The TV show set inside a funeral home is about to bite the dust. After the last episode of HBO's deliciously dark "Six Feet Under" airs Aug. 21, the fictional Fisher clan will be gone. And set decorator Sandy Lipscomb will have lost a family she knows almost as intimately as her real-life husband and four kids.
To hear her talk about the Fishers, an oddly dysfunctional family who own, run and live above a Los Angeles-area funeral home and who, quite literally, see dead people every day, you might assume they are real folks in whose home Lipscomb has been a boarder and a snoop.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Thursday July 28, 2005 Home Edition Home Part F Page 6 Features Desk 0 inches; 27 words Type of Material: Correction
TV show -- An article in last week's Home section gave an incorrect first name for "Six Feet Under's" set decorator. She is Rusty Lipscomb, not Sandy.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Saturday July 30, 2005 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 0 inches; 31 words Type of Material: Correction
"Six Feet Under" -- An article in the July 21 Home section about set decoration on the TV show "Six Feet Under" referred to set decorator Rusty Lipscomb as Sandy Lipscomb.
There's repressed mother Ruth, conflicted sons Nate and David, angst-ridden and artsy daughter Claire. Lipscomb knows what's in their bedside drawers, what childhood trophies and toys they've kept, whether they're messy or neat, what colors, foods and furniture they like -- and probably a great many more intimate details that can't even be suggested here.
She knows all this not from reading the scripts, which offer no such details, but from hours spent delving into each of the Fishers' psyches, she says, imagining how they developed from the time they were kids, why they've selected (or rejected) certain signature looks, lovers, friends. And from those ruminations, she and colleagues on the set decided what kind of home and what possessions each might have.
"Scripts are black and white," Lipscomb says. "A set decorator uses imagination to color it in." Although her job, technically, is to supply items that reflect the Fishers' lives, she says her main attachment "is not to the family's physical things, but more to their emotions and thoughts."
From the start, the anchor for the series has been the rambling old Fisher manse with its embalming room, slumber room (where grieving kinfolk view the dead) and a warren of private living spaces where the family hangs out. The house has symbolized to viewers the entire Fisher family panorama and gestalt. Just one shot of the aging, stately, verging-on-seedy house can evoke the show's entire arc.
Rabid fans have debated on the Internet whether the house is in Pasadena or not. It's not.
Alan Poul, an executive producer of the show since its inception, says the Pasadena rumor started early, when the show's creator, Alan Ball, "arbitrarily [and temporarily] decided the Fishers lived in Pasadena in a certain kind of house. When we began looking for the right house, the actual location to shoot, we found it at 25th and Arlington, in the West Adams district." An HBO news release about the show incorrectly mentioned Pasadena as the Fisher home location, the media picked it up, and the misinformation spread.
