Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/974985
A. BLACHFORD HOUSE, SHOT ON LOCATION IN MALIBU. B. THE FIVE-STAR HOTEL STAGE 10 AT FOX, THE EPITOME OF OUR USE OF PINK AND NEON TO EXPRESSIVE PURPOSES. C. ANDREWS' APARTMENT, BUILT ON STAGE 10 AT FOX. D. ANDREWS FRIENDS' HOUSE, ENCINO LOCATION REDRESSED IN AN AU COURANT BEIGE MINIMALIST HIGH-END '90S STYLE. PHOTOS COURTESY OF FX. country spree. Andrew started in San Diego and wreaked havoc in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Chicago and Pennsylvania, before his demise in Miami. The production spent a month in South Beach, and a few days in Chicago, but every other exterior had to be found in a 50-mile radius of Century City. The flatlands of the Midwest are hard to evoke, given Southern California's arid and steep topography. With ingenuity and very little post-production trickery, the tableaus came together. Camarillo, CA, became the Great Plains; Lake Piru was used as an imaginary Minnesota. Had all the scouting mileage within that tight zone been added up, it probably could have equaled that of Andrew's murderous one-way trek. Ryan and I started with a prevailing idea, seen in Miami—a place I had visited and he knew well from his time as a reporter for the Miami Herald (and later shooting Nip/Tuck). I described to him a man I saw years ago, when I was on a Nike shoot down there. This guy had on a blue T-shirt, plus swim trunks of another shade of blue, and he was walking past a sunlit azure wall. Ryan got it, remembering this exact color story, and we committed to a tone-on-tone concept. Usually I devise a specific palette of, for example, three dominate colors that play together. But for Versace, a total domination of a single hue was wanted. Andrew's Normandy hideout layered together pink walls, pink carpets, seen in hallways, exteriors and inner sanctums alike. Furniture? Pink, again, with a turquoise trim. It represented the optimism of the hotel's original plan—seaside relaxation, now marred inside by age and dashed hopes. Color can tell a story, even when monochromatically vague. Early in Andrew's life story, he lives in Berkeley and communes with a straight couple. Both his apartment and theirs is beige-on- beige. For Andrew, the color scheme suggests his colorlessness—he has no furniture, some ill- gotten possessions in a closet, with diffuse light pervading. He's essentially blank. But in his friend's better appointed starter condo, beige signals the chromatics of aspiration—it suggests, in a place with new leather and steel furnishings, a youthful good taste. They're essentially full of promise. Same color, different connotations. D C B A