Variety: Bill Groom had barely celebrated his fourth straight Emmy win for production design on “Boardwalk Empire” when he was approached to board another HBO series, “Vinyl, ” set in the music scene of 1970s New York, a world steeped in sex and drugs, even as musical tastes were shifting from rock ’n’ roll to disco, punk and hip-hop.
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Vinyl is a show that hasn't necessarily captured the hearts and minds of audiences, with ratings appearing to go down steadily each week. the show gives an unflinching portrayal of rock and roll, often to the detriment of character and plot. Having seen three episodes, I personally got burned out on the tales it was telling, but I was always astounded by the production design and the way the show managed to create what appeared to be an accurate depiction of the sex and drugs so common of that era. The author of the article makes a good point by saying that the 70's architecture is hard to track down in New York, as opposed to the 20's architecture that is preserved for historical value. We look back more fondly on things a century ago than we do a few decades back, because it is so far removed from where we are now. This makes sense, and corresponds to the relative failure of the show, as a lot of the show's audience still has their memories of the 70's, and would prefer not to look back on their perms and their one time they got exposed to cocaine. It was a bad time for everyone.
To climb aboard my old-lady-soapbox for a moment: this show sounds a lot like a pandering move by the TV business to appeal to the rise in vintage- and retro-inspired fashion, music, etc. "Vinyl" sounds like a show that tumblr-scrolling twenty-somethings would watch while wearing their striped crop top turtlenecks and 90s denim and taking polaroids. That aside, I've never even heard of the show before so my predictions could be wildly off. It sounds like the designer had a difficult job, however, in recreating this era without allowing it to eclipse the characters themselves and what is happening to them, since the 70s were such a complex and tumultuous time. I think the muted colors would really work for a show like this, however, because it implies that there is much more going on below the surface than just the chaos that appears above. The premise for the show doesn't really appeal to me, so I can't see myself watching it in the near future, but I think the set is a good testament to a designer having to look at the themes and goal of the show more so than the physical and temporal setting,
Production design for TV is a monster that I still don’t comprehend, and I don’t think I ever will. The difference between scouted vs. created environments and all of the details that need to go into something that needs to realistically and unironically portray a character’s space seems like so so much to consider at one time. At least in theater you are grounded by the confines of the space and what can be achieved live/ what can be seen by the audience, but with television and post-editing I feel like anything at all is possible. I’ve never personally dreamed of working for television, since I always thought it might be slightly boring to just recreate realistic homes for things like sitcoms, since theatrical sets can often be much unrealistic, exaggerated and interesting. But the period setting shown here looks beautiful, elegant, and just elevated enough to be intriguing. The combination of real-set-for-a-movie and fake-music video-filming-set overlaps in a mysterious way. I also appreciate how the designer went for muted colors in order to keep the focus on the story; sometimes I feel like the designer puts a lot of pressure on themselves to make a visually interesting set to the point that focus is taken away from the characters.
What Mr. Groom did for this show is one of the things I find so enticing about scenic design, or I guess in this case production design. You get this amazing opportunity to shape the entire world of the show. Everything else interacts with the decisions you make and if you’re not careful you can rapidly end up giving the show the wrong feeling. Not to mention you don’t work in a vacuum, you have to work with all the other designers and make sure the world you create doesn’t over power their designs or make their lives too much harder than they have to be. When I started the year I was leaning towards scenic design for tradition theater and musical theater but the more of these articles about the production designers for tv shows and movies that I read the more interested I get in their kind of design.
It is interesting to think about what decades have essentially "endured" over time. I find it kind of sad how the eighties and nineties sought to essentially eradicate the seventies when they became aesthetically divergent from the wants of the masses. The 1900s were incredible for their decade to decade evolution, and the hallmarks of fashion that were so readily apparent in each decade. I think soon decade-themed parties will become things of the past, as trying to differentiate between more recent decades is increasingly hard. Now six years into the 2010s, tastes are so wide and varied and able to be thus that it is nigh impossible to come up with an actual pervasive style. Forget about trying to define 2000s clothing from 2010s clothing. I am sure the production designer has his work cut out for him, a job potentially made slightly easier by the recent resurgence in interest (fashion-wise) in the seventies, as well as the popularity of late seventies, early eighties shows (like The Americans).
I haven’t yet started to watch ‘Vinyl’, but with influences such as Mick Jagger and Martin Scorsese, I’m certain it will be worth while to watch. There’s an interesting issue to overcome though when you compare this world to the world of ‘Boardwalk Empire’, and that is that there are still a lot of people around who remember the 70’s and all the glory of sex, drugs, & rock and roll that goes with the era, and to a larger extent the show. Creating a dramatized version of this world that retains the character of what people remember without going overboard has to be like balancing on the edge of a knife. Similarly, even as a person who was born in the 90s, because of the fact that there have been so many movies and television shows, and just cultural references in general, to the 70s, I have a very distinct perception of what that era should feel like, even though wouldn’t be born for another 15 years after it ended. The point is that there’s still a lot of active culture that’s been sustained from that era into ours, and I’m excited to see how it plays out.
Reading articles like this makes me very interested in exploring the world of theatre and film as a designer. It’s fascinating to see the level of detail required both as a designer and as an artist. There isn’t a way to make an approximation of something with a paint treatment. You have to really find out exactly what it looks like and put that on the set. I’d imagine this could be both a blessing and a curse because while on one hand you can’t just fake something, having the resources to truly recreate something and have the whole set look exactly as you envisioned it is really really exciting. I hope I get the chance to work on a TV show or movie like this in the future and am excited for the new challenges it will inevitably begin to bring my way as a designer.
I wish this could've been a longer article because this exactly the type of thing I want to do with my life. The whole 70's "Almost Famous" era is fascinating to me, and 70's New York is even more fascinating. On the bridge of a bad era for New York, corrupted by drugs and crime, and excess- I love the style and designing for it is a dream, with Judy Becker, American Hustle's production designer being a huge hero of mine. To coat a room in the excess that was during that time, with gold and also grit would be incredible. Creating a space perfectly evocative of a time is difficult so I understand whyt hey would want to film in isolation in some parts on soundstages, since clearly a lot of that era wasn't preserved. But I'm sure that gives you a certain amount of freedom as a designer, creating a period space from the ground up.
My mom actually called me the other day and was like "You need to watch Vinyl", because that's my era of music is the 70's glam rock scene. However, I am a bit tentative. The show isn't doing as well as hoped, or for how much it was hyped. I am still interested, and now watching it only to see the design is probably what I'll do.
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