In 1927, Frank Lloyd Wright—having decamped to Los Angeles for a personal and professional reset in the city he once called “that far corner of the United States”—completed one of his more extraordinary commissions, an office building for the Continental Studios film company. The design was an outlandish application of his Mayan Revival style, a moody synthesis of Mesoamerican archaism and old Hollywood glamour. You can still visit the building today, where a uniformed tour guide will parade you through this working monument to moviemaking.
Just kidding. Such is the fictitious conceit at the heart of The Studio, Apple TV+’s Emmy Award–winning workplace comedy about a once-mighty, now-flailing film studio and the neurotic executives (played by Seth Rogen, Ike Barinholtz, and Kathryn Hahn, among others) who keep it going. Much of the show’s action unfolds within this Fake Lloyd Wright, a seductive Gesamtkunstwerk of concrete block construction in keeping with Wright’s real LA-based work from this period, such as the Ennis House in Los Feliz and the Millard House (both…