\n\tThe wizard responsible for this remarkable bit of time travel is production designer Alex DiGerlando, who happens to have some first-hand memories of the period from attending NYU during in the 1990s.\u00a0The Hollywood Reporter dug up its old Motorola StarTAC and gave him a call to ask how he did it. Read our chat, below.<\/p>\n
\n\t***<\/p>\n
\n\tYou lived through \u201990s New York yourself. What was the overall challenge of recreating it for Love Story?<\/p>\n
\n\tThe nineties are kind of a weird era \u2014 it\u2019s a transitional period. You see the \u201980s and you know it immediately. But there\u2019s a lot of the \u201990s that still seeped into what we\u2019re doing now. I don\u2019t know if it\u2019s because it\u2019s come back, or it just never went away.<\/p>\n
\n\tWhat were some of the specific anachronisms you had to deal with on the streets?<\/p>\n
\n\tIt\u2019s like a period landmine. Everywhere you look, down to things you wouldn\u2019t expect. The horizontal crosswalk lines \u2014 those did exist back then. Now everywhere you look it\u2019s a series of horizontal lines. We tried to frame those out as much as possible. Bus lanes and bicycle lanes are everywhere too. We had to either frame those out or paint them out in a couple of instances.<\/p>\n
\n\tSome of the actual locations in the show still exist. How much work did they require?<\/p>\n
\n\tA lot of these places, because they\u2019re so iconic of the time, are sort of trapped in amber, and we were really lucky so many of them still exist. Odeon hasn\u2019t changed at all \u2014 the chairs have changed, and we replaced them to match what they had back then. The current chairs are red, white and green plastic wicker. Back then they had these more mid-century bent chrome metal chairs, where it arches back and then cantilevers off the bottom, with red and green Naugahyde upholstery. And then the Odeon sign \u2014 the thing that was on\u00a0Bright Lights Big City\u00a0\u2014 that\u2019s still there.<\/p>\n
\n\tWhat about Panna II, the Indian restaurant where JFK Jr. (played by Paul Anthony Kelly) <\/a>and Carolyn (played by Sarah Pidgeon)<\/a> had their first date?<\/p>\n \n\tAt the time, there were four restaurants that were sort of stacked on top of each other, but now only Panna exists. And there\u2019s a lot of LED lights in there now. So we had to bring in a lot more incandescent bulbs and dress out the other windows to make it look like it did back then.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\tSarah Pidgeon<\/a> and Paul Kelly on the New York set of Love Story in August 2025.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tJose Perez\/Bauer-Griffin\/GC Images\/Getty Images<\/p>\n \n\tThe Roxy was a different situation entirely.<\/p>\n \n\tThat building doesn\u2019t even exist anymore. It\u2019s the Lantern House on the High Line now \u2014 those condominiums have taken over what that space was. We found a nightclub called Elsewhere in Bushwick, which is a really cool place. The actual Roxy, before it was the Roxy, was a roller-skating rink \u2014 huge and sweeping, with very high ceilings. Elsewhere is much smaller, but it does have very high ceilings and it\u2019s very dark and kind of cavernous. It had a lot of modern things \u2014 point-of-sale interfaces, LED lights. We had to strip all of that out and bring in candelabras and the swings. We built the banquettes with the zebra pattern the Roxy had. And then we built a facade over the exterior that mirrored the Roxy\u2019s architecture and recreated the neon sign and the \u201cBe Good to the Roxy\u201d sign, which was printed on sheet metal.<\/p>\n \n\tWasn\u2019t there originally supposed to be a scene with Carolyn at Barneys? That store was a major New York hotspot in the 1990s.<\/p>\n \n\tWe looked into shooting there \u2014 weirdly, the Barneys building is still sitting empty. But it would have been a very big project to bring it back to what it was, and then the scene ended up getting simplified. For scheduling purposes, they moved it into the Calvin Klein showroom, because we had that set built already.<\/p>\n \n\tThe phone booth scene is getting a lot of attention \u2014 where girls break one open to steal a Kate Moss Calvin Klein poster.<\/p>\n \n\tI think it was while we were making the show that the last phone booth in New York had just been removed. We sourced one from a prop house in Los Angeles and had it shipped over. As a person who was at NYU at that time period, the stealing of posters from phone booths and bus stops was a thing.<\/p>\n \n\tWhat about the smaller props \u2014 the things most viewers would never consciously notice?<\/p>\n \n\tEvery member of the team really develops tunnel vision, reading everything we can, looking at every picture we can find, and then trying to mine those data sources for details we can use to tell the story \u2014 even if it\u2019s never spoken, but you can see it and it tells you about the character.<\/p>\n \n\tLike, say, JFK Jr.\u2019s bikes, which keep getting stolen.<\/p>\n \n\tOur prop master did a lot of work to figure out what kinds of bikes he actually rode and then sourced those.<\/p>\n \n\tThe show is landing<\/a> at a moment of intense \u201990s nostalgia. Do you have a theory about why?<\/p>\n \n\tMy 15-year-old daughter is very into the music and just \u201990s things in general. I remember in the \u201990s thinking we got stuck with the lame era, and looking back at the \u201970s thinking that\u2019s when all the cool stuff was happening. Now, having the distance, I kind of see the appeal. I actually think it\u2019s the last era before the smartphone. There is something oppressive about being tied into everything all the time. Watching the show, there is something kind of like a breath of fresh air, where the plot is not driven by this thing. And it\u2019s also the last era of monoculture. Whereas now everything\u2019s so fragmented \u2014 a band like Nirvana today, people might like them, but they would not be the biggest band.<\/p>\n \n\t***<\/p>\n \n\tLove Story\u00a0releases new episodes Thursdays at 6 p.m. PT\/9 p.m. ET\u00a0on\u00a0FX<\/a>\/Hulu.\u00a0Read\u00a0THR\u2018s interviews <\/a>and coverage here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Before Bloomberg, before the High Line, before the $18 cocktail, there was a different New York City. One…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":154610,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[61830,9,11,10,57756,6914,64061],"class_list":["post-154609","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-love-story","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news","tag-paul-anthony-kelly","tag-ryan-murphy","tag-sarah-pidgeon"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154609","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=154609"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154609\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/154610"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=154609"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=154609"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=154609"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.hollywoodreporter.com\/wp-content\/themes\/vip\/pmc-hollywoodreporter-2021\/assets\/public\/lazyload-fallback.gif\")
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