The Apple TV+ comedy “The Studio” has been justly lauded for getting virtually every detail of how Hollywood’s movers 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 is observing the sense of Hollywood history that seeps into every aspect of the visual design. Directors Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg are avid movie enthusiasts, and it’s clear that the show’s props, locations, and decor are all carefully chosen to tell the story not only of the series’ particular characters but of an industry that’s now over 100 years old.
Nowhere is this attention to detail more felt than in the production design of the studio itself, which is intended to emulate great legacy companies like Paramount and Warner Bros., the latter of which stands in for the series’ fictional Continental Studios in exterior scenes. For interiors, production designer Julie Berghoff was tasked with creating studio offices that felt like they originated in the 1920s but had evolved with the times — they also needed to express the psychological state of the characters who occupied them.
“I had to go through certain steps to get to what the executive office looked like,” Berghoff told IndieWire. “I really wanted it to be an American architect, and I wanted it to be an architect that existed in the ’20s and ’30s because that’s when the studio would have been born.” Berghoff settled on Frank Lloyd Wright, an idea that Rogen loved. “This crazy idea that Frank Lloyd Wright built the offices really anchors the whole thing in a tangible history,” Rogen told IndieWire on an upcoming episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast. “It makes it feel permanent, and like you’d constantly be trying to live up to the grandeur of this space.”
Berghoff modeled the offices on Wright’s Mayan phase when he created buildings like the Ennis House in Los Feliz. That structure has been used on-screen in movies as varied as “Blade Runner,” “The Day of the Locust,” and “Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf,” so when the Continental Studios design echoes it there’s an added sense of resonance for film buffs. For Berghoff, the Mayan Revival phase of Wright’s career made both visual and emotional sense. “It felt like The Continental,” she said. “A little archaic, classic and beautiful and sturdy, but maybe crumbling at the base of the foundation.”
Rogen liked the idea that Wright’s Mayan buildings gave a sense of entombment, something he thought was appropriate for his lavishly paid but emotionally constricted characters. “These Mayan Revival buildings were very monumental, but also very tomblike,” Rogen said. The Mayan Revival concept had the added benefit of designs where light came into the buildings in interesting ways, something Berghoff played with by creating cucoloris effects with light coming in through the bricks and windows.
In a world where everyone is looking over their shoulder to see who might be coming for them and their job, Berghoff also decided to emphasize the space’s voyeuristic potential. “I made the space open in the center, and I also added a lot of glass so that 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 down below. And then, of course, Seth’s office was the highest so he could see everybody — it was like a bird’s nest for him. I thought about the space and how you would come in, how you would move, how you would wait, how you would go up the stairs.”
Speaking of the stairs, they’re adorned with a mural that adds to the weight of history the characters are constantly inspired by and suffocating under. “The mural that I did on the stairs was like the history of the studios and how they started off in the golden age, the Hitchcock era, screwball comedy, then ended up slowly in decay,” Berghoff said. “By the late ’60s it’s robots and the Loch Ness monster.” Ultimately, the message of the show is encapsulated in the message of Berghoff’s production design: “The architecture is coinciding with the story of the studio,” she concluded. “Will it be standing at the end?”
“The Studio” is streaming on Apple TV+. To make sure you don’t miss Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s upcoming episode of Filmmaker Toolkit, make sure you subscribe to the podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.
