Ladies and Gentleman: 50 Years of SNL Music

Today on Art of the Cut we speak with the co-director/co-editor and the show editor and the montage editor of the documentary, Ladies and Gentlemen: 50 Years of SNL Music.

Oz Rodriguez co-directed the documentary with Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson. Oz directed many of your favorite SNL Shorts, and has also directed episodes of Goosebumps and Nobody Wants This. 

John MacDonald was an associate producer on SNL. He’s an editor, composer, and segment producer on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. You’ve probably had some of his YouTube videos running on repeat. 

Jimmy Lester has been nominated for a Documentary Emmy for  Stockton on My Mind. He’s edited episodes of Wu-Tang Clan: Of Mics and Men, History Channel’s FDR series, and the doc, Getting Naked: A Burlesque Story.

Everybody wasn’t on the call at the same time, so introductions are done throughout…

Oz, welcome to Art of the Cut. It’s great to have you here.  Congratulations on Ladies and Gentlemen.

RODRIGUEZ: Thank you for having me. Big fan of the podcast and really excited to be here. 

When you went into the shooting of the documentary, did you know the structure or the stories or the way that you were going to tell it? Or did you go into the interviews without the structure? 

RODRIGUEZ: There were some stories that we wanted to pursue. Sinead is such a big controversial performance, so we knew we wanted to dive into that story. Then we had these buckets of ideas and stories and chapters.

But when you talk to someone like Jack White, he is such a connoisseur of music and he just gives you so much, so as we were interviewing people, we were finding different threads to follow.

We got really lucky with Bad Bunny. He happened to be host and musical guest and he allowed us to follow him that week. That’s how we ended up with that segment about the demands of the host who’s doing double duty - the host of the show and musical guest.

That just happened because he happened to be there and allowed us to follow him. Same with like Billie Eilish. Billie was a performer on the show, and she’s a huge mega-star, so we were lucky to get half an hour with her and get some questions in.

We vaguely talked about having a montage and some way of showing the scope of 50 years through the songs.

Obviously Questlove is also an amazing DJ, so it felt like if we could figure out a visual element to that it was gonna serve a lot of the musicians that have been there for 50 years that we couldn’t get into their individual stories.

The show’s co-editor is here - James Lester - or should I call you Jimmy?

LESTER: Please call me Jimmy. My friends and loved ones call me Jimmy. 

Alright. I would love to be in that category of people. Welcome to the show. 

LESTER: Thank you. I’m so honored to be here, Steve. 

How scripted was this documentary? 

LESTER: That’s a really great question because I think what people don’t always know is what the process of nonfiction is. Documentaries are always different, right? You can’t put all of them into one bucket.

There’s so many different types of documentaries. For instance, I’ve worked on documentaries where you might have a year and a half.

And you’re given, I don’t know, 500, 600, 700 hours of footage and maybe a director says, “Hey, you go into your dark room for a month, two months, maybe even three months, put together a rough cut for me.”

And everything in between. There’s all kinds of docs where the editor is - in many ways - a writer. I always say to people, I’m a dir-editor in those cases when I’m able to author the story.

James Lester editing

In this case, because of the tight schedule and because we had a system that is really answering to a showrunner - even though you have directors who are giving sort of the bigger vision obviously - but on the day-to-day level, what we did in this case was our showrunner would basically script out in rough form each chapter act.

We had about 16 acts because it was a three hour show. We had a story producer named Lee Doyle an associate producer named Joan Glackin.

They were both fantastic people to work with. They would give us scripts of all the interview bites and suggestions of what could fill in the bites - suggestions of archival footage, suggestions of moments from the years in SNL.

That script goes to my trusted AE Nick, who assembles that for me, so that at 9:00 AM the next day I have that sequence in front of me and I can just hit the ground running and go to town. We had a very compressed schedule.

We did not have a year or a year and a half to do this. We had about six, seven months to cut this massive show. So you have to have that kind of assembly line process.

Tell me about the process after that. How did a scene or act or a story begin, and then how did it evolve? 

LESTER: Even though it sounds cookie cutter, this kind of AV script, I think it evolved in an organic way. For instance, I would send my cut back to my show runner and he would give notes. We’d try different things.

I think the big thing was always: Did we pick the best moment from a sketch in SNL? ‘cause there’s so many possibilities and we would run through dozens of possibilities and exponential kind of possibilities because you could start with one excerpt and then go to another if you’re fast cutting and you could move those all around like “Three Card Monty.”

Then you could shift things in the act itself. The other thing was that our co-director - Oz - had a lot of access, because he’s worked at SNL. He had all this access to behind the scenes footage, what we call iso cams, isolated cameras, meaning when you watch the show, SNL, you’re watching a live edit of that show. A line cut.

There are seven or eight cameras involved, so we could have access to the raw footage of those cameras, too. We got access to the director’s mics, which was really helpful. Once those things come into the fold, which happens months into the project, you could then return to the acts that you’ve been working on and they evolve even further.

Montage editor John MacDonald’s been working and finally broke free. He’s joining us on the call. I know lots of people would love to hear a little bit about that opening montage. How did that get constructed? It almost felt like the music might have been first - or no?

MACDONALD: We knew we had to open the doc, with a quick view of things, but also understanding what we’re about to see. At first, Amir had the idea of following Maya Rudolph with a camera when she hosted. That way we could get some backstage footage of her doing the announcement of the musical guest.

That was the launching point, ‘cause once she says that, then you can go into all the classic hosts doing that. Then I sent Amir [Questlove] this hasty edit of just a couple things mashed up, but it was very bad and quick. He looked at me and said, “That’s exactly what I want.

I wanted to ask you to do that, but I thought I would be asking too much.” Initially, we were just gonna do a simple montage of the acts, but that’s been done so many times. I also noticed in the special -  I was seeing rough cuts - and the editing that was happening throughout was great.

In the stuff I was seeing of the show there were already montages supporting the narrative and I thought, “What can I do? The stuff elsewhere is great. I would just be doing more of that. I can’t do that. I gotta do something different.” It was definitely a journey.

It was a lot of trial and error, a lot of research, and a lot of setup. Getting everything in the project, but also in a DAW that I like working in and matching time codes, all that stuff. That’s all first. I have to be completely set up.

The table has to be very clear so that I can think more creatively and horizontally rather than be tweaking stuff down the road.

John MacDonald’s editing set-up

Jimmy, I see in the background you have a piano. Like so many editors, including myself, it looks like you’re a musician. 

LESTER: I studied music. I come from a musical family. My father is an amazing jazz pianist named Billy Lester, so I grew up in a New York, in a jazz kind of world. I studied music very seriously, and I still play today.

How did it help - in this musical documentary - that you have a background in music? 

LESTER: Music is so much a part of me that it just felt natural to be talking about music, editing music, and spotlighting great musicians. A lot of people ask me about the connection of music and editing, and I think there is a connection on some levels, but I always tell them - this sounds very mundane for me - the biggest connection was that when I was in college, I was practicing 10 hours a day in a room alone, and when I’m editing 10 hours a day in a room alone I never have any issues with it.

A lot of people ask, “How do you stay in a room by yourself for so long? Don’t you get lonely? Don’t you get bored?” I say, “No, I’ve been training for this since I was a kid.” I actually see that as the biggest connection in terms of the craft itself and just sitting there by yourself.

…knowing how to practice essentially.

LESTER: There you go.

One of John MacDonald’s Adobe Premiere “playgrounds” for figuring out the opening montage. Put it in the Louvre. Or MoMa. Or Chicago’s Art Institute…

This was edited in Adobe Premiere, correct? How did you share media and the project?

RODRIGUEZ: There were three editors. Shout out to Jimmy Lester, the other editor that tackled this beast – he’s the hub of this. The project was in New York. I happen to live in Los Angeles so I did my editing remote on this very laptop that I’m Zooming with.

I had an extra monitor, but all the footage was in New York. Somehow things didn’t crash. It should have, ‘cause we had every performance in our library! We could just check out literally every single performance in the last 50 years. 

We started editing this during season 49. Every Monday we’d receive last Saturday’s new clip. On top of that, we had sketches - the digital shorts or sketches with music - so it was a humongous project. I don’t know how many bytes, but many. 

What was your technology to get in? Jump Desktop?

RODRIGUEZ: Jump Desktop.

More Adobe Premiere from John MacDonald’s opening montage.

This has been a labor of love for a year? 

RODRIGUEZ: Close to two years. 

MACDONALD: More than that for Oz, for sure. 

RODRIGUEZ: We had six months of just conversations - just being on a whiteboard and using index cards on a wall. That’s how we started editing the project - figuring out what the threads are that we were gonna research.

Then in October, 2023 was our first interview. That was the Bad Bunny show. While we were shooting the interviews and editing, we let John cook. He had time to put together that beast of a of a project.

MACDONALD: Cook. I wish it was that elegant. Amir [Questlove] Thompson is first and foremost an amazing creative mind and he understands other people’s creative, so he would come in and we would talk about it. He would tell me, “Do your thing. Check in with me.

Send me things.” We’ve worked together for many years and he knows where my head is and he wanted to just see what happens if I was just let loose to do it. Having that kind of trust is the only way something like this could have happened - by someone giving me the space and the time.

Oz, as you probably saw - there were so many edits where there’s just a slate “MORE TO COME” or a lot of broken stuff. 

RODRIGUEZ: There’s one cut where you put “SOMETHING COOL WILL BE HERE” then you move on to something else. 

MACDONALD: Yeah. 

RODRIGUEZ: I think at one point the opening montage was like 15 minutes.

John’s MindNode to help make connections between songs with various BPM and keys.

MACDONALD: I had 300 songs in play before this all started. Amir had Excel sheets with every performance. He had watched all the shows, he had all the performances listed. So I had a great starting point, then I took that, put it into a mind mapping software, because I gotta see it. I use MindNode (mindnode.com)  and get all the songs.

I went in and checked all the BPMs, the keys, make sure that all the data I need is easily retrievable and filterable, then once I’ve got all the songs in, it’s just trying stuff out. It’s a lot of: “Here’s a cool idea that has absolutely no relevance to the main edit, but I don’t wanna lose this just yet.”

So I would - in those early cuts - send to Oz and the group a lot of  “island ideas” then black, then “island idea,” then black, so it didn’t really find its structure till a few months before the doc aired.

RODRIGUEZ: We’re going through every genre of pop music, so you’re making wild connections. You wanna serve serve hip hop and rock and pop.

MACDONALD: It wasn’t necessarily to just do this flashy thing. I wanted to serve the whole documentary in a way: what does it need at the top? We gotta establish all this, but not take too long doing it.

“Oh, maybe if we have two artists on the screen at once, singing together,” you knock out two birds with one stone and then you cover all the eras and it’s just a quick zoom through 50 years of amazing music.

What’s great is you can see on screen juxtaposition of somebody from the seventies along with somebody from the nineties or the aughts and it’s the same studio, so it’s bound by all that stuff. It was fun to try to contrast those types of things.

Screenshot from John’s LogicPro set-up splitting tracks of songs and “re-composing” them.

I heard you mention you’ve got your favorite DAW: digital audio workstation. What are you doing with the DAW and how are you incorporating that into what you’re cutting in Adobe Premiere? 

MACDONALD: I’ve been a LogicPro user since it was owned by a German company in the nineties. All the organization of all the musical performances was so amazingly done by the editing team: assistant editor Nick Evans and everybody at Radical.

I could bring the proxies into Premiere, then I’d have a sequence for each performance that was clipped out and make sure the time code matched, then I’d kick that out. I wanted Logic to reflect what I’m seeing in Premiere, then in Logic I wanted to have beat references back in Premiere.

There are a lot of ways to do that, but in Logic, I can grid it and make a click track to bring back into Premiere. The reason I use a click track in Premiere is ‘cause visually it puts a pop on beat one of every bar. So I just visually, it’s like flying an airplane in bad weather.

I could edit the whole thing without even looking at the monitor. I could see where I am in the song. Here’s beat one, et cetera. So that’s the point of working in Logic. Also, I had I just had the stereo - or in some cases - the mono mixes, so I had to split all that out so that I could actually remix stuff together and I did that in Logic.

There are various tools that you can separate stems with. I was shocked at how good the one in Logic was that came out last year and how fast it was. I was able to do that with 300 songs, then bring those back into Premiere, then you start getting into beat matching and all that stuff. I’ve got my palette set. I didn’t wanna change the songs or make it this untrue thing.

As much as possible, I wanted artists to live on screen and just hang there for seconds on end and play together, so I had to get all the BPM info down and translate that back to Premiere.

Beautifully organized Adobe Premiere Pro project for 

Ladies and Gentlemen: 50 Years of SNL Music

From what I’ve heard from you and everyone else on the team, you’ve got a fantastic assistant editor. Tell me a little bit about his contributions to the film and what could other AEs learn from his work on this doc? 

LESTER: I’m so glad you asked me about that because I feel strongly that assistant editors don’t get enough attention.

Our assistant editor is named Nick Evans, who is a really special guy. I’m not much of a Premiere editor. I’m mainly an Avid editor. I can cut on Premiere, but it’s been a while and I know things have evolved in that software, so when I originally was coming onto the project, I was nervous about coming onto a Premiere project on a show that we really had to cut fast.

So my showrunner, Alex Brown - who’s one of the best showrunners I’ve ever worked with by the way - said, “We have an AE named Nick Evans, who’s a Premiere expert and he can probably, show you a few things.” Nick didn’t just show me a few things. Nick became my Premiere teacher. We had a joke.

I said, “For every Premiere question I ask you, log it and it’ll be 25 cents. By the end I think I owed the guy five grand. He did an amazing job teaching me. That aside, any AE should call Nick to learn how to be a great AE.

Nick is a filmmaker too, so he has a really good sense of being in production and the camera world and the edit world and everything and how that workflow connects, which I thought was really helpful: his level of organization and his understanding of the project itself, not just the technical project in Premiere, but meaning: What are we doing here?

What is the story? What is the music? Who are we focusing on? His knowledge was so great. I could really sense that he did his homework and was continually doing homework. So if I brought up something like, “Who is this guy?” - like some performer from the seventies or whatever - Nick just knew right away. He became a resource.

Assistant Editor Nick Evans

Nickipedia. 

LESTER: Yeah, Nickipedia, definitely! He upped the level of what an AE is, and he in a way brought it back to the old school AE that’s not just this technical person who’s doing exports. God knows I love all my AEs and they work their tails off.

They work harder than anyone in post-production. I believe the way the industry has gone has forced AEs now to become super technical and less story-oriented. My hat goes off to him and my gratitude goes to him.

How long was the editor’s cut or were you trimming individual acts as you went? 

LESTER: This was a different type of project, a different type of show than most feature documentaries because it was modular: meaning each act was its own story, beginning, middle, and end. Other than act one and the final act, which obviously has to be your opener and your closer, everything else could move around.

We started off thinking this would be a two hour show, but Amir – Questlove - wanted to go big, so midway through he said, “We wanna do a three hour show.” So suddenly it became a three hour show. Now we’re adding eight more acts or something.

It was cool because we didn’t have to worry about the complete arc, since you could move these acts around. So you have one act about the avant-garde times in the seventies. At one point we had that as act two because we felt we were gonna go into chronology, but then we realized we could throw out that chronology.

It didn’t really matter. It was more just a feel of what needed to come next. Questlove had a great idea that it should feel like you’re watching the show, meaning you have the cold open, then you have the title sequence, then you have one of the fake SNL commercials.

Following the feeling of it. It’s not exact, but it follows the vibe.

Questlove’s a musician too, so he goes with the vibe. In our case, we had all different kinds of cuts, but then we would just move these acts around like chess pieces.

Talk about the process of killing your babies.

RODRIGUEZ: This could have been a six hour documentary easily, but there were some people that we couldn’t get to. We wish we could have gotten Paul McCartney. Something we knew we didn’t wanna do from the beginning was have it be chronological. It felt like a boring way to tell a story.

We also wanted to make sure it didn’t feel like a sort of a history channel clip show. We wanted to show people things they hadn’t seen before. It was a process of editing and trying stuff out, then new things would come in.

For example, the Rage Against the Machine act was basically done, then Matt Yonks - post production supervisor at SNL - found the audio of the SNL crew having that skirmish with Rage, and that changed the edit right away.

Same with the Ashley Simpson director mic. Things were coming in and we were adapting it on the go. The process was ever changing. We basically futzed with it until the day that we were told, “You can’t futz no more.”

MACDONALD: I worked at SNL for 12 years and as we screened, I’d lean over to Oz and say, “Where did that come from?”

Adobe Premiere timeline screenshot of the entire show… note the acts along the top

I loved some of the behind-the-scenes sound.

RODRIGUEZ: So for the Rage Against the Machine scene, that particular moment took months. He tells the story but we felt that if there was a recording of that moment, that would really elevate that story. Finding it took months. Then one day we got an email: “We found the thing.” And it completely changed that story. It’s all true.

There was a skirmish between the band and the crew. When you work at SNL, you can listen to the director channel and I found it to be the most stressful thing to hear the director saying: “Camera five ready. Ready two.

Camera two.” nonstop for 90 minutes. It made me so anxious and I felt like that was a way to bring some of the energy, anxiety, speed of SNL into the documentary so you can get in the mindset of what it takes to put the show together.

Then in the case of Ashley Simpson, when something goes wrong you hear it - you hear the reaction in the control room and no one’s prepared for that moment. That is all people reacting on the fly. 

How siloed were you – away from the other editors?

MACDONALD: I work in 30 Rock at The Tonight Show, so I was close by. I had this giant drive with everything on it.

RODRIGUEZ: We used Premiere because SNL is edited in Premiere. Since we were gonna get so much material from SNL it felt like the right software to cut this on.

What was the collaboration like inside a Premiere? How do you work with multiple editors on the same project and did you use Productions?

LESTER: Yes. So when we started. It was a very simple project and it was not Productions. It was basically that I had the only project and Nick, our AE would manage the project. But as it got bigger and as we brought on some additional editors - and Nick also was editing a little bit, and Nick’s great editor - Nick changed it to Productions.

Productions is the Premiere way of having Avid bins being all together in one project. It worked quite well. Nick made it work really easily for me working with multiple editors. With Productions if someone has  something open, you can see it so that you’re not, crossing paths with them.

For me, I’m more of an Avid editor and with Avid I’m very used to working that way with multiple editors where you can share bins or copy sequences into different people’s bins. In this case, we had a very good rapport, all of us.

I just wanted to also give a shout out to our additional editor, Mike Young, who came on for a short stint, but did amazing work: really put a stamp in areas of the show. I’m grateful to him. He and I would work really well together, and Productions made it fairly simple.

Jimmy Lester

Since you’re more of an Avid editor, how do you think you got this gig? Was it a team that you usually work with and how was your apprehension level of leaving your baby Avid behind?

LESTER: The company that did the whole production is Radical Media and I have a really great relationship with them. I’ve worked with them at least four projects now -  maybe five over the years. They’ve been great to me. So I always take the call when they call. In this case, I had worked with Alex Brown - the showrunner - on a show the year before on an episode of a show for History Channel on FDR.

We hit it off. We had a good relationship. When he called me, I remember I was walking down the street, I picked up my phone. He said, “Would you be interested in doing a music documentary on 50 Years of Music at Saturday Night Live with Questlove?”

I said, “Hold on.” (Then he mimics screaming silently.) I did have apprehension when it was Premiere. I was on the fence. Thank God that Alex said, “We’ve got a great guy: Nick Evans. He’ll teach you Premiere. Don’t worry.” Thank God I didn’t not take the job just because of that. 

To be clear, it wasn’t because you didn’t think Premiere could do it, it was because you weren’t sure of your skills on Premiere.

LESTER: I’m not dissing Premiere. It’s more that I didn’t know that I would feel as comfortable and to be able to go that fast - which we had to go fast! But I’m a pretty good learner. Like I said, I had worked in Premiere before, so it was more just brushing up on it and seeing where it had evolved to since I had been on it.

You guys have all mentioned Radical a couple of times. Can you explain what that relationship is? 

RODRIGUEZ: Radical Media was the production company alongside Broadway Video, which is Loren’s company that put this together. That was the hub.

That’s where we met and that’s where we discussed cuts. Alex Brown was the producer from Radical. That was the brain trust.

You’ve got two directors. You’ve got multiple editors. How is that all working with people in different locations? Where was James?

RODRIGUEZ: Jimmy’s in New York. I was the only one not in town. I was in Los Angeles and flying in and out.

MACDONALD: I really worked on the opening montage. I also worked on the intro to the hip hop section.

RODRIGUEZ: A hundred percent. That was me asking, “John, fix this, please.” 

MACDONALD: I worked at the Tonight Show with Amir and he was very intent. He knew immediately what this was gonna be before I did probably. He wanted me to focus just on the opening montage.

RODRIGUEZ: It was your piece de resistance.

What was your collaboration like with Jimmy? How does that work out between an editor and another that’s also the director?

RODRIGUEZ: It was such a big project that there was stuff for him to do, stuff for me to do. We have a large group of collaborators here.

When you screen it to people, they will tell you if it’s working or not. I gotta say, shout out to Jimmy, at the end of the day, he had to be the one who put it all together: Jimmy and our AE, Nick Evans. 

MACDONALD: Also shout out to Dan Laurence, who was amazing. He was our post-production supervisor. He was wonderful. 

There were a lot of acts that you never got to.

MACDONALD: Oz and I both worked there. We’re aware of so many potential things that could go in there that we’re constantly thinking about how can we serve the show and its legacy the best and in the most fair way. A lot of the killing your babies work happened before we even started because there’s just so much stuff.

RODRIGUEZ: We had a great Jimmy Fallon/Justin Timberlake story as they put together the Barry Gibbs show. That was an amazing story, but we only have three hours.

Justin was really well-represented. Jimmy was well-represented, so it felt like maybe that could go so that we make sure that we can serve everyone that we interviewed and all the stories that we wanted to tackle.

Talk about the things that you edited together as scenes or stories or concepts that ended up on the cutting room floor, and why? What were some of those discussions? 

LESTER: There was so much to, to fill this three hours. I don’t think a lot ended up on the editing floor, but there were definitely some things. I remember very early on cutting kind of verite footage - behind the scenes footage - of a Jimmy Fallon/Justin Timberlake reunion doing the Barry Gibbs show, and I thought it was great. I love digging into verite footage if we have it. It’s rare that you get good verite footage.

There’s a lot of backstage stuff with them, a lot of antics during rehearsals, which was really fun. But we just didn’t have the real estate in our show for it. It ended up getting pushed back, pushed back, pushed back. It was not because it wasn’t funny or wasn’t good, it just maybe was redundant.

I don’t remember a lot of other verite stuff in that documentary, so it would just be a little bit of a break in tone, which might be cool: “Oh, this is something new and different.” But it also might be: “We don’t have verite with anybody else.”

LESTER: That’s a great point. I’m glad you made it because you’re making a better point than I am. Most likely, yes, it was a tonal shift. We fall in love so easily as editors with certain footage and you get really attached to it.

There were moments of tension and there were moments of catastrophe. Funny moments. Let’s discusss not just having the documentary be one speed or one tone throughout the whole thing. 

RODRIGUEZ: It goes back to wanting to show people things they haven’t seen before. Also wanting to make this an entertaining documentary that’s not just a clip show that goes from A to B to C.

Finding places in the interviews, for example, when we interviewed Leon Pendarvis when he got so emotional talking about John Belushi. First, you see this very sweet old man, then you see him in 1981 raising hell on SNL.

Then you get his emotion, you get a sense of how much John Belushi meant to him. I think those are the moments you’re looking for in a documentary where you could serve the story and take people from highs and lows and have some emotional reaction to some of the stories.

When you are using talking heads in this documentary - or in other documentaries you’ve worked on - talk to me about when you go to them on camera and how much you feel like you need to either Franken-bite people or let them have their run of what they truly say. 

LESTER: This is such a great question. Probably to the lay person that it not that important. They’re seeing a person on camera and they just talk. You see them sometimes, you hear them sometimes. But nowadays it’s really a conversation.

We talk about it a lot. When do you go to the person on camera? How much do you not wanna see them? There are some directors or networks that say we don’t wanna see people so much. We want to hear them and only go to them in their finest moments: a laugh, a warm face, tears, something emotional.

There are some people that take it to the nth degree and say - ala the documentary Senna - or the one about Amy Winehouse -  where they literally never showed any person on camera. They just used audio interviews.

So you have this wide range of when to go to people on camera, when not to go to people on camera. What is the aesthetic idea of talking heads? Personally, I like to see people talking, especially if I don’t have something to cover them that is really eliciting the emotion of what they’re saying or the construction of what they’re saying.

That doesn’t have to be what we call, “see/say,” literally seeing exactly what they’re saying. It could actually be contrapuntal: meaning going against what they’re saying, which is sometimes really fun.

There’s that musical background of yours coming out. 

LESTER: It’s like Bach fugues where you have different layers happening all at once. That creates something that resembles harmony. You can really enjoy it. It’s not confusing, even though you have multiple things happening.

I would say in the case of this, it was really more of a feel thing. We’ve got so much good material to show, so let’s show as much of it as possible, then go to our great interviews when they’re really performing.

One interview that comes to my mind a lot was the Jimmy Fallon interview because he’s a really great interview subject. Whe tells a story, he tells a story and I just loved that.

So I went to him on camera as much as I could. And because we have two cameras, you can cut back and forth if you need to edit them. 

You asked about Franken-biting, and of course we do. My opinion on Franken-biting is that you always honor what the person is saying - meaning get the gist of what they’re saying and if they flubbed a line a little bit, it’s not their fault.

Being interviewed is a tough thing. I consider it my job to help them be their best self, so when I Franken-bite them, it’s to make sure it’s in the service of the story they’ve told

The truth of what they meant to say, instead of what they did say.

LESTER: Yes. I had a great mentor who is an amazing editor named Pam Arnold. She’s retired now. You would’ve heard of her over the years. She was just so great. She said the funniest thing to me - this is so many years ago, when I was really young.

I didn’t know what Franken-biting was. I was working under her. She said, “Go edit this and have him say this.” I said, “But he doesn’t say that!” She said, “I’ll make him say what I want him to say.”

She was joking. I’m not saying that Pam Arnold was engaging in unethical behavior, but it was a joke that she was basically saying, you can craft people. You can craft them to say an “and” here or s “the” there if they didn’t day it correctly.

Did you have to hit specific times at commercial breaks?

RODRIGUEZ: The first act couldn’t be past a certain length. I think maybe it was 16 minutes or 15 minutes. NBC needed the first act to be over 10 minutes, but not past 16 or 17. We knew how many act breaks we had to serve. So there were definitely some timing issues.

What was the process of deciding how long something would be? Do you cut it and say, I’m just gonna make it 20 minutes long, even though I know it’s gonna be seven eventually then play it for people? What’s the process? 

RODRIGUEZ: The acts always started long, then Alex, our producer, would come in with the bad news and say, “This act cannot be 20 minutes. It needs to be 10 minutes.” For TV you gotta hit that mark to the second. Sometimes it helps to have limitations. You just have to figure out how to keep telling the best story that you can.

Talk to me about going to the mix. The mix is critical. What’s the importance of an editor going to the mix?

RODRIGUEZ: Extremely important. Especially in one about music. The first five years at SNL were recorded a lot differently, so trying to mix these different years together so that it feels like one cohesive thing That was all Jimmy. It was a very important challenge to mix this right.

How was the project organized so that you could find all this stuff?

RODRIGUEZ: We had two projects really. We had the archival project and the interviews project. We had archival from season one to season 50 of every performance, then we had our other project that was the interviews, and any kind of archival stuff that we found - any kind of graphics. Again, shout out to Nick Evans.

Everything was perfectly organized. We had our sketches. We had our music. We had our interviews and they were all transcribed.

One good thing AI’s doing is transcribing interviews. Then all kinds of archival stuff. Every Saturday there’s a new performance that comes in, and as we’re editing, we’re finding things out.

MACDONALD: Having been so close to that show for so many years, I felt like I was seeing a lot of that story told in a completely different, new way. It just felt like a very human retelling. There are a lot of anecdotes that people are already familiar with. I was close to a lot of that stuff as it happened. The editing team was pulling ISOs from places to serve the narrative.

RODRIGUEZ: This can’t just be like cool people, amazing musicians. You need to stop and serve an amazing performance.

We can’t fit all the 50 years, but you do have to stop at some point and just bask in an amazing performance. We wanted to make sure that we were showing people new things.

There’ve been so many documentaries about SNL, so everybody knows those stories, but we want to make sure that we’re presenting things that haven’t been seen and trying to elicit an emotional reaction from people.

MACDONALD: Amir has this total love for SNL - we all do. At every point we wanted to ultimately serve all the little things as well as the big things there. That moment with Rage Against the Machine - when you actually hear the panic and the voice of the people on the floor as it’s happening, it just puts it in a whole different context.

RODRIGUEZ: Because we both worked there, we know the people behind the scenes that are really important to the show, that aren’t usually center stage like people from the band or Eli, the musical director, or someone like Hal Wilner that we just, we really wanted to make sure he was part of this documentary ‘cause he was such a huge part of music at SNL.

MACDONALD: Phil Himes was the longtime lighting director there. At times you think that the documentary is focusing on this talent that comes from outside to perform, but it also highlights some of the characters we had there too for a long time.

They’ve seen and done it all and they know how to solve any problem at any moment, so it was great to see those people pop up in the doc as well. 

Were either one of you asking for things that you thought might exist but you weren’t sure? Like an ISO or some behind-the-scenes sound?

RODRIGUEZ: We were asking for ISOs way too much. 

MACDONALD: When I first started working at SNL I was very impressed with how focused on preservation and archiving. They were very forward-thinking about how to store all this stuff.

Having worked on a few different shows I very much admire that SNL was trying to find efficient ways to catalog all of its stuff early on and make it so that we can access it quickly. Shout out to Matt Yonks and Adam Nicely.

They revolutionized this whole system of keeping everything easy to find and in its best state. 

RODRIGUEZ: That’s how you end up with the raw footage of shooting Dick in the Box.

I wanted to get back to the opening montage and some of the transitions. What was the process of figuring out that you could blend multiple artists at the same time?

RODRIGUEZ: I have a follow up question too. I need to know how you ended up on combining Cher and Hansen.

MACDONALD: I didn’t want it to look like I was trivializing any of it or making fun of it. It was my process of looking at who sings a song in this key and in this tempo, so I have 15 candidates then I’ve got the thing that’s going in my edit.

Often, I started from the middle and worked out because my initial pitch to Oz and Amir was from Vanilla Ice right up to Michael Bolton. “Here’s a proof of concept, guys.” Once they were liking that, then I thought, “Oh, great! Now what do I do?

I gotta get out of this. Figure it out.” I also tried to work backwards. There’s a great jazz arranger/composer, Bob Floss. He told me, especially in music, they wanna start the song then they just want to end it.

But the ending is the most important part. That’s what you leave people with. So if you can work backwards that’s one less problem you have to solve. That  informs you what should go into something versus just, “Oh, I’m doing this and now where do I want to go?” I think the pacing tends to reveal itself more easily that way.

So all the transitions were more or less informed by that: by making sure that the tension and the release and the pacing was right.

Also trying to use handoff moments where we’re not just hard cutting from one thing to another, but there’s a little bit of overlap - like with Prince and Rick James and Duran Duran - using a little bit of all of their stuff, but not at the same time.

You’ll tease Rick James then you don’t see him when Prince is there. Then when we do see Rick James, we see Duran and we’re hearing the groove from Girls on film, although Rick James is singing Super Freak over it. There are just a lot of ways that you can allow the audio to carry you into the next section.

Were there actually splits for that stuff?

MACDONALD: No. That’s tricky ‘cause when you’re auditioning this stuff, it’s chaos. You’ve got full mixes of everything. The tempos don’t match. That’s why I was a maniac about splitting out everything and getting it back into Premiere.

Once it’s in Premiere, I wanna be able to kill the drums and hear how it sounds with just the vocal over somebody else’s drums. From a beat sync standpoint, I would create these 90 beats per minute sequences where I’ve got all my stuff that’s plus minus two BPM, then you have just enough overlap where it’s grooving.

Having two people’s drums playing over each other simultaneously will instantly make you think, “Oh, this isn’t working at all.” There were times where I thought, “I bet if we lose this track from this thing and that track from that thing, this might work almost in counterpoint with this other song.”

I have a whole music background and I’m a composer, so I think, “This person’s singing in D. What’s the relative minor?” Once you think of it on that plane, then there are endless possibilities. It’s jazz. I think, “Oh, Billie Eilish could totally sing over this other thing.” 

When did you finally get marching orders that it had to be a certain number of minutes? 

MACDONALD: They were very patient with me. Amir talked initially about 10 minutes or something. My thought was always, “If it’s long, I promise you it’s not long for the sake of long. It won’t feel long.” We finally zeroed in on seven minutes, but even that length people thought was way too long. But I said, “I promise you it won’t feel long if we do it right.” I like to try things out.

I’m a creative lemming. Sometimes I need the Alexes to grab me and make sure I don’t run off the cliff. So they kept saying, “Three minutes or five minutes.” Amir and I looked at each other and said, “That ain’t gonna work,” so Amir just kept saying to me, “Just go do your thing.

Don’t worry about clearance. Don’t worry about time.” He didn’t want me to be thinking about anything other than just being creative. I think also he knows how he would want someone to give him space to create something if he was onto something. I think in everybody’s mind, it was going to be three to five minutes, but Amir and I were thinking, 7 to 10.

Amir “Questlove” Thompson

What was the end length? 

MACDONALD: Seven and a half.

RODRIGUEZ: At some point Alex came in and told us that the first act can only be 15 minutes. We wanted to do the montage, but we also wanted to get a little bit of an introduction into what was coming ahead and get a little bit of story there.

We had to find the balance between the montage and you have to serve Lorne Michaels. There was a lot of experimentation but at some point, Alex has to be the bad guy and say, “This can only be 16 minutes guys. We gotta figure it out.”

One of the things with a director is really establishing tone and feel. Talk to me about how you collaborated with Questlove and the rest of the team and came up with the vibe of the show. How do you orchestrate that as a director or co-director? 

RODRIGUEZ: There wasn’t necessarily a mandate of what the tone would be. It was always driven with what’s the best way to tell the story that, you can get an emotional response from the audience.

John, I loved your lemmings metaphor. You have to be able to go off the cliff. I gotta know I can go off the cliff that way I know I’ve pushed it as far as I can push it. 

MACDONALD: For me, sometimes I want to try out things and something might be working, but then I’ll just keep trying things out and go past it. So it was helpful for Amir to jump and say, “That’s good.” He was someone else who could look at it.

It was sometimes difficult for me to step back from it and not be so vertical and technical about it and think, “Okay this could flow into this or that, but I’m like listening for specific rhythm things and harmonic things and I wanna serve the music.

I don’t want to manufacture something and just make it a clippy mess. I want ultimately the spirit of these performances to persevere through this whole weird mashup that I’m doing and not necessarily reinvent it. 

RODRIGUEZ: The last act was something we talked about a lot and how to end it, how to land the plane. I did a real nutty pass with the Philip Glass song ‘cause Philip Glass is different kind of style. My version was a little too nuts, but that opened up the idea of integrating Philip Glass.

Same with Toscanini. I went down this Toscanini rabbit hole, then it’s too much Toscanini, let’s scale it back. It’s just finding the stories there. You first have to try some stuff out and it might not a hundred percent work, but there is something there and how to shave it down to the best version of itself.

I wish we found a way to use Pavarotti. I could never figure out how to place him ‘cause it’s such a different musical change. That was the one thing that we had to let go. It’s easy to focus on who’s hot now or what the big splashes were, but when you dig into the Hal  Willner segment, just the true creative DNA of that show. 

The range is insane of people and it really feels like a time capsule of pop music in the last 50 years and now in the last 10, 5, 10 years it’s more than just American music or British music, it’s global music. You have Bad Bunny and there you have the BTS K-pop band.

Adobe Premiere Pro timeline of the final act of the show

There are a lot of creative partners. You have a showrunner. You’ve got two directors. You’ve got multiple post people. You’ve probably got Lorne Michaels and SNL people all trying to have a creative say in this. What do you get out of a screening when you have to show something of yours to the larger body of creative people you’re working with?

LESTER: Screenings. Screenings are always a roll of the dice. What’s gonna happen? Who’s gonna speak? Whose opinions are gonna come out? Is the showrunner gonna synthesize all these opinions? In the case of this show, it was a smooth process and some of the screenings we had were really enjoyable. We would often screen in person. Almost everything I do is still remote.

I think I’ve been in an office maybe 10 days total since March 10th, 2020. I do love working from home. It’s been great for me. When we screened, it would be in person in a nice screening room, and it would be several of the producers from Radical Media - who’s the production company that was doing the edit - Amir Thompson, AKA Questlove, who would attend… our co-director Oz might attend via Zoom from LA ‘cause we’re in New York. I would always bring my AE. I always bring my AE to screenings and ask them to bring a notebook.

I should have said this earlier: good AEs keep notes in meetings. It’s really helpful to your editor. So we would screen and stop/start because it’s a long show. The acts are quite modular, so we would talk about the flow of the entire show. We would talk about specific songs. Is that the right song to use right now? How long a song should play: how short or long? I’ve worked on music films where it’s not really that cool where the songs are cut down to say eight, ten seconds.

I want to hear it. In this case, our note sessions were very fluid and I feel like they were very helpful to me.

Does it help to just feel how other people in the room? 

LESTER: Oh yes, definitely. Especially with something like this, with music and comedy, especially comedy. If no one laughs at a little joke that you cut, I think it’s safe to say you don’t even need a note. You either make it funny or you lose it. 

You get a great sense from people in the room through body language, even through sounds. For instance, when I’m screening with people in a dark room and you start to hear people coughing, I know that maybe they’re not that interested.

I don’t ever remember anyone coughing in Empire Strikes Back or running to the bathroom. So I take cues from physical cues too. 

Guys, thank you so much for joining me on Art of the Cut.

LESTER: I’m so glad to have been here. I’ve known about you for so many years. I’ve read your books and when I got the call to be on this show, I was really excited. So thank you, Steve.

RODRIGUEZ: Thank you so much. 

MACDONALD: Thank you for having us.