He’s the man behind the curtain.
Keith Raywood has been a production designer on “Saturday Night Live” for forty years. As the show celebrates its landmark 50th anniversary with two specials airing Feb. 14 and Feb. 16, Raywood, who has been on “SNL” since 1985, revealed what it takes to make the NBC variety show run smoothly.
“I’ve been a part of this pretty much my entire adult life,” Raywood told The Post.
“I’ve always looked at it as something I love doing, but it’s also my job,” the Emmy-winning production designer added. “We’re not designing things aware of what it might mean – like ‘this cowbell is going to become iconic’” he said, referring to the famous “More Cowbell!” sketch featuring Will Ferrell and Christopher Walken.
“You don’t know about [the audience reaction]. You’re just part of the entire process.”
“It’s only recently that I’ve become aware of how much the show has meant to people, how much it’s meant to the culture, how much it’s meant to New York. I wasn’t really aware of that until fairly recently. It’s very satisfying to know that I’ve been a part of all that.”
To celebrate 50 years on the air, “Saturday Night Live” is having a 50th anniversary special airing on a rare Sunday (Feb. 16 at 8 p.m. on NBC and Peacock) called “SNL50: The Anniversary Special,” which has many iconic alums returning. The show is also having a special showcasing past musical guests, “SNL50: The Homecoming Concert,” streaming live from Radio City Music Hall in New York City on Peacock Friday, Feb. 14 at 8 p.m.
Raywood is part of a team of “SNL” production designers that also includes Joe Detullio and Akira “Leo” Yoshimura, and included his mentor, Eugene Lee, before his death in 2023. He was quick to stress that it’s a group effort that includes the team as well as art directors and the props team.
After forty years, he hasn’t seen it change much, it’s just gotten less “analog” and his team has gotten bigger. They get scripts on Wednesday night each week, so they have around three days to put together all the sets and props.
“Lorne [Michaels] is very involved, but not in the sort of nitty gritty of a particular sketch. We would be dealing with the director Liz Patrick. Or, a writer will come in and say they need something or they want to change a prop or something like that,” he explained.
Raywood, who did the production design on a slew of iconic sketches such as “Wayne’s World,” said there are often last-minute changes.
“It’s never our job to say ‘no.’ It’s always our job to try.”
For example, he referred to the 2014 sketch, “Bikini Beach Party,” when host Charlize Theron’s character and Taran Killam plan a romantic evening but he wants to meet next to a dead beached whale that’s full of gas. Eventually, it explodes, spraying them in whale innards to end their date.
“We’ll have to make a whale that literally explodes. And we did it. It was a mess, but we did it,” said Raywood. “The funny thing is, we usually have to do it three times, because we have to do it for rehearsal, dress rehearsal and for the show.
He added, “So, if we’re building a whale that explodes, we have to build three of them.”
The scenery gets built at Brooklyn Navy Yard and then “it’s shipped in on a truck down into the bowels of Rockefeller Center and comes up a freight elevator onto the eighth floor where we have to load everything in pieces. Then, we put it all together in the studio. Meanwhile, on Thursdays, while scenery is still being built, I will be out with my prop team and I will do all the set decoration for the show. So any of the furniture that needs wallpaper, floor coverings, all of that.”
Since the “SNL” cold opens are typically about timely political events, “it’s usually not till Friday that maybe something happened that we’ve decided to do a cold open about … it could be Friday night, and we have to get it ready for Saturday. That is just about as common as could be to have to do things at the last moment like that.”
He added, “I don’t think any other show on television has ever been done that way.”
For instance, if he’s told on Friday night that the cold open will involve a sketch about a congressional hearing, “Suddenly, I need 20 matching chairs.”
He said that happens all the time, and to complicate matters, most vendors close on Friday.
“I’ve often called owners of prop houses to say, ‘I need you to come in this morning on a Saturday,’ and they’ll do it for me … I have to have his truck waiting at a prop house to load up those 20 chairs. Normally, they would be closed to anyone else.”
Because “SNL” is such a New York City institution, “shops and prop houses and places like that know us well. Everyone knows that at any moment we may need something.”
He added, “It would be very rare for someone not to show up for us.”
