Apple TV+ Comedy ”The studio“Has been fairly praised to get virtually every detail in how Hollywood’s relocation and shakers live and work exactly right, but the show’s accuracy goes beyond behavior. One of the great pleasures of The series Week after week, the feeling of the Hollywood history observes that seeps into all aspects of the visual design. Board members Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg Are eager film enthusiasts, and it is clear that the show’s prop, places and decor are carefully chosen to tell the story not only about the series’ special characters but about an industry that is now over 100 years old.
Nowhere is this attention on detail more famous than in the production design of The studio himself, which is intended to mimic large older companies such as Paramount and Warner Bros., of which the latter is inserted for the series’ fictional continental studios in external scenes. For interiors, production designs Julie Berghoff Was commissioned to create studio offices that felt like they originated in the 1920s but had developed with the times – they also needed to express the psychological state of the characters that occupied them.
“I had to go through certain steps to get to what the executive office looked like,” Berghoff told Indieview. “I really wanted it to be an American architect, and I wanted it to be an architect that existed in the 20th and 30s because that was when the studio was born.” Berghoff settled on Frank Lloyd Wright, an idea that Rogen loved. “This crazy idea that Frank Lloyd Wright was based on the offices really anchors the whole thing in a concrete story,” Rogen told IndieWire about an upcoming episode by filmmaker Toolit Podcast. “It makes it feel permanent, and as if you were constantly trying to live up to the greatness of this space.”
Berghoff modeled offices on Wright’s Maya phase when he created buildings like Ennis House in Los Feliz. That structure has been used on screen in films as varied as “Blade runner” film Buffs. For Berghoff, the Maya Revival phase in Wright’s career made both visual and emotional meaning. “It felt like the continental,” she said. “A little archaic, classic and beautiful and robust, but maybe crumbles at the foundation of the foundation.”
Rogen liked the idea that Wright’s Maya Buildings gave a sense of Entombment, which he thought was suitable for his lavish paid but emotionally summarized characters. “These Maya revival buildings were very monumental, but also very tombike,” Rogen said. The Maya Revival concept had the extra advantage of patterns where light came into the buildings in interesting ways, something Berghoff played with by creating cucoloris effects with light that came in through the bricks and windows.
In a world where everyone looks over the shoulder to see who might come for them and their job, Berghoff also decided to emphasize the voyeuristic potential of space. “I made the space open in the middle, and I also added a lot of glass so everyone could see each other in their offices,” she said. “They could see each other in their conference rooms. They could spy on people if they were waiting below. And then, of course, Seth’s office was the highest so he could see everyone – it was like a bird’s nest for him. I thought about the space and how to come in, how to move, how to wait, how to go up the stairs.”
Speaking of the stairs, they are adorned with a mural that adds the weight of history that the characters are constantly inspired by and suffocate. “The mural I did on the stairs was like the history of the studios and how they started in the golden age, the Hitchcock era, screwboll comedy, then slowly ended in decay,” Berghoff said. “In the late 60s, there are robots and Loch Ness Monster.” In the end, the message of the show is encapsulated in Budghoff’s production design: “The architecture coincides with the story of the studio,” she concluded. “Will it stand at the end?”
The “studio” flows on Apple TV+. To make sure you don’t miss Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s upcoming episode of Filmmaker Tolkkit, make sure you subscribe to the podcast on AppleThe SpotifyOr your favorite podcast platform.
