Los Angeles has had a tough few months. From the wildfires devastating large swathes of the city at the start of the year to the current unrest in downtown LA, the city has faced its challenges.
Netflix, however, has been keen to show Los Angeles on screen in three of its latest hits – Nobody Wants This, Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story and Forever.
Nobody Wants This is a romcom, largely set on the east side of LA, starring Kristen Bell and Adam Brody; Monsters, the Ryan Murphy-produced story of the murders of José and Kitty Menendez, takes place in Beverly Hills and Forever is Mara Brock Akil’s adaptation of the Judy Blume novel set in Baldwin Hills and Beverly Hills.
All three shows were designed as a “love letter” to LA, according to those behind them.
At a Netflix FYSEE event – Crafting LA: The City You Love Onscreen, Claire Bennett, production designer of Nobody Wants This and editor Maura Corey, Monsters production designer Matthew Flood Fergusson and Suzuki Ingerslev, production designer for Forever and music supervisor Kier Lehman spoke about bringing LA to life onscreen across various neighborhoods in the city and eras.
Corey said Nobody Wants This “set out to make LA a character”. The show is set across Hollywood, Los Feliz, Silverlake and Eagle Rock with locations such as Mirate and De Buena Planta.
“Shooting on location really did help shape the performances. The actors had a more intimate connection because they weren’t on a sound stage, they were in a house, or a restaurant,” she added. “We specifically went out too to shoot B-roll that was pops of LA that you don’t normally see. It wasn’t aerials of the Hollywood sign. It wasn’t the Capitol [Records] building. We made sure to make it look like you were walking down the streets of LA. You see a bus. We have busses here.”
She added that the team shot some of the interstitials a little bit off speed to give it a dream quality and did jump cuts to make it feel like one was walking down the street, seeing LA from the ground level.
Forever, which is set in 2018, lent in on the musical aspect, using music from local artists such as Tyler, The Creator, SZA, Nipsey Hussle and Victoria Monét. Daniel Caesar’s Blessed was used during a reunion between the two leads, while Frank Ocean’s Moon River was played at the end as they broke up.
Lehman said that it was important to use music that these characters would have been listening to at the time. “What were the things that they would have been hearing, in the world, in the city, maybe things that would be on the radio, or things that were in the community, and things that they were sharing with friends,” he said.
“The music coming out of LA at that time… it was a really rich environment with a lot of really incredible artists that became huge, household names,” he added.
In Monsters, Erik Menendez was a tennis prodigy and Matthew Flood Fergusson revealed that this posed some challenges.
In 2004, the National Tennis Association changed the color of all tennis courts from green to blue, but seeing as the show was set in the late 1980s, the courts they used needed to be green.
“I would run to a location, very excited and be immediately let down that [the court was] blue. We looked into the cost of resurfacing a tennis court, and that proved to be prohibitive, so we found a house, a sweet man owned this house out in Sherman Oaks, which then [became] their tennis court,” he added.
Watch the conversation below.