Adam McKay talks "SNL Digital Shorts"

(MakingOf) People talk about your days as head writer on SNL.  One of my favorite things is your digital shorts.  H is O, I love H is O and I love the food pawn shop.  I think it's like, one of the funniest things in the world.  Where did those come from and how did you know you wanted to do start doing some more digital versions of your material?

(Adam McKay) Well, by the way, your in a group of about 100 people that remember those so I'm impressed that's very good.  Well I was a head writer there for three years and it kind of felt like it was time to move on.  I had had a great time there but I was like ehh I want to do other stuff.  My manager Jimmy Miller actually said 'Well you know you should go a kind of make a demand, just in case they say yes.'  So I went in and said, 'Well I've always wanted to direct.  Can I direct short films?' and Loren Michaels was like 'Yeah absolutely' and gave me a nice little budget and it was absolutely my training ground for directing and I got to do 16MM shorts the first year.  Then the second year I switched to the digital, which was amazing because we had one day where we shot a digital short with Molly Shannon called Five Finger Discount about her shoplifting dogs and we did it so fast that we had like four hours left and we went and improvised a whole other short film in the same day.  And the digital was so fast it was perfect for SNL.  Now mine never really caught on in any big way, there's some fans out there.  But then The Lonely Island guys came and then obviously it got huge at that point.  But man, it was like the best experience, I mean, that's absolutely how I learned to direct and, you know, all the fineries of doing it came from that.

(MO) Cool.  And any kind of backstory into where those two, at least my favorite ones, like where the H is O came from?

(AM) H is O came from Ferrell was at a Lakers game and Glen Frye was sitting there and he just...we were talking about how Glen Frye must like rule Los Angeles, he's from the Eagles, he's an actor, he's done all this stuff.  And he just was sitting at the game like 'This is my world.'  And then so Ferrell sometimes would have sunglasses and we'd go out drinking in bars in NYC and he'd put the glasses on and I would act like I was part of his entourage and just tell people like 'Look Glen Frye is here, he doesn't need to be bothered' and of course people were like 'What are you talking about?' And so we would just do that as kind of a bit.  So when I had a chance to do a short film Stiller agreed to do this one and it was a guy who accidentally stumbles into a really dark encounter with Glen Frye. [cuts to H is O clip]

(AM) And the Food Pawn Shop I don't know where that idea came from but we got to work...basically it was a pawn shop that sold second hand food was the premise. [cuts to Food Pawn Shop clip]  

(AM) And we got to have Steve Bushemi be in it, who is just fantasic.  I love Bushemi so much.  I'm dying to work with that guy again and it hasn't happened, but yeah those were a blast to make man.  That was really fun.