Flowers for ‘Tulsa King’

Right, co-owners Sandy Jackson (center) and Rita Miller (right) purchased Petal Pushers Flowers & Gifts on June 1, 2019, and recently moved the business into a historic building on 917 Manvel Ave. Left, Petal Pushers’ Carmalita Ritter places fi nishing touches on an arrangement. Photos/Kendra Johnson

Hidden behind displays of flowers and gift items, tucked away in the cool exterior of the Manvel Ave. shop, a standing-height work table overflowed with flowers, greenery and tools as four shopworkers carefully placed each sprig and blossom into large vases one at a time.

It was the beginning of a busy weekend for the local business Petal Pushers Flowers & Gifts.

The shop has been commissioned by the Paramount+ online tv series ‘Tulsa King’ to create 48 separate floral arrangements, for use in one of the scenes scheduled to shoot on Tulsa, Okla. on Tuesday, June 7.

Set to premiere Nov. 13, 2022, ‘Tulsa King’ stars Sylvester Stallone as “Dwight “The General” Manfredi” and begins “just after he is released from prison after 25 years and unceremoniously exiled by his boss to set up shop in Tulsa, Okla,” according to the show’s IMDb page.

To prepare for their role in helping bring the story to the online screen, the florists at Petal Pushers had begun putting together vases of flowers for ‘Tulsa King’ in preparation for a June 2 filming date, when they found out that the shoot was rescheduled to June 7.

They were able to sell seven out of the ten vases they had already made, at a discount, and then remade the arrangements for the new filming date.

Petal Pushers co-owner Rita Miller estimated that the tv production was paying them between five and ten thousand dollars to complete the order.

The large order posed both an opportunity and a challenge for Petal Pushers, because the 48 arrangements needed to be made early enough to finish on time, but late enough to keep them fresh.

To address this need, the shop started with approximately 10-15 vase arrangements.

“We’ll make all those on Saturday because that’s going to be in water,” Miller said on Friday, June 3. “They’ll be totally fresh. They’ll stay in the cooler until we deliver them. And then Sunday we’re going to work and it will probably take us probably an eight hour day and we have four people working to make the rest of the stuff that we’re going to make.”

The other arrangements will be in foam, which has a shorter shelf life, meaning they must be made closer to the filming date than the vase arrangements.

Miller had previously worked with Amy Watkins, in approximately Nov. 2020, to design flowers for a smaller film that has not yet been released, and it was Watkins who contacted them about doing flowers for ‘Tulsa King.’

“She kind of told us what she wanted,” Miller said. “She sent some pictures and then she left it, the creative part, pretty much up to us.”

For a select few of the pieces, Miller said, Watkins was very specific about what she needed, but the other arrangements relied predominantly on the florists’ discretion.

They looked at similar kinds of scenes in other tv shows and movies for examples of the type of designs that might work.

“I have to rewind; go back or I don’t know what happened in the movie cause I’m just watching the flowers,” Petal Pushers co-owner Sandy Jackson said. “Yeah, not before we owned the flower shop. I’d never noticed flowers in a movie.”