Secrets Of The Cars Of Widow’s Bay Revealed By The People Who Sourced Them

I know all of you are car-owners, but I suspect many of you also own televisors, or television sets, or as they are sometimes called with vulgar familiarity, “TVs.” If you have such devices, I suspect you may have heard of a teleprogram called Widow’s Bay, which is broadcast on the AppleTV network, which is think is somewhere on the UHF dial. It’s a great horror-comedy series that has become something of a sleeper hit, and with good reason. It’s genuinely good, a really skillful mix of horror and comedy, much like, you know, real life.

The series takes place on a small New England island about 40 miles off the mainland, a fairly isolated place, not exactly prosperous, and the whole look of everything reflects that. It’s sort of a place out of time, there’s no cell service, buildings are old, it’s not the easiest place to get the newest whatevers, and the cars reflect that, too.

I was so taken by the interesting and evocative car choices made for the show that I wrote a whole writeup about them. You can see some of those cars in this teaser for the show:

Whoever chose the cars for the show did a fantastic job, I think, and I was quite curious about what the whole car-casting process was like. My curiosity may well have gone unfulfilled, until someone named Carrie Capizzano reached out to me, because she was the owner of one of the cars used in the show! Carrie is a scenic artist for movies and television, so is very familiar with the process of picking cars for these sorts of shows.

Here’s how Carrie describes what she does specifically:

Technically I’m not in the picture car department – vehicles that appear on camera are called “picture cars” – but I’m car people, and I work closely with that department, often because everyone knows that. I’m a scenic artist. That is, wildly oversimplified, a painter.  People wonder what those two departments would have to do with each other, but trust me: a lot. When I say paint, I mean any aesthetic modification that isn’t, say, structural or electrical or applied directly to an actor. It’s paint, it’s texture, it’s sculpture, it’s dirt, it’s signs, vinyl, wallpaper, aging and distressing, graffiti, reflectivity, whatever affects storytelling through objects. Cars have a LOT of that. I’ve spent more of my life than you want to know on things like “windshield continuity.”

Even if Carrie wasn’t directly involved with casting the Widow’s Bay cars, she knows who is: Theo Orfanos.

Carrie also explained the car-casting process quite eloquently:

“Car casting,” like every aspect of film, is collaborative. It’s not the top-down process a lot of people envision, exactly. There are lots more people with lots more voice. The picture car coordinator is the one who takes concrete or emotional directives and sources vehicles to match. Sometimes these directives are specific (“I’d definitely see this character with a 2001-2002 Chevy Tahoe in a dark color”), and sometimes, not so much.  I could run on about this process, but it’s better coming from Theo or another coordinator.

Well, I was thrilled that she reached out, and, even better, she agreed to get her and Theo on to talk all about the process of picking the cars for Widow’s Bay. And that’s exactly what they did, here on this episode of Carbage Time! Which you can watch, right here!

Or, if you’re currently piloting a dirigible or performing a root canal and can’t watch, you can just listen here, or, really, any of the seedy places a degenerate like yourself finds their podcasts:

Theo and Carrie are both delightful people, and getting an inside look at how the process works, creatively and technically, was fascinating. They only had two weeks to source all the cars, for example! Holy crap!

If you’ve ever wondered what the process is like to match cars to characters in television or movies, you really need to give this a listen. Or if you’re just a fan of Widow’s Bay and are craving more content? Here you go!

Oh, and as a bonus, Carrie sent me some pictures of some of the cars from the show in their off-hours, where they are being stored right now.

There’s Squidwig herself, taking a break from show biz to haul a canoe.

Here’s that wonderful Corvair Greenbriar cargo van from the last episode of the show, one of my favorite cars of the whole series.

And finally, there’s the Ford Explorer cop car used by the beleaguered Sheriff of the island.

I’m still excited I was able to have these two creative people on the podcast, and all of this just reinforces the idea that being a picture car coordinator seems like a fascinating job.