A great deal has changed since “Saturday Night Live” first aired in 1975, but one carpenter has remained a constant.
Stephen “Demo” DeMaria, 85, has helped build the sets for every one of the show’s 960 episodes.
“I never missed no show,” the Brooklyn native told The Post in his thick accent.
The weekly production schedule is an adrenaline-fueled race.
DeMaria, who now lives in Staten Island, comes into the shop at 1 a.m. on Thursdays. By 2 a.m., he gets sketches of the sets the show will need for the week. Then, he divides up the work between five crews and about 50 carpenters. They have barely 36 hours to get everything built by Friday night.
“You gotta know who can do what,” he said. “Some of these sets are really hard to do, and you gotta have the right people – I give out all the sets to different guys.”
Not all the sets make the cut. For a February episode hosted by actress Ayo Edebiri, his team built an enormous boat that the show didn’t end up using.
“A lot of times that happens,” said DeMaria. “We build 10, 12 sets, they might cut two.”
The father-of-two and grandfather-of-three — his wife of over 60 years passed away in 2022, with many “SNL” people attending her funeral — isn’t always up to watch the show when it airs late Saturday evening. But, he and his team make a point of viewing it Monday morning.
“We got a big TV in the shop. All the guys that work on the show, we put it on the TV and watch the whole show, to see the sets,” he said, adding that it’s often funny to see how their work looks in the broadcast.
“Some of the sets are tremendous, and when you see it on TV, you see a very little bit of it.”
Many of his colleagues are like family.
Nicole Stiegelbauer, 51, is director of operations at the family-owned Brooklyn Navy Yard fabrication shop where the “SNL” sets have been constructed since 1989. Previously, the show was built in-house at NBC by a team headed by her father, Michael J. Stiegelbauer, in a department led by her grandfather, James Clifton Stiegelbauer.
She’s known DeMaria since she was a child and he worked for her dad.
“He’s the loyal-ist employee I think we’ve ever had,” said Stiegelbauer, adding that DeMaria is a “lovable lunatic” who is “irreplaceable.”
DeMaria plays as hard as he works. He’s a regular at the annual “SNL” wrap party.
“I go in, first I say hello to Lorne Michaels. Then I go on the dance floor,” he said, adding, “I have danced with a lot of [the cast].”
He recalled cutting a rug with Kenan Thompson and getting pushed into a dance circle to get down with Leslie Jones.
“He’s the life of the party,” said Stiegelbauer.
His favorite current and recent cast members include fellow Staten Islander Colin Jost and Tina Fey.
“I heard she’s gonna take Lorne Michaels’s place if he decides to go out when he’s 50 [years in], like me,” DeMaria, who plans to retire after the show’s fiftieth season next year, said of Fey.
He’s most nostalgic for the early days
“The best ‘SNL’ shows to me, was the first 12 shows,” he said. “Belushi really was something.”
He can’t imagine working anywhere else.
“If I had to be reborn again,” he said with a smile, “I want it the same way.”
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
