‘Hacks’ Production Designer Rob Tokarz

The setting for Hacks seems to change drastically from season to season, from Las Vegas to a tour bus to a late night talk show. For production designer Rob Tokarz, these shifts became a great opportunity to pay tribute to Deborah’s journey throughout the series with the latest set.

Season 4 of Hacks begins with Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) finally achieving her dream of hosting a late night talk show. Not only was it important for Tokarz to bring in elements of late night talk shows into the design, but he also needed to consider Deborah’s beginnings in Las Vegas as a main inspiration for the set.

DEADLINE: Coming into this season, what were some of your big design choices and inspirations for the late night set?

ROB TOKARZ: The big design choice was what does Deborah Vance’s version of late night look like and how does it fit into the whole world of late night as an institution? We really wanted to make it feel like a late night show, because you have to have the band and the desk, and the monologue, but it also needed to feel like her. So, we bring in a lot of elements from her history where behind her head we have a star drop, which is behind her at the Palmetto during her residency. The Chevron floors come from her tour bus and from the mansion… we wanted to bring in the elements that are very her. We even have her journey from Las Vegas to Los Angeles in the silhouettes of the buildings and the landmarks.

We added a lot of Vegas because late night is her Vegas. The marquee bulbs were all programmed to twinkle and change, which was a really fun collaboration with [cinematographer] Adam Bricker. We ran almost a thousand feet of integrated LED throughout the entire set to give it all of this really fun lighting that would really bring us all together, and then when she enters, we wanted the curtain to open up and then reveal her sequins. She wears a lot of sequins throughout when she’s performing and we wanted the wall behind her to be an embodiment of the sequins that she wears as a person.

Then we needed to tie the whole show in with the world of production. Each office started out as a white box, so when we do Ava’s office, we want it to feel like that white box is a little bit weird. There was a detail in her office of a coaxial cable coming from a way too high socket into the ceiling, which we saw in one of our producer’s offices when we started the season. There’s always this kind of funkiness, you just inherit all the weirdness of spaces. We used that footprint for five different sets. Rob’s office, we do a slight paint change and redress it, because Rob needs to feel more established. Then that gets turned into the writer’s room, where we have all of our writers and they all have their own personalities. Jennifer Lukehart, my set decorator, reached out to the actors playing the writers and asked what they would have at their desk as their character, and they gave us a lot of really good suggestions… mostly things that we couldn’t clear legally, but they gave us a reference point for how we wanted things to look. So, we dressed that as the bullpen and then that would change again and it would become the conference room that Bob Lipka is at the head of the table and then, for the last bit, we turned that into one of my favorite sets, which is at top of episode 10. Deborah tries to get out of her contract and we get this attorney’s office, and that was the fifth iteration in the same footprint, generally using the same walls, just reconfigured and repainted and the attorney’s office was just one of our favorites. 

DEADLINE: I love keeping the weirdness of the offices. Other than the cable, were there any other details you had to throw in to keep everything from looking too perfect?

TOKARZ: A lot of it came out of the dressing rather than the architecture. The way that we’d like to shoot the show is to have a lot of symmetry, so despite the fact that we’re using real details from the offices we were actually shooting in, a lot of it was still designed to have those really nice symmetrical moments within the weirdness. I would say probably the weirdness would come out of a lot of Jen’s work, just the things she brings in, the furniture that somehow works aesthetically, art direction wise and set decoration wise, but really is funky little bits and pieces like that. In the writer’s bullpen, one of the weirdest things that she brought in was all these little rubber chicken things that were sticky and you can fling them from your finger, so while we’re dressing the set, we’re just flinging ’em against the wall. If you look at them, you might see a couple of little chickens all over the set that are just some of those really small details. Those are the funky little details to give it some life, give it some color, but you don’t necessarily know about. When it comes to design in general, it’s an accumulation of details. It’s not one thing, it’s just everything working together.