When “Summer of Soul” debuted in 2021, the director Ahmir Thompson, better known as Questlove, was inundated with offers — and that was before the film won the Oscar for best documentary.
Among those who approached him was the creator of “Saturday Night Live,” Lorne Michaels, with the idea of a film dedicated to the history of music on the show — part of its 50th anniversary celebration this year.
The job would include digging through more than 900 episodes to assemble a single film — a potentially daunting prospect. Thompson’s response, he said in a recent video interview, was “an instant yes.”
“They’re actually paying us to watch ‘Saturday Night Live’ and decide what’s cool?,” he said. “It seemed like the best version of fantasy football.”
But the resulting film, “Ladies & Gentlemen … 50 Years of ‘S.N.L.’ Music,” which premieres on Jan. 27 on NBC, is more than a greatest-hits clip show. Of course, the memorable moments are represented, including the groundbreaking performances (Funky 4 + 1, Nirvana); the controversies (Sinead O’Connor tearing up a photo of the pope, Ashlee Simpson being caught lip-syncing); and the chaos (Kanye West storming off the set mid-broadcast, the punk band Fear inciting audience mayhem).
But Thompson — who is perhaps best known as the drummer for the pioneering hip-hop group the Roots — and his co-director, Oz Rodriguez, also created narrative pieces looking into the ways in which music has always been a central part of the comedy and culture of “S.N.L.”
One segment explores the history and impact of the pretaped Digital Shorts, like the viral-before-viral-was-a-thing music video “Lazy Sunday.” Others look at the music in comedy sketches, including Eddie Murphy’s impressions of James Brown and Madonna’s appearance with Mike Myers on “Coffee Talk.”
After constructing what he described as a “comprehensive sort of ‘CSI’ tape-and-yarn thing” laying out the material he wanted to cover, Thompson pleaded and won his case that the film should be expanded to three hours of broadcast time (with commercials) from two. “By the time I got to, like, Season 8, I realized there’s no way you can give a 50-year course in two hours,” he said.
Thompson, whose Sly Stone documentary “Sly Lives!: The Burden of Black Genius” premieres on Thursday at the Sundance Film Festival, emphasized the importance of hearing from the musicians, comedians and crew who were “inside a paradigm shift” and the challenges of presenting music within the unpredictability of live television.
“I always wanted to know the stories of artists who decided to go home between dress rehearsal and show, to get a jacket in New York traffic, arriving to the studio with seven minutes to spare,” he said. “My favorite part of ‘S.N.L.’ is just trying to figure out how they pull it off every week.”
These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
How did you come up with the more ambitious segments, like taking us through a week with someone who is both the “S.N.L.” host and musical guest?
That fits into me wanting to show people what creativity is. But there’s also a human element to it, like when Dave Grohl says that as a 9-year-old watching the B-52’s do “Rock Lobster,” he was like, “Yo, those weirdos are my people.”
I will never forget seeing Devo as a 7-year-old. Me and my cousin Kevin spent the night at my Aunt Barbara’s house, laughing like: “Are these aliens? What the hell is this?” Us not knowing about New Wave culture and seeing five white guys with orange things on their heads, singing: “Are we not men? We are Devo.” Then we’re at the basketball court the next day, singing, “Are we not men?,” and all the hood kids were like, “What the hell are you singing?” And then later, “Whip It” became a hit, and that kind of made me and Kevin, like, the hip guys. That’s how the virus spreads. So hearing Grohl say that told me that this could be a human-experience story and not just soup to nuts, how things get made.
Did anything come out of nowhere and surprise you?
The Fear story was one that I wanted to know about forever. When I first got to 30 Rock in 2009 [when the Roots became the house band of “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon”], I purposely waited six months to figure out how I was going to infiltrate the “S.N.L.” ecosystem. Who am I going to be friends with so I can see how it works? And one of the first people that took to me was Hal Willner [the longtime “S.N.L.” sketch music coordinator], I couldn’t have chosen more wisely and all the stories he shared with me about Fear, Miles Davis, Captain Beefheart — before I was even a filmmaker, everything that he told me in the hallways of 30 Rock all those years, I definitely wanted to explore all those things.
Getting inside the Fear story, probably the most interesting was Eddie Murphy’s take. I wasn’t even going to ask him about Fear. We were going to wrap, and I was like, “Wait, were you there for that Fear performance?” He’s like, “Hell, yeah, I was there — I was onstage with them!” and with a fine-toothed comb, we found him.
You unspool the show’s hip-hop history backwards, back to the Funky 4 + 1 in 1980.
I knew that “S.N.L.” was the first vehicle that showed what rap music was — the very first rap act on television was the Funky 4 + 1, five months before Kurtis Blow comes on “Soul Train.” Now, hip-hop’s a part of us, whether we admit it or not, be it our sneaker choices, wearing T-shirts to a meeting, certain slang. There’s no denying hip-hop’s effect on our everyday fiber. I wanted to figure out a way to tell that story without just starting with, “The very first time that America heard or saw hip-hop was on this show.” Telling it backwards was a way to creatively add a layer, and there was so much history to pack in.
We have to talk about the film’s cold open — a high-speed, six-minute D.J. mix of “S.N.L.” music highlights.
It’s impossible for me to phone anything in, even if I wanted to. I just wanted to throw the ultimate D.J. gig and hook you in from the gate. It started off small, and it couldn’t stop.
In the beginning, I was just going in five-year intervals — what’s the three strongest moments between ’75 and ’80? — and do it that way. But I’m so programmed as a D.J. it’s physically impossible for me to gather a group of songs together and not start — that’s my version of improvisation. And once you put, like, 17 songs together, you have a conversation with yourself: “OK, are we really doing this?”
My producers said: “It’ll never happen! The clearance, the clearance!” This is the first time that I realized my diplomatic position in music. People say, “Ahmir, you might be the next Quincy Jones, because your whole thing is more social than creative, knowing the right people, knowing who’s who.” There were at least 19 situations in which I had to come hat in hand to said person, and mind you, this is for two seconds — Michael Bolton singing “Love Is a Wonderful Thing” just once.
And you got them all?
The only outright no that I couldn’t fix was that Luciano Pavarotti was going to be part of the Bobby McFerrin-Busta Rhymes mash-up. But it was too much to explain to his estate, and I couldn’t go to Italy and whatever. It could have been brilliant, Bobby McFerrin and Pavarotti going toe to toe.
The whole experience is the same as “Summer of Soul.” At first, I said, “Just let me get the 20 coolest performances, let’s cut and paste it, and that’s it.” But I’m not at the place where I’m ready to say: “OK, here’s what you asked for. Where’s my money?” I want to make history buffs and nerds feel good about this show, and I want future creatives to get a master class on how to take risks and be creative.
The post Questlove on Parsing 50 Years of Music for His ‘S.N.L.’ Documentary appeared first on New York Times.
