Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) has officially launched her Late Night show. This means that after hours of seemingly tilting at comedy and Hollywood industry windmills, not to mention an escalating feud with head writer Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbinder), “Hacks” Season 4 needed a late-night show of its very own. Production designer Rob Tokarz was given an honest-to-goodness late-night soundstage — the Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs and Jen Statsky-created Max series picks up the baton, location-wise, from the studio where Conan and Kelly Clarkson shot talk shows in the past — and the task of Vance-ifying it.
But “Hacks” has always been in touch with how its two protagonists fit into the larger history of women in entertainment — no less of an icon than Carol Burnett gives Deborah advice on how to get over the nerves of finally being on the verge of achieving her dream — and the all-too-current absurdities that shift the winds of comedy and culture. So Tokarz didn’t just build a late night stage to Deborah’s glitter and sequinned taste. He also built it as a tribute to Los Angeles, and pulled from the colors, shapes, and architectural design history that make the set feel quintessentially LA.
This creates an interesting tension, actually, between Deborah’s comfort zone and the late-night host persona she wants so desperately to own and that she has to literally step into as she steps foot onto the stage. Tokarz spoke to IndieWire about giving “Late Night with Deborah Vance” enough gravity to psych out even Deborah Vance, as well as all of the little touches both onstage and backstage that are a tribute to LA, past and present.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
IndieWire: I’d love to dig into the design of Deborah’s Late Night set. It’s a visual template we’re kind of all familiar with, but what are the touches you added to it that make it particular to her?
Tokarz: We wanted to make it feel like the institution of late night, but very specifically Deborah. I kept coming back to this idea of creating a monument to Los Angeles with the late night set. I wanted to lean into a lot of the Art Deco that we have here that makes LA feel so classic.
So we were looking at things like the Griffith Observatory — that’s where some of the finishes and the columns came from — and at the Eastern Building downtown with some of the tones behind the band stand. There are a lot of little touches that lead to her.
For instance, the floors are the chevron floors that we did in the tour bus [in Season 2] and that appear in her mansion in Las Vegas. The twinkle lights behind the city are one of the backdrops she used to use at the Palmetto. The buildings behind her were a testament to the journey she took — if you read right to left, you start in Las Vegas on the right and you work your way to Los Angeles on the left. And I found this really great reference in this old movie called “The Broadway Melody.”
Oh yeah! 1929.
Yeah. There’s this great song and dance scene, and there’s that beautiful set that’s these uplit buildings that are super deco. I wanted those buildings [on the late night set] to feel like that. So we went through a lot of trial and error. We did cutouts, we had them designed, we played back and forth with which places we wanted to show.
We actually changed it over the course of the season, and the way that we rationalized it is if you were doing a late night show, the set changes. This doesn’t work for the first night, the next week we change this a little bit, let’s tweak the lighting. So there are a lot of tweaks going on over the course of our season, too. We added texture, so [the set] would pick up more light, and we tweaked the lighting with Adam Bricker, the DP.
When you get to the arch, that’s also playing into the deco-ness of it, and playing into the color of the fabric being very Deborah Vance and in the palette that she’s known for. And then once the curtain opens, we want to see her sequins. It’s just a quick read. But it just feels like it’s her.
Absolutely.
But the big thing is that she’s walking out of her world into this very public world. That’s where we play around, this season, with the public and the private persona of Deborah’s, and where are the places where she touches on. SO the curtain wants to feel Deborah Vance, the sequin wall is Deborah Vance. And then once we go deeper into the backstage, her office, her dressing room, those all want to feel like she designed it so she has comfort in her own spaces.
Then, when she comes out, she comes out on stage. She’s a public face of late night and the first woman of late night. You have to feel the weight of that.
Yeah, I was so impressed tracking over the course of the season this sense of Deborah being watched in a way she hasn’t been before, and that tension between her private self and the person she becomes specifically for this role, as a late night host. Even the darkness of the risers on the stage gives this, like, adversarial sense.
That was a big conversation we had when we laid out the set. At first, because during the photo shoot at the end of the first episode, you see the bones of the set behind it, we had been building the set a little bit. But once we were standing there, and Lucia and Paul and Jen were looking out on the stage, we realized the stage was too far away for the specific shot of when Deborah comes out for the first time. They wanted it to feel like the coliseum, like a wall of people. And there’s Deborah.
I mean, the stage was one thing, but everything around the stage was probably the more monumental challenge that we had to accomplish. We were at Universal Stage 1, which is where Kelly Clarkson had her show and Conan had his show. So we were already working within the bones of a late night stage. We started with a black box. But in the space, we had all the real things that would’ve been there at late night. The pedestal cameras still live there. The monitors and everything, down to the control room, were there. That was the set. That was the control room that the Kelly Clarkson show would’ve used.
Wow.
Just creating all the hallways that interconnected and trying to connect the hallway to the dressing rooms, how that all worked — we shot in our production offices. Deborah’s office, in fact, is Kathleen [Felix Hager], our costume designer’s office. So all the actors would take fittings in what was Deborah’s office, just with the furniture removed.
One of my favorite little pieces of the late night set is directly behind the stage because late night is an institution, and we are in spaces that have been there for years. And the host changes and the set changes, but the guys that run the crew don’t change. You have the same painter who’s been there for 30 years, the same grips that have been there for 30 years. I wanted that backstage to feel like that space is evergreen.
Just held together by gaff tape, yeah.
Exactly. So what we saw backstage, our crew was actually using for props or for electrics or whatever, and then we turned the outside into the history. The cue card area, that room in particular, we had all the crew sign the walls so it looked like, you know, well used: Paint from 1956, [with] stickers and layers of the stickers. We wanted the paint area and the prop area to look like that’s where everything has been built. That’s where all the gags come from, and there are elements that feel like it’s that thing that’s been forgotten there, but nobody’s moved it, because why move it? That was one of my favorite things, just the juxtaposition between the history of late night and what Deborah Vance is bringing to it.
“Hacks” is now streaming on Max.
