Euphoria fans: anyone else notice Maddy’s basement apartment exterior get its hero shot moment in ep 3??
OK, if you were a bit distracted by the wedding insanity, I get it… But Maddy’s Apt Ext was particularly special for me, because of all the locations we scouted for, I think this one might have technically taken the longest to find… Which is odd, because it’s such a short scene!
But I started around Oct ’24, and it was one the last locations I scouted nearly a year later in September. Why did it take so long? Two reasons…
First, because it’s so short, it’s the sort of location you want to find near an “anchor” location, where the brunt of a day’s filming will take place. So if you have, say, a major restaurant scene, you’ll then go out and find the best apartment exteriors close to the restaurant.
The problem is that smaller scenes like this always have a habit of jumping around the schedule. So you’ll scout a bunch of options near the restaurant, only for it to abruptly be reassigned to a house location halfway across town. So you do it all over, again and again.
The second issue is that the actual location as described – an apartment building with a door leading down to a basement unit – is about as rare as it gets in Los Angeles. Like, Bigfoot sighting rare.
Basements on their own just aren’t ubiquitous here like they are in much of the country, and an actual basement apartment with its own dedicated staircase?? Most likely, this was going to be a cheat, maybe the rear entrance to a building, or a back door leading to a laundry room.
So how do you go scouting for rear apartment entrances when most are gated or walled off, and not visible from the street? Sometimes, a real estate listing or Google Maps’ satellite view gives a hint of something promising.
But most of the time, you just go street by street, searching for buildings that look right from the front, then do what you can to get a glimpse of the back (if you saw a guy standing on his car to see over a concrete wall over the past year, good chance it was me!).
There was obviously no shortage of rear doors, but nearly all had a few steps leading UP into the building, and it just killed the vibe of going down to a subterranean unit. We did the search several times, never really finding a great option only to be saved by a schedule change.
Finally, toward the end of the shoot, it was on the calendar for a neighborhood known for its older homes that have since been broken up into apartments. I saw a row of buildings that looked mildly promising from the front and headed into the back alley…
And suddenly: there it was, this gorgeous, hundred year-old-behemoth with a rear doorway, beautifully textured clapboards, towering dormer window, LA skyline in the distance…and…wait…does that door actually go to a real, honest-to-god basement apartment??
I run around front, and because the stars have clearly aligned, the apt manager is just randomly hanging out on the street. I breathlessly make my pitch, and he says he’s interested, probably wondering all the while why this crazy guy with a camera is so impressed by his basement door.
Yep, this is indeed the kind of find that location scouts get excited about, that one place that no amount of research or pre-planning could have uncovered, and it’s nothing more than a dice roll of the universe that causes you to turn a corner and magically find exactly what you were looking for from the start.
As always, how it appears in the episode is ENTIRELY due to the unbelievable creative work of the entire production team, but this is one canvas I’m especially proud to have helped provide.
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