How Did Questlove Make His New ‘SNL’ Doc? Step One: Watch 900 Episodes

Questlove can still remember seeing Billy Preston perform on the first Saturday Night Live on Oct. 11, 1975. Technically, he wasn’t allowed to watch TV, but his parents were Soul Train devotees who wanted their son, then four, to absorb “anything musical,” he says. To get him ready for its 1 a.m. start time, they’d wake him up at 12:30… as Lorne Michaels’ brand-new sketch show was airing. “Back then, Weekend Update was a two-part thing, and then the musical guest would do two songs after, and then [again] right before 1 a.m., like the last thing of the night,” the musician, born Ahmir Thompson, explains to Rolling Stone. “And so, waiting for Soul Train to come on, I would watch the music act on SNL perform. And that’s how I got drawn into the system.”

SNL would become one of Thompson’s passions, but his devotion was more personal than professional until 2021, when Michaels asked him if he was interested in directing a special on the show’s music for the 50th anniversary this year. Thompson was fresh off a Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award at Sundance for Summer of Soul and instantly said yes. On Jan. 27, NBC will premiere Thompson’s three-hour documentary Ladies & Gentlemen … 50 Years of SNL Music, an intensely researched look at how music shaped the show and vice versa, featuring former and current cast members, longtime staffers, and dozens of musicians who have performed on its stage.

The film draws on a dizzying number of moments that are equal parts somber (Paul Simon on the first post-9/11 show), surreal (Sinéad O’Connor ripping up a photo of the Pope), and groundbreaking (Funky 4 + 1’s 1981 appearance was the first hip-hop performance on national TV). With access to the full audio from inside the control room from numerous performances, Thompson takes the viewer inside some of the show’s wildest moments, delivering voyeuristic thrills like hearing producers scream when Kanye West nearly walks offstage.

Thompson, who jokes that he’s “not in my phone-it-in era yet,” rewatched more than 900 episodes to prepare for the film. “I watched every day without fail,” he says. “Three to seven episodes every day.” What started as just compiling the show’s 50 best performances bloomed into exploring nearly every aspect of music on the show, from music-centric skits and digital shorts to cast members imitating famous musicians and artists appearing on the show to host or in cameos. 

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“I started to realize that there’s even more iconic sketches and music moments on the show without the artist,” he says, citing the Wayne’s World theme song, Eddie Murphy’s musical performances, and Steve Martin’s King Tut, among others. “Half of SNL‘s existence, music’s involved … I had to beg for an additional hour [of programming].”

After watching 81,000 minutes of SNL, interviewing dozens of participants, and directing this definitive documentary, here are Thompson’s five biggest takeaways.

Lorne has never banned anyone from the show

On Halloween 1981, at the behest of John Belushi, L.A. punk band Fear pummeled a national audience with one of SNL’s most raucous performances. To the delight of the band and chagrin of producers, hundreds of punks invaded the show, stage-diving and slam-dancing their way to TV notoriety and leading to the urban legend that Michaels banned the group from the show.

The number one thing I wanted to investigate and dismantle was the entire idea of the Fear performance. I wanted to go to the [Mount] Rushmore of all the taboo performances on the show and look under the hood. This was my number one. If you listen to various urban legend tales of the show, I was under the impression that these punk guys came in and damn near almost set this entire building on fire. Lorne brilliantly captures it [in the doc] when he says, “We’ve never banned anybody — we’re way too crass and opportunistic. We know the benefit of this moment even if it’s controversial.” Learning that Fear was just good old American entertainment [and] a band that came in, did their two songs and left immediately; there was no riot or structural damage. But the myth of it all is what built up the thing.

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Elvis Costello’s prickly reputation is overblown

In December 1977, Costello pissed off SNL brass by cutting off the intro to “Less Than Zero,” the song his label wanted him to perform, and instructing his band to instead play “Radio, Radio,” a track that took on the commercialization of radio. For Thompson and others, it burnished the lore of Costello as a “difficult” artist. Thompson would see a different side of Costello in 2013 for the Roots’ joint album with the musician, Wise Up Ghost.

Having worked with Elvis Costello, we talked about all the “taboos” of Elvis Costello. Halfway through the process, I was like, “Wow, I didn’t expect you to…” and I was, like, stalling, and he’s like, “Yeah, to be a regular guy?” And I was like, “Well, you’re kind of the poster boy for the troubled artist.” What you basically discover is just the intense, abrupt way that he stops the song — he does it in such an intense, Nicolas Cage, the-world’s-about-to-end way. He didn’t have to do that. He could’ve just been like, “Guys. I hate this song. 1, 2, 3.” That one moment defines the legend. It served him well. [When we were recording the album], he too would just chuckle and laugh at the fact that people thought he was this renegade troublemaker. He’s just like, “Nah, I didn’t like the song, so I changed it.”

Someone should’ve had Sinéad O’Connor’s back

The show’s most infamous performance occurred in 1992, when Sinéad O’Connor stunned the audience into silence following her cover of the Bob Marley song “War,” by ripping up a photo of Pope John Paul II to protest sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. While she was widely denounced and ostracized at the time, her performance is now viewed as brave and revolutionary as much as it was shocking. 

In 1994, the Roots were “exiled” to the U.K. In our very beginnings, we lived in London for like five years, using that as a hub to work Europe. We would do three to four weeks in every territory. Sinéad O’Connor was one of the very first co-signers of the Roots before we had a hit, when she just heard of this group on Geffen that made a dope record that a friend of hers gave her. We became friends and hung out anytime that we went to Ireland. Back when we were like the hip-hop Commitments, playing a nightclub with only 80 people there, she was one of those people front and center.

This is three or four years after her SNL ordeal, which affected her greatly. She was quietly hiding out, and every once in a while, coming up from out the shadows. For me, I wanted to give her a justice moment in turning that narrative around because she really caught some unnecessary strays during that whole period. And I love the fact that Al Franken really nipped it in the bud and said [in the film], “Yo dawg, she was right.” That was such a vindicating moment for her. 

Ashlee Simpson wasn’t the only one who freaked out during her lip-sync

Most fans of the show have seen Ashlee Simpson’s lip-synced 2004 performance, arguably the biggest musical flub in the show’s history. (Simpson blamed vocal cord nodules that prevented her from singing live.) Thompson’s film goes more in-depth on the incident than ever before, broadcasting the panicked audio dialogue from inside the control room during the performance. 

Even though I didn’t come in the door getting the result I wanted, I really wanted to investigate the Ashlee Simpson incident. I got something better, although it wasn’t the story that I thought I was going to get.

I wanted to reach out to anyone that’s ever caught bullets for a performance. And so instantly I reached out to both Lana Del Rey and to Ashlee Simpson. Both, understandably, not knowing what kind of storyteller I am, declined, and I get it. “This is something I want to put behind me. I don’t want to be known as the person that messed up on SNL.” I think if I just pressed harder and gave them the “my aim is true” standpoint, maybe I could have pushed a little further, but I understood. 

Oz Rodriguez, my co-director, was like, “I know for a fact that the producer’s mic is also included on the audio thing. And you gotta hear the control room’s response when that was happening.” This opened up another door, which is, “How does one react in real time behind the scenes when something goes awry on a live show? How prepared is SNL when that’s happening?” And to hear the control room freak out — to hear them scream “What do we do?! I don’t know!” — I compare it to two teenagers that stole their parents’ car and went joyriding and the car goes down the hill and you don’t know how to stop it. 

In my mind, SNL is such a well-oiled machine, very calm, cool, collected, in the kind of way that Marsellus Wallace in Pulp Fiction tells Sam Jackson, “Chill out. I got this. I’m sending Wolf over.” So to hear them in a moment where they’re panicking was very intriguing to me, because nothing fascinates me more than to come to SNL on a Saturday and just sit in the audience and watch the ecosystem and wonder how one plus one is going to equal two. It’s the best choreography ever to sit and watch them figure out stuff in real time.

Yes, Kanye West blew up the show — but he also expanded its limits

The film dissects two strikingly different Kanye West moments: his 2016 performance that transformed what a typical SNL performance looked like and his 2018 MAGA hat-wearing, end-of-show critique of “liberals who bully you” that rankled many in the cast who were onstage with West.

I had carte blanche on this and as a storyteller, you ask your subject, “Is there one person or something that I shouldn’t touch upon?” And at the time of filming, that’s when Kanye Loose-Cannon-Gate was at its highest. Nobody wanted to touch Kanye with a 10-foot pole, which was hard for me, because I didn’t want to white elephant his contribution to the show. He’s singlehandedly responsible for this new canon of creativity in which now you don’t have to perform behind the fake train station. You can make musical visual statements. You can almost damn near do a video to your song performance. And I was struggling to find someone that’s willing to get on record and talk about it. 

Ego Nwodim was the gift that kept on giving, because that’s her first day of school. [Kanye’s MAGA appearance was Nwodim’s first show after joining the cast for the 2018 season.] I wanted to know, “What’s it like to be onstage when someone goes rogue and you gotta figure out a way to Irish exit your way out of the picture.” To get her first person account on what it is to be hijacked by somebody and you’re in their radar as this is happening.