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The Shards is so intrinsically LA that it feels like a character. When you began this process with Ryan Murphy and Bret Easton Ellis, what was the main thing they asked of you in curating the vibe of the city?
I’m a local, so I know the city really well. And I also went to a private school in Los Angeles, kind of in the period just about when Bret wrote his book. So I had a really intrinsic memory of that, and we just try to get as close to the actual as we can. Ryan’s influence from the beginning was American Gigolo, and what’s great about that movie is that it was filmed in 1981. He takes walks through areas of Los Angeles that are completely authentic to the time because it wasn’t a period piece, and it’s amazing what he sees. The entire Westwood Village was there. Ryan thought of a very muted palette, grays and whites, and this is ‘81, so it’s not the height of ‘80s design, just the edge. You’re turning into the ‘80s from the late ‘70s, where you would have those browns and reds, while the ‘80s were those pastels and stronger colors that came later. So it was kind of a combination of those two distinct eras.
Are there any places in the city that have stayed in that same design style as in American Gigolo?
We did shoot in the Westwood Village, and the Bruin and Westwoods theaters are the same because they were built in the ‘30s. Although the theater [Bret] went into was closed temporarily, and it didn’t have a concessions booth outside, so we had to build that. But when you come outside, we were able to copy the street from Westwood at the time. When you pass by the theater and you look behind, all of those are façades we put up, but that street was mainly still the architecture of that time.
There’s this beautiful shot of the ceiling of the Bruin Theater in the pilot. Why are design details like that so important in your storytelling?
Right! Because that’s what you’ll find in LA, those theaters kept those details. That’s something that either we, as a city, thought was worthwhile, or they renovated it. In this particular case, it’s actually the Fox Theater interior. We cheated it. They really loved the way the Bruin looked on the outside, but the inside of the Fox was in better shape. There’s certain things that people find important, that they keep. And one of those things that they don’t keep is shopping malls.
