Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) have officially launched its late night show. This means that after hours with seemingly slope on comedy and the Hollywood industry windmills, not to mention an escalating feud with the lead author of Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbinder), “Hacks” season 4 Needed your own night show of his own. Production designer Rob Tokarz received an honest-to-the-evening in the evening in the evening-Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs and Jen Statsky-created Max series picks up the baton, in terms of place, from the studio where Conan and Kelly Clarkson shot conversations in the past-and-chick task with vance-g.
But “Hacks” Have always been in contact with how its two main characters fit into the larger story for women in entertainment-not less of an icon than Carol Burnett gives Deborah advice on how to finally get over the nerves to be on the verge of achieving her dream and the overly current absurdities that shift the winds of comedy and culture. So Tokarz not only built a late night stage for Deborah’s glitter and seconded taste. He also built it as a tribute to Los Angeles and pulled from the colors, shapes and architectural design history that makes the set feel substantially LA.
This creates an interesting excitement, in fact, between Deborah’s comfort zone and the late night’s host persons she wants so desperately to own and that she literally has to go in when she walks her foot on stage. Tokarz talked to IndieWire about giving “Late Night with Deborah Vance” enough to psych to psych out even Deborah Vance, as well as all small touch on both stage and backstage that are a tribute to LA, earlier and present.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Indieview: I would love to dig in the design of Deborah’s late night set. It is a visual template that we are all familiar with, but what do you have added to the one that does it especially for her?
Turner: We wanted to make it feel like the department on late night, but very specifically deborah. I continued to come back to this idea of creating a monument to Los Angeles with the late night set. I wanted to lean into a lot of art deco that we have here that makes LA feel so classic.
So we looked at things like Griffith Observatory – that’s where some of the surfaces and columns came from – and in the eastern building in the center with some of the tones behind the band stand. There are many small details that lead to her.
For example, the floors are the chevrong floors that we did in the tour bus (in season 2) and which is shown in her mansion in Las Vegas. The Twinkle lamps behind the city are one of the backgrounds she used at Palmetto. The buildings behind her were proof of the journey she took – if you read right to left you start in Las Vegas on the right and you work to Los Angeles on the left. And I thought this really good reference in this old movie is called “The Broadway Melody.”
Yes! 1929.
Yes. There is this fantastic song and the dance scene, and there is the beautiful set that is these illuminated buildings that are Super Deco. I wanted these buildings (in the late night set) to feel that way. So we underwent a lot of tests and wrong. We made cuts, we had them designed, we played back and forth with what places we wanted to show.
We actually changed it during the season, and how we rationalized it is if you did a late night show the set changes. This does not work the first night, next week we change this a bit, let’s fine -tune the lighting. So there are many tweaks going on during our season as well. We have added texture, so (the set) would pick up more light, and we adjusted the lighting with Adam Bricker, DP.
When you get to the bow it also plays into the Deco-Ness and records in the color of the fabric which is very deborah Vance and in the palette for which she is known. And then when the curtain opens, we want to see her sequins. It’s just a quick read. But it feels like it’s her.
Absolutely.
But the big thing is that she goes out of her world to this very public world. This is where we play around, this season, with the public and the private staff in Deborahs, and where are the places where she touches. So the curtain wants to feel Deborah Vance, the sequin wall is Deborah Vance. And then when we go deeper into the stage, her office, her dressing room, they all want to feel that she designed it so that she is comforting in her own spaces.
Then, when she comes out, she comes out on stage. She is a public face late at night and the first woman on late night. You have to feel the weight of it.
Yes, I was so impressed during the season that this feeling of Deborah looked in a way she has not been before, and that tension between her private self and the person she becomes specific to this role, as a late night host. Even the darkness on the stage gives this, as well as the opposite.
It was a great conversation we had when we put out the set. For starters, because during the photography at the end of the first section you will see the legs of the set behind it, we had built the set a bit. But when we stood there, and Lucia and Paul and Jen looked on stage, we realized that the scene was too far away for the specific shot when Deborah comes out for the first time. They wanted it to feel like the Coliseum, like a wall of people. And there is Deborah.
I mean, the scene was one thing, but everything around the stage was probably the more monumental challenge we had to achieve. We were at Universal Stage 1, where Kelly Clarkson had his show and Conan had his show. So we already worked within the legs at a late night stage. We started with a black box. But in space we had all the real things that would have been there late at night. The pedestal cameras still live there. The monitors and everything, down to the control room, were there. It was the set. It was the control room that the Kelly Clarkson show would have used.
Wow.
Just create all corridors that are interconnected and try to connect the corridor to the changing rooms, how everything worked – we shot in our production offices. Deborah’s office is actually Kathleen (Felix Hager), our costume designer’s office. So all actors would seize what was Deborah’s office, just with the furniture away.
One of my favorite small pieces of the late night set is directly behind the stage because the late evening is an institution, and we are in spaces that have been there for several years. And values change and the set changes, but the guys who run the crew do not change. You have the same painter who has been there for 30 years, the same grip that has been there for 30 years. I wanted the backstage to feel that that space is winter green.
Just held together by Gaff Tape, yes.
Exactly. So what we saw backstage, our crew actually used for props or for electricity or whatever, and then we transformed the outside into the story. The CUE card area, that room in particular, we had all herds sign the walls so it looked, you know, well used: paint from 1956, (with) stickers and layers of the stickers. We wanted the color area and the proprietary area to look like it is where everything has been built. This is where all gags come from, and there are elements that feel like it is the thing that has been forgotten there, but no one has moved it, why move it? It was one of my favorite things, just the composition between late evening history and what Deborah Vance brings.
“Hacks” now flows at max.
