The best noirs have a strong sense of time and place. But what if your noir hero is pretty messy? And what if your place is somewhere not instantly recognizable like Los Angeles or New York City? That was the challenge put to the crew of Sterlin Harjo’s acclaimed FX series “The Lowdown,” which stars Ethan Hawke as Lee Raybon, a self-described “truthstorian” stumbling upon conspiracies and crimes in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Shot entirely in and around Tulsa, “The Lowdown” offered unique challenges to production designer Brandon Tonner-Connolly, who’s no stranger to the Oklahoma metropolis, having worked with Harjo on “Reservation Dogs” for three years.
“We wanted to approach this shaggy detective story where somebody is roaming through the different zones of a city and different subcultures and everything, but instead of it being LA or New York, we want it to be Tulsa, and show this world that you haven’t really seen in film or TV before,” he explained.
The overall look of the show’s sets was inspired by the harsh Tulsa weather – very hot in the summer, very cold in the winter. “Things tend to wear a bit,” he said. “You kind of get that dust bowl noir quality to it.”
But the first step in building out the world was finding where to create Lee’s apartment and place of business, a cozy and fittingly disorganized used book store. Tonner-Connolly also needed to craft additional locations nearby for some of Lee’s usual haunts – namely a law office and a diner. Luckily, all four materialized in the form of an abandoned block on which the crew built these locations. The camera could trail Lee out of the bookstore, onto the street, then inside the law office, all with a picturesque view of the Tulsa skyline.
“We don’t have any soundstages, so we built everything into these spaces that we found there,” Tonner-Connolly said. “The whole premise of the show is you’re following Ethan’s character as he dips in and out of these different spaces and worlds with this madcap energy sometimes, so we wanted to have the freedom where he could be walking down 6th Street, pop into this store, pop out, pop into this thing and not worry about cutting up the exteriors and interiors.”
Tonner-Connolly, an avid bookstore fan, raided local used bookstores to fill out Lee’s shop—but not too tidily. The messiness of Lee’s mind is made manifest in the store. The result was so convincing that passersby would frequently knock on the faux bookstore asking when it was going to open.
Indeed, Tonner-Connolly leaned on the Tulsa community and even Facebookn Marketplace to source props and set dressing, given that the city doesn’t have a local prop house like L.A. He sees that as a feature, not a bug. “We’re not renting the same old thing that you might see in some other show. We’re forced to go out there, and we’re finding new and unique things.”
Sometimes that involved meeting up with a stranger at a gas station to buy a sculpture or resurrecting pieces from a decades-abandoned local theme park for a sequence set at a counterfeit caviar cove tucked away by a lake.
“One of the things that I love about this show, and about Sterlin’s writing in general, is he treats all the characters with empathy,” Tonner-Connolly said.
So when it came time to create this illegal lake-adjacent compound, the production designer put a lot of thought into the reason the brothers in charge of the operation were running it. “How can we create a backstory and design a space that tells the story of these people, and tells the story of these characters, and doesn’t leave it as a one-note thing, but actually invites you to look at why they’re there and what they’re doing?” Even if what they’re doing is selling paddlefish eggs as caviar.
Welcome to Oklahoma.
