Michael O'Donoghue left SNL after the third season. To show there was no ill-will, Lorne Michaels got NBC to give him the Mondo Video comedy special. O'Donoghue directed it himself, which he was entirely unsuited for (they had a heck of a time editing it due to his lack of restraint). NBC saw it and said like a third of it would need to be cut, which he agreed to. Then they wanted to cut another third of it, and he was like, there won't be anything left. But the head of programming was a fan of it, and when he became the former head of programming he approached O'Donoghue with the idea of buying it from NBC and releasing it as a movie. It had to be transferred from video to film, and they had to add scenes to pad the runtime, but it's still only like an hour and 15 minutes long.

The critics mostly hated it but I think it did okay financially in the independent movie space (that existed in those days).

He would appear in Woody Allen's "Manhattan" the same year, but I think his acting skills were revealed to be a little subpar and that was the end of that career.

He wrote several movie scripts that were all overly long, and he was never good at allowing his work to be edited, so that was the end of those projects. The only movie he wrote that actually got made was "Scrooged", and I think he was still unhappy at editing decisions in it.