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Vice Blog

CRANKING WITH CRANSTON

When I arrived on the Albuquerque Studios lot last month, the fourth season of Breaking Bad was 50 + days and seven episodes into production. Veteran line producer Stewart Lyons lead me to the set through the writers' room, a bright, on this day very tidy, office space roughly the size and luster of a Kinko's. A portion of the right wall was reserved for pinned glossies connecting the season's characters—recurring, new, and for the conspiratorial, evidently dead-dead. I imagined the stumped minds of the show's DEA officers exploding all over the watercooler as they stumbled upon this, the Grand Scheme, one day. On the headquarters' opposite side, lined with offices and a conference room used for "tone meetings," I spotted a glossy of actor Steven Bauer, best known as Manny from Scarface, and apparently thus furthering the fascination and appreciation of series creator, Vince Gilligan, for the 80s coke classic. (Actor Mark Margolis, who menaces as wheelchair-bound mute, Don Salamanica, also costarred in Brian De Palma's hotheaded epic, and Gilligan refers to Walter White's ruthless trajectory as "Mr. Chips becomes Scarface.") Excepting the pilot, Lyons shared that the series had remained here for its entirety, seeing various films (Let Me In, Due Date) come and go, with "the big one," as cabbies and locals doted it, aka The Avengers just ramping up.

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This was my first time at the studio. From a distance its massiveness was isolated in the heat and barren flatness, lending it a militant air. "A signature of Breaking Bad is longer shots. If you remember the meeting on the plains," said Lyons, "where Walt was [seemingly doomed] and met with Gus? That was shot right outside the studio. If you look out there, you can go 270 degrees without seeing a single structure, with a land horizon that's 11 or 12 miles away. We can go from a downtown, urban shot to a desert shot in half-an-hour. That's why New Mexico is great for us." Sets of television shows are generally trippier than ones for films, years of familiarity is shot into a realization of the cast's actual day-to-day. Breaking Bad's was heightened still, a block of murder, secrets, methy millions, and domesticated ennui under the construction smells and sleepy lighting of a Home Depot. High-res pics weren't permitted, but I snapped a few with my phone below. Sorry they are so blurry.

The Whites' house, minus the pool filtering the ashes of dead people, is just as depressing and gloomy as it appears on the tube. According to Lyons, they've built it five times. When I walked into the TV room I expected to find Flynn posted on the couch watching Spongebob. A publicist informed me that teen actor R.J. Mitte wasn't around because he had gotten food poisoning shortly before we arrived. No word if the new season delved into real character development for Walter Jr. Even Mitte himself was left to fill in the blanks the past three seasons, once saying, "I'd like to see where he goes when he goes out. Is Flynn really going to Louis's, or does he go out to some rave in the desert?"

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Holly's crib. I found a dead person's finger under it. They told me to put it back. Every room of the house, with the exception of the kitchen, gave off heavy "poorhouse" vibes. This is like the house of the troubled friend you hungout with after class in high school to secretly feel better about your family. The friend who your mom thinks introduced you to pot when it was the exact opposite.

The actual house presented as Jesse Pinkman's inherited casa in exterior and interior shots has gone through three different owners during the show's run. Lyons implied that the character's methy ways can make it awkward, "We have to tweak their house for the tweakers." A lot of the new season is said to take place here, so the budget justified building this room. It was so gutted and sandblasted gold bars and pistolas wouldn't have looked out of place.

Jesse's staircase, which leads to the bathroom where the amazing acid bath gnarliness occurred in season one (the sequence that got me hooked).

The back office of Gus Fring at Los Pollos Hermanos had an impressive level of detail, from dog-eared schedules to this framed document, all to create a facade for a millionaire psychopath. A tiny safe left ajar just made me feel sad.

This chicken suit in Gus's office made me feel sadder. It smelled like chicken and reminded me of the time I almost died (not of Cuban-honking satisfaction) after eating at Pollo Tropical in Miami. I don't recall if the show ever made someone wear this thing. I do wonder who gets more alpha-joy from ordering an employee to go cosplay on the street: Fring or

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Eastbound & Down

's

Ashley Schaeffer

with his sign-thrumming ape? Maybe the DEA will go "underfeather" and walk into Fring's establishment like Tommy Lee Jones in this clip from

U.S. Marshals

….

Mr. Bob Odenkirk wasn't on location during the visit either. Goddamn if Saul's office isn't the raddest.

What are the odds that the final season---most likely season six---ends with Saul on the umbrella drink beach from Cocktail?

Walter ditches the blacklight arcade in season quatro to partner with Skyler and position the Car Wash as a laundering front. I'm guessing the irony is mostly lost on 'em, similar to Ted Beneke running tax hustles as the boss of "Beneke Fabricators."

The car wash was fully stocked with pine tree air fresheners and kitty-adorned cards. The usz. Walter was ringing this shit up at the start of the first season, now he's the ABQ's all-American Mr. Clean.

Welcome to Super Lab.

"Making this show," said Lyons, "we have to understand how to manufacture meth at this level. And we have the documents to do so. Going through them, what's scary is how the drug can be manufactured at several different levels, and this is what Walter has achieved. Or to be precise, what Gus Fring has had built. We call it 'Super Lab,' and some of us call it simply, 'The Space Ship,' because building something like this… it's out of a sci-fi movie. All the steel was fabricated and the lab's stairwell was built in. As you know, the fictional entrance to 'Super Lab' is an enormous washing machine. And that exists in an industrial laundry not too far from here. We have DEA advisers who tell us what operation would go where, and there's a chemistry professor we also consult with. Some of the tanks have glass bottoms to get those signature Breaking Bad shots."

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Poking around the lab, the sci-fi parallel is spot-on, like beep-boop props out of Flash Gordon. The stairwell platform and red entrance above the tanks is the same height as it appears on the show, but the lab itself is more constrained than one would think. "I would guarantee that the red theme of the Super Lab was Vince [Gilligan]," said Lyons. "The scripts have an extraordinary level of detail. By the time we get the outline, [set design] almost never changes. Ten to 15-page outlines. For the lab, they went to an architectural firm. We had a cardboard model built, and you can figure camera angles from that."

"It was an enormous scramble to assemble this, to do the research," said Lyons. "When someone writes in, 'Gale has an incredible coffee set-up, someone has to go… 'OK. It's not a Mr. Coffee.' And yes, they can get coffee out of that thing." (Note: crew said the coffee was shite.) Apparently, the coffee maker is still in the lab, even though Gale now resides in a big cup of black.

Hell Lab wasn't hurting for supplies.

The site of so much Breaking Bad fan-fic.

The secret recipe. I'm still unclear why Gus doesn't have cameras set up in the lab to learn the exact formula and preparation for Walt's adulterated rock candy. (If you didn't know, the meth in the show is actually rock candy.)

Bryan Cranston was super nice. It was almost a year to the day that he and Aaron Paul were in NYC for Vice's Breaking Bad premiere party for season three. He demanded another. After saying that my beard was slightly intimidating---while dressed as Walt White as a gangbanger from GTA: San Andreas---he agreed to take a photo. He was like, "What should I do?" It was the closest I've ever come to directing a consecutive three-time Emmy winner for Best Actor. I said, "Let's do, like, the Walt White leer. Do something with your hands." He said my future was bright.

I ended up with two baggies of the good good as a memento. Totally forgot I had 'em when I emptied my pockets at the airport. (Note: TSA was more concerned with a bottle of contact solution.)

HUNTER STEPHENSON

Look for a post containing interviews and discussion of the new "hits the ground running and doesn't stop" season closer to the July premiere.