Steven Prusakowski
In the world of Saturday Night Live, the focus is always on the stage, but the real stars often work behind the scenes. Cast members get the laughs and celebrity hosts get the buzz, but for more than a century of combined experience, production designers Akira “Leo” Yoshimura, N. Joseph “Joe” DeTullio, and Keith Raywood have been doing the impossible, turning comedy writers’ words into live television gold. While their work has earned them honors and is crucial to the success of the show, their biggest wins come when the audience forgets the sets even exist.
“Embarrassingly I’ve been involved for 51 years,” Leo said with a laugh when asked about his tenure. “The first television studio I stepped onto was 8H. Lucky me.” Keith added that their arrivals were all in 10-year intervals. “I’ve been there 41 and I think Joe’s been there 31… so all together it’s like a 100 years of television design.”
Scripts don’t arrive until Wednesday evening, meaning the team must accomplish in days what should take weeks. “We don’t get scripts until Wednesday evening,” the team explained. There’s a read-through around 4 p.m. that can stretch until 6 or 8. They read through 30 or 35 sketches, which then get cut down to about a dozen, including film pieces. From there, they divide the work and chase the night. “We try to get as much done as we can on Wednesday night, but it goes… Wednesday can go on for a long time. It depends on the show and the needs of the show.”
They never say no. “We always do it,” they shared. “It’s actually something that we’re pretty proud of… you don’t really say no. We just say we’ll do the best we can. We always… do the best we could with the idea. And sometimes, yeah, it’s an overwhelming task and we think, ‘How are we going to do this?’ But with all the experience, we tend to give it our best shot.”
One thing that allows for these tight deadlines to be possible is the fact that SNL has a theatre energy at its core. “I think some of the generosity of theater… the theater is a little more forgiving than high-end film production. And in comedy we’re allowed to be a little campy sometimes and cut a few corners to get it done and to get the idea or gesture said… People don’t always look at it and say, ‘That’s not real.’ We tell the story as best we could just like you would in the theater.”
Nowhere was that approach more on display than in the Olivia Rodrigo episode’s “Edge of Destiny” staircase sketch. The soap-opera parody demanded repeated, increasingly ridiculous tumbles down a flight of stairs. On screen it looked chaotic and hilarious. In reality, it was the team’s live-TV ingenuity on full display.
“That Olivia Rodrigo sketch, that staircase sketch, was a really great example,” the team agreed. “The way that was done… it was incredibly clever. How to do something live that’s not particularly written to be done live… and we just figured it out.”
The idea came from head writer Steve Higgins. “It was a cinematic thing that he was explaining to us… we had to divide the railing and the back wall, so they were two pieces. And he kept explaining that that’s really how they did it in old cinema. And it’s how Joe designed it and worked on it. It was complicated, but it was a visual that we had not attempted at all before.”
They built two separate sets that lined up together, the railing in front of the wall so each could move independently. “Initially we actually provided the whole balcony upper level and the whole room, and then there was discussion really after it was built: we don’t need the whole first floor. Let’s just drop it down. So we actually lowered the set, so it was just a few steps to run down. They tightened the shot, and we provided 50 feet of railing. It was the longest that we’ve ever designed in the show.”
The camera stayed locked. The wall and railing moved. The actors jumped in place onto a crash mattress, flipping and flopping with great comedic effect. “And the people were just jumping up and down in place.” Some classic physical comedy only made possible by the team’s expertise. “I felt anxious when we first tried it,” one admitted. But it worked. Behind-the-scenes footage later went viral, yet on the night itself the illusion held perfectly.
Collaboration with the writers is essential. “We try to honor the vision of the writers because they really steer their piece and produce them, which is very unique compared to most television. What’s unusual about our show is that we get to collaborate with the writers. I’ve been in productions where you don’t even see the writers. You’re given a script and then you go off and do it. But the involvement makes it a lot better.”
When asked to pick career highlights or favorite solutions, the designers were in agreement that they did not think in terms of singular triumphs. “Between the three of us there’s been thousands of sketches at this point.” Leo shared, “Instead of focusing on one particular show, they should look at the whole season. Because the whole season is a show filled with surprises and new ways to do visuals… We never say no… We’ve always been told we try to find a solution best we can to any writer’s visual idea.”
If the audience is focused on the comedy instead of the construction, the designers know they’ve succeeded. “If you’re focused on the comedy, we as designers have been very successful there,” one of them said. “That’s what we’re there for.”
Not everything is a completely fresh build, they shared, many of the more common environments get reused. “Talk shows and restaurants and other offices kind of get redone,” they explained. “We sometimes do use our footprint or our envelope for a talk show or a game show or a regular restaurant. We do use them, but then that’s when Keith’s work comes into play… the decoration and dressing is never the same unless it’s intended to be the exact same location.”
The special builds stand apart from the rest “There are one or two or three sketches that you will remember as the staircase sketch. You’ll remember that as a piece of brilliant comedy.”
Akira “Leo” Yoshimura, N. Joseph “Joe” DeTullio, Keith Raywood, and their design team are the invisible heroes of Studio 8H. After more than 100 years of combined experience bringing written words to life in record time for a live studio audience, they are still finding new ways to make the impossible look effortless, letting the laughs take center stage.
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