The other irony illuminated by Ferrara’s tour was that, for a series set in the land of closed-set studios and soundstages, roughly 90% of it was shot on location—figures in stark contrast to virtually everything else that films in the city. That Coffee Bean where Vince’s high-powered agent Ari Gold (Jeremy Piven) and his assistant Lloyd (Rex Lee) hole up after Ari’s unceremonious firing in season 2? Ferrara points that out too. And for anyone who wasn’t on the LA party scene in the early aughts, club Prey—where Vince and the gang pull up as they await news of his thriller Head On’s box office performance—was exactly the kind of WeHo hot spot where a real-life B-plus-lister like Vince might have been spotted. (The space is now occupied by another, different nightclub; they can’t all survive like the Viper Room.)
Ellin, Ferrara said, “was adamant about [using] real locations. LA is a great place to shoot, but if you really look back at the history of it, how many TV shows actually filmed in LA on location? The lots of course were always filled and everyone was doing studio stuff. We only had one stage throughout the whole run, and that was Ari’s office.”
Of course, an Entourage tour would not be complete without one specific location, the spot at which Ferrara estimates they must have filmed “at least 25 scenes.” A bro show wouldn’t be true to life without regular scenes at breakfast, any self-respecting squad’s most important meal of the day, where the night’s previous festivities are hashed out and hangovers are defused. The show’s very first scene finds the guys finishing a meal at a spot next to Fred Segal (an iconic L.A. clothing boutique whose Melrose and Malibu locations closed their doors last week.) But their Cheers, their Central Perk, was unquestionably the Melrose location of Urth Cafe.
“It’s kind of synonymous with us,” Ferrara says. “We did so many scenes in an Escalade driving on [Melrose] and then they would park right in front of Urth Cafe.” In full tour-guide mode, Ferrara gestured to the two-mile-an-hour congestion atypical of the area. “See this traffic right now? We used to cause this traffic, because people would be lined up on the other side of the street just watching us work. It was like a basketball game or something.”
“In a way,” Ferrara said, “the show ruined Urth Cafe for us. At one point I kind of asked for trouble [by] getting a black Escalade of my own. And I would come here because I like their coffee, but here I am pulling up in the same car, and people would be like, ‘What scene is this?’ I’m like, “I’m just here for an iced coffee.” (There is no Entourage special at this Urth location, not even a Turtle Frappe. Clearly someone on HBO’s branding side fell asleep at the wheel.)
Ferrara could reminisce for hours if he wanted, in a much wider geographical range—like the Studio City 7-11 parking lot he sat in, decompressing from a nervous final audition round when he got a call that he had indeed landed the part. Or we could go to Malibu, one of the show’s first instances of straying from home base and one of the first times a real actor did more than just cameo, when Turtle ran afoul of Gary Busey—and Busey improvised pouring beach water on Ferrara’s head during a take. (He improvised everything, Ferrara noted: “He said, ‘I love the script. The lines are great, but no one can write Gary Busey like Gary Busey. So I’m going to give you your words, but mine.’ To this day, if I still see Gary, I get a little nervous.”)
