Production Designer Ethan Tobman on Recreating Vintage 1990s Glory for ‘Pam & Tommy’

Reading this headline, if you’re anywhere near my age, you have a little heartache over thinking about the 1990s as “vintage.” Yet, what seems like yesterday was actually nearly 30 years ago.

Yikes.

Production designer Ethan Tobman (Free Guy) doesn’t feel that same anxiety. He approaches the era in a very practical, less age-focused manner.

“If I was in the 90s doing a 1960s piece, then you would never question whether or not that was period, and it’s the same amount of time. When you imagine the culture of CDs, laser discs, or Walkmans, you start empathizing with how much our world has changed since then,” Pam & Tommy production designer Tobman explains.

That span of time means it’s also been nearly 30 years since the legendary Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee sex tape surfaced, first sold on mail-order videotapes before migrating online as the first streaming internet sex sensation. Hulu’s limited series Pam & Tommy explores a version of these events as well as the impact on Anderson (Lily James) and Lee’s (Sebastian Stan) personal lives. It also asks the audience to revisit the scandal through the prism of a 2022 mindset. As with the creative team behind the series, audience’s viewpoints on the infamous sex tape and the tabloid-level discourse around it has dramatically changed.

“I remember the videotape being kind of suddenly everywhere in college, and I never watched it. But like most people, I didn’t think very much of Pam Anderson or Tommy Lee as people I should sympathize with or whose privacy had been breached,” Tobman recalls. “When I first read the script, I remembered thinking [Pam & Tommy‘s] really a symbol for the loss of privacy that we all now endure. This was the first moment where I think we all were confronted with that, and we all acted shamefully.”

During Tobman’s first meeting with Pam & Tommy director Craig Gillespie (I, Tonya), he understood Gillespie’s vision and intent for the project and discovered they had similar sensibilities regarding the material. Gillespie’s number one edict was that the production team had to treat these characters with the utmost respect. They could not emerge as caricatures, and as Tobman began his research, he began to respect both Anderson and Lee, recognizing that Anderson’s arc resembled that of the classic Hollywood story of a wide-eyed innocent seeking her dreams only to have them crushed by outside forces.

Filming Pam & Tommy required that Tobman and his team build every major set you see on-screen. The Lee house. Various apartments. The Tonight Show set. The porn studios. The law offices. The airplane. Cancun.

All of these sets were built from scratch.

“What I never experienced before was the pace of a limited series period show. We have grown so accustomed to these shows, changing locations, every three or four pages. You’re racing to stay ahead of camera, no matter how much prep time you have,” Tobman explains, “and everything ends up being built because you are running out of time to find the right location, and you don’t have time to move the company from A to B.”

One of the most challenging sets to build was Tommy Lee’s home. Lee’s remodeling of his bedroom (and his admittedly bad behavior during the process) kicks off the events surrounding the sex tape. Since Lee changed his mind frequently through the process, the set had to shift to reflect the Lee’s redirections as reflected in the script. Because the build took place on a period construction site, Tobman relied on his art director Tom Wilkins to find period tieback and insulation that would have been available to construction crews at the time, a time before everybody went to Home Depot or Lowes.

The room also had to mature and shift as different construction crews work on it in the series. Because Lee changed his mind frequently, Tobman had to rebuild the set while the crew shot in other rooms.

“It was really, really fun to design a set that you knew you’d never see completed on camera, but that you had to have an idea of what it would look like when it crosses the finish line,” Tobman shares.

Other sets were also built with careful attention to detail, authenticity, and reflection of that character’s theme. For example, once Anderson moves into Lee’s home, their mutual attraction to Eastern religions began to appear as religious artifacts within the house set. Anderson’s color preferences of beige and white differed dramatically from Lee’s love of red, blacks, and shiny purples. With Seth Rogan’s Rand Gauthier’s apartment, the color palate of burnt mustard and greens that reflect Rand’s struggle to survive emotionally. The lack of light in Rand’s space reflects his internal shame. Taylor Shilling’s former porn star character Erica lives in a crumbling Hollywood deco apartment that reflects her cracked and crumbling Hollywood dreams.

The love, attention to detail, and extreme sensitivity inherent within Tobman’s production design reflects that of a carefully orchestrated and sensitive limited series with much more on its mind than a simple sex tape exposé.

In fact, Tobman and team needed to replicate period-specific pornographic film sets so that they could authentically reflect Erica, and eventually Rand’s, porn shoots. During the 1990s videotape porn boom, budgets for pornographic films were actually much larger than they are today, so they needed to research exactly how the 1990s porn industry operated to ensure authenticity. That research obviously uncovered potentially triggering material for those working on the production, but Tobman ensured those involved felt seen and safe.

“I had a meeting in the art department where I mentioned, ‘Okay, there’s gonna be some really, really racy images around this office, and we can protect you from this. If you feel uncomfortable, say so. Don’t look at them,’ ” Tobman recalls.

Pam & Tommy streams exclusively on Hulu.