The 90 minutes leading up to its very first episode of Saturday Night Live make it seem like the show would never make it to air, but we all know the show has become a dominant force in entertainment. Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night documents chaotic moments the audience never saw and highlights all the incredible talent behind the scenes. Offscreen Central had the opportunity to talk to the production designer, Jess Gonchor, about his work on the film and why it was a special experience for him.

Meredith Loftus: You have been the production designer behind so many films that I love, like The Devil Wears Prada, Little Women, and a few Coen Brothers movies. How would you compare your experience working on Saturday Night versus your previous projects?
Jess Gonchor: Well, those, you know, those two projects that you just mentioned, The Devil Wears Prada and Little Women, you know… This project, I felt much more comfortable with and much more in tune what was going on because that’s kind of like, it’s exactly what I do for a living. It’s create sets and timetable that they have to be done by and you know, and usually a lot of my movies are very nostalgic and in a time period. So on those two movies, I mean, I don’t know much about fashion or a family of women living together during the Civil War. So I had to, you know, identify with the scripts, but I had to really become, maybe not an expert, but I was super well-versed in that time period. But this time period and this subject matter, I was super comfortable with, and I knew I could make a difference in the script; and I was hoping I would be able to do the movie, and it worked out. I was able to draw on a lot of personal experience for the film.

Meredith Loftus: Yeah, can you share with me what type of personal experience you were bringing into this?
Jess Gonchor: Yeah, sure. I grew up in New York. I worked in the theater in New York. I worked on a lot of those, you know, the TV shows in New York, which it’s different now; but in the 80s, they didn’t have big movie studios like they do now in New York. It’s little spaces that were on maybe the 10th floor of a building or the second floor. I knew what it was like to design something and build something and have to get it up a little tiny elevator with somebody working the elevator to get it up and wheel to the stage and put it up again and make it look like what what it was, which is bigger. The texture and the feeling, I knew what it was. You know what I mean? Nothing like it is anywhere else in the world that I that I’ve worked on. It’s just a certain way of, you know, it’s being stuck in traffic in New York and finally finding a parking spot and unloading something, getting something in and patching together. That whole mentality went into the making of the movie and how to create the chaos in the sets and the backstage area, which was the hallways and the dressing rooms and all those. Then the soundstage, which is the stage where the performances take place, how to sort of make those two things synonymous with each other. It was just a vibe and a feeling that I could draw on. We built everything to some modern specs but like what it would be in 1975 or even earlier, because the studio was, it had been many things. It was a radio studio for [Arturo] Toscanini when it was first built. Then it had long running shows. They had the Kraft Macaroni Hour and different NBC shows until SNL was in there. I tried to get all that history in there while just making it seem like these people were on borrowed time. They had these sets to build and the show to put on. Was it gonna happen, was it not gonna happen? They were in somebody else’s house, basically.

Meredith Loftus: There’s so much I wanna ask from that. Well, you mentioned there is a vibe to this film and to what you’re bringing to this; and it was chaos. I know Jason Reitman has said that this was one of the fastest movies that he’s ever made. Did you feel that same sense of urgency when doing your prep work and designing the sets for Saturday Night?
Jess Gonchor: Yeah 100%. It was all shot on one stage and in one environment, everything from the elevator banks to the back wall of the stage. We had to have it all ready on Day 1 of shooting, which is not normal. Usually you have a piece of a set ready; and then you’re working on the other one or you’re working in this location, and they shoot it while you’re getting another one ready. But this was like you had to have the whole environment ready on Day 1. The approach was very similar to what was happening in the movie. We had 12 weeks to build this whole world and get it all done because on a date, the curtain is going to open, the light is going to go on, the camera is going to get turned on, you have to be sort of ready for it. It was different in that way that we had to have the entire set ready because the camera was just flowing through all of the environments and all of the spaces.

Meredith Loftus: I think the proof is in the product. Watching Saturday Night, I felt transported back to that opening night in 1975. Can you share with me your process of how were you able to reconstruct so much of that set and so much of the props involved that, you know, in a space that Studio 8H has had many iterations but in a way it remains timeless in a sense?
Jess Gonchor: I appreciate you noticing that, and that was kind of the plan. First of all, there was some things that were sort of written in stone, and that was like the Billy Preston set, the home base set, which was that brick area and that Wolverines apartment behind it, which was featured highly throughout the first season and has evolved over the years. But everybody knows where that monologue happens from, whether it’s from ’75 or 2004. So that, watching a lot of the old, certainly the first year episodes. I knew that The Wolverines set, the home base set, and the Billy Preston set, those were very well-documented, although muddy to see because the clarity of the shows were not that good. There was some old drawings floating around in some books that have been published of what those things were. So, my team and I were able to patch that together and create those three things that everybody, if you’re an SNL fan, you know what they were. The rest of the world, we had to sort of create from a lot from what I knew the footprint of 30 Rock was, from seeing it and also facilitating the script of what that needed; and all of what went along with that, of the camera floating around.

One thing Jason [Reitman] had told me at the beginning is, we need to put an identity on all of these spaces because we’re going to be going through them rather quickly. You know what the sets are onstage, but you know once you’re in the backstage area, which in this case is actually the front stage because he got out of the elevators and you walk through all the backstage, and then you walked on to the soundstage. But he said, “Let’s make sure that all of those environments are individual and have an identity of their own so people understand where they are.” We had to recreate that control room, which was a big, big deal just to get. It was all live feeds and live images on there. There was nothing burned in after. There was no visual effects on the whole show. That does not happen these days, especially in 1975. And for me, the costumes that Danny [Glicker] did that, that was enough to say what time period it was. What I had to do is like something that could have been left over from the radio days or the Kraft Macaroni Hour or somebody else was in there or a soap opera. All of these things, and prop-wise, I tried to get some things in.

Other people were established in that space, and the SNL team was on loan, you know, in that space. They were in somebody else’s house. ​​They should try and do their little show. They’re not really that welcome there. Go ahead, give it a try, but probably not going to work out, so I’m not going to get attached to the whole thing or something like that. So I tried to make it like they were in a borrowed space and facilitate the flow that the script needed for the action and for the camera. We built a big quarter and scale model of the whole environment and really studied that and paced things out for real. We taped that out on stage and ran the dialogue of the script quite a bit and say, “Oh, when we get to this point,” Jason [Reitman] was like, “I think you should make this a little bit wider or this a little bit more, I want to make a turn here.” It was calculated a lot. A lot of that dictated that as well.

Meredith Loftus: Speaking of that control room, something I was really impressed by was the authenticity of the equipment in the studio space because so much of that technology has been replaced time and time over. How were you able to track down or even recreate some of the light boards and cameras that were relevant to the 70s?
Jess Gonchor: We had an amazing decorator, Claudia Bonfe. The cameras… there’s not many of them, but there’s a few of those around. We had to build new housings for them, too, because they weren’t exactly right for that time period. The control room itself, we had it built from scratch. All those boards were manufactured. The control boards, we built all those from scratch, got all sorts of parts and cobbled together something as realistic as we can make it. But all of the monitors were practical, too. I could tell you right now, there’s nothing that you can turn on from 1975 and have it filmable, especially since we shot this on 16mm. They all had to be synced up and things like that, and they all had to be working. We didn’t want to burn anything in at a later date. So that was like a big deal. It also had to look right. Often times, you see these things in that a period, and the screens look like they’re from the 1980s. Some of these were probably from 1980 or even 90s. We had to, across the board, make them look like they were from, hodgepodge as they were, could have been from the 60s or the early 70s. And build all false fronts for them and set them up in a way that they could be shot and, you know, all with live feeds to them. I think that was one of the biggest things on the movie. It wasn’t the biggest in scope, but it was certainly a bit of a thing to figure out. It had all practical lighting in there.

Everything you saw, the lighting was such a big deal in the movie because everything you saw fell under the art department because you visually you saw it on camera, but it also had to light the set. So all of the lights that created the lights for all the sets on stage that came down, those pink, red, Mole Richardson lamps, we had to source. They don’t even use them anymore. They’re incandescent lights. Everything is LED. We had a source all those, but also build some because there wasn’t enough period lighting. Then all of the lighting in the control room, the dressing rooms, all of that lighting, because you saw it on the camera, had to sort of be worked out with [cinematographer] Eric Steelberg of how there was enough light and the right quality of light to light the scene; but also, to be shot and seen in the movie. That was something I had done on, you know, you do it on a smaller scale, but not for an entire set before. It was a lot of fun to figure all that out. The collaboration was amazing with everybody on the movie, and, you know, especially Eric [Steelberg].

Meredith Loftus: I just want to commend you for the way that you really brought Studio 8H and 30 Rock to life. I felt like they were their own characters in this massive ensemble movie. You’d mentioned, in talking with Jason [Reitman] about giving each set its own type of character. How did you go about achieving that?
Jess Gonchor: You know what, it’s a good question because a lot of times people say, “Oh, whatever, this prop was a character in the movie.” And I do agree with all of those things. Some things have a big presence in a movie of things that I work on. But in this thing, I truly do believe that the sets were as big as a character as anything else, because they were as big as anything else was in the movie. You saw a person in a set and being set up. I just think that you have things when you create something in a movie that you see a movie and it has to hit the audience right away and get the point across. Cause you don’t want them to start thinking about “what is that thing?” and distract them from the dialogue. We really had to sort of break it down and individualize each of the environments. What did this Wolverines thing look like? What did this apartment look like? What does the dressing room look like? What do these hallways look like? And how does that fit in to work with the costumes and the camera movement and the colors of everything? How could I make my work stand out, but also live comfortably with everything else? I think that was a choice of architecture and controlled color palette and the use of set dressing. I really felt like it was my job also to inspire the actors and certainly the crew.

I think we did that because there was no version of not being on that set because the minute you walked in the door outside, you were in this set. There was very little room around it to be not in the time period. I just think that sort of just evolved and helped along the way. A lot of times you do something, and it’s like watching a theatrical performance. You’re in a seat and you’re seeing something, you know it’s all fake but you’re engaged in it. This thing, even knowing it was fake to be in it, had to just be completely believable because it was a nonstop movement of the camera and stuff. I don’t know if I answered your question, but I think it just had to control everything. And like you said, that it’s its own character, whether if it was a payphone or a shark that they were wheeling around or a light bulb in a makeup room or a sign. It was all much more calculated than usual because it was a big set, but it was super intimate.

Meredith Loftus: You did answer my question. That’s so great, honestly. I do have one more question that I just thought of. Do you have a favorite little Saturday Night Easter egg that you threw into the set at all?
Jess Gonchor: There was a lot of things that, you know, weren’t so visible. There was, you know, sketches in the costume department of the Coneheads and things like that. Certainly we got the shark in there, which represented the Landshark. That was cool. There was a big portrait of Toscanini outside the control room, and it was sort of saying like, “Hey, this stage was built for me when they built the building with the NBC orchestra. You know, don’t mess around with history. What are you doing with your new show? You better make it good.” I just love that part of it. There was little like hints of other shows inside of the stage. Something that’s interesting is when you see the seating, this is not such an SNL thing that you can see; but they borrowed the seats, those blue seats, from Yankee Stadium, because they were renovating Yankee Stadium. They hadn’t already built these sets, someone went there and said, “Hey, can we borrow a couple of hundred seats?” And George Steinbender was like, “Take them, but bring them back when your show fails.” That was an interesting thing. I don’t know, there’s a lot of little things, hints of other shows from the past that are in there from like Kraft Macaroni Hour. Like I said, I wanted to make it seem like they were in a borrowed space, so look for things that are there, but not necessarily pertains to SNL.

I know your question was what was SNL, but you’ll see some things in there. I think, you know, we didn’t want to like slam it over the head either. Once you had the bee costumes in there and the shark, you couldn’t really have a lot of the other iconic things in there because there was no history yet. So you could put things in there, but maybe, you know, a little bit, maybe, you know, through the first season, what they were working on, what they developed. We kind of like kept it true to what it was.

Meredith Loftus: Well, Jess, thank you so much for chatting with me. Again, congratulations on Saturday Night. I just adore this film and I hope you feel really proud of the work that you’ve done with this.
Jess Gonchor: Yeah, I do because we had a great team. I loved working with everybody. Like I said, you often don’t have a chance to, being a production designer, to actually work on a movie about the craft. I’ve been fortunate a couple of times, but it was just cool to live that experience of something that I actually do for a living. So thank you.

Saturday Night is available to watch on PVOD.
You can read our review of the film here.