Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1538080
5 0 P E R S P E C T I V E J U L Y / A U G U S T 2 0 2 5 A lone payphone rings on the side of a two-lane road in the blank heat of the endless desert—no highway, no signage, only a red mirage humming on the horizon, screaming toward the camera. A "Rally Red" 1970 Plymouth Duster fishtails to a stop beside it, engine ticking in the sun. This opening, the inspiration of showrunner J.J. Abrams for the series Duster, gave me everything I needed to start to build this world—a place where velocity meets the road's refusal to end, where purpose collides with the endless changing unknown. And at the heart was the machine that would carry the characters through it all—built for escape, but bound by need, memory and the ties that tether them to home—the Duster. Imagining Duster The spark of J.J.'s idea and showrunner LaToya Morgan's captivating scripts led me to think about four main design principles I would use to form our approach; first, space—not as character, but as a charged arena—a pressure trap waiting to trigger emotional release. Next, motion, which can liberate or entrap. Then, style—the Southwest not as a place, but a dream, built from dreams of expansion or harsh realities of displacement. Finally, color as protest—a way to pry open nostalgia's sepia lens and let the true, primary hues scream through space I don't believe space is a character—characters have agendas of their own. Space, as designed, is instead a stage: a measured field where dreams, delusions and dangers play out. Space can cradle a secret or broadcast a threat; it can compress a soul or let it breathe. It can let characters be themselves or hide what they choose. And in Duster, the stage is forever shifting. It's 1972—when the myth of the American frontier still coated the Southwest like dust, yet the asphalt of modernity and the brightly lit conceit of Americana and road culture had already begun to seal it over. The sets would be dynamic—the series would always be on the move, and each setting, even if never returned to, had to be the part of a road trip memory the audience would share with the characters. Motion My earliest memories of the Southwest are flashes caught from the back seat of a childhood station wagon: sun-warped motel signs, hand-painted gas station signs, totem poles, the primary color streak of a hot rod tearing past. Nothing ever sat still. That sensation—vistas and mesas interrupted by bright signs of life—buildings and cars glimpsed at eighty miles an hour— needed to be what made the design of Duster to not only be about place, but about pace as well. Our sets needed to feel provisional, like brightly painted mirages we were watching our characters approach, exist in, or many times, escape or outrun. Style Every period show and every designer walks the line between verisimilitude and stylization. Tip too far into photorealism and you reproduce yesterday's imagined wallpaper; lean too hard into stylization and the artifice eclipses the actors. D u s t e r A S U N - B L E A C H E D W O R L D O F M E M O R Y, M Y T H A N D M O T I O N B Y J O N A H M A R K O W I T Z , P R O D U C T I O N D E S I G N E R A. CAN'T MISS DINER. SET SHOT ON HISTORIC ROUTE 66, ALBUQUERQUE, NM. ILLUSTRATION BY SVEN JOHNSON. B. NACHOS CON DIOS. SHOT ON HISTORIC ROUTE 66, ALBUQUERQUE, NM. ILLUSTRATION.