As Schur says, “Of all of the things I have been interviewed about, I never expected this to be one of them.”
#Easy cat sketch movie
With the movie adaptation imminent, we caught up with all three of them to hear the story of how the sketch - now only available in online-bootleg form - came to be.
#Easy cat sketch full
The writers, meanwhile, were SNL newbies - Parnell just months into his first season as a featured player, Schur in his first full year as a writer - collaborating for the first time, with varying levels of enthusiasm about Cats. For Van Der Beek, then just 21 years old, the day of filming it eased him into the pressure that would come with hosting. In fact, the sketch holds a special place in the hearts of Van Der Beek and the sketch’s writers, Parnell and Mike Schur, now of Parks and Recreation and The Good Place renown.
If you don’t remember the sketch, it’s not because it wasn’t any good - it’s that it’s been effectively scrubbed from the internet because it contained a copyrighted song, the hit “Memory,” that SNL doesn’t have the rights to rebroadcast. (His enthusiasm is not infectious - when he invites some cast mates over for board games and a viewing of his new Legends of the Fall DVD, one of them attempts to strangle him.) The sketch, which was pretaped on location at the real Broadway home of Cats, the Winter Garden Theatre, included Darrell Hammond as Andrew Lloyd Webber, Ana Gasteyer screaming “Go fuck yourself!” when asked to share any anecdotes about being the stage manager, and Will Ferrell as a weeping Macavity who’s “rotting from the inside.” Dawson’s Creek star James Van Der Beek, hosting the day after Varsity Blues hit theaters, played Freddy, an eager young actor who just joined the ensemble as Rum Tum Tugger. In it, Chris Parnell plays a jaded member of the cast giving the backstage tour, with all the joy in his life eroded by years of starring as Skimbleshanks. That was the premise of a 1999 Saturday Night Live sketch that took viewers behind the scenes of the record-setting 11,000th performance of Cats. How soul-sucking would your job be if you had to do the same thing 11,000 times in a row with no variation? How much worse would it be if that job involved singing and dancing in full cat makeup?
James Van Der Beek and Chris Parnell in SNL’s Cats sketch.
0 kommentar(er)
