Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1504681
S A T U R D AY N I G H T L I V E | P E R S P E C T I V E 9 3 There's never been a particular system for that other than who's interested in doing what. There's not a lot of time, so whatever your first impression is, that's what you draw. If it was a sketch with a boat or a theatrical theme, Eugene would do it. Art Director Edie Baskin was usually given talk shows to sketch and supervised the set decoration for the next four years, a responsibility I took over afterward. The dressing she did for Wayne's World became its branded look and was later reproduced in the movie. Eugene drew up the original wood-paneled basement set. One of the first times it was on, it featured a young Tom Hanks as host and Aerosmith. Everything was and, for the most part, still is drafted by hand. Since there were neither fax machines nor emails, I would bring the drawings to the NBC shop in Queens at 6 a.m. Thursdays. While so much of how we design the show now is the same as it was then, a lot has changed too because of our ability now to be in constant communication. When I think about how little we were able to speak to each other on show days, except periodically on hardline phones, I'm amazed we got it all done, but, of course, we always did. Season eleven didn't go exactly as everyone had hoped and turned into a transition year with most of the cast being replaced for season twelve. As for the main set design, it made sense to acknowledge the reset of the show and do a new one. Eugene called me and asked if I'd like to design of a new home base. He said, "Let's do an interior this time," and that was pretty much it. I was left to do whatever I thought would be cool and already had something in mind. While working with him in the theater, we would often go to salvage yards to look for windows, doors and other architectural elements. The Polish director Jerzy Grotowski's "poor theater" had an early influence on Gene's approach to design. Creating sets out of found objects was very much a theoretical part of that, though not exactly resulting in a poor man's budget for construction. Eugene's 1979 Tony Award-winning set for Sweeney Todd was built from a foundry he'd found and dismantled in New England and then had it reconstructed inside the Uris Theatre. He preferred to use real materials whenever possible, rather than building them new and scenic-ing them to look old. The monologue platform of the original 1975 home base was made of real brick. The studio crew at NBC—on discovering they were working with masonry and not vacuform plastic brick—were skeptical it would work and if they could do it. I did a sketch of what I was planning, and the two propmen and I went up to a salvage warehouse up in the Bronx that was run by the city. There I found a beautiful quarter-sawn oak mantel with matching paneling and pilasters taken from a Sutton Place townhouse, two enormous mahogany doors and a slightly worse-for-wear chandelier I was told had been in the Helen Hayes Theatre before its renovation. At the time, there was a new nightclub on 14th Street called Nell's. Its style was English, a drawing room/men's club with a bit E. 1984-1994 HOME BASE SET. F. BOBBY BROWN PERFORMING IN 1992. AL LEVINE/NBC. E F