Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/834282
and I knew it well, but Perino's was really different looking. It was round, it was huge, it was white, it had mirrors on all the walls. It had peach-colored velvet banquettes. It was truly gorgeous. It was, however, challenging to build. For example, all the mirrors need to gimbal, and Nelson likes to work with hard ceilings, so figuring out the design and decorative details of the large, circular ceiling, incorporating the necessary beams and wild sections, was not an easy task. It was something really worth building onstage because it made such a statement about the era, and the glamour of that time, and in a way that you really couldn't match with any place that still exists in modern-day Los Angeles. For a scene in episode eight where Joan is having dinner with her agent, I needed to find a location that could play as a New York City coffee shop from the period. I have always loved going to Early World Restaurant on San Vicente Boulevard in Brentwood (sadly, about to close) because it reminds me so much of New York. They were very open to filming but, although the interior was great, San Vicente does not look much like Manhattan. Necessity is the mother of invention, as we all know too well, and I came up with a plan I've never used before. I pitched putting free-standing neon signs on the meridian of the boulevard, along with diffusing the glass windows to give the impression of Manhattan street life through the glass. I was nervous, as I'd never done it before, but Flo found some great signs, the grips and electricians helped rig them, and the result is pretty believable for the brief moment it appears in the episode. A big part of FEUD: Bette and Joan was reproducing the film sets within the story. It was a challenge to get the highly talented craftspeople on my crew to do things badly enough, because everyone wants to do a good job, and make it look real, and make it look well done, but that's just not how these sets looked. For me, again, it's really fun to not have to worry about it creating a convincing reality, and instead, to play with it and say this is fake, and we're going to really go with it, because that's how it really was. Since the soundstage was in itself a set, period construction methods were used when the backs of the flats could be seen: plywood instead of Luan and 2x4s instead of 1x3s for the framing. The resulting flats with the 2x4s, ply and plaster were about three times heavier than they are built today. Of course, central to the early episodes of Feud was a complete re-creation of the original stage set for What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? It was one of the first sets I worked on. Baby Jane was a very low-budget movie, definitely considered a B picture by Jack Warner, who green-lighted it. The set was built in the cheapest way imaginable. In black-and-white, you can get away with more than in color (especially now with high definition). Still, when you look at the set photographs of Baby Jane, some things that they got away with are astonishing. There are gaps between the flats used to create the walls. They didn't seam and paint them; they just stuck flats next to each other, and you can see the gaps in between. Everything was done in a kind of heavy-handed and unsubtle way. I was trying to figure out what the wooden floors were made of, and finally realized that it was just paper printed to look like wood. When I looked at the walls, I thought it was wallpaper because it was so ornamental. Then I looked more closely and realized it was plaster, but with so many dips and curves. I was working with a magnificent plasterer, and it was hard for him to make it look that bad, because he's used to doing very fine work. This looked crazy, like a volcano had erupted. The only thing that wasn't done cheaply—and that we didn't do cheaply, either—was the ironwork. The bars on the windows appeared to be real, and I made the window bars real too, since they had to withstand Joan Crawford's grip; but for budgetary reasons, the ironwork on the front doors was made out of painted sintra. I generally resist the use of faux materials when it is possible to use the real thing, but I was pleasantly surprised to expand my horizons in this way on Feud. Above: A photograph of neon signs placed on the meridian of San Vicente Boulevard in Brentwood, CA, outside the windows of Early World Restaurant to suggest the more confined streets of New York City. Below: The interior of the Brentwood restaurant, standing in for a New York City diner, shows the neon lights outside the windows. Both photographs were taken by on-set dresser Giovanni Aurilia.