Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/820551
56 P E R S P E C T I V E | M AY / J U N E 2 0 1 7 Star would test whether a show set in the music world can also live in the real world. Can poverty play alongside fantasy? Can the musical form accommodate a plot with murder, underage rape, violence against black youth and women, substance addiction, and injustice in the criminal system, and still tell a story where music and dance can blast off the screen and thrill an audience the old-fashioned way—through the heart? The anchor setting for the series would be God's Blessings Beauty Salon, a struggling business in an old two-story house run by Carlotta (Queen Latifah would play her), the mother hen who takes in the three girls. Turns out Lee Daniels' cousin Jackie Noel runs just such a salon out of a row house in West Philly, so day one on the job I flew to Philadelphia to learn all I could from cousin Jackie. The research photos I shot that day supplied the juice for designing interiors that would avoid clichés and focus on the authentic unexpected choices that a struggling business such as Carlotta's would make to outfit the place. Old vinyl couches retrofitted for hair dryers, a welded steel staircase with brown shag carpeting, Right: The view looking out the salon front door's burglar grill toward the porch onstage. With the addition of parked cars, extras passing by and wind to move the greenery, the views outside were utterly convincing. Opposite page, clockwise from top left: The staircase in the salon foyer with its shag carpeting and metal railings was inspired by the one in the salon owned by Lee Daniels' cousin Jackie. The stairs and wall décor were duplicated for both first-floor and second- floor stage sets. From the foyer staircase, one could see the entrance, the styling room, the orange main room, the shampoo room and down the hall to the laundry room, kitchen and backdoor. Flow was essential: the key rooms connected through a series of archways, wide door openings and even interior windows to allow camera angles from room to room. Carlotta's second-floor bedroom featured a small shelf for her devotional books and a stained-glass window set into one of the dormers as a nod to her born-again faith. She wouldn't have the money to renovate the upstairs, so the bathroom she shared with her daughter remained a relic of the 1940s. © 20th Century Fox