Mean Girls Musical: Janis Garage

Clearer shot of this corner of Janis Garage in the shot above.

Working on Janis’ Garage set was my favorite set on Mean Girls.

Garages sets are challenging because you always need so much stuff but fun sets because they are so layered where you get to imagine many different aspects of a character.

In the case of the Janis Garage set, we wanted to show how it was her family’s storage space, a place where she has created a cozy hang out zone for friends, as well as her art studio.

What the area when we just started loading in furniture. Essentially it was an empty garage and we started with a blank slate.

In the original Mean Girls movie in 2004, we see some glimpses of Janis’ paintings as well as evidence of the garage being a storage space for an earlier childhood she has grown out of.

In the Mean Girls Musical Movie (2024) what has changed is now, Janis is a fiber artist “the lines are the thoughts and the string are the feelings.”

Additionally we wanted to create a purple and green color palette for the garage (which if you pay attention is her color palette for her costumes, hair and makeup too!).

So in the garage we created two art workstations for her: one painting, and one sewing.

JANIS’ Painting and Drawing Workstation

The painting workstation pictured in the background of the shot below where Damien explains what REALLY went down between Janis and Regina.

clearer shot of the angle behind Damien:

JANIS FIBER AND SEWING STATION

but first, a little popcorn moment then and now side by side.

Close-up on the area behind Damien and Janis’ heads for that popcorn moment.

One of my favorite elements which are hard to tell in the photos are the adorned black plastic bags with sewing and patches (I’ll get to who made all that art soon) hanging on the door.

HAWAIIAN EASTER EGGS IN JANIS’ GARAGE SET

For the 2024 Mean Girls movie, they updated full name of the character Janis to Janis ʻImi'ike (which like “Auli’i” is a name in native Hawiian language).

Since Auli’i Cravalho (Janis), is an outspoken native Hawaiian actress, we wanted Janis Garage space to reflect that too in subtle and meaningful way.

So I also ordered some artwork and little stickers from Hawaii to sprinkle the set with nods to both the character and actress’ history and lineage.

In the above photo you can see an orange kou flower and a taro plant sticker. Kou is a plant native to the Hawaiian islands and the taro plant is an important plant in Hawaiian mythology and diet.

There was also a bunch of artwork from artists in Hawaii of the taro plant and the ʻōhia lehua flower which is one of Hawaii’s most iconic tree and a native species of plant to the Hawaiian islands.

…as well as a Sonic Youth poster which we imagined was one of Janis’ parents posters.

MAKING ALL THAT ARTWORK

While Tina Fey’s daughter and one of the producer’s daughter did supply us with some great original artwork they made themselves, we also had very specific ideas of how we wanted Janis’ artwork to look throughout her garage based on Kelly’s (production designer) research and ideas for Janis.

This turned out to be way more labor intensive than I had ever imagined essentially running a custom artwork atelier for Janis Garage with multiple different artists and groups.

And because of copyright and legal clearances, it wasn’t enough for me to just give the artists some sample images of what we were hoping for, but also supply all the base images and materials from known cleared sources.

But I think the end results were so worth it!

I reached out to local fiber and textile artist groups to see if anyone was open to some artwork commissions that we could work closely with to craft what we were looking for and incorporate feedback as it was being made on our production timelines…a tall order I know.

So I was thrilled when I was able to connect with local fiber artist Kate Eggelston.

Not only did Kate make the incredible piece of ham quilt hanging on the back wall of the set she was able to create some truly fabulous stitched canvases based on a very specific idea, sensibility, and mood Kelly had in mind based on cleared historical images I could find that I felt had potential for acheiving our aims.

on the upper left hanging on the wall is a quilt of a piece of ham!

there are more! these are just the ones I could easily find photos of.

And then I reached out to a local art school to see if they had actual teenagers around the age of the character of the Janis character to make some collages and the plastic bags enhanced with fiber art.

So incredibly grateful we were able to work with two local branches of One River Art School who held special workshops to help us inspire their teen students to make the type of artwork we were looking for. I brought along sample images, supplied all the materials, and what the students made were INCREDIBLE!

I really felt having teens make the artwork would bring something intangibly important and more authentic for the artwork that is meant to be Janis’ throughout the set.

All the pieces that were chosen also received rental fees (which I hope is encouragement to some of these artists) just like any other artwork we rent for our sets and you can even see some of their artwork on screen.

one teacher went above and beyond and even created a little presentation on the movie Mean Girls for the students!

Just a sampling of some of the best pieces made with stock artwork images I brought along as well as patches and and string supplies for the plastic bags.

JANIS’ Garage goes on the road

Lastly, after we finished filming Janis’ Garage set at the actual garage, a modified version of it went on the road to facilitate the opening shot where the garage door opens on the plains of Kenya (New Jersey) during the musical number “A Cautionary Tale”.

So here is what it looks like to redress a portion of Janis’ Garage in the middle of New Jersey, I mean Kenya which is one of the moments where I thought, set decorating is sometimes hilariously absurd.

I look like a maniac because there were TONS of ticks in this area and I did not want Lyme disease!

KALEIDOSCOPE EPISODE GREEN: Spending a Winter at an Abandoned Prison Can Wreck You

For Episode Green of Netflix’s newest heist show Kaleidoscope, we were recreating over eight distinct sets in prison:

1. a visitation and waiting room (over two eras)

2. a prison cafeteria

3. a large working prison kitchen

4. a prison infirmary (that was itself made up of seven different sub sets: treatment room, doctor’s office, nurses’ station, record room, specialty treatment room, pharmacy, and hallways)

5. a security check entrance and guards station

6. a prison auto shop

7. a prison garden and outdoor workout area

8. and a prison cell plus guard booth. 

For my first time working on decorating a prison set that was a lot of prison.

Working as a set decorator means that we all have to eventually work on a prison set.

To be honest I’ve been unusually lucky in my eight years as a set decorator, that this was the first prison set I was assigned. It was my turn, my time had come. 

There are spaces where heightened moments of human life play out regularly: ER rooms, hospitals, police stations, jails, and prisons.

It is where people are often stretched to their extremes, where relationships are pushed to make or break moments, where consequences of previous actions are laid bare, and where actual life or death decisions are made. 

If one is lucky, a normal life of going to work, doing your laundry, paying your cellphone bills, making dinner, and watching something on streaming before going to sleep does not usually visit these sites of extreme human drama that often.

some welcoming gates that say “you made it to work.”

Recreating the spaces where heightened and dramatic reality play out for characters in movies and TV, however, is the job as a set decorator.

That means in turn that ER rooms, hospitals, police stations, jails, prisons are sets my colleagues and I are regularly trying our best to replicate with anthropological accuracy and some artistry.

Most people will intersect with a hospital room or even an ER room in their lifetime because sickness and death are just a fact of life. Prisons don’t necessarily need to be a reality for anyone. 

And yet, in our fun little industry of make believe where we can create fantastical scenes where elves live in cozy homes or where characters break into song and everyone around them joins in to dance in the supermarket, we are constantly recreating the grim and violent reality of prisons.

There are award winning movie classics like Shawshank Redemption or popular streaming hits like Orange is the New Black and Escape from Dannemora.

On one hand, it makes sense as America is the most carceral state in the world so any representations of American life on screen would by extension naturally include prisons. On the other hand, why are we constantly recreating prisons for entertainment? 

There is nothing entertaining about America’s prison system, sadly.

It is so unentertaining that most of the time we like to keep the deadening reality of prison hidden away. Prisons are whole ecosystems tucked away from daily life—purposely built away from society.  And similarly most of us who have that privilege to not regularly interact with the carceral system, have the luxury of pushing prison out of our conscious personal life.

Yet we also happily visit prison regularly on the television and movie screens we turn to for thrills and inspiration and drama and comfort.

For a bunch of people (mostly pretty privileged) who moved to NYC for a creative career that paid well enough that we can spend lunch chatting about cute brunches, live concerts, and international travel, directing a lot of attention towards recreating prison is usually a non-threatening work exercise that has almost no overlap with our personal lives.

And yet two months working on these prison sets affected many of my coworkers and me.

In order to come up with plans, move furniture around, change paint colors and build new walls and doors and attend to the details of creating the eight sets in prison for the episode, key members of the art department initially visited the abandoned Arthur Kill Prison facility in Staten Island, the site for all our sets, multiple times.

Afterwards, together with a group of set dressers, I basically decamped to this abandoned prison and set up shop there from January to early March, everyday 10 hours a day. 

We all walked the long cavernous halls of the abandoned prison that still have a red line down the center of the floor, feeling the cramped feeling of low ceilings, scant windows, and views of endless coils of barbed wire layered upon itself.

We can feel the walls dripping with sorrow and heaviness. Even while empty you could feel the sadness, violence, and despair vibrating off the walls. 

We don’t need to ask “If these walls could talk.” They speak to us in the language that we are trained and professionally work to communicate in: their design, decoration, and built intention.

The stenciled sign of “Limit Calls to 15 min” sprayed above the 5 pay phones affixed to the brick wall reminds us how little connection to the outside world is afforded people who find themselves on this side of the wall.

The sign in Spanish elucidates the statistic that 23% of incarcerated population is Latinx or at least Spanish speaking.

A single stray Hans Wegner style wishbone chair sitting lonely in the hallway stands out like a lost child who inadvertently stumbled onto the wrong side of the tracks.

Every time I pass it I want to ask, what’s a nice chair like you doing in a place like this? A place where stacks of interchangeable plastic chairs and old soulless office task chairs look more at home.

That empty space ricocheting with the collected energy of people imprisoned seeped into the walls was impacting each and every person who walked in there.

Coworkers and I share the anxiety, depression, and scattered effect on the mind working daily in a prison has on us. We talked about how eerie, odd, and dark and heavy it was to devote so much energy on recreating the details of human imprisonment. 

One colleague who was just visiting for a day to help us hook up all the surveillance monitors talked about how spooked he was by the gloom of the site just sitting in the guard’s booth for a few hours.

Colleagues who never have to visit the site of the abandoned prison but are tasked with drawing up construction plans remark on how surreal it is to draw out plans for prison cells on computers even from the comfort of their home offices. 

The challenge was to make each prison set accurate and authentic while also finding a way to stylize the sets to be all shades of green.

One of the conceptual hooks of working on Kaleidoscope, is that each episode is its own color and each episode can be watched in any order. They are categorized by color not chronological order and prison was green. 

The thing about designing and decorating a fake prison for entertainment is: reality is grim, recreating this from reality even grimmer, and stylizing it seems delusional.

So the only way to survive it seemed to be personalizing prison and showing the humanity in the face of this scourge.  This made me determined to get to the personalized and human level of prison research

I talk a lot more about the process of researching and putting together the green sets for prison in this post here.

You could say my emotional state completely domineered by recreating prison is partially my fault for really plunging into the research feet first, and on top of that seeking out all sorts of supplementary engagements with prison outside of work. 

I attended a documentary screening made with a drone about the floating boat fortress prison in The Bronx, watched an opera a colleague designed which is an update on Fidelio (Beethoven’s opera about prison) and commentary on contemporary mass incarceration, read Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s “Is Prison Necessary?” and all of a sudden noticed anything and everything related to prison and America’s mass incarceration problem and ingested it. 

It led me to some really dark corners of the internet. For instance how seemingly proud (?!!?) the official US Bureau of Prisons seems to be about a long historical legacy of using prison labor to manufacture products. I guess I really thought that as a society we might be ashamed of that? 

When I really started to spiral though was when I started to search for the specialized door hardware and locks needed to create authentic prison doors and locks.

I came across many companies that profit handedly at selling specialized locks to prison companies to the tune of around $2,000 a door handle. One company in particular will haunt me for the rest of my life. 

Yes their slogan is “to last a life sentence.” When you call the company to inquire about purchasing items the recorded phone tree message is a cheery woman saying “Built to Last A Life Sentence!” as if she was wishing you a Merry Christmas.

I haven’t stopped talking about this harrowing company slogan to anyone who will listen ever since.

It wrecked me that in pursuit of making our sets as authentic as possible, we were paying so much more money to enrich the literal prison industrial complex and all the specialized companies that create furniture and supplies specifically to serve prisons.

I felt determined that if we were going to spend a quarter million dollars recreating the violence of prison for entertainment and enriching the companies that blithely profit from mass incarceration we had to find a way to support organizations doing good work to end mass incarceration and support people who got out of prison.

A prison industrial complex carbon offsetting credits of sorts.

If it affected us so much to be in an empty prison with the luxury of going home each night, I can only imagine how much more it must affect each person imprisoned there, who works there, and the violent way it chips away at your basic connection to humanity. 

Working together with our unparalleled coordinator Jackie, we approached Netflix accounting to see if we could donate the proceeds of our sale of remaining furniture and set dressing decoration at the end of the show to two organizations that seemed to be doing really positive work:

• Hour Children is a local organization in NYC I’m pretty familiar with that works with families affected by incarceration, particularly children who have an incarcerated parent. I’ve visited the offices and met the people running the programs and touched with their sincere commitment. 

• Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA) which “helps people in prison develop critical life skills through the arts, modeling an approach to the justice system based on human dignity rather than punishment.”

Together we were able to donate $25,000 from our set sales and Netflix these two organizations.

For all the money we spent further enriching the companies profiting off incarceration, and the deep emotional toll it took on me personally (I was pretty depressed for three months afterwards), at least we were able to support these two organizations doing healing and positive work in some way. 

I thought that mass incarceration was one of America’s biggest problems for a while, but after the two months in that abandoned prison in Staten Island, and all the research I did about the details of prison radicalized me into a prison abolitionist.

Probably not the intended outcome for someone whose job it was, among other things, to find lots of green prison cafeteria trays.

Kaleidoscope EPISODE GREEN: CREATING A GREEN COLORED WORLD IN Prison

For the newest Netflix heist show, Kaleidoscope, that just dropped on Jan 1, the concept is that each episode is a different color—and we all tried to bring that color theme to the screen.

I’m going to go into the Green Episode and share about the research and method of recreating a green hued prison.

One of the first things I did was research movies and other TV shows that have a very green palette and created a mood board of green sets and images for myself.

Of course the first thing I thought about was Alfonso Cuarón’s movies A Little Princess and Great Expectations where the sets and costumes are exclusively shades of green. They are like green fantasias!

a quote from a New York Times article interviewing Alfonso Cuaron in 1996.

Then of course I thought of the movie I ADORED probably my favorite movie in 2021, The Green Knight, which is also a very green movie and even includes a monologue of Alicia Vikander’s character discussing what the color green means.

Lupin, another Neflix heist show, also has a whole episode in prison that is also very green. And lastly who can forget The Wizard of Oz and the emerald city?

So after assembling that little green mood board for myself I started to dig into the particulars of prison because we were doing eight different sets within prison:

1. prison auto shop

2. prison cafeteria

3. large working prison kitchen

4. prison infirmary (that was itself made up of seven different sub sets: treatment room, doctor’s office, nurses’ station, record room, specialty treatment room, pharmacy, and hallways)

5. security check entrance and guards station

6. visitation and waiting room (over two eras)

7. prison garden and outdoor workout area

8. prison cell plus guard booth

THAT’S A LOT OF PRISON AND A LOT OF GREEN FURNITURE AND SET DRESSING!

doing some research in front of part of my green sets mood board at our production office. I ordered the “definitive book” about Federal Prisons to get lists of what was allowed and what wasn’t and just to learn more authentic details about what life in federal prison was like. 

yes, my photo is oddly reminiscent of this iconic moment from everyone fav show: HBO’s Succession.

To me the biggest challenges were understanding what made a prison auto shop or a working prison kitchen distinct and different than any other auto shop or institutional kitchen/cafeteria.

 I listened to podcasts about cooking in kitchens and even reached out to the authors and people I learned worked in prison kitchens to see if they would share some details of working in the kitchens. Did extensive google image searching to find images of prison kitchens and how they stored their utensils and knives. I searched for prison auto shops and even called one up in Nevada who agreed to a quick informational interview so I could understand more about what tools were allowed and how they are stored. 

I’m going to highlight putting together the auto shop and kitchen below since I think they turned out the most green on screen (well the infirmary and waiting room also looked very green on screen so I’ll throw in some photos of that).

Plus showcase some photos of some sets you don’t really see much of on screen below.

emerald city guard crying for all the stuff we didn’t see on screen.

PRISON AUTO SHOP

Leo Pap in the prison auto shop

One of the major sets for Kaleidoscope over multiple episodes is Leo Pap’s Auto Shop which the set decorator Jessica and assistant set decorator Lindsay did a phenomenal job creating (here’s a fun video of that process).

For the Prison Auto Shop, I was doing a smaller version of their epic set and making it authentic to the particulars of a prison auto shop (all the tools are supplies are locked up) and instead of red making it green.

Lindsay gave me a hot tip of an auction house she went to, to get a lot of things for her set and I lucked out that they were doing a relevant auction right when I was starting the prison auto shop.

So one VERY COLD Saturday in January I drove 3.5 hours north of New York City, with Tony my husband along for the adventure, and attended my first live auction!

the auctioneer spoke out of that loud speaker and sounded just like a cartoon of an auctioneer!

the auction was outdoors 🥶 but this is where we stood in the sunlight as I kept on outbidding all the dudes there 😇with my little auction paddle.

This is how cold it was: frozen crystals on Tony’s eyebrows.

Stuffed my work minivan full of auto repair tools and items from the auction.

But it still wasn’t enough stuff to fill the empty room we were making into a prison auto shop

Set Decorator Jessica Petruccelli and Leadman Craig Capitelli at one of the initial scouts of the room

So I started calling around and responding to people who seemed like they had a lot of used auto related supplies on Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace, eBay, and other auctions.

Below is a checklist I made to make sure all our payments were being made.

Kevin, Jimmy, and Ben were guys in Long Island, New Jersey, and Connecticut that I literally met off the internet I was regularly texting cause they were sending me photos of stuff they had in their garages they were willing to let us buy or rent.

One local municipal auction in CT I called up connected me to Ben who turned out to be one of our best partner vendors cause he hooked us up with a whole used car lift amongst many other things for very little money and was the nicest and most reliably helpful guy.

the set filling up with green prison auto shop things including the car lift!

Finding a car lift that will fit in our location at a good price is one thing, but transporting it and getting it to work was a whole other thing. So when the set dressers successfully did it, it was a big deal!

This photo below is when I followed Kevin to a second location which was a pretty large junk yard and I was like 🤔 should I be more concerned about following random guys to second locations that are a remote junkyard?

So after all that collecting of items and trying to find as many green ones as possible, Jess and I put together a board of the ones we liked the best to see how it was working together.

This gives you an idea of the quantity of green related auto repair shop items I was collecting around the tri-state area with Kiran one of our wonderful PA’s in the background.

Unfortunately we never see a car raised on the lift on screen. 😭 Nor do we see like 75% of all the other set dressing or walls. 😭😭😭

Here are some before and afters:

BEFORE

AFTER

midway point when we are still working out what should go where

close to what you see on screen

BEFORE

AFTER

you recognize any items from the auction???

one wall you did not see on screen:

KITCHEN

What my eBay homepage looked like when I was searching for used green cafeteria trays for the prison cafeteria.

Love how all the greens came together in this little corner of the prison kitchen leading to the cafeteria (which you never see on screen).

props to our favorite Canal Rubber for helping me find a large quantity of green industrial rubber flooring.

From the prison research I learned some prison kitchen details were:

• having all the utensils and knives carefully laid out and hung with a painted silohuette with a strict sign out sheet so that each and every item was accounted for at the end of each shift.

• each knife is padlocked to the workstation so that no knife is ever rogue in the kitchen.

the process of creating our utensil and knife lockup with a delighted Jess in the last photo.

you see the lock-up in the background of this shot.

I feel like you do get some nice hits of green in these two shots of the prison kitchen on screen:

WAITING ROOM

On screen you just see this little corner of the waiting room, when in fact we had also created three other zones you never see in the episode:

a kids play area

A visitor’s vending machine waiting area + prisoner entrance complete with prison grade locks and handles on the double doors by the vending machine.

guard booth with a vintage herman miller GREEN leather office chair and another visitors waiting area as you can see in the background.

INFIRMARY

I felt this shot was a great hit of our gradients of green in the infirmary

we actually spend a lot of time in the infirmary and you really do see a lot of our green work but can you believe we also dressed a bunch of rooms with some great green furniture you never see?

in this shot we get a blurry background glimpse of the nurse’s station on the left.

While it was still a work in progress, we are about 80% done in this photo, but you get to see the cute mint green desk and green desk chairs we used in the part of the nurse’s station you don’t see on screen.

We also did a whole doctor’s office that never made it on screen and sadly I can’t find any photos of but it had a bunch of great green furniture pieces in it.

Here is another shot of the doctor that while super simple, I did enjoy for its feeling of green.

in this shot you see a hint of a pharmacy window

This is when we were half-way done with the pharmacy set behind that window..

There was a time when Leo Pap runs down this hall and we see inside each of the rooms along the hallway behind the actress below.

here is one of those rooms with its symphony of green filing cabinets.

PRISON CELL

There will be a lot more photos of the prison cell in my next post, but in this photo you can BARELY see in the background there is a guard’s booth.

the booth was empty so we filled it with some green

I enjoyed the collection of vintage green office chairs on display here.

Some shots were definitely more green than others but mostly I smiled a little smile to myself with the overall green feeling we were able to imbue the episode with.

The Other Two S 2, Episode 9-- A Perfect Episode

toasting to a perfect episode The Other Two style

All of Season Two of “The Other Two” on HBOMax is laugh out loud hilarious, but I think Episode 9, “Chase & Pat Are Killing It” is a perfect episode of the specific type of humor The Other Two excels at: joke filled ridiculous situations that tenderly humiliate the characters while perfectly satirizing American pop culture and celebrity media to ultimately pay off with pathos and and affection for the characters.

It is also an episode with A LOT of sets!

Here are some little behind the scenes moments on some of them in the order they appear on screen.

the episode starts with Brooke and Cary flying First Class from New York City to LA

our challenge was to try and elevate a very old 1970’s plane set into something that could come somewhere in whiffing distance of a contemporary First Class Cabin.

Katie Lobel, the Assistant Set Decorator, and I both worked on The Flight Attendant, so we both knew a little bit about plane sets…but I’ll just say that the budget for The Flight Attendant and The Other Two are not the same at all. Think the difference of ground altitude and cruising altitude (a difference of 33,000 feet yet the numerical difference in budget is way more than $33,000).

Anyways so we had to get resourceful we thought changing some textiles would be a good bang for buck (we reupholstered the flight attendant’s chair, made custom curtains, and used fabric to recover the wall panels, and made custom seat headrests), screens and screen holders, and all the little details (magazine holders, safety cards, headphone cases etc) that make a space a believable plane.

evaluating fabric swatches for the plane cabin in the office.

I’m sure when you look at this photo you notice all the feet and perhaps not the custom curtains that are a nice tonal contrast to the fabric covering that wall or the custom embroidered and cut seat headrest pieces.

This is the crew dressing the set posing for a photo to send to the showrunners so they would see how the scripted feet gag might work.

Next set is the Sauna at the LA Hotel Brooke and Cary are staying at where Brooke runs into Alessia Cara. I can take no credit for the actual LA Hotel they filmed in because they filmed that in LA.

We built this sauna set on a stage in New York, and addition to our fancy sconces getting some on screen time I was pleased some sauna specific details we splurged on (because they are relatively small details they were something of an indulgence for a low budget comedy show) made it on screen!

our fancy sauna rock heater

The luxe sauna bucket and ladle and you can also see the bank of spa lockers we bought secondhand which was the first purchase I made for season 2.

When a set is more spare (like a sauna) each little detail matters sort of how like when you are cooking a simple recipe the quality of each ingredient matters more.

The next run of sets is when Cary visits a bunch of lawyers in LA for help in his photo going viral predicament. We were going to see three different lawyers offices, and while they were all filmed at actual NYC lawyers offices in midtown we were supposed to figure out a way to telegraph LA in the set dressing.

We came up with three different personas for each lawyer’s office based on stereotypes of LA and found artwork and set dressing details to flesh out these ideas:

1. a hiking outdoorsy lawyer

2. a health and wellness lawyer

3. a surfer who is really in to Japanese culture

I’m sorry to say you don’t see on screen much of what we brought in art or set dressing wise to create these personas for lawyer 1 or 2 (they even had real LA Legal magazines on their desks!), but you do see some of that surfer who is really into Japanese culture in this lawyer’s office:

somehow the cactus that was in the hiking outdoorsy lawyer’s office got moved into this set during filming. alas, have learned to try my best to let go once I leave set. anyways I’m sure most everyone like myself was most preoccupied with squealing at the Bowen Yang cameo.

Ok the next set that was super fun to work on was the underwear party nightclub.

To fully appreciate it I need you to go back to March 3, 2021 when most of us in NYC had been confined to our homes for almost a year. The idea of going to a packed nightclub was an exotic forbidden thought or a far distant memory.

In the vacuum of dance parties and crowded venues of fun, we stepped into an empty Elsewhere which had been vacant for a year to set up the LA nightclub set.

what it looked like when I arrived to the location to start dressing the set.

Yes, the stairs in the video are the ones you see on screen here:

Elsewhere provided some in-house technical staff to help us with lighting and etc and we had the fortune to work with the wonderful Dom Chang who indulged us, when I walked into a totally empty nightclub and thought well we should at least be pumping some tunes on their nice sound system while we work in here today.

please ignore my “middle aged mom visits the kids at the club” vibes.

Not only did Dom ask me what music I wanted (Robyn’s “Dancing on My Own” being the most appropriate in this situation obviously) HE DID THE LIGHTS FOR US to truly imitate being in a club and it was such a moment of sheer joy for all of us party-gathering-starved-in-a-pandemic-New Yorkers.

We were waiting for the set dressing truck to land, so our locations contact Will, Leadman Bo, and I had some fun. (can you believe that? FUN!)

Ok one last video of our merriment: Will our locations person hamming it up and Dom taking it one step further by enhancing with lights.

Sometimes production work can be a long marathon of stress so whenever there are openings of fun and joy you got to snatch it up and marinate in it.

Our moment of dance club euphoria was such a bright spot in an otherwise pretty glum winter that it almost doesn’t bother me at all that the part of the club we spent the most work on and overcame a logistics feat to dress didn’t even make it on 😐.

Thank you Absolut for all the product placement!

That wraps it up for my Behind-the-Scenes blog posts for Season Two of “The Other Two.” Hope you enjoyed watching the season as much as I did!

You can read all the posts I wrote about working on “The Other Two” here.

Here Today Lake House Behind-the-Scenes Process

screenshot of an album in my phone to show what pieces we have been looking at or already bought for this set.

A little glimpse into the process of carefully accumulating the right pieces to put together the finished look of the Lake House in the feature film “Here Today” written, directed, and starring Billy Crystal with Tiffany Haddish.

There aren’t many scenes in the interior of Lake House but it is the emotional core of Billy Crystal’s character’s journey in the movie and the setting of the finale of the movie so I felt it was a very important set. Additionally it was a place that connected Billy Crystal’s character deeply to his first wife, so I wanted to feel like you could feel her there through the furnishings and decoration.

a snapshot of the items we bought for the lakehouse from one antiques store.

After the designer communicates their vision for the set, and we discuss color palettes and touchstones fro mood the first part of the job is to go out and find the furniture, items, and pieces (within budget) that will come together to create those ideas.

I went to a bunch of different vintage, antique, thrift, and secondhand furniture stores surrounding the New York City area scouring for the pieces that I thought would contribute to the vision for the Lake House interior Andrew and I discussed always keeping in mind who Billy Crystal’s character was and what would make sense for the story.

I like to keep track of what we have bought from all the dfferet scoures and how it might work together on a board. I am fully aware there is something called Pinterest which in theory would make this super easy to do digitally, but somehow it is not the same and more pleasingly productive for me on paper. it makes swapping around and playing with combinations easier actually.

The second part of the process is getting to the location where you will be filming and actually putting together all the items you have gathered and hoping all your planning and accumulating will actually work out in the way you were hoping.

Worst Case Scenario is you don’t have enough pieces or the ones you have don’t work and you need to buy more things but you are out of time and out of money. The second Worst Case Scenario is you have far too many things, have overbought thus used up a lot of the precious budget, and forced your poor set dresser colleagues to load up and carry in and out more heavy furniture then needed.

So yes, the Best Case Scenario is something like a Goldilocks situation you want to have enough items to play with and so you don’t have to go out buying more things but not too much it is a drain on resources.

Fortunately for this set we were close to best case scenario leaning on the more than needed side. This was a set I was worried about getting right and happy it came together the way it did. See below for the before and after.

Before (what the location looked like when we got there)

After

This angle on screen

To see more photos of the set and other sets in the movie, please visit my photo portfolio for Here Today here.

Organizing Those Vintage Playboy Magazines

When Cassie enter’s Alex’s closet she finds out some things she may or may not be entirely ready for…one surprise is that Alex is a guy who has the entire collection of Playboy magazines catalogued systematically.

yes, those are real vintage playboys we purchased.

This is me very early in the morning organizing these magazines on set before the crew arrives.

So definitely we could have asked for these to be arranged in chronological order before they arrived to set…but somehow they weren’t. And not everybody is up for the sort of insane attention to detail and diving into a mountain of disorganized magazines and cataloging them in order that this project would require…

Fortunately that morning it was exactly the kind of soothing quiet project I was game for. Getting paid to answer to the most OCD corners of your mind can be a pleasure. Don’t get me wrong though, I’m by no means the kind of person who has all my magazines catalogued in order at home.

when I still had one shelf left to go.

one things I learned in this painstaking process is there is a transition in binding for Playboys from stapled binding to the flat edge binding that happens today.

I would like to note that the closet at the location was totally empty when we started, so one of our tasks when decorating this set (which was already a pretty massive project) was to find all the items to totally fill in this closet with designer clothes (on a non-designer clothes budget) and all the small things you might find in your closet with the sort of details that would make it look realistic.

here’s a little bonus, that isn’t this closet, but something else I worked on that same afternoon after I sorted this closet: The Medicine Cabinet close-up.

this is what we see Cassie and Max see when they open the cabinet

the reverse shot of Cassie and Max staring into the interior of the medicine cabinet.

If you are ever wondering how they do that, this is what it looked like when we were setting it up:

Roxy and Richard, two great set dressers I was working with that afternoon.

This is what my files for “Alex’s Penthouse Apt” looked like when we finished the set.

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.