Outside the Beltway

Behind The Scenes At Saturday Night Live

· Friday, December 23, 2016 · 4 comments

Via Business Insider and NBC comes this look at how they change sets so quickly in between skits on Saturday Night Live.

This is how they went from the Trump and Putin based cold open to the monologue, all in about 2 and a half minutes. Of course, they’ve been doing this for more than forty years so I’m sure they’ve got it down to a science by now.

Oh and here’s the cold open in case you missed it:

FILED UNDER: Entertainment, Popular Culture, , ,
Doug Mataconis
About Doug Mataconis
Doug Mataconis held a B.A. in Political Science from Rutgers University and J.D. from George Mason University School of Law. He joined the staff of OTB in May 2010 and contributed a staggering 16,483 posts before his retirement in January 2020. He passed far too young in July 2021.

Comments

  1. al-Ameda says:
    Friday, 23 December 2016 at 10:44

    ha!
    Have a great Christmas weekend, Doug.
    … and the same to your OTB colleagues.

  2. Jay L. Gischer says:
    Friday, 23 December 2016 at 11:29

    I’ve seen faster scene changes, but they used rigging and flies, and just hoisted the big pieces up into the rafters. As an all stagehand job, that was amazing.

  3. Franklin says:
    Saturday, 24 December 2016 at 11:15

    Quite a bit of manpower (and womanpower, I noticed) to achieve that tight schedule.

  4. Mr. Bluster says:
    Monday, 26 December 2016 at 18:53

    Well damn. I thought they did it all with mirrors!

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