It’s not just a problem for the camera department when a project decides to go full “Truman Show.” On “Company Retreat,” the Prime Video follow-up to “Jury Duty,” production designer Joe Warson and prop master Rebecca Tendick needed to construct each set as a space of airtight, tactile reality and hidden artifice. That way, the crew could capture temporary assistant Anthony Norman’s experience at the extremely fraught, extremely fake company retreat for the fictional Rockin’ Grandmas hot sauce.
Any fake company on television — from Los Pollos Hermanos to Nate’s Lizard Lounge to Tecca Office Furnishing — generates a certain amount of branding and baggage the art department needs to create in order for it to feel real. Art teams decide on color palettes and aesthetic preferences, logo designs, t-shirts, step-and-repeats, and office spaces. But it’s rare that a film crew actually has to generate products, and at scale. Every box full of bottles of hot sauce stacked around Rockin’ Grandmas had to be full of the real stuff. No folder of papers could be left blank. Anything that Norman might see or touch had to be accounted for by the art team first.
Almost by default, that meant collaboration between the production design team and the cast of actors to put as much personal material in the frame as possible, while still being very telling about who each Rockin’ Grandmas employee is. “We landed on something that was hand-drawn for the logo, and that became a whole backstory, and then a through-point in dressing Doug Senior’s [Jerry Hauck] office,” Warson told IndieWire. “He started a little bit more old-school, and I have a lot of antiques and stuff from my grandparents, who came from the South. So we expanded on that, and with each character, we made their little pods [expressive]. We tried to personalize it.”
The personalization wasn’t just for the characters, though. The structure of the office space Warson designed was also riddled with points to discreetly install cameras. The key there, according to Warson, was uniformity. “We made the desk and the cabinetry, and they’re all the same,” Warson said. “If you have that tinted glass everywhere, no one is going to notice anything. Things stand out when it’s only one single item — why is that mirror right there? So we just made everything uniform and put it at angles that our DP wanted.”
But one thing that couldn’t be uniform was the hot sauce itself. There were several scripted varieties, and each had to pass muster with director Jake Szymanski. “He really wanted to make sure that he liked the flavor profile,” Tendick said. “A show like this has so many more elements than a regular television show.”
On a regular show, the crew would never have to think about what props smell like or what they feel like or whether they can flawlessly function as the objects they’re designed to mimic. “You can’t have something that’s a quarter-done or half-done, and the backside of it’s not done. Because someone might pick it up. This box in the corner can’t be an empty box that looks full,” Tendick said. “It has to be heavy. So that’s a lot of extra layers you don’t think about normally, you have to bring to a show like this.”
Tendick layered mountains of paperwork throughout the office to make it seem like the space had been in business for a while. The art team created order sheets, stamps, and warehouse inventory for the Rockin’ Grandmas “office.”
“They wanted Anthony to be doing busy work while he was in the office to make it feel like he was there for a real reason. There are things that you learn, doing work like this, that you take for granted. Like, I know how to z-fold. I know how to collate. So I’m telling the actor, ‘Just have him collate these pages and then z-fold it and she’s like, ‘I don’t actually think I know what that means or how to do that.’ So she had him do something else and snuck back [to where the crew was hiding], and then we worked through it,” Tendick said. “Then she went back out and taught him how to do it. But it’s one of those things you don’t realize until the moment, and you can’t cut, and you can’t step in.”
That high-wire act is part of the ambient tension in “Company Retreat,” especially being so much larger in scale than “Jury Duty” was, but also part of what made the project an exciting one to work on. “We are always diving into these things headfirst,” Warson said. “Was I always confident about it? Absolutely not. There’s fear, but you have to embrace it, and that’s what drives you, and then it’s like, ‘God, I think we’re actually going to do this.’”
“Company Retreat” is streaming on Prime Video.
