Five Votes Down - Production Notes

Production Notes

The cold open of this episode features the longest and most ambitious steadicam walk-and-talk scene to date. Over four minutes in length, it was shot on location at The Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.

Director of photography Tom Del Ruth recalls, "It started out on the dance floor, went into the lobby, through the top-floor kitchen area, down two flights of stairs into the bowels of the kitchen and through the cavernous kitchen, where food was being prepared for a banquet. We worked our way through that area, went down another flight of stairs to where the laundry facilities are, then proceeded into the catacombs, all the way through the base of the hotel and out into the parking lot, where we ended up in a motorcade. The shot involved more than 500 extras and nearly all of the major cast members, and it was all done in one seamless Steadicam shot. Each take required one magazine of film, and the actors had to pass off dialogue from one person to another. It required quite a bit of orchestration. It was about a five-page scene and took us half the night ." This required steadicam operator Dave Chameides to walk backwards at full speed for over thirteen takes, nearly collapsing in exhaustion by the end of the shoot. During the shot, an astonishing 11 different characters have speaking parts (counting the Josh fangirls as 1).