Medium Dreams

Medium - The Experience: The Sets

by Sheila on November 20th, 2006

Medium - The Experience
A chronicle of my adventures visiting the set of Medium
1-Arrival | 2-Encounter With Maria Lark | 3-The Sets | 4-Patricia & Jake | 5-The Journalists | 6-Sofia | 7-The Ones I Didn’t Meet

Okay, so I could not come up with a jazzier name for this post than “The Sets.” I think that is fitting considering my tour of the Medium set was both thrilling and boring at the same time. Now don’t get me wrong. I LOVED it. I got to see the District Attorney’s office with Devalos’ private sanctum; the courtroom where the trials happen; every room in the Dubois house, plus a few I didn’t know about.

At the same time, I saw doors that go nowhere and the smallness of things that look so substantial on-screen. But the faerie glamour I lost to the reality of a working production set is more than made up for by the excitement of knowing how it all works and being able to say, “I’ve been there!” (with perhaps a “neener neener” thrown in, depending on who I am talking to.)

Medium shoots on stages 18, 19, and 20 at Raleigh Studios, Manhattan Beach (see Encounter With Maria Lark for a studio map.) To get there, we take the elevator down to the main floor and, rather than make a right at the giant Patricia Arquette poster to exit the building, we make a left and head for a heavy metal door. Overhead, I notice a light in a wire cage and imagine it flashing red when they are filming, warning people not to open the door and ruin the shot. Visions of old Hollywood and big movie studios dance in my head.

As we enter, the first thing I notice is the smell of carpentry. The second is the sight of cables and lights and wooden walls with the framing exposed. It turns out I am looking at the back side of the sets, of course. No need to make them look pretty. The pretty is all on the inside.

Stage 18 is where they film all the office and courtroom scenes for Medium. It houses Joe’s office; the District Attorney’s private office, outer office, and conference room; the police interrogation room and jail hallway (but no actual jail); Allison’s office (you know, that storage room she shares with Wayne the sketch artist); and the courthouse gallery, rotunda, and courtroom.

Stage 19 holds the Dubois house, yard, and neighborhood street.

Stage 20 seems to be for sets they don’t use very often, like the police station and the hospital room most recently used by D.A. Devalos in Four Dreams. It is also used for ad-hoc sets. The day I visited, there was what looked like a giant termite mound standing twenty-plus feet high. Turns out there is an upcoming episode featuring a boy stuck in a hole. The giant mound is the set for the interior of the hole. (Everyone has been inside there, I am told, yet I cannot convince them to let me in. *grump*) The exterior scenes were shot at a real hole in Santa Clarita. How do you do a location scout for a hole, I wonder?

Producer Laurie Seidman is an excellent tour guide. The best part was the:

SET TRIVIA

• While there is a set for the jail hallway, there is no standing jail set. Where do they put the bad guys? (Oh, yeah. Make believe. Sometimes I forget.)
• The desk in Joe Dubois’ office is a mere plank of wood with attached legs. No modesty panel. No drawers. It looks so insubstantial up close. I can’t believe I never noticed you can totally see Joe’s lower body when he is sitting at the desk. Must be the magic of camera angles.
• Miguel Sandoval has pictures of his real wife and daughter on the shelf behind D.A. Devalos’ desk. Sandoval’s daughter is an actress but there are no plans to have her on the show.
• The D.A.’s conference room walls are frosted glass. Glenn Gordon Caron specifically requested this so it would feel like ghosts are walking by when they shoot scenes in the room. Of course, that means they have to have people walking by constantly when they shoot those scenes. I wonder if they hire extras or just have the crew wander about?
• Allison’s office is a storage room she shares with the sketch artist, Wayne. It is filled with janitorial supplies and junked computers and is even more depressing in real life than it looks on-screen. No wonder she doesn’t spend much time there.
• The courthouse gallery (the covered walkway that runs along the front of the courthouse and where the jury consultant so rudely crushed out her cigarette in Episode 2) looks out on the Phoenix skyline, which is really a photo of Phoenix blown up to gigantic proportions. I need to dig out my DVD’s and see if I can tell that it’s phony.
• The courthouse rotunda has a beautiful marble floor but remember Episode 23? It is the one where Allison kept seeing a deer everywhere, including the courthouse. In one scene, the deer had to walk across the rotunda and into the courtroom but it kept getting spooked by the sound of its own hooves on the marble floor. They ended up having to lay carpet across the entire rotunda floor from gallery to courtroom. Deers must have a great Union.
• For exterior shots of the Dubois house that show more than just the front door (like the scene between Allison and Clay Biggs in the front yard in Four Dreams), they film at a real house in Northridge. The Northridge neighborhood is duplicated on the set down to the smallest detail but they like the look of the real thing better. So if you see an outdoor scene that only shows the front of the house, it was filmed on the set. If the shot goes wide and includes part of the street, it was filmed in Northridge.
• There are two identical sets for Bridgette’s room. Why? Because Ariel moved into her own bedroom at the end of Season Two, which is located on the other side of a Jack-and-Jill bathroom connecting the two rooms. The only problem is there was no set for the bathroom and second bedroom. The bathroom door in Bridgette’s room doesn’t go anywhere. Rather than change the footprint of the original set for the Dubois house by adding a bathroom and bedroom, they just built a whole new set for the two bedrooms and connecting bathroom, thus duplicating Bridgette’s room. It is eerie to walk into a room that is identical to the one you just left, right down to the mussed-up bed and toys strewn about the floor.

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Next post in the series: Patricia & Jake

Tags: medium, medium nbc, medium set visit

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POSTED IN: Interviews