The Set Decorator
The problem
Clearing one piece of on-screen artwork through a standard image chain — locating the rights-holder, confirming the license tier, getting written sign-off in a form your E&O insurer will accept — routinely takes a working week. On a show with 200 frames of dressed wall art, that is a coordinator's quarter.
Our library is cleared up front, with the license terms named in the file. The art is on-shelf, not in negotiation.
A studio shoot in the LA basin might touch fifteen or more prop houses across the Valley, the Eastside, and South Bay — plus archival shops, estate dealers, and one-off specialty rentals. There is no canonical index. Crews rebuild that map every show.
We maintain the public index, with per-store film attribution traced to published decorator interviews.
Decorators, production managers, and unit production managers lean on word-of-mouth when a clearance question turns into a legal question. That works until it doesn't — and the gap shows up in the E&O claim, not in the production schedule. We surface the public legal landscape — state bar entertainment sections, arts-legal nonprofits, and ranking directories — filterable by union, theatre, film, and commercial experience. Informational only. We do not refer; we do not advise. We make the existing public layer searchable so an art-dept lead can hand a credible shortlist to in-house counsel in the time it takes to make a phone call.
What we ship
A production-vetted library of paintings, illustrations, photography, and patterns — each with explicit on-screen license terms named in the record. Filterable by era, palette, orientation, and frame style. Owned-and-licensed inventory only; no stock-image second-hand chains, no maybe-this-clears assumptions. The dressing decision and the clearance decision happen at the same moment, in the same record. Built to retire the "we'll deal with the art after the walk-through" workflow that turns into a Friday-afternoon E&O fire on a Monday shoot. Paired with same-day Uber Direct delivery inside the LA basin and production-shipper handoff anywhere else.
Browse the library → LegalState bar entertainment sections, arts-legal nonprofits, and the public ranking directories — consolidated into one filterable list. Sortable by union/guild, theatre, film/TV, and commercial experience, plus state and city. CSV import for in-house counsel who want to seed it with their own verified list. Every entry carries an "informational only — not legal advice" disclosure. We do not run a referral business and we do not take fees from listed firms. The point is to compress the hours an art-dept lead currently spends asking around into a single search a coordinator can run before lunch.
Open the directory → SourcingOne search across stores, prop houses, vendors, theatre departments, jobs, and attorneys — instead of seven open tabs. Hits land in a working basket; the basket compiles into a printable itinerary with map order, addresses, and CSV export. Two ordering modes: legal-first, when a clearance stop has to anchor the day, and prop-house-first, when the dressing list is leading. Driver-handoff-ready. The version a coordinator hands a PA on Tuesday morning is the same artifact the decorator built on Monday night. No copy-paste between tools, no rebuilding the route on the dashboard of a passenger van.
Open Fancy Search → AttributionThe only public dataset linking specific film and television properties — pieces actually used in scenes you can name — to the specific prop houses, archival shops, and dealers they came from. Every attribution traces back to a published decorator interview, an SDSA Set Decor article, or a named on-the-record source. Built for the moment when an art-dept lead has to defend a sourcing decision in a Monday production meeting, or a producer is asking why this specific store is in the budget. Trust is built by citing the interview, not by claiming the credit. Updated as new interviews publish.
Browse sources →Restraint
The Set Decorator is not affiliated with SDSA, ADG, IATSE, USA 829, USITT, TCG, or any union or guild. We surface public information about them; we do not represent them.
The attorneys directory is informational and explicitly so. We do not replace in-house counsel, your production's E&O carrier, or a bonded clearance vendor when the matter calls for one.
We do not accept placement fees from listed firms or vendors. We do not stake credit for film projects we did not source through a published interview. We surface what is public, we cite what we cite, and we name what we own. That is the entire pitch.
Talk to us
Four real channels. Email lands on the founder's inbox. The address is a working office, not a virtual mailbox. No marketing-automation funnel — a person reads what you send.