‘Saturday Night Live’: How the Sets for TV’s Craziest Sketch Comedy (Camels, Airplanes and Crooning Clintons!) Are Built Overnight
‘Saturday Night Live’: How the Sets for TV’s Craziest Sketch Comedy (Camels, Airplanes and Crooning Clintons!) Are Built Overnight
Veteran production designer Eugene Lee reveals just what it takes to make the weekly comedy show in mere days.
Aidy Bryant and Tracy Morgan in “Saturday Night Live.”
Dana Edelson/NBC
After 41 years and 12 Emmy nominations (including one win in 2013), production designer Eugene Lee is the definition of modest when it comes to his work on “Saturday Night Live.” “If it looks good, I always think it’s by accident,” he told IndieWire recently from his studio in Connecticut. “I only see the mistakes. But guess what? You have the chance to make it better next week.”
Eugene Lee
Courtesy of Eugene LeeLee, who has been with the show since the very beginning, had plenty of stories to share about what it’s like to create these miniature worlds in a super-compresssed time frame. His “SNL” work “week,” as he explains it, begins on Wednesday, with a 3pm read-through — “it doesn’t usually start until later, but it’s scheduled for 3.”
It’s after the readthrough that the sketches to be produced are selected, which is when Lee and his team get to work, coordinating with director Don King to determine where things fit in the studio and figure out who will be designing what. (Lee usually does boats — he has a soft spot for them.)
“Our goal is to get out of the building before the next day — if we get out of there before midnight, we’re doing pretty good,” he said. But then the real work starts.
Production begins at 5am on Thursday, giving the crew two days to build sets for 12-15 sketches, at least three or four of which will get cut before 11:30pm. The studio, hearkening back to the days of radio, simply isn’t that big, and so they’re looking to economize space whenever possible. So when a sketch gets cut, they’ll break down the set right after dress rehearsal, even with the audience in the theater.
Lee, heading up a team of designers including Akira Yoshimura, Keith Raywood, Joe DeTullio and Wells Thorne, recently got on the phone to reflect on Season 41, picking five sketches that provided his favorite challenges, revealing which was the nightmare and why the simplest solutions tended to work best.
“The Undersea Hotel” (April 2, 2016)
Host Peter Dinklage plays the manager of a hotel with an underwater honeymoon suite — the drawbacks to which become apparent when a dead body (Taran Killam) floats by.
Kate McKinnon in “Saturday Night Live.”
Dana Edelson/NBC
“Oh yeah, that was a nightmare! Nobody seemed to know what it should be like, including the writers. The writers kept changing their minds; they were unclear about what kind of restaurant it was, high class, low class. And that’s why we had little elevators under the tables because busting through the table — easy to say, not so easy to do.
“This was one of those things that got finished in the studio, because it was changing all the time. It was typical Saturday night low tech — even when it was failing, it was funny.
“The writing was actually wonderful, which is how it should be. I think in a general way the design department feels that it should stay in the background. If we’re trying to do funny design, that fails. And usually Lorne [Michaels] doesn’t like that either.”
0 commentaires: