Tootsie’s
Front
Porch
It was November of 2018 and we were in Nashville, TN on a location scout for the 2019 NFL Draft.
As we strolled the city’s entertainment district, taking in the sights, smells and sounds, we struggled to pin down the spot where NFL Media would be able to broadcast for the duration of The Draft, which would descend upon Music City in just four short months. Critical to our production, we needed a spot that would really show off the heart and soul of our host city. And what better way to showcase the brilliance of Nashville than with some stellar country music? Music City is all about the music after all, and some of the best music in town comes straight from Broadway’s honky-tonks. So, I was on a quest to somehow help broadcast all 76 hours of The Draft on NFLN as well as every morning of Good Morning Football from one of the very places that makes Nashville so unique: a honky-tonk.
But doing so turned out to be far more challenging than I anticipated.
See, The NFL Draft is a very big deal. It’s big for the players and their families, big for the teams, big for the fans, big for the league, and big for the city that’s playing host. For each of Nashville’s honky-tonks — lively bars featuring live music that line both sides of Broadway, the street where the Nashville Draft would be taking place — the event meant bigger business than they had ever seen before. And not a single one of these honky-tonks were about to let some TV set inhibit their opportunity to capitalize on the opportunity.
But due to a perfect storm of political forces and Nashville public event forces, there was only one location in the entire city where we at the NFL Network could build our central live broadcasting set: a narrow strip of sidewalk that sat a good quarter mile up Broadway from the Main Stage, and, as it just so happened, right smack in front of one of the city’s most iconic honky-tonks: Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge.
Not only was this location nowhere near all the action that NFLN wanted to cover, but the owner of Tootsie’s let us know in no uncertain terms that he would shut down our broadcast operation if any part of the extremely large set we needed to build blocked his historic establishment’s front door and hindered his ability to capitalize on the half a million people set to descend upon Broadway. To be fair, we didn’t blame him. But physics and reality were not in our favor. We’d found ourselves between a rock and a hard place.
By some stroke of luck, the solution came to me just a few days later while I was daydreaming about one of my other favorite Southern cities, New Orleans. I had always loved the wrought and cast iron balconies of The French Quarter, giving those who were elevated above the party equal opportunity to have a celebration of their own. The shouting and laughing, bead-tossing and shenanigans that took place between the people up above and those down below only made for a better overall party. So maybe we could do something similar with our set — elevating it up above the party to make it even more memorable for everyone.
I realized that Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge wasn’t something our production stage needed to work around; it was a beloved local honky-tonk that needed to be honored and prominently featured! An establishment with this much historic presence deserved not just to be preserved, but amplified — and then used as a way to anchor this end of the biggest party Music City had ever seen.
We wouldn’t just build a set; we would grow the existing lavender brick building out over the sidewalk, fifty feet into the street, and three stories high to create an experiential celebration of all that is Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge. Tootsie’s Front Porch, as we would call it, would offer sweeping views of the entire Draft party outside and below, while giving viewers a real, authentic peek inside one of Nashville’s infamous honky-tonks.
With help from the wonderful skill and imagination of Larry Hartman, Senior Production Designer at Jack Morton Worldwide, the exceptional NFL Media tech and operations folks, and the mighty team at Filmwerks, our Tootsie’s expansion not only took on the honky-tonk’s signature exterior aesthetic — bright purple brick with adorned with the bar’s beloved orchid mural — but the set design on the inside was made to reflect the bar’s country vibes, too. Complete with a live all-star country band fronted by the uniquely talented Zach Selwyn on set (The Music City Miracles), a spectacular view of the entire Broadway strip including the Main Stage, and the NFL’s very own spinning neon sign, broadcasting The Draft from Tootsie’s Front Porch gave at-home fans a real taste of Nashville’s style and culture, and gave Tootsie’s the worldwide recognition it very much deserved.
As it turned out, The 2019 Nashville Draft was the biggest Draft in the NFL’s history. More than 600,000 people would ultimately attend the three-day celebration on Music City’s iconic Broadway, while 47.5M would tune in on television. And we at NFL Network were able to broadcast all 76 hours of it from the coolest set we’d ever seen: Tootsie’s Front Porch.