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 1924) in Pasadena. The Studio takes obvious pleasure in its architectural world building, crafting Continental’s invented home with unusual on-screen richness. Over the course of ten hour-long episodes, we are allowed to luxuriate in room after room of intricate carvings, plush textures, and impossibly buttery lighting. This is “a literal temple of cinema.” (We overhear the tour guide’s spiel in the show’s first five minutes.) I lost count of the number of textile block brise soleils.
Architecture and Hollywood have always been natural bedfellows, but rarely has their shared obsession with mise-en-scène been leveraged to such deliberately metaconceptual ends. The Studio’s précis is familiar: The movie business has lost its luster, its magic curtailed by the scourge of commercialization and an ever-growing addiction to “bankable” IP. Within the show Wright’s design serves as a delicious (if obvious) metaphor for Tinseltown’s faded grandeur, a sort of conflation of architectural and filmic auteurism. But it also struck me as a fetish—a sepia- toned fabulation of a past that never existed. This is the golden age of cinema seen through a golden-hour filter. In actuality, studios of the era often favored more restrained moderne styles for their corporate architecture. Would Louis B. Mayer (or his accountant) have ever signed off on a design so lush, so louche, so über-Wright as this? Here, even Wright’s signature concrete blocks—originally prized for their cheapness—are ready for their close-up. As the show’s production designer, Julie Berghoff, told Dwell earlier this year, the production team used glass aggregate to ensure the blocks sparkled in the light.
On-screen at least, The Studio’s lustrous specificity convinces—more so than, say, the particle-board modernism of Severance or the backlot Beaux Arts of The Gilded Age. If only the real offices of Hollywood today had half as much charisma. While Paramount still operates from its iconic Melrose lot, others have embraced far less cinematic environs. In 2023, Warner Bros. consolidated thousands of employees into a silvery Frank Gehry–designed complex inspired, for unclear reasons, by glaciers. Looming over the Ventura Freeway, the building certainly chills. And next year, Creative Artists Agency will relocate to a high-performance glass-and-steel skyscraper of the kind not uncommon in most major American cities. The site’s address now rings like a sad anachronism: 1950 Avenue of the Stars.