‘SNL’ Legend Retires

Saturday Night Live‘s secret weapon has left Studio 8H forever after fifty years of employment.

While most viewers have never heard of Stephen DeMaria, he’s been an irreplaceable part of the team since he began work on overseeing the show’s sets in 1974.

Every set ever constructed for Saturday Night Live sketches has been created under DeMaria’s purview. But when the head of NBC’s set design, Cliff Stiegelbauer, gave him the assignment in ’74, he had no idea how to pull the series off according to a New York Times interview.

His production design team, mostly comprised of “longhaired young kids…completely unschooled in television scenery,” was asked to create a system to design 10 to 12 sets and then transport them to 30 Rock for assembly every single week.

The work schedule was initially brutal, with Thursday shifts going from 1 a.m. to 3 a.m. the next day, and long shifts combined with inexperienced workers often resulted in completely unintelligible construction plans. “I didn’t know what the hell I was looking at,” DeMaria said.

But the team figured it out, and the SNL set design team has never missed a deadline in fifty years.

“That attitude started with my grandfather and [DeMaria],” said Nicole Stiegelbauer. “Hurricanes, tornadoes, no power, snow — whatever happens, it has to get done.”

DeMaria, however, credited “the people that work for me” as the show’s true beating heart.

“I’ll be 88 soon; I never had a bored day in my life,” DeMaria said on his retirement day last month. “I want you all to follow my way and have the same: Live and be happy, and don’t ever stop.”