Sitcom sets usually realistic
Jaime Jeske
By Catherine Seipp
From the Life & Mind Desk
Published 7/24/2002 11:26 AM
LOS ANGELES, July 24 (UPI) -- Few organizations are as obsessed with the
meaning of money than the production design departments of television
sitcoms.
Unlike one-hour dramas, which tend to revolve around the work world,
half-hour comedies generally take place at home. So those in charge of
sitcom scenery and decor spend huge amounts of energy thinking about how
their fictional people live -- and whether what these characters can
afford is at least on speaking terms with reality.
Oddly enough, it usually is. Movies may be larger than life, but
television actually has a long tradition of accurately depicting life on
a budget. If the unspoken sadness of "The Honeymooners" was that Alice
and Ralph never had children, the obvious sadness was that they lived in
an apartment with peeling paint and a sink in the living room.
Most of the time, set furnishings are quite believable -- even if the
design staff has to argue about it with those in charge. Sometimes they
lose.
Set decorator Diane Yates recalls working on "Grace Under Fire,"
starring the notoriously demanding Brett Butler. One script had Grace
dating a soccer coach, which Yates figured in a Southern small town
would mean a top salary of not more than $30,000-per-year.
"But she got pissed off when she saw how I'd dressed his house," Yates
says. "She insisted, 'Grace would never go out with someone like THAT!
He reads Tolstoy and Dickens!'" So Yates redid the set for someone
making around $80,000 a year, complete with bizarrely unsoccerish
details like a little framed portrait of Noel Coward in the corner.
"If your producer or star says 'I want,'" Yates explains, "you give them
what they want."
Another veteran set decorator, Freddie Rymond, worked on the '80s hit
"Family Ties" and remembers all the viewer calls that came in about the
TV family's then-unusual Wolf kitchen range.
But the dad in the show was employed by a local public television
station. Would he really have had such a high-end gourmet appliance?
"Gary David Goldberg (the show's executive producer) wanted the Wolf
range, he had one at home," Rymond shrugs. "And when the show ended, it
went to his house in Colorado."
Scenery furniture generally moves into a studio's general prop inventory
at the close of a show's run. But if a studio doesn't feel like playing
hardball, the cast and crew are allowed to buy favorite items at a deep
discount from the original price.
After all, it is used furniture by then -- thus the free-for-all that
can occur at the prospect of a bargain. The first thing producers
sometimes do at the end of a run is padlock the set.
When a show is in the planning stages, the production designer -- who
supervises all scenery including decor -- reads the script, meets with
the producers, and then begins research: bringing in pictures of likely
looks from magazines and books to subsequent meetings.
"And producers might bring in pictures too," says John Shaffner,
production designer for "Friends" and "The Drew Carey Show."
After that comes sketches, a plain white model, and then the set
decorator, who reports to the production designer, begins researching
specific items -- bringing back pictures of everything from sofas to
dishes.
"Last is working out the color scheme," Shaffner says. On "Drew Carey,"
for instance, that was established with a '40s-style green wallpaper,
presumably picked out by the Carey character's mother when she was a
bride.
"You could do this room for a thousand bucks in real life," Shaffner
says, of the "Drew Carey" living room. "You'd go to the Salvation Army
for the couch and spend $150; the rug you'd get from Grandma's basement.
For the set crew, though, it costs time and energy. They spent hours
rummaging through piles of dusty prop draperies in "Wornout Brothers" --
as the Warner Brothers prop house is fondly known -- before finding
green drapes that only sort of matched the '40s-style wallpaper.
"We couldn't be too matchy," Shaffner explains. The drapes needed to
look as if Carey's mother had bought them on sale 20 or 30 years after
moving into the house.
Probably the easiest assignment is creating a set for a character whose
personality is already established and whose financial status matches
that of his creators.
"Frasier," of course, is a spin-off of the erudite barfly psychiatrist
on "Cheers." And so in the "Frasier" pilot, the living room couch was
specifically described as a copy of the one in Coco Chanel's Paris
apartment. One of the writers owned a Chanel couch himself.
No problem. As a successful psychiatrist and radio shrink, Frasier could
well afford it. "'Frasier' is unique in that they simply don't question
you about budget," says Roy Christopher, the show's production designer.
"And boy, it sure pays off."
The set's original art alone cost around $75,000, including a $3,000
Robert Rauschenberg print, barely glimpsed in the hallway. And that
budget didn't even have to cover the set's single most expensive piece,
an $18,000 vase by Seattle glass artist Dale Chihuly, because it's on
loan.
Still, like most everyone in the design business, Christopher is far
more used to making sow's ears look like silk purses. He was shocked by
the $7,000 price tag on the pair of bronze candlesticks his wife wanted
to buy recently. "She told me, 'You're just going to have to realize
what things cost,'" Christopher says.
Much of a set decorator's time is spent filling out a room with the
mundane ephemera of daily life, even though viewers don't notice details
like the copies of the Cleveland Plain Dealer that's flown in every day
to the "Drew Carey" set.
But as assistant set decorator Joey De Rosa, who's helped texture that
set with Cleveland minutiae, points out, the extra layer of reality
"does help your actors."
Publicity departments are sometimes leery of letting reporters find out
what set dressing costs, because they don't like the inevitable stories
poking fun at how TV differs from life. But sitcom characters'
decorating budgets aren't really all that implausible...at least not
when you enter the "let's pretend" mindset of the scenic designers.
This is a state as hypnotically absorbed as that of an eight-year-old
busy with a dollhouse. Spend enough time poring over the details of TV
scenery, in fact, and the stars of the show -- glimpsed wondering
through between rehearsals -- take on an eerie, stick-figure-like aura
of secondary importance.
Far more vital, when you're thinking about this sort of thing, is that
spottily employed Monica of "Friends" could indeed have rented that
spectacular Greenwich Village apartment. It turns out Monica inherited
it, in all its rent-controlled fabulousness, from her grandmother.
This wasn't explained in the pilot, but later alluded to through jokes
in subsequent scripts, Shaffner says, partly as a reaction to criticism
in the press of these struggling characters' rather luxe housing.
Carey's wage-slave character, on the other hand, is so believable that
it felt a little painful when he didn't take the $200,000 in lieu of the
Batmobile he won in a contest. "But then there would be no show," points
out assistant set decorator De Rosa.
The class structure of TV characters is, just like the characters
themselves, necessarily sketched in a few broad strokes. "When you're
rich in television, you're richer than rich," as John Shaffner puts it.
"When you're middle-class, you're upper-middle-class. When you're poor,
you're middle-class. But you don't want to be depressing. It's comedy!"
"The thing that makes this unique is it isn't interior decorating for
design; it's interior decorating for character," says Shaffner. "So most
designers love doing their own homes because you don't have to think
about any character but yourself."
Eagle-eyed shoppers that they are, making a room look nice is far easier
for these decorating pros than making a room, or any item in it, look
NOT nice.
The trickiest item on the "Frasier" set, for instance, was Frasier's
dad's recliner. Roy Christopher's crew couldn't find anything ugly
enough in their usual haunts. So they finally took an old prop
department Barcalounger, reupholstered it, and then ripped and taped it
for authenticity.
It might look like something you'd tip the garbagemen to take away. But
the chair's final cost was $1,500 -- as much as Frasier's beautiful
dining room table.
Copyright © 2002 United Press International. All rights reserved.
Jaime