LOS ANGELES — Producer Quinn Monahan wants to show you the history of on-screen comedy in about two minutes.
He and his team watched more than a thousand movies and TV shows, clipped out the funniest moments and whittled them into a meticulously sculpted 2 1/2-minute comedy montage set to air Saturday during the Screen Actors Guild Awards.
Every Hollywood awards show has its film clips — the 10-second snippet of George Clooney’s performance here, the 20-second excerpt from some nominated movie there, and the inevitable historical montages. They pass in an instant, or maybe a couple minutes, yet each takes hundreds of hours of work.
“Our three tribute packages … they’re our entertainment, they’re our production numbers,” SAG Awards executive producer and director Jeff Margolis said of the show’s film montages. “So we’re very careful about how we choose the content and how we put them together.”
The SAG Awards show always includes an In Memoriam tribute to actors who’ve died, a montage about the year’s lifetime achievement award winner (this year it’s Betty White), and a segment dedicated to some aspect of the union or the acting craft — plus brief clips that showcase each nominee’s work. Total showtime spent on film clips? About 25 minutes out of the two-hour broadcast.
A different filmmaker produces each package. Monahan has handled the show’s union segment for the past four years.
Margolis and another producer pick the clips that show off each nominee’s work, a process that takes countless hours on its own. Each category typically has five nominees, and each gets a 10- to 12-second clip of their work shown during the broadcast. Margolis and his associates watch every film and TV show up for consideration and handpick the 10 or so seconds that best showcase that program or performance.
Meanwhile, Monahan and the other contracted filmmakers are busy making their montages for the show. The In Memoriam package develops throughout the year. The lifetime achievement tribute gets under way over the summer, as does the package dedicated to an aspect of the union.
Monahan learned of his comedy-montage assignment in August. He immediately got to brainstorming with his staff about funny moments they remembered from movies and TV shows. They searched the Internet for more ideas. His assistants watched all the material in contention — from “Chappelle’s Show” to “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” to “The Simpsons” and Jerry Lewis — and saved the best parts in the computer. Then Monahan gets to the delicate work of assembling the short film.
“I usually start with the music,” he said, searching an online music library to find “that right piece of music that’s not trying to be funny but just is sort of upbeat and fun. It sets the right mood.”
From there he built incrementally, piecing together moments from iconic stars in well-known properties with unknown actors in little-seen shows. He sent drafts of his work to the SAG Awards team throughout the process so they could begin securing the rights to each bit of material included.
A unit of the awards-production crew does nothing but secure rights and permission for each of the clips appearing on the broadcast.
Out of the thousand movies his team watched, Monahan estimates they selected some 300 funny moments. Of those, about 50 will appear in the finished package.
Because the montage “has become kind of cliche in this business,” Monahan aims to start with a bang and keep the laughs coming fast and fun throughout.
“You know people are (rolling their eyes) saying, ‘Oh. Montage,'” he said. “You want to hit them over the head right away so they say, ‘Oh, this is different. This is something I haven’t seen before.’ You want to keep them in their chairs.”