When Production Designer Bruce Miller sets the stage for an episode of the ABC television show “Revenge,” he knows not to shoot any scenes with the Santa Monica Mountains in the background.
“It’s hard to turn [the South Bay] into the Hamptons,” said Miller. “We use the beach and have to be careful not to show the big mountains.”
“Revenge,” a drama about a woman’s vendetta against the people who wronged her father, was shot in North Carolina for the pilot episode. When ABC picked up the show, Manhattan Beach became the permanent location, with MBS Media Campus, (formerly Raleigh Studios), as the production studio.
The first episode of the two-season series centers on an elaborate party and a murder at a sprawling Hampton estate called the Grayson Manor. It is a gigantic, foreboding fortress supposedly located near the beach. However, the place doesn’t actually exist, at least not in one location and not at all on the West Coast.
“The Grayson Manor exterior-wise is a combination of a North Carolina house and two big houses in the Hamptons,” said Miller. “They’ve used pieces of it [put together].”
The main character Emily Thorne, played by Emily VanCamp, lives next to the manor in the show, but in real life is neighbors with a soundstage.
“We have room around [Emily’s] house to put a blue screen,” Miller said. “With the Grayson’s, the backyard is narrow and tight and there is a big drop, so it really doesn’t do what they do in the Hamptons where they have a yard that’s half of a mile long and then sand dunes and a big view of the ocean—we just don’t have those and we don’t have houses like that here. We have to just fake it.”
They fake other things, too. The characters who live in the manor, Conrad and Victoria Grayson, played by Henry Czerny and Madeleine Stowe, are not often seen going to the beach since California beaches aren’t exactly like their East coast counterparts.
Emily, however, is often filmed walking from her porch to the ocean, but those scenes are shot with Emily walking from her soundstage house into fake sand dunes and blue screen, and are then combined in post production, with her continuing onto Dockweiler Beach in Playa Del Rey or Malibu.
“We look out to the ocean a great deal or else everything is really fuzzy,” said Miller. “And there aren’t any power plants in the Hampton so we don’t look towards them. They also don’t have palm trees, so we try to stay behind sand dunes, [but] there aren’t many.”
Miller is in charge of the art department, which includes set designers, the construction crew, set decorating and props. He also has a lot of say as to where they film each scene. Although he can mimic the Grayson manor on set down to the tinniest detail, there are problems with shooting on-location, like sunsets and sunrises. So the crew shoots the colorful West Coast sunset as an East Coast sunrise.
“Plus the architecture is so different,” Miller added. “It’s really Cape Coddy there so here if we know we’re not trying to do a wide shot and we’re just focusing on the people we fake it with signage. You’ll notice we won’t be wandering around town because it’s hard to do and make it a New England town— the writers know it would be really expensive so they just don’t write it.”
For outdoor shots the crew often moves the set to El Segundo or heads to downtown L.A. to mimic the feel of New York. In late January, the crew filmed a wedding for the season two episode of “Union” on Torrance Beach.
“There was a lot of dialogue during the wedding so we didn’t want to be at Dockweiler where the airplanes make a lot of noise,” Miller said. “It’s a tough beach because of the mountains and the way it curves around, so we have to be careful not to show too much of it.” B
