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00:00This season of Hacks was probably our most eclectic season set-wise. It took us from
00:04Madison Square Garden to Central Park to a cube 150 feet above the Las Vegas Strip.
00:10We went everywhere. Hi, I'm Rob Tokars, production designer on Hacks,
00:14and I'm going to talk about styling the set on Deadlines the Process.
00:23Coming into the last season of Hacks, we were really trying to cement the idea of legacy,
00:27both Debra Vance's legacy and the legacy that Ava was going to be establishing in her new show
00:33that she starts in their finale. So really what it was is looking back on her career and then
00:39looking back on how she wanted to rewrite her ending. So we knew that we were going to have
00:44these two big events that she was going to be doing this Madison Square Garden performance that
00:49needed to have the gravitas that that would really nail, but also we knew that we had to look back
00:55on the 50 years of the show that made her famous, which is Who's Making Dinner.
01:00One of the... Oh my God. Wow. You know, it's so cool that something you made so long ago is
01:08being
01:08celebrated like this. Well, it endured because it was important. It said something. That's what I've
01:13been saying. I want my MSG show to do. Totally, totally, totally.
01:25The oven line, that was so good. I liked it. Yeah, you wrote it too, right? Did I write that
01:30one?
01:31You know you did. Oh yeah, I did. Okay. Check out this hottie.
01:36Yeah. In this scene, Debra and Ava are arriving at the Who's Making Dinner retrospective
01:43and starting to take it all in. In this space, in particular, had a lot more artifacts and less
01:49parties. This was more the museum space. So as they're walking in, Debra's taking in everything
01:54that she remembers and then she sees the couch, which triggers our flashback. One of the tricky things
02:01with this was we don't have a lot of backstory on what the show actually is. A lot of it
02:07is just a
02:07couple of lines here and there in season one. So as the art department, what we had to do is
02:12we had
02:12to create not just the amount of material that you'd need to fill out an event like this, but also
02:18there's a reason somebody would do this show 50 years later to put everything together. This show had
02:23to be important. Luckily enough, I had grown up on Nick at Night, so I got to see a lot
02:27of these sitcoms
02:27growing up and so I had that in the back of my mind. What we did is we built the
02:31set because we knew
02:32we were going to have the scene that plays later in the episode and I convinced our producers to
02:38let me kind of amortize the set over and over again because what we did then is we built out
02:43a
02:43backstage in a camera alley and audience seating and tried to make it all feel correct in period
02:48and spent two days shooting background on it. In this space in particular, what you're looking at is
02:53you're looking at how we represented the set. It wouldn't make sense for us to hold on to the
02:57walls for 50 years. Usually those get trashed as soon as the show is gone. Unfortunately, like the
03:01mansion walls are gone forever. We photographed as elevations and we built out basically blown up
03:07photographs of the set. In our story of it, we've picked out a couple of items that somebody might
03:11have gone home with. The big one is the couch. There's a story about where the couch from the
03:16show was taken by a producer and then was sold to a big collector and then when they did the
03:22reboot of
03:23it, they wanted to use the original couch because it's so distinctive. It's such an iconic piece of
03:26Hollywood. At that point in time, it became too valuable of a couch and the stipulations on using
03:32the couch would be it had to be brought on just the shoot day. Nobody could do this on it.
03:35Nobody
03:35can do this on it. There could be no water around it. So what they ended up doing is they
03:39ended up
03:39recreating the couch for the reboot. So we ended up finding a couch on Facebook Marketplace that a family
03:46had in Pasadena. Their kids, they ended up being displaced by the fire. So they were going to school
03:51with our assistant set decorator. So it's just this weird Los Angeles confluence of events. But that was the
03:55couch that we landed on. And it's really spectacular in person. It's it's all embroidered. It's super
04:00period. The colors are fantastic. And that's why we highlighted the couch so much. It also triggers
04:04this really great flashback about when things were good between Deb and Frank. But in my mind, it's just
04:09like that highlights how important a couch is to a sitcom set. So it was really important for us to
04:15find
04:15exactly what we needed to find to nail it. Okay, let's roll that clip.
04:23Deborah, stop sulking. They won't let you get a credit card. You can just use mine.
04:35We did a great amount of work with the photographs and they're really significant. But I think when
04:39it comes to these events, people really love to see the costumes. They love to see what the actors
04:43wore. And so working with Kathleen quite a bit about what those elements would be, we populated it with,
04:48I want to say a dozen or 14 costumes. I think the most challenging part when you have to do
04:52a show
04:53within a show is that you have to nail the show and it has to feel real. We looked at
04:57a lot of
04:58references from the period. We looked at all in the family, but that's not quite economically where
05:01the characters are. We looked again at Mary Tyler Moore because that was in a smallish, mediumish city.
05:07So that felt a little bit more right. And one of the things that Jen, my decorator taught me was
05:12because we've used furniture from the seventies so often in the nineties and the aughts and the teens
05:17to represent old because it's dated. It's really challenging to take that same furniture and make
05:26it feel fresh, new and contemporary. And the idea behind the dressing here is we wanted them,
05:30they're a young couple, they're successful. They have nice things. They're, you know,
05:35they're contemporary to their time. So that was the big thing is making sure that we nailed those
05:39details without it feeling dated. So I really wanted to do a custom wallpaper for that space. And we
05:44found a couple of really cool references of stuff we liked. I did a few sketches and then Simon,
05:48our graphic designer ran away with it. And we did, I think, 10 different prints to figure out the
05:53exact scale of those diamonds that are in it. And then just making the pattern, making sure the
05:57colors made sense and then printing and adding to the set. But the entire time we knew that this set
06:02was going to play again in the finale where redo the finishes, repay it to be more contemporary.
06:07And it ends up being the opening shot of the wonder that we recreated from season one, episode one,
06:13but this time with Ava, but it's the same set. And that was, again, part of the legacy of it
06:17all.
06:17We wanted to feel like it was a passing of the torch from Deborah to Ava.
06:21Frank, thank you so much for sitting with us.
06:26In this clip, what we see is we see Deb has walked off after giving her unfortunate speech,
06:32and she's walking backstage and the show has transitioned into a never before aired interview
06:37of Frank, where he essentially admits that she was the funny one. She was always the funny one.
06:43She was what made the show funny. And despite all the years, despite all the hostility, it's something
06:49that really hits close. Like it's a validation that she didn't realize she needed and is embarrassed
06:55by the fact that she needed it. And so it's her working through those feelings and then confronting
07:01Frank one last time about the thing that they created 50 years ago. The Academy Museum was really
07:06great with working with us. One of my favorite things though is that dome. The dome is such a fun
07:11space to be in. It's a really fantastic view. And I hadn't had a chance to get to the Academy
07:15Museum
07:15until we scouted there. But when we did the actual event there, basically we wanted contemporary lines
07:20in the furniture, but vintage colors. So Jen, again, found these fantastic couches, these great chairs,
07:26a really fun bar, and just having that blend the period of it with the contemporary of it.
07:33Thanks for watching The Process. Who's Making Dinner was a really fun episode because we got to land
07:38on such a nice historical moment in our story.
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