Stay Tuned for These “S.N.L.” Bumpers

In an episode of “30 Rock”—a sitcom about a weekly live sketch show similar to “Saturday Night Live,” created by the former “S.N.L” head writer Tina Fey—the diva character Jenna Maroney offers advice for a photo shoot: “Don’t use the props. They always try to get you to take one funny photo, and that’s always the one they use and you look like an idiot.” Her counsel: “Just open your mouth a little and try to look like Lindsay Lohan.”

Mary Ellen Matthews, who since 2000 has shot “S.N.L.” ’s “bumper” photographs—those brightly colored portraits of the week’s host and musical guest that flash onscreen before commercial breaks—doesn’t mind a rubber chicken, a gargantuan Martini glass, or a pony. On a recent Thursday night, however, after shooting the comedian Shane Gillis (prop: large scissors), Matthews mused, over the phone, “Recently, I’ve gone off the rubber chicken.” She went on, “I think the shining moment of the rubber chicken was when I told Brian Williams, ‘I’m going to throw you something. Just be ready to catch it.’ ” She tossed the bird. “And the photo is, like, this moment just before he catches it, when he realizes what it is. He’s just so surprised and bemused—so many things at once. He’s just about to grab the neck.”

That image didn’t make the cut for Matthews’s new book, “The Art of the S.N.L. Portrait,” for which she had to cull the majority of nearly four thousand portraits that have graced TV screens in the past twenty-five years. (She’s joked that the book could be called “All This for Three Seconds.”)

When “S.N.L.” first aired, in 1975, it replaced reruns of Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show.” “Tonight” always included bumpers to alert affiliates that the show was cutting away to local ads. To make the bumpers hip, Lorne Michaels, “S.N.L.” ’s creator, hired the photographer Edie Baskin, who colored her portraits by hand, lending them a Warhol-esque, painterly aesthetic. Matthews started out as Baskin’s assistant before stepping up and putting her own stamp on the format—independently hilarious, often referential and conceptual setups for her subjects.

In Matthews’s book, she provides some of the backstories to these conceits. When she photographed Seth Meyers with a Times Square “Elmo” (and friends), she used costumed interns. For a shot of Louis C.K. getting “hit” by a cab, she snapped the picture from the passenger’s seat of a real taxi, while C.K. hurled himself onto the hood. Dave Chappelle, in one of the book’s more demure portraits, is shown smoking—Matthews notes that he’s the only person she knows of who is allowed to smoke real cigarettes in Studio 8H.

“I did Tina Fey once as a Robert Palmer girl,” Matthews said. “She was just wearing a tiny black dress, and I was, like, ‘Oh, my God, she looks right out of ‘Addicted to Love.’ Then I was, like, ‘Does anybody have a Flying V?’ ” The prop department provided the guitar; Fey’s hair was slicked back, her mouth slapped with lipstick.

Matthews’s rescue dog, Daphne, became an “S.N.L.” star during the pandemic, when all the bumpers had to be shot around her apartment—micro mise-en-scènes of life under lockdown. In this series, “Daphne got a bath, and she got dressed up like John Lennon,” Matthews recalled. (She often dresses famous people up as other famous people, to staggering effect—who knew John Mulaney could be Patti Smith’s stunt double?)

In Matthews’s pictures, her subjects look glamorous, and like they’re having a blast. She often sets the mood by blasting the Rolling Stones, though when she shot Mick Jagger, she opted instead to cue up Humble Pie. After they do the show, each host is given a leather-bound book, which includes their portraits, along with other on-set photographs and ephemera. In general, Matthews says, her approach is to tell her subjects to avoid overthinking what they’re doing. “I want to make it fast and fun,” she said. “It’s a part of the show that is like a trust fall.”