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Live, In Documentary and Exhibit,
It’s Saturday Night…
Casual fans and knowledgeable enthusiasts will find different
things to love and hate in two new ventures covering the history and
influence of Saturday Night Live
By
Michael Shashoua
“Saturday Night Live: The Exhibition” has been open for several
months, but it is interesting to compare what this New York
attraction, just under 15 blocks from SNL’s studios in Rockefeller
Center, offers for fans, in comparison to “Saturday Night,” a
documentary about the show just recently made available on Hulu.
The documentary, directed by actor James Franco, focuses on a single
episode hosted by John Malkovich in 2010, showing a lot of the
behind-the-scenes process of writing and producing “Saturday Night
Live.” This is the same purpose and mission as what the exhibition
promises, but by its nature, cannot completely deliver.
In bits and pieces, the exhibition, featuring costumes of popular
SNL characters, props, memorabilia, notes, keepsakes, and
audio-visual monitors with clips and interviews, tries to give its
audience a feel for both the history of SNL and its continued
immediacy and relevance.
There are certainly instances and pieces in the exhibit that are
illuminating, such as a clip displayed in a control room set showing
a frantic effort to get scenery in place for the start of a sketch,
which almost failed and left one wall of the set still shaking as
the bit started on air. Some of the memos and notes in display cases
tell a story unto themselves, like Jimmy Fallon’s thank you note
sent to producer Lorne Michaels after his audition for the show, and
a scrawled note from Bill Murray that evokes his deadpan demeanor in
your imagination – he writes “I got here on time, but no one was
here, so I left.”
Some of the material in the exhibition, like the introductory video
narrated by Alec Baldwin, and the closing video of Tina Fey on a
replica of SNL’s home base monologue stage, comes off
self-congratulatory and simple – geared not to fans but to tourists
who may know very little about the show.
That is where James Franco’s “Saturday Night” excels – straddling
the balance between informing those who are new to the show and
offering an inside look and new details to fans who already are very
knowledgeable. The documentary’s approach of showing a single week’s
production process includes just enough introductory material, but
not too much lauding and worship of its past, and really gives
insight into how sketches are written and chosen – or eliminated.
SNL has, for instance, sometimes generated sketches playing off
local New York-area TV commercials, and Franco’s documentary shows a
sketch in this vein, “Empire Carpets,” that ended up getting cut.
You can see why it had potential, but also how and why it might not
have played well enough, since it depended on Will Forte repeatedly
and abusively yelling at Malkovich to sing a jingle over and over to
get it right. This premise appeared to have nowhere to go after it
established itself.
The documentary also gives you the flipside of the same episodes –
sketches that worked well, like Bill Hader’s recurring Vinny Vedecci
character, and one where Malkovich played a teenage girl with
anxieties about maturing that she doesn’t want to reveal in a “truth
or dare” game at a sleepover with her friends.
The exhibition, by comparison, doesn’t really contain any examples
of the processes behind writing and producing any specific sketches.
Its approach is to show a broad overview of the same weekly process,
day by day. So while the exhibition contains numerous face casts and
special makeup effects, and blueprints of set construction, to
illuminate these aspects of production, Franco’s documentary gives
you a tidbit of set designers discussing construction of a hot tub
for a sketch, noting that the electric hum of a hot tub motor had
created audio problems when a similar set had to be made in the
past. The exhibition gives viewers certain things like this in a
concrete way that the documentary cannot, but also vice versa.
Similarly, the documentary probably is more satisfying to SNL nerds
than the exhibit, for its detail. But you can’t pose with authentic
costumes and sets by watching a documentary, which can also be part
of the fun for SNL fans and nerds alike.
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Feedback? Email shashouamedia@gmail.com or michael.shashoua@jesterjournal.com
© 2005-2018 Michael Shashoua