With apologies to Melissa McCarthy, the highlight of her Sean Spicer send-ups on “Saturday Night Live” is her “weaponized” lectern.
Now a Pennsylvania paper tells how the locomotive lectern came to be.
“The now-famous prop was designed by Wyncote-based Monkey Boy Productions, a company that fabricates puppets, props, practical effects, creatures and costumes co-founded a little more than a decade ago by 1997 Archbishop Wood High School graduate Michael Latini,” says the Morning Call.
“The week of the first McCarthy-as-Spicer sketch, they got a call from ‘SNL’s’ head of props about 10:30 p.m. Wednesday, and were told they had to have a podium ready by Friday afternoon that would be the appropriate height for McCarthy, and light enough for her to lift (the structure was basically made of thick foam insulation).”
One “SNL” writer suggested the podium be built on a Segway, but the base ended up being a motorized wheelchair — with McCarthy stand on it instead of sitting.
“When we rehearsed with her on Friday night, she spent 10 to 15 minutes just tooling around on the podium,” Latini told the paper. “She loved it. She said she wasn’t going to walk anywhere ever again.”