Here’s How SNL Created Donald Glover’s Kanye Twitter Horror Movie
This past weekend, Donald Glover was both host and (as Childish Gambino) musical guest on an extremely good episode of Saturday Night Live. While there were plenty of worthy candidates, the standout sketch of the show may have been “A Kanye Place,” the pre-taped parody of the recent horror movie A Quiet Place. The premise: A group of survivors can’t stop loudly reacting to Kanye West’s Trump tweets, even though aliens will kill them whenever they make a sound.
Especially given its up-to-the-moment jokes, the sketch has some shockingly high production values. And in a new behind-the-scenes video, the writers and crew of Saturday Night Live discuss how they managed to get the sketch ready in time for the show to air. After pitching the idea and tossing around a couple of jokes with Glover, two writers hammered the sketch out on Wednesday, and then the crew got it ready to film by Friday afternoon.
Even if you’re not particularly an SNL fan, you have to marvel at how hard everyone must’ve worked. Set designers built a cornfield on a soundstage, while visual effects guys got CGI alien monsters ready. The whole thing ended up looking great, and when West tweeted the sketch, he used cry-laughing and flame emojis, not the “Yeezy said they can kiss my whole ass” response that we might’ve expected. Here’s the behind-the-scenes video:
And here’s the original sketch:
If I were any of those writers, I would’ve been terrified that West would’ve tweeted some more crazy shit between the time the sketch was filmed and when it made air.