KALEIDOSCOPE EPISODE GREEN: Team Prison

The team of wonderful set dressers (Team Prison) who were with me everyday for two months working on all the sets for Episode Green in Netflix’s Kaleidoscope. Here pictured on our last day all Leo Pap’s prison cell.

working on the light fixtures in Leo and Stan’s prison cell.

A fun video of how the set dressers moved the VERY HEAVY bunk bed from one part of the prison to the set.

The electricity went out so set dressing by candlelight (cellphone flashlights) that looked like a Northern European painting.

All the set dressing gathered together in another prison cell.

We would eat breakfast every morning in the prison cafeteria.

my usual prison breakfast was an oatmeal, but one morning I decided I needed a grilled cheese sandwich for breakfast.

Testing to make sure the cafeteria tables were strong enough for people to stand on.

There was almost a 1/2 day spent just moving around all the very heavy equipment in the kitchen to accommodate the needs of the shots and scenes, fit into the space, and make it make sense for a working kitchen

a moment with the special effects team setting up the steam effect for the cooking pots

Dieter everyone’s favorite carpenter working on the mortise prison doors.

hallways of the Prison Infirmary which we purposely took out some old tiles to pepper in some green tiles.

remember when Wordle Mania swept social media feeds everywhere? This was during Peak Wordle, and I couldn’t help seeing this new tile configuration we added as a Wordle box. For the record I’ve never played!

a set dresser’s tool bag as we were putting the infirmary together.

One final little video about TV/Movie making magic/lies (depends on you see it)

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.