Setting The Stage

At Saturday Night Live

“You gotta make it fun,” Joe Rielly head carpenter on Saturday Night Live, said when asked how he approached each show after working there for twenty years.

You might think working on a show in its 48^th season, which premiered in 1975 and has made millions laugh would be fun for anyone in the vicinity. But working behind the scenes comes with responsibilities requiring unique skills.

Consider if you will one of the shows longest running skits “Weekend Update.”  It takes twelve of Reilly’s crew to get the set on and off the stage.  The set consists of the desk, chairs and three walls. It usually has to be assembled and dismantled in a minute or less.  And that’s one of the least complicated sets. There are eight skits for each live show and two performances by the musical guest. Joe never has less than a crew of twelve, and it averages about twenty for most shows.

Joe’s week begins with the read through on Wednesday, where forty or more skits are presented. The chosen eight helps Joe decide how many will be in his crew. On Thursday and Friday, he arrives at 6:30 in the morning and along with his team they start preparing and putting various sets together. “Those days end whenever and we usually go late into the night,” Joe told me.

Studio 8H in NBC at 30 Rockefeller Center may appear larger on TV than it actually is.  Broadway theaters like the Minskoff, for example have over 1500 seats. And the smallest theater on Broadway The Helen Hays has 597 seats. The studio of SNL seats a maximum of 300 people. The stage is just over 6,000 square feet about the same as an average stage of an auditorium.

During commercial breaks besides Joe’s crew changing sets, cameras need to move, props need to be placed, lights need adjustment and the cast needs to get in place. Every cast member is assigned their own makeup artist, hairstylist and dresser, all these activities give new meaning to the phrase lights camera action.

During rehearsal and production celebrities are on and off the stage in and out of dressing rooms and roaming the hallways. Of course, Joe has mingled with more than a few, and sometimes a friendship blossoms like that with Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder. “We exchanged numbers and stay in touch,” Joe said.  The group has made four appearances during Joe’s twenty years.

Joe Reilly began learning his craft back when SNL was premiering in 1975. He worked building sets on night crews freelancing at different networks, before becoming staff at NBC. He said, “I spent a lot of time learning, practicing and tying knots in rope.” He had to become an expert when it came to making a clove hitch knot, or bowline knot both used to anchor things in place that might be hung from the ceiling in a studio.

Joe Reilly mastered those knots and lots more. Live performances are not unique to SNL. All the morning shows are live, but there is usually one desk that’s stationary and perhaps a couch or club chairs that are close by. Most of the daytime and nighttime talk shows are live too, but many are live on tape meaning they shoot earlier in the day (usually with an audience) then aired later that night or even on another date. But the synchronicity required of cast and crew at SNL is a bit like a high-wire act.

Even with all the planning and preparation sometimes things don’t go as expected. There was the time Reilly and a few of his team dropped a glass table, which broke on the stage during a live sketch.  Just before the ruckus that startled everyone in the studio a cast member had just said his line: “I’ll take care of that” then after the crash said, “And I’ll take care of that too.”

It’s the spontaneity the energy and the unexpected that has made the show fun not only for Joe and his crew but all of us watching.