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A film industry veteran turned historian explores the relationship between Hollywood and architecture in Seth Rogen’s The Studio
There’s a shot in Apple TV+’s The Studio that keeps gnawing at me: the camera tracking through the Warner Brothers backlot in Burbank, soundstages rising like sandstone cliffs, creating a world simultaneously claustrophobic and infinite. It evokes the cover art to Pink Floyd’s 1975 album Wish You Were Here—two businessmen shaking hands, one engulfed in flames. It’s a perfect metaphor for Hollywood’s Faustian bargain, where ambition meets money in a handshake that always leaves someone burning. The backlot canyon functions similarly: confinement and possibility in equal measure, promising that around any corner might lie Paris or New York or ancient Rome, all built at three-quarters scale.
This architectural double-bind anchors The Studio, the creation of Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, Peter Huyck, Alex Gregory, and Frida Perez, currently airing new episodes Wednesdays. Shot entirely on a single ARRI Alexa 35 with a 21mm lens by cinematographer Adam Newport-Berra, the show employs a subtle visual distortion that expands what we see while maintaining a human perspective. The result recalls Herbert Bayer’s famous 1935 diagram depicting a viewer’s extended field of vision—a human figure with an enormous eyeball for a head glimpsing at wall panels set at various angles. That diagram might well be Hollywood’s patron saint: an industry constantly watching itself, documenting its own existence, seeing more than the normal eye permits.
The television show uses architecture that has appeared in films to tell a story about making films. (Courtesy Apple TV+)
This expanded vision resonates with me personally. I spent years working in the film industry before my experiences in production offices and studio lots sparked my interest in Hollywood’s built environments. What began as a career in film naturally evolved into a scholarly fascination with architectural history. Both fields involve scrutinizing structures that most people experience without analyzing—like a cinematographer pulling focus, I learned to sharpen certain elements while deliberately blurring others, to frame theoretical arguments the way a director frames a shot.
With this dual perspective, I find myself drawn to the spatial tensions in The Studio. Rogen plays Matt Remick, Continental Studios’ well-meaning but conflicted chief, perpetually caught between arthouse passions and corporate obligations. The spaces he inhabits mirror this dislocation. Whether in his convertible, at a party, or in his home, he seems caught in a perpetual dolly zoom—that vertiginous camera move where the background rushes away while the subject remains fixed. Inside Continental Studios’ executive corridors, the textile-block patterns—appearing as if looted from Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis House (1924)—create a similar effect: The geometrical concrete simultaneously grounds the executives in Wright’s architectural legacy while suggesting a disorienting expansion of their power. It’s not just a setting but a visual argument about Hollywood’s self-conception.
What’s most striking about Continental Studios’ headquarters is how the production design brings Wright’s textile blocks to both interior and exterior—departing from most cinematic deployments of the Ennis House, which typically feature these elements only inside. In The Studio, these concrete patterns aren’t about creating shadows; they’re about texture—a tactile quality suggesting both artisanal craftsmanship and industrial reproduction. Like a carefully composed close-up, they reveal their subject’s complexity while maintaining a controlled aesthetic.
On the Job
These architectural textures were far from my mind during my own Hollywood days. My memories of interviewing for creative executive positions in 2000–2001 unspool like a montage sequence: spaces cut together to create a cumulative impression. Barry Mendel’s office on the Warner Brothers lot—where I interviewed before the release of Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)—stands out vividly. Mendel, who had produced Anderson’s earlier films, threw me a curveball with an unexpected question about vintage tennis racquets—a detail that would, unbeknownst to me, feature prominently in the film’s aesthetic. Fortunately, my parents’ collegiate tennis backgrounds had familiarized me with the Spalding Pancho Gonzalez model they’d kept around the house.
In The Studio Seth Rogen plays Matt Remick, the head of production company Continental Studios. (Courtesy Apple TV+)
The Warner lot itself presented an architectural exquisite corpse—disparate elements stitched together in fascinating juxtaposition: corporate efficiency in the office buildings, nostalgic fantasy on the backlot streets. Mendel’s office exuded casual importance, with strategically placed scripts and art books suggesting, “Yes, we’re commercial, but the right kind of commercial.” I didn’t get the job, but looking back, my fascination with the office itself—rather than the scripts they were developing—foreshadowed my eventual pivot toward architectural study.
My next interview took me to a starkly different environment. I met with producers Jon Landau and Rae Sanchini of Lightstorm Entertainment, James Cameron’s production company. The experience played like a scene with conflicting subtexts. They had installed the company in a thoroughly unremarkable building at 919 Santa Monica Boulevard—the kind of structure you’d drive past countless times without noticing it. Inside proved equally ordinary: standard desks, movie posters, ordinary computers—nothing suggesting this was the company behind the highest-grossing film of all time. The space was aggressively normal, as if architectural anonymity served as camouflage for a filmmaker obsessed with technological boundaries.
This modesty belied the ambition within. What I remember most was their enthusiasm for a script about the Enola Gay and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. The executives were deeply invested in the mission as a technological achievement—until I mentioned that the bombardier had switched off both radar and the automated Norden Bombsight during the approach. Their expressions turned ashen as the technological marvel suddenly acquired profound moral dimensions. Their narrative seemed to dissolve before my eyes, like a scene unexpectedly changing direction—innovation suddenly recontextualized by human choice. (Lightstorm still maintains their unassuming headquarters even after Avatar‘s success—a rare architectural restraint in an industry obsessed with visible manifestations of power.)
From this understated environment, my final interview created architectural whiplash. Julia and Michael Phillips’ Beverly Hills tower office appeared as a time capsule from Hollywood’s 1970s heyday. Far from sleek or commanding, their space resembled an antique shop calcified around the era of their greatest successes with The Sting (1973) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). Dusty and cluttered, it felt less like an office than a mausoleum—the energy of their prime not so much faded as frozen, suspended in amber, the space itself holding its breath, waiting for another moment of glory to animate it again. The panoramic views of Los Angeles provided stark contrast to the interior’s dated aesthetic, like a wide-angle establishing shot suddenly cutting to a cramped interior.
The production design makes deliberate use of three John Lautner houses. Lautner was a protege of Wright. (Courtesy Apple Tv+)
With this history of navigating Hollywood’s architectural statements, I now watch The Studio with heightened awareness of how precisely it frames these dynamics. In Hollywood, buildings aren’t merely workplaces but extensions of ego, taste, and market position. The use of Wright-inspired textile blocks of Continental Studios in The Studio speaks to old Hollywood money and aspirations to artistic legitimacy—concrete patterns literally embedding cultural references into load-bearing walls.
The show’s architectural vocabulary extends beyond Wright. The production design makes deliberate use of three specific John Lautner houses: the Harvey House serves as producer Patty Keigh’s residence (played to comedic perfection by Catherine O’Hara); the Reiner-Burchill Residence (Silvertop) becomes the setting for “The Oner,” an episode where Sarah Polley plays a director attempting to capture a continuous tracking shot during Golden Hour—the house’s flowing spatial dynamics ideal for this cinematic challenge; and the Foster-Carling House doubles as Remick’s personal residence, lending architectural sophistication to a character who, ironically, begins the series tasked with creating a movie about the Kool-Aid Man.
Lautner, who began as Wright’s apprentice before developing his distinctly Californian futurism, created spaces that unfold cinematically—establishing shots waiting to happen, with sweeping views and theatrical reveals. The Sheats-Goldstein Residence didn’t appear in The Big Lebowski (1998) merely for its aesthetic appeal; it appeared because it already communicated a specific type of amoral West Coast hedonism. Lautner’s architecture works perfectly for Hollywood self-representation because it embodies the industry’s own contradictions: technologically innovative yet emotionally manipulative, rigorously structured yet given to grand gestures. His buildings, like the best studio films, create experiences that feel simultaneously surprising and inevitable.
On The Studio Patty Leigh, the character played by Catherine O’Hara, lives in John Lautner’s Harvey House. (Courtesy Apple Tv+)
The dialogue between Wright’s textile blocks and Lautner’s modernism in The Studio creates a visual argument about Hollywood’s relationship with its history—the tension between tradition and innovation that drives development meetings and production decisions. It’s architectural shorthand for the industry’s central conflict: how to seem historically significant while constantly chasing the next new thing.
This tension evokes Thom Andersen’s Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003), that epic meditation on the city’s architectural performance on screen. Andersen understood that Los Angeles buildings rarely play themselves; they’re pressed into service as symbols or stand-ins. The Ennis House that inspired Continental Studios has played everything from Mayan temple to horror movie mansion to futuristic apartment to Yakuza haunt in films like The House on Haunted Hill (1959) and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) and Black Rain (1989), like an architectural character actor suggesting ancient permanence or dystopian dread depending on lighting.
A Recursive Loop
Building on Andersen’s insights, The Studio goes further in its self-referentiality. It uses architecture that has appeared in films to tell a story about making films—a recursive loop that would make Charlie Kaufman proud. When Continental executives have showdowns in textile-block lined rooms, they’re unconsciously reenacting scenes from previous films while ostensibly creating new entertainment. The architecture becomes a physical manifestation of Hollywood’s cannibalistic relationship with its own history.
This self-awareness places The Studio within a distinguished lineage of Hollywood self-portraits, from Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels (1941) through Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950), the Coen brothers’ Barton Fink (1991), and Robert Altman’s The Player (1992). Sullivan’s Travels established the template for representing studio power architecturally through Paramount’s Colonial Revival administration building, suggesting the uneasy marriage between corporate structure and creative chaos. Similarly, Barton Fink’s Hotel Earle serves as both physical setting and psychological metaphor—its peeling wallpaper externalizing the tortured creative process and moral decay of the Hollywood writing machine.
The furniture staged on the set was built in a midcentury style. (Courtesy Apple TV+)
In 2016, the Coens returned to Hollywood with Hail, Caesar!, using golden age studio structures to communicate power hierarchies more explicitly. What distinguishes The Studio is its postmodern deployment of architectural symbolism—aware we’re now layers deep into Hollywood’s self-reflection, with each new depiction commenting not just on the industry but on previous depictions of it.
This layered awareness reveals Hollywood’s deepest insecurities. An industry built on ephemeral images naturally fetishizes concrete, glass, and steel permanence. The textile blocks speak to this desire for solidity—literally made of earth, pressed into repeatable patterns, both artisanal and mass-produced. They’re perfect metaphors for what studios wish their content could be: simultaneously artistic and reproducible, unique yet marketable.
Wright and Lautner serve as architectural patron saints for The Studio precisely because they embody Hollywood’s central tensions. Wright was the ultimate architectural auteur, a singular vision often at odds with practical considerations—mirroring the director-as-genius tradition that studios both celebrate and struggle to contain. Lautner represents California’s optimistic futurism—creating theatrical spaces that manipulate emotion through spatial design, just as blockbusters aspire to do.
Beyond the Film Lot
Watching from the vantage point of architectural academia, I’m struck by how my earlier film industry experiences prepared me to read these spaces. Those interviews in variously impressive offices taught me that Hollywood architecture is never neutral—always performing, always signifying, always pitching something about its occupants. The show’s production designers understand this fundamental truth: Spaces where stories develop become extensions of the narratives themselves. Continental Studios’ headquarters doesn’t just house executives; it houses the idea of executive power—artistic enough to claim cultural significance, solid enough to withstand changing tastes, structured enough to project order amid creative chaos.
The textile blocks speak to a desire for solidity, something filmmakers also strive to achieve. (Courtesy Apple TV+)
Eventually, I shifted my focus from entertainment to architectural history and theory. Watching The Studio, I feel a strange gratitude for those interview experiences, which function in my imperfect memory as, well, Memory Palaces—physical spaces providing permanent architectures for ephemeral encounters long since passed. The Warner lot, the Santa Monica office building, the Beverly Hills tower—each environment anchored conversations and moments that would otherwise be lost to time, teaching me how spaces preserve experience before I had developed the vocabulary to articulate it.
The genius of The Studio as comedy lies partly in how it plays with these architectural references on multiple levels: characters selecting Wright and Lautner designs as status symbols, while the show’s creators simultaneously use those choices to comment on this very process. The textile block walls of Continental Studios and Remick’s modernist home reflect both sincere appreciation and winking acknowledgment of how architectural significance functions as cultural currency in Hollywood. It’s a playful commentary on an industry where even the most authentic spaces serve as carefully curated set pieces in the performance of importance—a truth about an industry built on turning imagination into something that appears solid, enduring, and real. Until, of course, the next development cycle, when everything gets rebuilt again—just like those backlot streets, always ready to be redressed for the next production, always in flux beneath their seemingly permanent facades.
Enrique Ramirez is a historian of art and architecture. He lives in Brooklyn.
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