Saturday Night Live has been on the air for the past 50 years and has been the most vital source of comedy for all these years, launching countless careers. The new film by Jason Reitman captures the frenetic energy that went into the almost aborted first episode which was fertile ground for a compelling movie. Given that the only setting is just the SNL set and the backstage of this iconic show, only an expert production designer with dozens of credits could tackle a challenge like this one. Two-time Academy Award Nominee, Jess Gonchor recently spoke with Immersive via Zoom.
[This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.]
What is your personal relationship with SNL?
In the late eighties, I worked on the show. I worked for a scene shop out in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and we would build some of the sets and then bring them into the studio. So I got a chance to be in there. I used to live for the music and the musical acts on the show. It was just a chance to see a band that you really liked live on TV.
That’s amazing that you got to be there. How did you get involved with this film and what did you think when you first read it?
This is my first time working with Jason, and it was unbelievable. We tried to work together on something else, and it didn’t work out with the timing. So when this came around, he shared the script with me and I read it, then we talked about it. When he decided that I was the one to get the job, I felt like everything that I’ve done to this day led up to this.
I designed the scenery and we built it and we have to pull it off in a certain amount of time, whether it’s a curtain opening, a camera turning on, or people showing up. It’s all with a ticking clock. I had a real connection with the material and I felt like I could make a difference in this movie knowing what I know and having been in that world. There wasn’t a lot of archival to work with, the show wasn’t expected to last so there are no behind-the-scenes images. I just had the first season to work with and I toured the facility.
What did you see in there and thought I can’t wait to do that. Or were your eyes rolling out of your head like, oh my God, what did I get myself into?
I guess it’s always a little bit of both and the nostalgia of it and that iconography – the home base in which was that tenement apartment, which I’ve seen all my life with the little thrust of a stage coming out to that brick platform. I was super excited to recreate some of that stuff and also figure out what the rest of it was and how to incorporate it because we built the whole thing on one stage in Atlanta.
I like to figure out a puzzle and how, figure out how actors are going to move through something, and what the pace is. This was very fast-paced, so how the camera worked through there, how to integrate what was historically correct and what needed to go in there to facilitate making the movie and bringing the script to life. So all those kinds of things led to the creation of the set.
I have to ask you about the bricks. What was that like to have a piece of your set that was actually being built over the course of the film?
It kept going back to that in the script, and I thought that was just such an amazing way of telling a few things. Obviously keeping time, and there was a countdown until you got the… Are they going to get the last brick in before George Carlin steps onto that stage? It was that whole thing. There was a part of it that was real and tangible and heavy.
It was a hard job to do it just like it was a hard job to pull the show off in a certain amount of time. And it also was a way of gathering everybody around at the end and jumping in unison and helping this thing happen. So the brick thing was, I’m so glad that Jason put it in the script because it was the one constant thing sewn in through the movie, which I thought was amazing. That was one of the things I was excited about, figuring out how to unfold that story in the movie.
Excellent. Now, other than that, were there any other favorite things that you created?
I’d never done a big control room before, so that was kind of cool where there were all live feeds to what was going on on the set, whether was a camera inside one of the fake cameras we had, or a commercial that was going, or some footage that we had taped previously. It was all going at once and it was all practical. You don’t get a chance to do a set that’s all ready at once.
It’s one environment usually as a production designer, you’re doing something and they’re looking one way and then maybe you’re off in another thing, building something else or on another location. This was just one big giant environment to create. So not only could they move around it, but the cameras shoot wherever they needed to or say, let’s go over here. We weren’t chasing sunlight or anything like that, so it was just incredible to be able to create this whole environment to shoot the movie.
In a lot of ways it’s an unexpectedly experimental film and the sets do feel very lived in and have to be three-dimensional. It’s not like you could have something where the back part breaks away or something. People are just constantly filling in and doing stuff the whole movie.
Unlike other projects, all angles had to be finished, including the backs of everything. We had this giant sort of playground environment, but there were a lot of intimate moments in there and it sort of expanded and contracted when it needed to. I just wanted to get the breadth of the movie, have the scenery, and help tell the story. So it was very lived in because there was a movie crew, we shot on it for six weeks and it just kept getting better and better because real-life people and real-life crew could certainly do and think of things that I would never. Credit to Claudia Bonfe, the set decorator, she did an amazing job too.
30 Rockefeller Plaza (where the show is filmed) has such a rich history, what did you discover while researching?
A lot of the space wasn’t designed in 1975 but was left over from the days of NBC orchestra conductor Arturo Toscanini, which is why I put up a picture of him on our set. The stage was actually built for him until radio was phased out for television. So researching that was interesting.
I got to watch a lot of the old episodes and the whole first season, kept going back and watching old movies of the era. It’s one of my favorite parts of the job is diving in and seeing what it is all about. How we can use some of those pieces?
Did any of the original cast visit the set?
When we first started prep in Atlanta, Dan Aykroyd was there with Jason and they were doing a pickup shot on the Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire. So I’m in my office and all of a sudden Jason comes in with Dan in front of this big model. We asked him questions about how accurate was this set we built. Jason posted it on his Instagram. It was wild to get that sort of validation in a way. It was really fun getting his feedback.
I think this movie will live on and will continue to find more of an audience as time goes by. What’s it like now being on the other side of it? It’s certainly something to be very proud of.
I found it an extremely enjoyable process. I thought everybody involved was amazing. I thought from beginning to end when we got the stage and we taped out the set, much like you would do a live show, a live theater show, which is the world. I come from theater and musical theater and things like that. It was extremely satisfying while it happened. I saw the way they cut the movie together and the edit, and I was lucky enough to see it on film once a projected film home. I’m incredibly proud of it. I just think it’s up there with any of the best sets I’ve ever created.
Saturday Night is now available to buy or rent and in theaters.
