James Franco's 'Saturday Night Live' Documentary To Premiere On Hulu

After four years in limbo, fans will finally get a chance to see James Franco's Saturday Night Live documentary this weekend. Saturday Night will hit Hulu Plus on Friday September 26, marking the end of a long road for the comedy documentary.

Back in 2009/2019, Franco spent a week watching the then cast of Saturday Night Live put together an episode for one of his NYU film classes. He then realized the access he had was unprecedented, and created a feature based on the experience. Saturday Night premiered at South by Southwest in 2010 to solid reviews and got picked up for distribution. However, complicated rights issues and red tape locked the film up for some time. Read more about the James Franco Saturday Night Live documentary below.

Franco made the announcement on his Instagram:

Here's the message on Instagram:

THE SNL DOCUMENTARY is finally coming out!!! On HULU! This FRIDAY! Watch my documentary about the history of @nbcsnl "Saturday Night" on #hulu Plus: [link] #tizzlewizzl

This makes a lot of sense as Hulu is where you can watch recent episodes and clips from Saturday Night Live. You can see those here and Hulu Plus here. There's no page for the doc itself yet.

Back in 2013, Franco gave a little background on the doc to the Huffington Post:

It's something I'm very proud of and it got a great response at the festivals we took it to. We had to add extra screenings at South By Southwest because people liked it so much. It's one of those projects that I had to be ... not sneaky, but the way I got that access, I had to go and shoot before I had everything signed off. Meaning that I kind of went to them because I had a good relationship with Lorne Michaels and the "SNL" people. And it started as a class project, which is how the door opened and they said, "OK, an NYU project? Sure!"

And then I realized I had all of this access that people had never been granted before. And I thought, Well, heck, I'm not just going to waste this as a class project. This could be something interesting about comedy and creativity and the show. So, we shot a feature and put it together — and then we had to go back and first get all of the performers to sign off, which they did. And then Lorne to sign off. But then we had to get NBC to sign off. And then NBC has some big turnover of executives, so the people who had signed off before were no longer there — so we had to get new people to sign off. And then blah, blah, blah, blah blah.

Have you been looking forward to this film?