Glamour & Grit: Euphoria,
 Season 3

Rue’s story line takes her across the border to Mexicali, and it was important for that world to feel as authentic as possible. We shot the exterior of Club Playboy in Mexicali’s red-light district, then created the interior in an abandoned bar in downtown Los Angeles.

I scouted Mexicali multiple times with supervising location manager Michael Glaser and fell in love with the city’s colorful textures, hand-painted signage and faded murals. It was a gift shooting in Mexicali, as I felt that cutting between locations in Los Angeles and Mexico gave all the border sequences a texture that couldn’t have been achieved on one side alone.

For a Mexicali plastic surgery clinic, we dressed a street adjacent to a two-story hotel in South Los Angeles — building a rusty steel sign on the roof of the structure and adding hand-painted signage, sagging wires and window air-conditioning units.

For the Silver Slipper, a strip club operating as one of the many shady enterprises belonging to Alamo — Rue’s boss and the new antagonist of the series — I imagined a blend of saloon and hunting club. We filled the space with taxidermy — only predators, which I thought was apt given the other predators frequenting the establishment.

The set was composed of a main room and stage, a back hallway leading to the dancers’ dressing room and dingy bathroom, and a manager’s office, all tied together by a deep red and hunter green color scheme with wall-to-wall cheetah carpet and animal prints throughout. Sam got excited by a late idea to dress a terrarium in the back hallway featuring a nine-foot-long Burmese python named Whiskers.

The exterior was created at an abandoned strip mall in Lancaster, where we installed custom neon signage, a covered entryway and a 20-foot-tall woman’s leg reminiscent of roadside attractions from times gone by, sculpted at DeRouchey Foam.

Sam challenged me to find a home reminiscent of the great house in “Casino” (1995) — a place where ambition and tastelessness exist in equal measure.

The location department, led by Michael Glaser, found a one-of-a-kind property that had been listed for sale just five days earlier — a time-capsule home being sold by its original owner. Yellow shag carpeting, Roman columns and a pool overlooking an unobstructed view of the Lakeview golf course. The moment I saw it, I knew we had our foundation.

The question became: how far do we push it? We painted the front doors in a canary yellow piano finish and restored the kitchen to its 1960s pop spirit with a lime green color scheme. The house became a perfect expression of Nate and Cassie’s world: beautiful on the surface, garish underneath, and just a little bit sad.

The sequence begins with Cassie growing — à la “Attack of the 50 Foot Woman” (1958) — and continues with her rampaging through the city. We built her apartment as a half-scale miniature for the opening shots, then dressed the New York Street back lot at Warner Bros. for crowd reaction shots.

On stage, we commissioned a custom 90-foot-wide twilight backing from JC Backings so that everything could remain in camera.

To populate that landscape, the production engaged John Merritt Productions six months before shooting to construct the miniatures — the iconic Eastern Columbia Building, the Orpheum rooftop sign (lit with thousands of tiny incandescent bulbs), a handful of skyscrapers, a tractor-trailer rig that Cassie picks up, the Hollywood sign, and a destroyed Hollywood landscape of crumbled buildings.

The miniatures were built at a variety of scales, and we forced the perspective across the entire landscape: 1/24th scale in the foreground blending into 1/48th scale toward the back, with the cityscape buildings similarly stepping down in scale to enhance the illusion of depth and distance. A few close-up street scenes were built at 1/12th scale for tighter shots.

Alamo’s house needed to feel like a fortress designed for partying — a place where strippers and Alamo’s goons could all hang out. The exterior was the Brill House — a 1980s-era mansion designed by the modernist architect James Herbert Brownell, with custom woodworking, spiral staircases, an indoor pool, and endless windows overlooking panoramic views of the Antelope Valley.

The interior great room, drawn up by the set designer James Addink, took that idea further — an ebony Jacuzzi overlooking the space like a throne, a circular sunken living room encircled by a curved green leather couch built by the Warner Bros. Upholstery Department. The whole space was designed to feel like Alamo’s personal playground — lavish, hedonistic and just slightly menacing.

“L.A. Nights” — the name of the fictional soap opera within the show was also chosen to be the code name used for the entire “Euphoria” Season 3 production.

Lexi works as an assistant to Sharon Stone’s character Patty Lance, the showrunner of “L.A. Nights,” a campy daytime soap on the air for a dozen seasons. Cassie ends up auditioning for the show, reciting Shakespeare, resulting in Patty’s hilarious line: “If she’s good enough for Shakespeare, she’s good enough for L.A. Nights!”

The design challenge was irresistible: we were building sets of sets — a fictional production design inside our own. The “L.A. Nights” world needed to feel like a real show with its own established, slightly dated visual identity. It was also another facet of the fractured American West we were building all season — Hollywood as its own kind of frontier, with characters chasing dreams of fame and stardom the way prospectors once chased gold.

We built three standing sets on Stage 11 at Warner Bros.: a Spanish Revival living room, a brick-lined bar interior and a recording studio.

Anthony Carlino’s team dressed the stage with fake cameras, grip gear and extras portraying the “L.A. Nights” crew — and did it so convincingly that our own cast had difficulty telling the real crew and equipment from the fictional ones. That confusion was, in its own way, the highest compliment.

For the “L.A. Nights” writer rooms, we moved across the street from the Warner Bros. lot into the post-and-beam “Wood Building.” For Patty Lance’s office, I selected a corner room with walls of glass that offered a direct line of sight over the rooftops of Warner Bros. — and hung a giant banner advertising the latest season of “L.A. Nights” on one of the buildings, visible from Patty’s window.