Those Taxidermy Polar Bears

There was a quick little moment when Cassie is exploring the Sokolov Estate in Episode 3 “Funeralia” of The Flight Attendant and she comes across a huge taxidermy polar bear in one room. (above)

And then when Cassie and Max have successfully broken into Alex Sokolov’s apartment in Episode 5 “Other People’s Houses” we see a taxidermy polar bear cub in his apartment too—echo-ing the bigger one at his parents home. (below)

As the assistant decorator assigned responsibility for both of these sets (the Sokolov Estate and Alex’s Penthouse Apartment) it was, among other things, my job to find these these taxidermy polar bears.

One thing I learned early on was it was VERY difficult to find a real taxidermy polar bear in the United States for rental or even purchase because IT IS ILLEGAL to trade in taxidermy polar bears.

I found a guy in Canada who had some good looking taxidermy polar bears but then he told me, “I can’t rent it to you across the border in the US because it is illegal to trade in polar bear taxidermy.” Oh. (turns out the Canada-US-Polar Bear triangle is a whole thing)

Hunting Polar Bears has been illegal in the USA since 1973, with exceptions for the indigenous people of Alaska and I talked to one taxidermy specialist in California who told me that it is extremely difficult to find a real Polar Bear taxidermy after the 1940’s and the one they had available to rent was from 1936.

…the problem with that one is it looked like it was from the 1930’s…it was yellowing and a little bit mangy. It didn’t look like a taboo prized possession of some ultra rich people who dealt with dirty money.

In the end we went with one of our familiar taxidermy rental houses in the New York City area who had life size polar bear and polar cub models that weren’t actual taxidermy but very good substitutes that looked great on camera.

For a while, the polar cubs were in our office, though, because even though we had found the scripted polar bear taxidermy pieces, the cubs didn’t come with a stand so we had to build a custom stand for the cub.

View from my desk of Nick our Art PA helping tape out the surface area required to encompass the polar bear cub, with Katie our Set Dec Shopper in the background.

Nick a straight up legit dog whisperer bringing the same love and attention to our polar bear cub model.

Christine Foley (The Flight Attendant’s Awesome Art Director) talking with Katie Citti (one of The Flight Attendant’s Set Designers and Assistant Art Directors) about a design for the stand which Katie drew up for our construction team to build.

And VOILA! A (legal!) polar bear cub that looks like a legit taxidermy polar bear cub on a beautiful custom stand! (see below)

Hard to imagine how much work goes into these little details that appear on screen for a quick second right? I personally think that’s part of the total charm and fun of set decorating world—the crazy weird things you end up learning in your quest to find the right things either in the script or to flesh out a character’s imagined backstory.

You start out focusing on high-end penthouse masculine chic design furniture and then you end up learning all about the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972. :)

If you do want to see more photos of the high-end penthouse masculine chic design Jess and I put together for Alex’s Penthouse set (polar bear cub) though, or the classic old money interiors we did for the Sokolov Estate (big polar bear) you can see more photos of the set 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.

Everyone's Real Homes

I’m on Day 17 of being stuck at home here in NYC.

It has been a real rollercoaster of anxiety, occasional moments of joyful laughter, and just all the emotions. But one thing I have really been enjoying in these 17 days of being at home, alone, together is all the videos and images people are sharing of themselves in their regular-un-prepped-for-a-photoshoot homes all around the world.

Getting access to so many normal people and images of their everyday lived-in homes has been a real treasure trove for me. I’m loving it on an anthropological level, a design level, and a human level. I love seeing all the little details, what art they chose to hang, what things are left out, what cords are hanging out where, and how they arrange their furniture to actually use their rooms—basically all the little details we try to recreate in a set when we decorate it.

For the first movie I ever decorated “Trouble,” I was struggling to put in what we call the “life layer” of a set. The life layer is the magical pixie dust we sprinkle onto sets to make it look like a naturalistic lived-in environment that a real human occupies and not the fictional set that a bunch of people were paid to create (which is in fact the reality hahah).

Life layer is the stray paperclips on an office desk, or the strange accumulation of earrings next to tissues and a cup with a loose subscription card from a magazine on your nightstand, or how layers of post-its are arrayed on a bulletin board. It is always a fun and challenging part of finishing dressing a set: to make this look as realistic, natural, and unconsidered (even though it is totally considered often 3+ people working on it together) as possible.

When I was struggling with life layer on “Trouble” I called an older more experienced decorator, the very kind and generous Karin Wiesel Holmes who was the set decorator for “Girls” and “Sex and the City” (I was an Art PA for Season 6 of Girls for little bit). Karin gave me some ideas and then told me this nugget of wisdom: “just think about all the things you would tidy up or put away when guests come over” as a guiding principle for life layer. I always think about this when I get stuck on life layer now. (Thanks Karin!)

So the great thing about all these videos and photos people are sharing of themselves stuck at home around the world during the spread of COVID-19, is you get an unvarnished view into peoples homes FULL OF LIFE LAYER. I mean maybe they did some tidying up before they hit record, but it still looks way more natural than most interiors we get access to in magazines, shows, and publications that showcase interiors.

Because most interior photoshoots of homes in interior design magazines are TOTAL FICTION. It took a team of many professionals to make it look like that for the shoot and often it is not even what the featured celebrity’s home actually looks like day to day. I heard a rumor from a friend in the industry about how the cover shoot of highly regarded New York actress’ home for a super prestigious and popular interior design magazine involved a decorator colleague sourcing and bringing in and swapping out new furniture and etc just for the shoot. Like I said, total fiction.

Also I subscribed to some of the premier interior design magazines and realized instead of inspiring me they actually bum me out. Because it is less about creative interiors expressing personality and interesting off-beat combinations or telling a story through design but about expressing wealth, prestige, generating “aspiration” and maintaining status quo “good taste.” barf emoji.

What I sometimes fantasize about it is creating a magazine of normal people interiors as a balm to that barf emoji. Like everyday people and how they create solutions for small space in their homes, or have off-beat design styles, or decorate their homes in a way that does not look like a generic instagram or catalog photo. Often I get stuck at the issue of “but how do you get that access???” and make sure people don’t self-consciously clean up before you arrive to take photos? It is such a human impulse to want to put your best foot forward and hide the things that make you feel less-than.

And that’s where all the self-quarantine, socially distanced, on lockdown because of COVID-19 videos and photos people have been sharing from around the world comes in. All of a sudden a wealth of images and glimpses into regular everyday peoples homes! People who decorated without a team of professionals guiding “their taste.” People who set up their home to make them feel comfortable, cozy, and as an expression of their passions and interests. AND I’M LOVING IT.

The last reason I’m loving it (hahah this turned out way longer than I expected) is because it also now this precious catalog of reference photos. Set decorators are always on the hunt and collecting good reference photos to help us re-create realistic interiors true to the character and setting of the story in the script. We study reference photos together with the production designer and try to catch key details from often grainy small photos that we will then try to find somewhere to then dress in to our set.

I feel like I always spend a good amount of time ingesting and really digesting reference photos whenever I start work on a set so that it can guide me when I’m out shopping and looking for things and particularly when it comes time to dress the set. And not just for period pieces, but contemporary sets too.

Whenever I see a good “reference set” in the wild, like a store’s cash register that has a lot of good little details, or an office with a lot of great layered memos and post-its on the wall, I snap a photo and treasure that little reference. Closely observing the mundane details of life like on an almost anthropological level to re-create is one of my favorite parts of set decorating work. And now with the all the homes people are filming themselves in, it is like a wonderful encyclopedic catalogue of reference photos of contemporary life.

Sigh, just writing this is making me miss the work of set decorating. …but it’s going to be while.

I’ll try to update this post later with photo examples of the interiors I’ve been loving getting a glimpse of while at home these last 16 days.

Little America is out!

premiered on Apple TV January 17

Last winter, I worked as the Assistant Set Decorator for four episodes of Little America. This was the unusual TV show that had two Art Departments, one for every even episode, one for every odd episode. We were “Team Odd” (which of course we all loved.) But then the number we shot the episodes as (and which ones were odd or even) changed when it came time to air, so I think all our credits are attached to the wrong episodes…

Finally on February 8, the Decorator Lindsay, our team’s Set Dec Coordinator Jackie, and I all went to Lindsay’s place, ordered some really good pizza and watched the episodes we worked on together. Which are the following:

Episode 7, “The Rock” about Farhad.

Episode 2, “The Jaguar” about Marisol.

Episode 4, “The Silence” about a silent meditation retreat in the 1970s.

Episode 6, “The Grand Prize Expo Winners”, about Ai.

It is always fun to watch the finished product with the people you worked on it with. Reminiscing about the crazy little stories, the funny memories, the moments of extreme stress, and the things that gave us grief as we see them appear on the screen. As well as being able to exclaim in excitement when a set comes together in a great way on screen after the editing and plus the lighting, costume, hair and makeup, and of course the actors.

We all shared a few moments of heartbroken disbelief when sets we worked on really hard never made it on screen (scenes in the script that took place in that set were edited out or certain angles of the camera never captured the part we were most proud of in the set).

The real heartbreak was in Episode 6, “The Grand Prize Expo Winners” where they added in new scenes they reshot in Los Angeles after they finished filming in New Jersey, so then used a completely new home set as the setting for the childhood home as opposed to the one we worked on. The home we decorated was so lovingly put together with so much attention to detail and came straight from my heart and personal lived experience…(crying emoji).

…I’ll try to put together a post of set photos from that home so at least the set can live on here even if it never made it on air.

Either way it was such a gratifying show to work on to focus entirely on immigrant stories that were so unique and compelling with some really fun sets. (on Apple+ TV!)

Used Milk Crates Treasure Trove

Wanted to buy a large selection of colorful used milk crates that were in our color palette so after some internet sleuthing found this guy who seemed to have a lot.

Went to meet the guy, a retired cop, and discovered he has a thriving second-hand crate business (he has sold almost 4,000 since he started the business 3 years ago) and has sold to crate collectors (a real thing!) in Japan, Germany, and beyond.

He told me of the almost 4,000 crates he has sold he’s only seen 5 yellow ones and I took 2 of them! 🐥🌼⭐️🌝☀️🍋💛love meeting niche businesses like this and the people who run them—one of the funnest parts of the job.

Anthropology vs Aesthetics

Been thinking about anthropology vs aesthetics and how sometimes they are at odds and reconciling that idea when putting together a set.

I’ve had the great fortune to spend the last few months working on a number of different sets for characters from different class and cultural backgrounds. That is actually a rarity in our business. The great majority of stories that are told on screen (and thus the sets I work on) are centered on white people. Actually white males, actually straight white males from upper-middle class…but that’s a whole other topic.

What I’m trying to say is I have been RELISHING the opportunity to think deeply about different types of characters then I usually get the chance to do and imagining what their homes and spaces look like.

I love set decorating work for so many reasons and one of them is the aspect of anthropological curiosity we get to apply to how people actually live. Researching, learning, and finding what types of furniture, decorative items, functional pieces, artwork, curtain style, or leftover food wrappers that might be found on table surfaces specific people surround themselves with and what it means is a particular joy for me.

My goal when working on a set for a group of people who are often under-represented on screen is to learn as many unique little details and put them in the set so that when people from that group watch they see such a specific part of themself reflected on screen they delight in the recognition that someone “gets them” and feel truly seen. Or that the writer, actor, or director come onto the set and feel they understand the character better or cry in recognition (has happened twice!).

Most often the process to unearth these details is the set decorating team and the production designer find reference photos and work from there. Usually I take it a step further and try to interview people from the same community as the character and ask them anthropological questions about their homes.

For a few examples, that’s how I learned that it was really important to reflect Abbie’s identity as a black woman in America with specfic hair care products and sleeping caps near her bed in Irreplaceable You; that Doc and Scarlett’s characters as second generation Korean-Americans in Season 3, Episode 5 of High Maintenance, would most likely only be visually reflected in her kitchen so I dressed in the stainless steel bowls that are unique to Koreans, a rice cooker, and some Korean food products; that Adriana as a second-generation Puerto Rican woman living in New York in Season 3, Episode 8 of High Maintenance, a wooden beaded curtain would likely make an appearance in her home, and a bunch of details on the sets I’ve been working on for the last four months but can’t talk about until they air/get released.

Anyways, what I’ve been thinking about however, is where anthropology and aesthetics intersect and sometimes are at odds while putting together a set.

If we were working on a museum diorama or maybe filming doing a documentary our sets would just be recreating exactly how certain people and the anthropology would be the aesthetic. But as craftspeople, designers, and artists working on telling a visual story on screen our sets are artistically aesthetic expressions of the emotion and mood of the story as well as representations of the character and not merely anthropological recreations.

Often times the aesthetic tone of the story and character is defined and the starting point of imagining and creating a set before the anthropological details of character’s identity specifics are fleshed out. We want our sets to enrich the understanding of the character and illuminate backstories but we also want our sets to be aesthetically unified and visually satisfying.

What I’ve been thinking a lot about lately is how often the “perfect” lamp or side table for a character from a working class immigrant background is considering too ugly or far away from so-called “good taste” that they never make it into a set. On one hand there is already a fine line of representing characters with authenticity, compassion, and dignity vs being lazy, condescending, and working on stereotypes. On the other hand there is danger of imposing a certain mainstream (often white-centered) normative idea of decorating a home in “good taste” that often erases the specific details of living environments because they are “too ugly or cheap looking” but maybe there is more dignity in representing characters’ environments whatever their background as beautifully as possible.

Usually my guiding light is what makes sense for the character and what seems “too ugly” becomes “perfectly ugly” to me because it is an accurate or authentic representation. But many times that’s not how the decisions are made. I’ve worked with people where the aesthetic and design idea is the determining factor that trumps something accurate but “too ugly” and the resulting set is more beautiful and visually pleasing.

I can see both sides and I’m sure there is room for both approaches to work together when putting together layered sets to reflect both reality and the story. I would love to hear more about the underlying philosophy other decorators and designers use to approach these ideas.

Low Budget Sleeper

Our low-budget take on the Sleepers aesthetic

In episode 4 of High Maintenance Season 3 on HBO, we had a set that was meant to be a set dressed into a homeowner’s home on a fictional filming crew’s set. (yes, very meta.)

We needed something that quickly read as drastically different than an ordinary residence’s furnishings so our designer Tommaso came up with the creative idea of doing a sleek futuristic look based on Sleeper to create a high contrast with the existing home.

the original inspiration from the set of “Sleeper”

The existing room we were working with looked like this:

BEFORE

AFTER with just some white linoleum, plexi glass, light boxes, table and chair set plus plants

For a set you see maybe for 2 seconds on screen and the reason it is there is not entirely readily apparent if you are just watching the show without knowing the script. The idea is that the homeowner is answering the door to let some set dressers in to put the finishing touches on the set.

Mother-in-Law's Brainscan as Art

On the window above the taped “HELP” is the brainscan also taped to the window.

In episode 2, in Season 3 of High Maintenance on HBO one of the characters is Darby who among other hustles she has going on around town, steals items from our corporate office job to resell on Craigslist. If you look closely, the items laying around her apartment ready to sell match items in her office.

We wanted to flesh out her character as a strange, dark, and creative woman with many little art projects in and around her apartment.

On the desk are many little art projects we created as we imagined Darby would have started

After gathering a bunch of elements to put together these aspects of her character, we still needed somethings that were off-kilter and a bit off.

So I searched around my own apartment for things that might add to this part of Darby’s character and then I saw my mother-in-law’s brainscan and was like hmmm this could work. And it ended up being a star.