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In order to have a sizable audience for the interview portion of the special, they had to move that segment outside, due to California's rules about indoor gatherings at the time. arranged for lots of flower arrangements in the apartment, so there's lots of flowers. "If it was simply not going to happen, it would be better to not happen than to have something that was obviously wrong," Shaffner says. Winston wanted everything to be as exact as possible, and if they couldn't make it exact, then it had to be close. "Boy, you sure couldn't have done that 27 years ago." "They did a tremendous job replicating things," Shaffner says of his team. They also had to reprint Monica's carpet pattern on a piece of plain carpet, and track down a scrap of the linoleum used for the parquet floors to scan and reprint onto stock linoleum. Most of Monica's ( Courteney Cox) decor was easy to find, but Joey's ( Matt LeBlanc) apartment did not fare as well and many things had to be created from scratch. While the sets for both the girls' and boys' apartments were mostly intact, the set dressings-the art, the cookie jar on top of the fridge, the blankets and pillows, etc.-were another matter. Studio lot. And while you might think that the museum part would actually make things easier, it most certainly did not. Luckily, a lot had been saved, whether in archives, in Shaffner's own home, or in the literal Friends museum on the Warner Bros.
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"This was a long time ago, and at that point, there was really very little indication of what had been saved and what hadn't been saved." "When Ben called, it was like, 'You want what?'" Shaffner recalls to E! News. And Ben Winston, who executive produced the special, wanted every single piece.
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Production designer John Shaffner, who designed the set with his life and work partner Joe Stewart all the way back in 1994, worked tirelessly to track down every piece of the set that could be found, a full 17 years after it had all been taken apart.
It looks frozen in time, like it's just been sitting there waiting for the cast to return since the 2004 finale. If you've already watched the big event, which just made its debut on HBO Max, you may have noticed that the set seems to have been restored almost perfectly. The much anticipated Friends reunion did a whole lot more than just reunite the six main friends.