‘Saturday Night Live’ Production Designers’ Biggest Weekly Challenge? The Clock

We’re celebrating 50 years of “Saturday Night Live“! All this week, we’re digging into the late-night comedy institution with new stories, including lists, essays, interviews, and more.

Every Friday afternoon in midtown Manhattan, Akira “Leo” Yoshimura goes hunting. One of two members of the “Saturday Night Live” crew who have been with the show every season since its beginning in 1975 (the other being camera operator John Pinto), Yoshimura isn’t looking for art materials or props 24 hours or so before each episode of “SNL” goes live. He’s looking for Colin Jost. 

The reason for Yoshimura’s weekly game of “Where’s Waldo/Jost” is because Jost is usually responsible for the show’s cold opens, which are always the last sketch to be written given that they tend to respond to current events. Once Yoshimura locates the wayward writer — and the production designer describes finding Jost as “the strangest adventure I have on the show” — then he and the rest of the “Saturday Night Live” production design team have under a day to turn that set around for the run-through on Saturday afternoon. 

“I love the tension of the cold opens,” Yoshimura told IndieWire. “I love [how they are] skewering our president or skewering some political or government official who has done really bad things to our world. So it’s always a pleasure to me to [find out] what it is at 3 p.m. on Friday, knowing you’re going to do a show on Saturday and knowing you have to draw [the cold open set] in the next two hours so the shop can build it. And the shop will always deliver it to our studio at 11, then we’ll set it up and have a go at it on Saturday morning.”  

There’s kind of an ambient awareness most audiences have that “Saturday Night Live” comes together quickly with a very all-hands-on-deck, ‘let’s put on a show’ ethos. But it might not be clear, especially given the size limitations of Studio 8H, just how big of a production design team it takes to make the eye-wateringly fast turnaround happen for the NBC comedy series’ sets. 

Most scripts come in on Wednesday, and everything needs to be built and ready to go for the Saturday afternoon run-through — or, at the absolute latest, for the dress rehearsal at 8 p.m. It takes Yoshimura, his fellow production designers on the show Keith Raywood and N. Joseph DeTullio, and a village of artists and artisans to make everything from the planet Pandora, David S. Pumpkins’ haunted elevator, the industrial traps from which MacGruber needs to escape, to ships headed to Ellis Island. 

‘Saturday Night Live’ Will Heath/NBC

With such a breadth of work and almost no time to do it, the production design team has to divide and conquer. “Wednesday night all of us will sort of divide up what we want to do. We’ll get the sketches and we’ll all draw up stuff. But Thursday morning, everybody separates and is running different parts of the process,” Raywood told IndieWire. 

In general, DeTullio supervises construction and the show’s existing warehouse of parts — doors, windows, staircases — that are used along with a lot of new builds, all of which need to be transported to the studio. “ I’m generally out doing all the set dressing and dealing with props, specialty props that might need to be built, and things like that,” Raywood said. “ Leo takes care of everything coming in, where it should go. And when new things need to be drawn up at the last minute, he’s there in the studio.” 

Each of the show’s production designers has specialties they’ve developed over the years — Raywood has a real facility with game show sketches, while Yoshimura has tended to design the spaceships of “Saturday Night Live.” But they all do a little bit of everything, and just because one of them created the initial sketch, that doesn’t mean it takes the whole production design team — including over 40 artisans in the shop and beyond — to make the sets happen. 

Donald Glover on ‘Saturday Night Live’NBC

In fact, Yoshimura insisted on passing his iPad around the office so that key members of the art team, all veterans of “SNL,” could also introduce themselves — including art directors Melissa Shakun and Patrick Lynch, scenic designers Charlotte Haye Harrison, Emily Kollars, and Sabrina Lederer, and department coordinator/department “mom” Cassandra Briskman. 

One of DeTullio’s favorite recent builds — the train platform for “Subway Churro” — is one such setpiece where it really did take many hands, as well as a lot of remote coordination and scrappy resourcefulness in the shadow of COVID to bring the subway platform (complete with mole man entrance for Kenan Thompson) together.

“Although I drew it, it could never have happened with all the dressing and props from Keith and Leo’s oversight of the adjustments and Sabrina and Charlotte’s graphics and all of Sabrina’s dressing and Melissa’s oversight of colors and all of this stuff. It’s really hard to take possession of a piece, even though it came from your pencil originally,” DeTullio said.  

‘Saturday Night Live’Will Heath/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank

Large-scale collaboration is a core piece of how the production design team tackles the challenge of “SNL,” and working backward from 11:30 p.m. on Saturday night is another. But one reason all three production designers keep taking on new builds each week is that each week really is a new challenge. 

“There is something about having a person who has written the words come to you and develop it with you. And I think — there is an art to that part of it, you know, it is the art,” Yoshimura said. “That’s what fascinates me about this show. We start with nothing and we end up with something after three days. It’s pretty amazing.” 

It’s pretty amazing that it’s been happening for 50 years, too.