www.wsls.com/entertainment: Costume designer Tom Broecker has been working at “Saturday Night Live” for more than 30 years so, like the show, he’s become an institution. He’s won one Costume Designers Guild Awards and six Emmy awards for his work on the legendary sketch show, which is celebrating its 50th year this week.
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For some reason, I never thought that there was a costume designer for the hosts in SNL. I thought that the hosts always had themselves, or their own stylists picking out their outfits, which I guess is a testament to how good of a job Tom Broecker does. I really enjoyed reading about how he values the cross-mingling of the different ages within Studio 8H. Within history, when there’s tradition amongst a community, there’s a strong urge to just continue on with the same aged people, till they die, in order to continue to create the same, loved feeling that started years prior. But now more than ever, especially with things beyond entertainment, there’s an absolute need to filter in newer, younger ideas to one: continue the chain instead of them just dying out, and two: represent the newer generations’ way of thinking, especially with the rise of technology and everything else new.
This must be such an interesting job. SNL is amazing and has a huge wide variety of skits and performances, and Tom Broecker does an excellent job on them. The pace and stress of this job must be insane and it is amazing that he has been doing SNL for more than 30 years. While I know the industry is one that is fast and ever changing, it is still amazing to me that every single week Broecker throws together dozens of outfits in the span of such little time. In the interview, he commented that they don’t get scripts until late Wednesday night so that his costuming job doesn’t really start until “Thursday morning at 9 a.m.” I also found it very interesting that they have a ton of these costumes on hand in a “giant warehouse space here in the building“. The costume needs for SNL are so wide given how many things they reference and do in their skits, so I imagine that collection is huge and wonder how they could fit that all in a crammed building in New York City. I also wonder what his budget is and how much per week he can spend on ordering stuff from other places that they need specially for a skit, especially with such a short turnaround time. It seems like he loves his job and he is certainly doing an excellent job on it, so yay for Tom Broecker!
One of my favorite aspects of SNL is how the costumes can alternate so easily between absurd, realistic, and stereotypical, and you never know which one you’re going to get in that sketch. The best costumes are when you don’t immediately recognize the cast member, you first see the character they are portraying. I think that that can be a really difficult task for a costume designer, especially when they are costuming the same handful of comedians in vastly different roles minutes apart from each other. However, Broeker rarely fails. I watch SNL weekly with friends, and I have yet to see a costume choice that confused me or took me out of the world of the skit.
I really appreciated hearing about Broecker’s approach to what is obviously a very fast, high-stakes job. I knew that SNL operated on a short timeframe but I didn’t know that the crew doesn’t get finalized scripts until late Wednesday night—that’s barely 3 days to pull an entire hour and a half show together! I recall one host recently (the anniversary episode I think) making a joke about how disorienting it was to be the subject of a quickchange on SNL, so it was also cool to see Broecker’s description of that from the other side. I also liked Broecker’s thoughts on how costumes sometimes have to tell the comedy themselves (or jumpstart it) but other times just need to mirror what’s written. I think knowing when to be flashy vs pull back as a designer is super important in virtually any film or theatre design discipline, and it’s something I think about a lot.
Tom Broecker has one of the coolest jobs I can imagine. For some reason, it never occurred to me that SNL sourced new costumes every week for sketches, I figured that they must keep the costumes they use and have amassed enough of an archive to not need to do any sourcing, but thinking about it it makes sense. Being filmed at 30 Rock in New York City, SNL lacks one of the biggest resources required for producing theatre: space. The amount of things that would need to be saved and archived could never fit in the warehouse they have on sight, and conceivably all the items have been seen on TV before, so they can’t truly be repurposed for new characters. I think it would be a really cool job to be in charge of sourcing the costumes for SNL. Also, I love the comments that were made about the nature of quick changes on SNL. As someone who has run quick changes in the past, it is one of the most stressful things you can coordinate in theatre, especially at the speeds that SNL requires, and making sure people are comfortable and cooperative is so important and so difficult to do. Because Broecker is right, it is a violation, and it isn’t really one you can prepare for without doing the change, so there is so much trust and rapport that goes into it. Tom Broecker truly amazes me as an artist and a technician.
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