ST. CLOUD — As “Saturday Night Live” celebrates its 40th anniversary, former cast member Al Franken is recalling a movie he’d hoped to film in his home state but didn’t.

Franken is now a U.S. senator. But in the early 1980s, between SNL stints, Franken and his fellow cast member from Minnesota, Tom Davis, penned a screenplay called “Datenight.” It was set in the central Minnesota city of St. Cloud and chronicled the adventures of teens and adults over the course of a single Saturday night. Franken and Davis gave themselves roles as band members in town for a one-night gig.

But the city didn’t cooperate, the St. Cloud Times reported Sunday. Then-mayor Sam Huston and then-Police Chief Woody Bissett felt the adult content in the R-rated movie wouldn’t reflect the image of St. Cloud they wanted to portray. So while the story remained set in St. Cloud, it was filmed in a Chicago suburb instead.

The filming location wasn’t the only change.

“The studio made all kinds of decisions we didn’t agree with,” Franken said. “Originally, we wanted to set it during a blizzard. The blizzard would have been kind of a character. We had a chase scene with a kid on a snowmobile, and a snowplow would have been involved with that. The studio didn’t like it. So we didn’t do that part. And this was pre-’Fargo,’ but we wanted to have everybody in the film have Minnesota accents. They nixed that, too.”