In 1975, when host George Carlin took the stage for the very first episode of Saturday Night Live, he walked out onto actual bricks that had been laid just hours before by production designer Eugene Lee. Creator Lorne Michaels wanted to surround himself with fresh talent who would give his new sketch show a unique vibe: “just a bunch of hippies,” Lee lovingly recalled to Vanity Fair over the phone. And Lee, straight from the theater world, shocked and appalled the veteran TV crew hanging around the now-legendary Studio 8H by opting for that actual brick and real wood. “They said it was going to only have six shows. I guess they got it wrong,” Lee chuckles. More than 40 years, three Tony awards, 11 Emmy nominations, and a win later, Lee—one of the few surviving original crew members to still work on the show—is having the last laugh.

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Lee still commutes into New York City for Saturday Night Live from his home and workshop in Providence, Rhode Island every Wednesday. Lee—who has no permanent New York address—sleeps at the Yale Club during the week but, at the age of 77, no longer hangs around to watch the show live and has a driver whisk him home after the Saturday dress rehearsal. “I work really hard for an old guy!” he says.

Lee and Michaels recently retired their tradition of occasionally getting the original crew members back together. “We don't do it anymore,” Lee says sadly. “Last year, we didn’t do it because there were so few of us it’s not worth talking about. The stage managers, they are all either gone or dead. Don Pardo died a few years ago. There is hardly any of us. There is one cameraman that claims he was around for the first show, but I’m always suspicious. We have a lighting designer, Phil Hymes, he’s probably the oldest living lighting designer—but he wasn’t around for the first show. There are so few of us now. Maybe it’s time for us all to be put out to pasture.”

But as long as Michaels wants to do the show—and Lee has some ideas about how long that might be—Saturday Night Live’s original production designer plans to be by his side. And while Lee has taken something of a step back from managing every facet of production (he leaves that to his “overqualified” team), he’s still very much in the inner circle. It’s Lee whom Saturday Night Live alums Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers called to design their own sets when they launched their tenures as late-night hosts.

And it’s also Lee who was able to tantalizingly hint at a secret new endeavor Michaels has up his sleeve. “I’m not supposed to talk about it,” Lee said nervously, “But Lorne and I have a little—it’s more him than me—a little project we are working on that is really insane. I can’t talk about it. It’s a little like Wicked,” Lee explained referencing his Tony award-winning work on the long-running Broadway musical. “Nobody thought Wicked was going to happen either. It got mixed reviews. How many years now?” Again, Lee has the last laugh.

But while Lee may not be spilling the beans on what he and Michaels have planned for the future, he is happy to reflect on the past. Here are some (literal) behind-the-scenes secrets from his 40 plus years on Saturday Night Live.

Sometimes they send the wrong llama. Die-hard Saturday Night Live fans will tell you that there’s a long-running visual gag whenever the action of the show goes backstage. “I don’t know if you ever noticed,” Lee said. “When we shoot in the hallway, we go outside the studio. We always have, 99% of the time in the background, Abe Lincoln, a chorus girl—like Radio City—and a llama. We always have that.” The show actually didn’t always have it—the 80s and 90s were pretty llama-, showgirl-, and Lincoln-free—but since Seth Meyers started his writing tenure in 2001, the gag has been pretty frequent.

Some credit an early appearance of a llama, a showgirl, and Abe Lincoln in the background of a pair of early Eric Idle-hosted episodes as the source of the joke. . .

. . . but according to Lee, “We don’t know why we do it anymore. We get a script [set] in the hallway, so we call the prop department and say, ‘Order up a llama.’ Sometimes it’s the wrong llama—it has the wrong color. We send it back.”

The sets may be fake, but the cars are real. Most of the sets on Saturday Night Live—even ones you expect would be handy to keep around—get destroyed after every use. “Keep it?” Lee said incredulously, when asked about recycling sets. “That’s bound to be sitting in a warehouse costing money storing it.” There are a few exceptions, like the Oval Office—but, for the most part, every set on S.N.L. has the life cycle of only a few days.

But while the sets may be disposable, Lee’s department doesn’t mess around when it comes to automobiles. “We do things in a way that would never be done in California. When we need a car, we go get a real car. We actually go looking in Brooklyn or someplace,” Lee explains. “You see some kid with a car and we say, ‘We like your car. Is it for sale? It’s going to be on Saturday Night. You’ll like it.’ We buy the car. We take it to the junk shop. They take the engine out. Anything that they can to make it lighter. Then they cut it into two pieces, because that’s the only way it will fit in the elevators. The studio, 8H, that we use, [Arturo] Toscanini used it—but it was all radio studios, so the elevators are small. All the scenery has to come in in small pieces and be put back together. It’s a miracle actually. The same with the car. A car just fits by sometimes half an inch. They call from the loading dock, ‘The car is not fitting.’ You go down and you say, ‘You got to make it fit. Shift something.’ It’s a very strange show to do. It really is.”

Don’t believe everything you hear on the tour. Lee is full of Saturday Night Live stories, but he’s always wary of the legends that have grown up around the show. Take, for example, the seats in the Studio 8H audience. “We were very short on time,” he said recalling those early, brick-laying days of building the Saturday Night Live set. “And they were changing the seats at Yankee Stadium. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been in the studio in the daytime, taking a measurement of something, and the tour comes through. A page talks to these people that have paid money to be backstage. Things are just made up. I’m tempted at times to say, ‘Stop, it wasn’t that way at all, guys. We made all this up. This is a myth.’ They say things like, ‘Lorne went to [then-Yankees owner George] Steinbrenner and he donated some seats from Yankee Stadium.’ No, that wasn’t true. The only reason that the seats are there is because it was the only thing we could get fast.”

Release the cow (not to be confused with cowbell). “I may be a little bit old-fashioned; I’m a little sentimental,” Lee admits, thinking back to the earlier, scrappier days of Saturday Night Live. “We used to have a stuffed animal—it might’ve been a cow or something. It had spots on it, black and white spots. They used to hang up in the grid, and when a sketch wasn’t working, this thing would just fall to the deck. Release the animal. It just falls down. There is no explanation for it. It’s like the llama in the hallway. It’s just great.” Lee says it’s the writers, not Lorne, who used to make the cow call. “The writers are king.”

The End. According to Lee, there are a few signs that signal Lorne Michaels may be getting ready to hang up his hat. “He’s been quoted as saying that his plan is to stay with it as long as possible. Whatever that means,” Lee says. But he points out that Saturday Night Live’s ever-changing home base—the show’s name for the set where the host gives the opening monologue—hasn’t changed since 2003. “It’s been around longer than any of the other home bases. It’s become kind of generic. I think it’s going to stay until the end. That’s what I think. I just sense that. It’s the boss who has to tell me if he wants a new one.” But as he talks about it, Lee—the man who defied convention to lay down bricks at the show’s home base back in 1975—can’t help but get ideas. “Maybe when we get to 50 years, what you think? Maybe eight years away. 50 years. Maybe we should change it then. I’m getting excited about it. That might be a good idea.”

The prospect of giving the show a facelift makes Lee more excited than he has been during our entire conversation. There’s a sense that, after 40 years, Saturday Night Live—once a fly-by-night, edgy comedy experiment—has become predictable routine. Still, every once in awhile, there’s an emergency that injects Lee with a sense of that old adventure. For example, if someone asks for a last-minute color change, Lee says they “get out the paint“ and “the big fans to dry the paint faster because the audience is actually loading in . . . If it wasn’t live, we would just shoot ourselves.”