'Bluff City Law' transforms iconic Memphis store into sound stage: A visit to the set

An iconic Memphis skating rink-turned-catalog showroom on Summer Avenue has been transformed into a sound stage and courtroom set for "Bluff City Law," the NBC legal drama currently in production in its namesake city.

In a resourceful example of the type of "repurposing" necessary if Memphis is to become an active base for filmmakers, the former longtime Fred P. Gattas store and original Skateland building now houses a convincing faux courtroom of gleaming polished wood with trick walls that slide away; a ceiling rigged with huge lights; and a cyclorama image of a supposed Memphis skyline behind a large bank of windows, ensuring that the city will have a visual presence even when much of the action remains indoors.

The first day of shooting on the recently constructed set occurred Wednesday, with series stars Jimmy Smits and Caitlin McGee and 12-year-old guest star Priah Ferguson — the breakout scene-stealer from the third season of "Stranger Things" — in a courtroom battle that pits the girl against the builders of the levees that failed to protect her home from floodwaters. 

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During breaks in the actions, Smits — who plays a famed Memphis lawyer named Elijah Strait — practiced his closing argument in front of an empty jury box (the folks cast as jurors were not yet needed on the set). Meanwhile, a camera crew set up behind the actor playing the judge, where a wall had been pulled away to enable the director to capture a dramatic over-the-shoulder shot.

"It's brand new," second assistant director Glen Moorman cautioned an assembled group of out-of-town journalists and local visitors, invited to the set by NBC. "We've been on it all of three hours now, and we're trying on the first day to at least not ruin it."

"If you're making a show about lawyers, you need a courtroom," explained television veteran Andy Wolk ("The Sopranos," "Ugly Betty"), director of this particular episode, the fourth of 10 scheduled to be shot in Memphis through early November. "You can work more quickly here than you can in a real courtroom. The walls move, we have our own lighting, you just need it."

Also, the courtroom set is accessible on any day of the week. Previously, producers had filmed trial sequences inside the actual Shelby County Courthouse, but "to use real Memphis courtrooms, which are beautiful, you can only shoot on Saturday or Sunday," Wolk said.

The lack of readily available sound stages — secure, soundproof buildings with large interior spaces where sets can be constructed — has long been cited as a drawback in Memphis' attempts to lure film and television production. Leased from building owner GCI (Gattas Children Investments), the new "Bluff City Law" sound stage provides an example of a solution.

Memphis & Shelby County Film and Television Commissioner Linn Sitler,  Deputy Film Commissioner Sharon Fox O'Guin and longtime local location scout Martin Lane already had been looking for possible sound stages when Tom Gattas, general manager of GCI, contacted the commission to see if the storied Summer Avenue building could be used by "Bluff City Law."

"As soon as we walked in and I saw that vaulted ceiling, I knew that I'd found it," Sitler said. "It was, 'Bingo!'" Lane confirmed that the site was made-to-order.

The elegantly curved ceiling — high enough to provide room for the lights, crane and scaffolding of a movie set — is the most distinctive element of the 27,000-square-foot room, originally constructed in the mid-1950s as the city's most impressive roller-skating rink at that time, the original Skateland. 

In 1963, Skateland relocated to its more familiar and longer-lasting location on nearby Old Summer Road. The original building was sold to the Big M company, a discount store chain that converted the roller rink to retail space and expanded the building to 97,000 square feet.

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When Big M went bankrupt, the Fred P. Gattas company bought the building. Gattas already had operated a couple of popular department stores on Main Street, including one at 387 S. Main that Elvis Presley frequented in the early 1960s on Sundays, when it was closed to the public due to the "blue laws" that prohibited commerce on the traditional Christian day of worship.

"Elvis would call my dad," said Tom Gattas (son of Fred P.), "and the whole posse would come down and go on a wild shopping spree."

In 1976, the Fred P. Gattas Company catalog showroom opened at the Summer Avenue location. Other businesses shared space in the large building. Almost a movie set in itself, a furniture store offered multiple staged environments — a dining room, a living room, and so on — for customers to view, to help them choose the furniture and appliances they wanted to order for their own homes.

An iconic Memphis brand of its era, with an immediately recognizable diamond logo inspired by its inventory of jewelry, the Gattas showroom was closed in 1996. The family retained ownership of the property, however, and leased the space to Fred's Dollar Store and a number of other businesses, christening the six acres of property "Gattas Plaza."

On May 31, Fred's closed its Gattas-building space, along with most of its stores nationwide. The timing proved fortuitous for film-industry boosters, however, because the next week city officials and producers of "Bluff City Law" announced a financial deal that would enable the series to remain in Memphis, with production on nine episodes starting in late July. (The series pilot had been shot here in March.)

When Tom Gattas heard the news, he contacted the Film Commission, in case his building might fit the production's needs. It was not entirely a shot in the dark: In the one-year interim between the closing of the Fred P. Gattas Company and the opening of Fred's, director Francis Ford Coppola used the building for some modest sets for his John Grisham adaptation, "The Rainmaker."

(Other notable Memphis locations adapted into sound stages in the past include the old International Harvester plant in Frayser, which became home to the law office sets constructed for Sydney Pollack's 1993 Grisham film, "The Firm," with Tom Cruise; and the floor of The Pyramid arena, where director Craig Brewer erected the set of the ramshackle home-with-infamous radiator occupied by the blues musician played by Samuel L. Jackson in "Black Snake Moan.") 

The Gattas building provides a discreet shooting location. From the outside, the building — which still houses several functioning businesses along its strip mall-like western edge — is nondescript. Knowledge Tree, a Gattas-owned school supply company, occupies the opposite side of the structure from the sound stage.

The "Bluff City Law" production company leased the sound stage area from the Gattas company for two years, on an agreement to be renewed every six months. Because the space was used for retail, it already was air-conditioned, equipped with a sprinkler system and otherwise "up to code," said Gattas, 66. "So they were in there the day after we signed the lease."

"Of course, people want to make money," Sitler said of the lease agreement with NBC, "but they're also trying to help the Memphis economy and the film community." She said the set was built in part with a $5,000 grant from the Downtown Memphis Commission. Producers said a "judge's chambers" set also will be built in the space.

Wednesday, the set was bustling, with dozens of crew members and extras working a wide variety of jobs, from food preparation to camera operation, beneath the same ceiling that in decades past had sheltered roller-skating teens and new homeowners dreaming of sofa sets.

It seemed appropriate that even this busy, practical space had meaning for Memphians. David Janollari, an executive producer of "Bluff City Law," said Memphis seems like "a place steeped in history."

Janollari said "Bluff City Law" episodes frequently will find themselves at "the crossroads of the old historical Southern Memphis and the new, contemporary, burgeoning city of today." His characterization was a nice fit for a newly organized sound stage where images of Smits and McGee flickered on state-of-the-art video monitors just a few twisty hallways away from walls adorned with framed black-and-white portraits of Fred P. Gattas with St. Jude Children's Research Hospital founder Danny Thomas and President Richard Nixon.