One of Saturday Night Live mastermind Lorne Michaels’ best lines is, “We don’t go on because we’re ready, we go on because it’s 11:30.” But the team that works for him makes sure that the show is as ready as can be.
SNL celebrated its landmark 50th season with SNL50: The Homecoming Concert at Radio City Music Hall on Valentine’s Day and the three-hour SNL50: Anniversary Special two days later. They marked an astounding achievement for the sketch-comedy TV series, which operates within its own singular, crazy space in 30 Rock’s Studio 8H — and in entertainment history.
Another Lorneism is that costumes, hair, sets, camera angles and other details should never be the joke of a sketch — they should play it straight, in contrast to the funny performances. Which means the SNL behind-the-scenes team has to be exacting and detail-oriented, with far less time than they would have on a typical film set.
MovieMaker spoke with several of the show’s key operatives, the below-the-line personnel who get the show to air, week after week, and deserve their own celebratory moment.
Louie Zakarian, SNL Makeup Department Head
Louie Zakarian was at SNL during TV’s standard-definition era, and boy was his job easier before HD.
“I remember early on we did a test where they shot the show in regular and then HD. And then the following week, all the department heads sat around the studio and they showed us the regular version, and then they showed us the HD version, and you could see everything,” Zakarian says.
“On a bald cap that looked beautiful on standard, [on HD] you saw the edges. If blush wasn’t properly applied… you could see the smears. You could read the label on a bottle — it was very scary.”
There have been other major technology changes since Zakarian started at SNL in 1995, not all of which have made his job harder. For example, these days, Zakarian does a 3D scan of the show’s host on a Tuesday and prints it the following day, “in case there’s something written at the table on Wednesday night that needs a prosthetic, a severed head, or something crazy.”
Zakarian has a room at his shop filled with these heads.
“My kids used to say, ‘Daddy makes monsters,’” Zakarian says.
Daddy also makes great bald caps. He recalls, for example, creating the perfect one to hide the long, thick hair of longtime cast member Kate McKinnon.
“We came up with a way to wrap her hair underneath; it was a whole process. Basically, we’d wrap her hair and put a stocking cap on, but then there would be a little piece of string attached to the front of the stocking cap that would run out the back,” Zakarian explains. “So, I would apply the bald cap three-quarters of the way, leaving the nape exposed, and then slowly slide out that stocking cap so you wouldn’t have any ridges. And then I would be able to mush her hair around to make it nice and flat underneath the bald cap. Sometimes, if they have a lot of hair, they’ll look like an alien, or they’ll look kind of crazy, but we were able to get away with it.”
Bald caps typically take about 15 or 20 minutes to apply, Zakarian said, with some notable exceptions. He was able to do Will Ferrell and Fred Armisen in six minutes apiece — but his record is just four-and-a-half minutes on current cast member Mikey Day.
Turning James Austin Johnson into Donald Trump is a bit trickier than that — and much harder than the Alec Baldwin-as-Trump SNL days. Zakarian and Johnson are on their sixth Trump look, he says.
“Every time either Trump loses weight, or James loses a little weight, I’ll redo it,” Zakarian says.
The current Trump look involves a fake belly and chest piece.
“I think this is the happiest I’ve been with his Trump look,” Zakarian explains. “It looks like him and gives him the most weight.”
Liz Patrick, SNL Director
Liz Patrick started her career at MTV, where she “was exposed to a lot of live television,” including TRL, awards shows, red carpet events, and a big New Year’s Eve special. So when she joined Saturday Night Live, she notes, she “wasn’t scared” of the Live part.
She also worked at Ellen, which has a bit of a reputation for stress.
Though her 90 minutes each weekend in the SNL control room can be “pretty intense,” Patrick says she gets a little “time to breathe” during a show’s two musical performances. She earns the respite.
Patrick spends Monday and Tuesday with the musical guests, primarily. By 10 a.m. on Wednesday morning, Patrick is reading through the earliest-available version of each pitched sketch.
It’s important that she gets a jump on understanding which potential scenes will need “a staircase, a front door, a breakaway window,” and perhaps even a choreographer or a stuntperson.
This won’t be the last time she sits with the material.
“The script will change so many times, and sometimes it’s just trying to stay up to date with those changes. Because obviously it affects blocking… sometimes adding people to the sketch, losing people from the sketch, and sometimes you don’t have the chance to go back and look at it,” Patrick says.
“So, you may have rehearsed it on Thursday and Friday, and then by Saturday morning, before you rehearse it in the morning, before dress rehearsal, it’s already changed again.”
And that’s Patrick describing the chill part of her Saturdays. Between dress and air is “the most adrenaline-fueled time in my life,” she explains.
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For SNL50, Patrick had an extra obstacle to overcome — a very literal obstacle. As it did with the 40th anniversary special, NBC brought extra seating into the smaller-than-you’d-expect Studio 8H.
But SNL50 was a much more ambitious show. With the temporary bleachers and so many more live sketches this time around — some of them on large sets — Patrick said there was less floor space than ever before. That makes it tricky when you need to put cameras… somewhere.
“Generally, this show is shot on pedestal cameras, but [for SNL50] I would have a handheld camera built up to operate like a ped,” Patrick says. “It takes up a smaller footprint, so here we are, backed up right against the bleachers. I can’t use a giant ped because now I’m [encroaching] by three or four feet. But if I use this handheld on sticks, now I’ve given back two feet.”
Leo Yoshimura, N. Joseph (Joe) DeTullio, and Keith Raywood, SNL Production Designers
If you think it’s hard finding space for pedestal cameras, talk to SNL production designers Leo Yoshimura, Joe DeTullio, and Keith Raywood. They’re the guys who needed to fit the many SNL50 sets in a studio originally built to house radio shows.
Sets for Saturday Night Live are built in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, trucked to 30 Rock, and crammed into elevators that were most certainly not designed for this sort of thing.
Leo Yoshimura
Yoshimura describes the regular design schedule as “chaotic and hectic,” yet “exhilarating” come Saturday nights at 11:30 p.m. ET. And for Yoshimura, we do mean 11:30 on the dot. He handles the cold open — which is the first performance viewers see, but is generally the last script to be chosen, given the show’s never-ending effort to be as topical as possible.
“I usually start my cold open search on 11:30 a.m. on Friday morning,” Yoshimura says.
His search goes like this: First he finds a writer, a process he likens to searching through a Where’s Waldo book. He and the writer will then talk, and Yoshimura will seek a “one-sentence” (at most) description setting the scene, i.e. “Presidential Debate,” “State of the Union,” or “The Oval Office.”
By 1:30 p.m. he’s doing photo research; an hour later he’s drawing designs.
At 4 p.m. Yoshimura faxes (“I’m old school,” he says) his set designs to the shop across the bridge. And a mere hour after that, he’s building in Brooklyn. Yoshimura, and the new set, are due back at Rockefeller Center by around 9 or 10 p.m.
It all takes a crazy amount of energy, but at least he’s not alone.
Joe DeTullio
Joe DeTullio has been with the show for more than 30 years, and before that, served as an NBC page. He outlined three distinct differences he’s seen at “SNL” across the decades.
First up: “The Evolution of the Music Guest.”
“Originally, the guest musicians would come and perform within the existing stage with the existing scenery,” DeTullio recalls. Today, the musicians are “welcome to create and bring whatever environment they wish,” so long as it is “within the limitations of our space and within the capacity of our crews.”
That means more production work, as the scenery may change from Song 1 to Song 2. Moving all this stuff around, as well as the components of the live sketches, makes for a Saturday night “game of Tetris,” DeTullio says.
The second change: “The Advancement of Technology.”
The best example here is the video wall, which DeTullio says is “more readily available, more reasonably priced to rent, and is becoming more commonly used.” A video wall is “effective” but also a “large permanent fixture” that must be factored in for that weekly Tetris game.
The third development: “The Film Unit.” Actually, make that units. These days, they’re large, and numerous, DeTullio says.
Pre-taped segments are great, but their evolution has created challenges, he explains. In earlier days of SNL, the pre-tapes were done on dark weeks and rarely involved the episode’s rotating hosts.
These days, pre-tapings whisk cast members away from Thursday and/or Friday rehearsals.
Keith Raywood
Keith Raywood, meanwhile, is the unsung hero of the Radio City concert special. In some ways, the Valentine’s Day performance felt like his destiny.
Like Liz Patrick, Raywood did a lot of work for MTV earlier in his career. His first VMAs in 1994 were at Radio City Music Hall, so when Michaels chose the iconic venue over the equally iconic Madison Square Garden, Raywood was elated. It was also Michaels who hand-selected Raywood to oversee the event, which was two years in the works, from a design standpoint.
“I love that it was called ‘The Homecoming,’ because it almost was like a homecoming for me,” Raywood says.
“Those two paths of my career got to meet,” he adds. “For me personally, it was a very special show.”
Even though Radio City Music Hall has one of the largest stages in the country, Raywood wanted more. For SNL50: The Homecoming Concert, Raywood pulled out 1,500 seats, built two side stages and a runway connecting them, and “dropped the orchestra pit to become a mosh pit,” he says.
With Eddie Vedder, Jack White, and a reunion of the surviving members of Nirvana on the Peacock special’s docket, the mosh pit was a must. Raywood’s design also included giant industrial fans projected via video screens, recalling the background of Nirvana’s 1992 debut perfomance on the show.
Dave Grohl, the Nirvana drummer-turned Foo Fighters frontman, “really appreciated” the digital re-creation,” Raywood says. “He told me it was really cool.”
Jodi Mancuso, SNL Hair and Wig Designer
Speaking with Jodi Mancuso, you immediately believe the story that Amy Poehler and Maya Rudolph’s “Bronx Beat” sketches were inspired by her. (Rudolph’s character is even named Jodi.)
“It probably came about from them making fun of me and my accent and me always complaining, which was pretty funny. We all did to each other,” Mancuso says. “And then it’s just one of those things where you hang out in a hair room and that’s just what happens, you start finding a sketch somewhere.
“I had two small children, and I was just always bitching about something,” she adds, calling the premise of the sketch “pretty on point.”
Though her days as a mom from the Bronx perpetually exist on YouTube for all the world to see, Mancuso says she lives her life in a bubble — a “wig bubble.”
A wig bubble is essentially a “Ziplock bag with tape,” Mancuso explains, a “very old-school” way of making wigs for hosts, cast members, guests, and even extras. “We basically put plastic over their head, like we’re going to kill them.”
We told you the sketch tracks.
Mancuso and her shop make 80 wigs per week for an episode. (Lady Gaga alone wore 13 wigs in her episode this past season.)
There’s just one problem: Building a wig typically takes 80-100 hours, Mancuso says, and she only has… Thursday. So she and her team of 21 hairdressers take their craft very seriously.
“If a wig fell off, I would probably have a heart attack,” she says. “I just ruined somebody’s sketch — it became about my wig.”
Mancuso says she prefers her department to “not be seen, quite honestly.” And she gets especially nervous about creating wigs to be worn during an impression of a real person.
“There’s so many reasons why someone may not look like someone,” she says. The goal is to not let the hair be one of those reasons.
Asked about the Trump wig worn by James Austin Johnson, Mancuso trails off into a fantasy: “If I never look at that man’s hair again…”
Tom Broecker, SNL Costume Designer and Producer
It’s a nice reprieve when Tom Broecker can re-use a costume for a recurring sketch. But that doesn’t always work with anniversary specials. His team needed to make new costumes, for example, when Steve Martin and Dan Aykroyd reprised their 1970s “Wild and Crazy Guys,” the Festrunk Brothers, for the 40th.
Broecker says the most difficult part of his job is dressing sketch actors as politicians — particularly male politicians.
“Most people don’t buy their clothes today and wear them tomorrow, right?” he says. “They go into their closet, and their closet has clothes from five years ago, eight years ago, 10 years ago.”
Ties tend to be refreshed even less, creating a “tricky” situation when “duplicating a particular moment,” Broecker says.
“Us trying to find that tie might be a needle in the haystack,” he continues.
The solution? Make the tie. Broecker and his team work with the show’s graphics pros and a fabric printer to make a facsimile. They have also reproduced particular T-shirts, and even jewelry.
Adding to the pressure is the fact that the Sunday morning news shows have developed a habit of highlighting SNL’s recreations.
“Sunday mornings, a lot of times, they’ll flash up a picture of a cold-opening sketch, and then they’ll flash up the real event — we call those ‘side by sides,’” Broecker says. “We try and get it as close as we can to the actual event.”
Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ unique necklaces and pins were especially challenging last year. So was her wardrobe when she appeared live on the show just before the election.
“We had been led to believe that she was wearing one thing, but then, when she got there, found out that she was wearing something else,” Broecker recalls.
It was especially challenging because her planned sketch called for her to look in a mirror at herself — actually Rudolph playing Harris. The veep’s unexpected wardrobe led to “a very frantic 40 minutes of quick alterations and changes,” Broecker says.
But he credits his “magical team” for pulling it off. The sketch was a hit.
Saturday Night Live returns for its 51st season this fall on NBC.
Main image: Liz Patrick directs an episode of Saturday Night Live. Photo By Rosalind O’ Connor / NBC
All photos courtesy of NBC