Set Design

George Clooney Tells AD About His Personal Connection to The Tender Bar

The director enlisted production designer Kalina Ivanov and set decorator Melissa Levander to create a multilayered 1970s watering hole for his new film starring Ben Affleck

By Lisa Liebman

December 17, 2021

The Tender Bar starring Ben Affleck and Tye Sheridan opens in Los Angeles and New York on December 17 and nationwide... — *The Tender Bar,* starring Ben Affleck and Tye Sheridan (right), opens in Los Angeles and New York on December 17, and nationwide December 22. It launches on Prime Video January 7, 2022.Photo: Claire Folger/ © 2021 Amazon Content Services LLC

Much thought goes into the look of a 1970s blue-collar bar on Long Island when it reflects the title of a new film directed by George Clooney and is presided over by an affable bartender played by Ben Affleck. “It felt like a good time to do a film that was kind and gentle,” Clooney tells AD via email about choosing an adaptation of J.R. Moehringer’s Pulitzer Prize–winning memoir, The Tender Bar, as his eighth directorial effort.

A bar in Beverly, MA, became The Dickens. Production designer Kalina Ivanov says George Clooney “absolutely loved it because the building is almost slightly crooked like the Tower of Pisa.”

The story plays out from the perspective of J.R. (Daniel Ranieri, and later Tye Sheridan), the film’s nine-year-old protagonist, as he and his mom, a broke secretary named Dorothy (Lily Rabe), move back in with her quirky parents. In their neglected house in Manhasset, New York, her bartender-brother, Charlie, still lives. J.R’s disc jockey dad (Max Martini) is mostly MIA—and an “asshole on the radio,” according to the boy’s ornery grandfather (Christopher Lloyd), an Ivy-educated former Wall Streeter with just enough money to get by.

Charlie updated his childhood bedroom with a paint job and improvised storage for all of his books.

After Clooney and the crew played with a vintage shuffleboard game and realized it was warped, they aged a new one to make it ’70s appropriate.

J.R. is drawn to The Dickens bar and his charismatic autodidact uncle, who holds court with his barfly friends Chief (Max Casella), Bobo (Michael Braun), and Joey D (Matthew Delamater) like he owns the place. The gold-chain wearing, Cadillac-driving bachelor fills a void for the fatherless boy, warning him that his dad won’t save him, and based on his athleticism, to skip sports. He also instructs his nephew in the “male sciences” (“You don’t hit a woman, ever, up to and including if she has stabbed you with scissors”), and introduces him to a library of classics. Stashed in his bedroom closet and stacked on The Dickens’ shelves, these books lead to J.R.’s writing aspirations.

Though Clooney’s first brush with bar life was also as a kid—in Kentucky, his uncle lived above a pub and would send him to buy cigarettes and beer—his experience didn’t influence the film’s happy hours. “It was very, very dark at noon,” he says of the beat-up place. “The same people sat on the same bar stools every day. Like Cheers only with a certain desperate feel to the reason they were sitting there at noon. No books, just horse-racing forms and a radio playing the races.”

“The Dickens was such a fun set to decorate because it had so many layers,” set decorator Melissa Levander says. She sourced the tables and chairs from a Boston-area restaurant purging some older furniture. Production designer Kalina Ivanov says Levander talked her into the yellow bar chairs.

Set decorator Levander thought it was important to illuminate the bookshelves, and found small unique lamps that she fit into them. The other light fixtures are a mix of vintage and reproductions, spanning from the ’40s to the late ’70s, to give the bar a period feel.

When prepping the film, Clooney asked production designer Kalina Ivanov to check out the tavern in The Deer Hunter as a reference. She says that led to “our interpretation of a neighborhood Irish bar, very warm, inviting, and yet very working class with its own history and heroes.” Posters of boxers fill the mostly wood-paneled walls, and many shelves accommodate Charlie’s overflow of hardcovers. Set decorator Melissa Levander placed old bottles, cigar boxes, model ships, and vintage ceramics of drunks leaning on lampposts between the books for added character.

Clooney played and then selected the prop games, ultimately rejecting a 1960s mini-bowling machine he deemed too short in favor of a vintage shuffleboard table that had to be replaced with a new one because the period piece was warped. Levander found the vintage pool table online. Even though only the actors would see them, Ivanov graffitied passages from David Copperfield and The Iceman Cometh on the bathroom walls to add to the vibe.

A residence with a windowed enclosed porch near Lowell, MA, was exactly what production designer Kalina Ivanov was looking for. “It was as decrepit as I imagined, and the smallest house on the block,” she says.

The family’s saltbox-style house is dilapidated, designed both inside and out from a 1940s perspective to show “the various periods of their deteriorating financial state,” Levander explains. An eclectic mix of furnishings fill the living room, including a couch covered with a 1976 bicentennial fabric of the founding fathers, an orange La-Z-Boy-style vintage chair for grandpa, and custom print drapes aged with washing, tearing, and staining. Dorothy’s perfectly preserved girl’s room has circus wallpaper designed by Ivanov, who also designed the kitchen cabinets in the room filled with appliances from different eras.

The couch covered in bicentennial fabric was reproduced based on the real one J.R. Moehringer describes in his 2005 memoir. The sofa, along with some of the living room’s other large pieces, was sourced from Westerman Props Warehouse in Worcester, MA. The only thing the family ever updated was their TV.

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Though locations in and around Boston were stand-ins for Long Island, a planned scene at New York’s Shea Stadium with J.R., Charlie, and the bar crew had to be scuttled due to COVID-19. Instead, a bowling alley last updated in the late ’60s, early ’70s in nearby Wakefield became the male-bonding site. “There was candlepin bowling all along the Northeast,” Clooney says, when it’s suggested the sport played with a small ball and tall narrow pins is a New England phenomenon. “Believe me, we were relieved when we heard that. I used to do it in Ohio as well as a kid.”