Romulus] get?” Reitman asked his fellow filmmaker.

“I lost count,” Álvarez replied. “You lose count.”

“Two? Is it three?” Reitman continued.

“Oscars?” said Alvarez. “It was one.”

“It was one?” Reitman said, joking, “It was one more than Saturday Night got.”

The reception and awards presentation coincided with Argentina’s Independence Day, marking the 209^th anniversary of the country’s separation from Spain.

“This is an incredible honor,” Reitman told the assembled crowd including Consul General Héctor María Monacci, the consul’s wife and entertainment industry notables. “And most importantly, happy Independence Day.”

In addition to serving as artistic director of the Mar del Plata International Film Festival along with Jorge Stamadianos, Lerman is a journalist writing for publications in Argentina, Chile, Mexico and other parts of Latin America. He has been a voter for the Golden Globes since 2004, presently serving on the board of directors for the successor voting organization to the HFPA.

“Gabriel and I have known each other a long time, and this is a city that brings people — Los Angeles — people gravitate here. Some people gravitate just because they want to be around fame, but some people come here because they love movies,” Reitman noted. “And Gabriel came here because he loves movies. And when you meet another person who loves cinema as much as you do, you immediately feel like you’ve found someone that you’ve been searching for since high school.”

Referencing his appearance at the 39^th edition of Mar del Plata, Reitman said, “I was there with a film called Saturday Night, which is about the opening night of Saturday Night Live, which is about a group of young people who came together to put on a show that had never been done before. And when I got to Mar del Plata, what I found was a group of young filmmakers who felt exactly the same and they were kids, and they loved cinema. And after the movies, they would take me out to this bowling alley, and they got really drunk. And then they would talk about movies until the sun came up. And it reminded me of exactly the type of community I was looking for when I was a kid.”

“It was my first time in Argentina,” Reitman commented. “I fell in love with your country. I cannot wait to go back. And I had the most incredible experience down there.”

The 40^th anniversary edition of Mar del Plata will take place from Nov. 6-16. Whether he’s there for the 40^th or it takes Reitman a few more years to return to the festival, you can expect to see him with Sharpie in hand. That pertains to an anecdote he shared from his experience last year.

“One morning I get a text message from Gabriel and he says, ‘They want you to put your name in concrete here.’ I said, ‘What?’ And he goes, ‘Yeah, it’s similar to the Mann Chinese. You’re going to write your name in the ground.’ And I just thought, are you sure they want me?” ‘Yeah, they want you to do it.’ Now, I’ve never done this before,” Reitman recounted. “When you’re writing it, it’s way harder than you’d think. And I have no practice at this, but this is going to be permanent. It’s in the ground. Do you know when you’re writing a birthday card and you start writing letters, but they’re too big? And you start to realize that you don’t have enough space to write all the letters. So as a result of this, I wanted to write ‘Jason Reitman,’ but I ran out of space. So, it just says, ‘Jason’ — that’s it. There are handprints. And then just ‘Jason.’ So if you don’t know it’s me, there’s no way on earth to know who signed it.”

He concluded, “So maybe one day I’ll come back with a Sharpie, and I’ll fill in the rest of it.”