Heat Advisory in a Junkyard

Some days you are dressing a set in a historic mansion, a five star hotel in a penthouse suite, and some days you are outside in a literal junkyard all day.

Leadman Deon Philipps literally jumping out of a dumpster

I was so grateful to our set dressing crew for really rallying for a long day under the sun in heat advisory (HEAT ADVISORY!) weather to put together this unconventional and creative set. Shooting crew was filming in there overnight.

Not going to lie, it was a really tough day for me. But this was a real highlight that gave me faith in humanity:

At lunch I walked to the nearby deli but wasn’t feeling it.

Remembering that I saw some Chinese workers eating a rice dish at the warehouse down the street I walked over and asked them where they got that Chinese food (we were in deep industrial Ridgewood where cinematic junkyards still exist in NYC.)

They told me the warehouse provides lunch to them but if I walked a couple of blocks there was a Chinese place. I was about to start walking when the lady of the group said to one of the truck drivers “you want her to walk blocks in this weather?”

And she rushed inside and gave me two boxes of the homemade food she made for everyone’s lunch at the warehouse. We chit chatted about 老家 and the 麻烦 when filming is on your street and then I walked back to the junkyard to eat lunch.

The food was so good and I felt so grateful I totally forgot how utterly disgusting it is that I ate lunch outside in a toxic junkyard. I went back to the warehouse with some oranges from crafty to say thank you. Best pay off of learning Chinese to date.

Find of the Day

this perfect 80's couch

I had this idea today to start a new category on this blog of "Find of the Day" to keep all my favorite things I find when out shopping but usually don't end up buying or needing catalogued. 

It is hilarious that I'm creating a new category for a blog that I hardly ever update, but anyways I am leaning into the ambition for now. 

The thing is, I get a chance to come across so many truly unique, fascinating, and funny things which truly give me joy and delight. Often I feel like I just need a photo to complete my joyful experience without purchasing the item. 

But then I was thinking about all my favorite things I've come across throughout the years and many thrift shops I've scoured and I thought it would be nice to have them all accessible here through the click of a category tag "find of the day". So I'm going to try it out. Maybe one day when I'm feeling truly ambitious I will back catalog all my favorite finds from the last few years (...someday).

Back to this couch, it is such a nice shape, great proportions, and then the print. THE PRINT! It is so perfect. So late 80s early 90s in such a great subtle and interesting way. Sigh if only I needed the couch for a set...

here's a close up of that sweet print. AND THE MATCHING PILLOWS!

Magazine Back Issue Warehouse

One of my favorite parts of the job is discovering warehouses filled with items that are a gateway into a whole ecosystem you never thought much about. Today’s was magazine back issues, like where newsstands send back all their magazines after the month has passed.

Difficult People: Carter the Musical

From Season 2 Episode 7 of Difficult People

Since it was just announced that Difficult People has not been picked up for another season and Taylor Swift is out there promoting her latest album, it seems like the perfect time to resurrect this highlight in my career thus far. 

One of the storylines from Difficult People Season 2 Episode 7 “Carter” was a musical that Julie and Billy are writing which evolves from a musical about Taylor Swift from the point of view of her cats (“Swiftical”) to a musical about President Carter in a pastiche homage to the runaway Broadway hit “Hamilton.”

This sort of improbable and absurdly comic combination of pop-culture elements is a hallmark Difficult People move and what made the show so fun. (#RIP)

So the idea was that they wrote the musical about Taylor Swift, and then they had to change it overnight to make it about President Carter and the script called for a storyboard that showed this evolution in the set. 

Knowing that writing story beats about a musical about Taylor Swift was a job perfectly designed for me and my embarrassing wealth of knowledge about Taylor Swift, Jess the set decorator delegated me the task of coming up with the storyboard elements.

this is after I wrote it out at my desk in the production offices

In order to transform the Taylor Swift musical storyboard elements into a musical about Carter, I did a quick Carter presidency wikipedia read and tried to find storylines or characters that had any sort of parallel to the story beats I came up with for the Taylor Swift musical. 

Yes, what I’m saying is I tried my best to make it actually logical and realistic in how I transformed a Taylor Swift musical storyboard into a Carter Presidency musical storyboard. 

here is a nice little close-up of Arthur and the storyboard in the episode

So you can imagine my utter delight when watching the episode to see how prominently the storyboard was featured!

 It was one of the wonderful moments in life when you are like YES I AM GETTING PAID TO DO A JOB THAT I AM PERFECTLY SUITED TO DO. 

here is one last zoom-in of the finished board on the set from a still from the episode. 

One of my proudest finds

For the opening scenes of the season for The Affair Season 3, we had a funeral scene. Our wonderful production designer Kelly McGehee wanted us to find these special vintage folding funeral chairs for the funeral home in a quantity necessary to fill a funeral home room. 

this was the reference photo of the chair we were looking for

Always loving a good scavenger hunt challenge I started with the usual suspects: calling around the prop houses in NYC, looking up listings on Chairish, Krrbed, Etsy, Ebay and even Craigslist. I could never find more than 6 matching chairs and they were never quite the perfect fit of chairs.  That was a good afternoon's work. 

The next day I looked up manufacturers of funeral home furniture. I called a few places who had folding chairs, but none of them that had the special flair and specific vintage look to evoke the chairs in the reference photo. But I asked them the names and models of older vintage funeral chairs they thought most similar to this chair. 

I found the name and manufacturer of the type of chair most similar to these, but of course they are no longer in production. I googled that like crazy for any sellers online who might still have stock on these but didn't turn anything up. 

So then I started calling around old school funeral homes in the NYC area to see if any of them still had chairs similar to this photo and if they would let me rent. That wasn't turning up anything either. 

Finally one afternoon (I had probably worked on this for a couple of days--while of course also working on other set dressing needs) I decided I was going to drive around to personally visit some old funeral homes and see what they might have in stock and see if I could convince anyone to let me rent. 

I looked around online, and it looked like Yonkers, NY right outside of NYC had a good collection of old school funeral homes right near each other. I visited one, and turned up nothing. Then I visited another, walked into a room and saw these:

you have no idea how happy I was one I saw these. 

I was ecstatic and texted Kelly and our decorator Jessica Petruccelli right away. YES! I had found them! And yes they wanted them! 

...now I just had to convince the funeral home owner to let me rent them, take them out of his funeral home, bring them to the funeral home we were shooting at, all for a reasonable price. Well, I used to work as a diplomat so I summoned all my diplomatic skills and negotiation classes and got my hustle on with the funeral home owner. 

In the end we made it work:

This is still one of my most satisfying hunts to date. 

Abbi's Wallpaper on HBO's "Divorce"

I was watching the premiere of the new HBO show “Divorce” starring Sarah Jessica Parker, and when we were in her character’s bedroom, I recognized the wallpaper as a familiar friend…

Frances’ bedroom in “Divorce.”

…it is the same wallpaper used in Abbi’s apartment on Broad City!

Abbi’s living room wall in “Broad City.”

I recognized it instantly because I had to reorder Abbi’s apartment wallpaper while working on Broad City so spent some quality time with the design and seller, Secondhand Rose (which by the way is totally sold out of this design now).

I know those are sort of weird images of Abbi, but the best scenes featuring this wall of wallpaper in her set are from her infamous naked dance number to “Edge of Glory” when she realizes she has the whole apartment to herself in Season 2, Episode 2 “Mochalatta Chills”:

yes only decorators watch shows and notice wallpaper which reminds them of other wallpaper.

Trim Mania

Was dressing a set in beautiful Victorian Flatbush and needed a large quantity of ribbon fast. So I searched what was around and was delivered to this gem box of a ribbon and trim store. 

Stumbling upon little old school businesses with an ambiance of cheerful mania like Trim Fabric (they have coupon codes named "SuperMega") is one of the true joys of set decorating work for me.  

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.