Less than a week after staging a decor-heavy post-screening event for Boardwalk Empire, HBO painted New York red again for the second-season premiere party for its offbeat comedy series Bored to Death. Picking up where they left off with the Brooklyn literary hipster look of last year's event, the team from the television network borrowed even more ideas from the show and its native borough. Tuesday night's effort, a collaboration between HBO's special event crew, led by manager Allison Castillo, and the media relations department, brought 400 guests from a screening at Skirball Center for the Performing Arts to a scarlet-colored Capitale littered with S&M club-inspired decor, Chuck Close-style portraits, and branded pool tables.
"Since [last year's event] was for the inaugural season of the show, we had wanted to set the scene with the literary and detective themes. This year, that has already been established and the characters have been established," explained HBO director of special events Cindy Tenner, who planned the 2009 premiere party and this year worked alongside Castillo and event designer DeJuan Stroud. So this event's visuals took more specific cues from Bored to Death, focusing on scenes from the first three episodes of season two, which Stroud and the HBO team prescreened.
"DeJuan came in and watched the first three episodes, and there were a couple of things that really jumped out at everybody," said Castillo of the design process. "One thing was the scenes with the S&M club, which is in two of the first three episodes. It was a fun, cheeky thing that we could use, but in a tasteful and not so literal way. Another thing DeJuan came up with that we all responded to were the Chuck Close-inspired portraits. That was a detail he noticed and brought to us." And since the site was not in Brooklyn, an underlying thought was to bring in some sense of the borough, too.
With these images in mind, Capitale became two venues—a dive-y Brooklyn pool hall in the front and a raunchier, S&M dungeon dominated by a red and black color scheme in the ballroom. Attention was paid to detail in both spaces, with dim lighting and undressed floors to emphasize a certain grunginess for the pool area, and metal studs, chains, and hooks and eyes decorating the vinyl and leather cloth used to cover the bars, couches, tables, and vases as an allusion to S&M clubs. At the center of the ballroom Stroud hung 5- by 5 1/2-foot portraits of the show's three characters. And just as last year's effort had provided games for guests, the goal again this year was to add activities to the overall design.
"We like to do something a little fun at events, so the idea of having games or something people can do was a concept we also wanted our designer to incorporate," Castillo said. Beside providing the pool tables, Stroud integrated photo booths into his plan. To avoid having these components stick out like a sore thumb, the designer built custom facades of quilted red velvet, branded the photo strips with the show's logo, and supplied kinky props like dog collars, whips, and handcuffs.
With more shows being filmed in New York, HBO plans to host more events here. "There's so much of our stuff going on in L.A.—a lot of premieres and events—but a lot of more of our production is coming back to the East Coast, which we're very happy about," said Castillo, who is based in New York.