Madonna, Rhianna, Ilana + Fruit Cart!

On last night's Broad City one of the funny little joyful sequences was Ilana's little jaunt arriving at Madison Square Park. 

For this sequence, one of the key pieces of set dressing was a classic NYC fruit cart.  

There are many ways to go about finding the right fruit cart, but in this situation we decided approaching a working fruit cart nearby and negotiating a rental deal was the ideal choice for ultimate authenticity. 

The fruit cart we used in its natural habitat on 6th Ave in Manhattan

So I walked up and down 6th Ave approaching different fruit vendors. As you can imagine, most of the guys working a fruit cart are not interested in entertaining little requests like this + many don't have the authority to ok a non-traditional request like this. 

But I finally found, Helal, who was willing to do it.  Finding out he was a Bangladeshi immigrant, I talked him up in Bangla which I learned while living in Bangladesh for two years when I was a Foreign Service Officer--who knew speaking Bangla would turn out to be so useful for set decorating in NYC? 

Here is the fruit cart in question on set, Helal on the right in the brown shirt, and the actor who plays him on the left in the maroon shirt. Hilarious right? oh also, Ilana on the right. 

I thought Helal and I talked about him bringing another plain umbrella for the shoot, but when we got to set we realized the only two umbrellas he had were all marked up with company brand names. In the future, I will always bring an extra back-up umbrella-lesson learned. 

So then it became an issue of finding the right matching blue tape nearby to do the best "Greeking" job we could on short notice. 

It isn't the greatest color match, but it was the best we could do on such short notice. 

I'm sure when you watch that sequence for the first time your attention was focused on Ilana and her unique blend of charming and irreverent joyful charisma.  I, however, was watching the blue tape. 

You can watch the whole episode "Burning Bridges" (Season 3, Episode 8) from Broad City here 

Broad City's Warehouse Sale

The crazy warehouse sale Abbi and Ilana come upon in Season 3, Episode 1

In Broad City's Season 3 premiere Abbi and Ilana go on one of their signature NYC epic days and one of the fun scenes they come upon is a crazy NYC warehouse sale. 

Finding enough clothes to fill a store size space with a limited budget to sustain the wear and tear required for the chaotic and vicious action required in the scene, was a challenge. 

a hilariously exaggerated representation of how competitive NYC Warehouse Sales can be

We had to get resourceful so we asked some local fashion brands for product placement, hit up our favorite by the pound thrift store, bought some discounted high-fashion clothes, and lastly rented racks of clothes that were actually part of the location's actual pop-up sale inventory. 

But renting clothes at this quantity from someone can be tricky because they need it all back, and if you watch the sequence you see there is a lot of intense movement of clothes with lots of opportunity for confusion and mix-up.

So one of my jobs was to take a detailed inventory of all the clothes we were renting so that we could be sure we returned everything after shooting. 

Since I didn't have my computer with me, it had to be a good'ol handwritten list.  A list like:

And it worked.  It allowed us to start the day dressing the set like this:

fill it up like this in a day

then have it look like this at the end of filming:

And have each piece of clothing back where it belonged. 

You can watch the whole, super fun, hilarious, and full of Broad City charm episode here.