To director Trish Sie, the title of the screenplay – “Sitting in Bars With Cake” – sounded like a rom-com, and as much as she loves both bars and cake, a rom-com wasn’t what she wanted to do next, she says.

“So when that script kind of landed in my inbox, I was tempted to ignore it,” Sie says. “But my husband, he loves to read scripts as a hobby. And I came in from taking care of my flock of chickens in the backyard. I’m muddy and disgusting, sweaty, and I see him bawling at his laptop.

“I was like, ‘What happened?’” she recalls. “I thought he’d gotten like a mean email from a customer or something. And he’s like, ‘You’ve got to read this one. You’re gonna love this one.’”

So Sie, whose previous films include “The Sleepover,” “Pitch Perfect 3,” and “Step Up: All In” – as well as many of the over-the-top music videos her brother Damian Kulash’s band OK Go is famed for – read the screenplay, and in it found something she absolutely wanted to make.

“I thought it was going to be one thing, and it turned into something different,” she says of the story, which is based on screenwriter Audrey Shulman’s book of the same name that was inspired by her real-life experiences. “Definitely harder, but better and more interesting to me.

“So I started stalking Audrey, the writer, and I started stalking the producers,” Sie says. “And being like, ‘Please, please, please, please let me have this. I’ll do anything to make this movie.’”

She got the job – you already knew that, right? – and this month “Sitting in Bars With Cake” began streaming on Prime Video.

It’s the story of Jane and Corinne, 20-something best friends since childhood, now roommates in Los Angeles. Yara Shahadi plays Jane, the introvert, who’d rather stay home baking fancy cakes than put herself out there to meet guys. Odessa A’zion, is Corinne, the extrovert, who decides on a plan to help her friend after seeing the reaction from guys when Jane brings Corinne’s birthday cake to a bar one night.

They will go out once a week with a cake to a bar – “cake-barring” is the term they come up with – and guys will follow. And all goes well until a crisis arrives that we will not spoil here.

That’s a premise strong enough to draw many viewers in. But for Southern Californians, “Sitting in Bars With Cake” has a secret ingredient to enjoy. It was shot in more than 30 classic L.A. bars, from the Golden Gopher and Clifton’s Republic in downtown Los Angeles to the Tiki-Ti in Los Feliz, Chez Jay in Santa Monica, Tramp Stamp Granny’s in Hollywood, and many more.

The settings, and the cakes designed by culinary producer Megan Potthoff, helped Sie navigate the difficult, unpredictable emotional terrain of the screenplay, she says.

“That was the trickiest bit, sort of finding a tone,” she says. “I realized it jumps around a bit. That was sort of intentional. I think that’s what it feels like to be in a situation like this where some days you’re laughing your ass off, some days you’re feeling romantically inclined, some days you’re devastated.”

Bar shots

For Sie and her crew, the decision to make the film almost entirely on location, and many of those inside actual working bars, was mostly a blessing, with an occasional curse thrown in.

“The good news is, you don’t have to do anything to make it look like what it is, which is wonderful,” Sie says. “I think it’s very hard to create that kind of authenticity on a soundstage where we’re in an empty box. So I love all the true color.

“But yeah, it’s a lighting challenge, it’s a sound challenge,” she says. “We definitely had to shoot at weird times, either during the day when we had to make it feel like night, or way, way, way, way, way late into the night after the bars were closed.

“I think overall it’s worth it. And if it’s a little grungy, if it’s a little messy – we did a lot of handheld [camerawork] for that reason, so we just move and go and run and gun – it makes it fun.”

Some of the bars were mentioned in Shulman’s 2016 book. Others were chosen for their ability to capture the particular appeal of a classic L.A. bar.

“Here’s the thing,” Sie says. “There are so many beautiful bars in Los Angeles, but we wanted ones that you recognize instantly when you see them. So we did lean towards theme bars to make them sort of feel different from each other and make them feel very iconic.

“Like, ‘Oh, I know that’s Clifton’s, I know that’s the Redwood,’” she says of the reaction she hopes to elicit. “Even the Cowboy Palace (in Chatsworth), we just wanted people to know exactly what it was. We wanted bars to just have a very distinctive personality.

Cakes and more cakes

As a food stylist, Megan Potthoff is usually hired to come to the set for one or two days when a food scene is being shot. For “Sitting in Bars With Cakes,” if she wasn’t on location, Pothoff, a pastry chef before going into film and TV work, was at home creating cake after cake after cake.

“I would say it’s close to 30,” she says when asked how many unique cake designs she came up for the film. “And maybe the amount of cakes that I made with duplicates, and backups and testing, it was probably over 100.”

In an important way, the cakes are a storytelling device in the narrative.

“We wanted to start off with simple and conventional cakes,” Potthoff says. “Throughout the process, as Jane’s character evolves and kind of comes out of her shell, the cakes show that in a way too.

“So we started simple but as we moved forward we’d have more adventurous and exciting cake flavors, whether it was with a flavor like sage and ricotta or banana and avocado. Or if it was the decoration, trying to show it on the screen as she comes out of her shell.”

Sometimes she says she ran into a wall, trying to figure out how to interpret a cake Shulman had included in the screenplay in a way that made sense on screen.

A carrot and cardamom cake was first too simple, then too over-the-top. Finally, she nailed it with an orange and yellow ombre icing, the color of the icing shifting from orange to light orange to yellow to white, with little sugar cookies shaped like ghosts on the sides and candy corn lollipops on top.

“The licorice and leather cake was definitely the one that intimidated me the most,” Potthoff says. “What does a licorice and leather cake look like? We kind of came up with the design by how we were filming the scene, where they start at a burlesque bar and then go to a biker bar.

“We added sort of a black edible lace around the cake to represent the burlesque, and then we went to the biker bar and had black licorice and things like that on the cake. And the cake was black chocolate, like a charcoal color. Sort of a black-and-white theme and it really worked for both bars.”

Like any good cake mom, Potthoff hesitated when asked which of her 30 cake designs was her favorite.

“It’s so hard because I have a special attachment to each one because it was such a process for each one,” she says. “But the pina colada cake always stands out because it was carved to look like a coconut cocktail, and I made it a passion fruit, coconut, and pineapple fillings.

“So I made it tropical and it looked like a coconut at a tiki bar. It was cool.”

The bar scene

Sie, who lives in Los Feliz, says the bars she’s most familiar with tended to be on the eastside of L.A. near her home, or just a little further away in downtown.

“My favorite bar in the movie will change from day to day, but today my favorite bar is De Buena Planta, which is in Silverlake on Sunset Boulevard,” she says. “It’s the bar where they bring the CBD-THC cake, which first of all, that’s my favorite cake. It’s a cherry cake with these real cherries inside, and these gorgeous fondant marijuana leaves on the outside. That cake is delicious and it’s one of the most beautiful ones.

“But it also shows how far out of Jane’s comfort zone she has come,” Sie says. “That she’s not only eating weed in public and sharing it, but she stands up for her friend in that really awesome way. (A very stoned Jane takes care of business when a bar creep hits on Corinne.)

“But I love that bar because it’s very tropical. It almost feels like you’re in Cuba or Tulum, Mexico or something. Really good vegetarian tacos. Great drinks, fabulous vibe, the best cake in the movie, and Jane really showing that she has changed a lot as a person.”

Others in the film also have personal connections, Sie says. She and her husband Roe used to take their kids to Clifton’s for Jell-o when it was still a cafeteria. She can walk to the Red Lion Tavern.

“I do love the Redwood,” she adds of that downtown Los Angeles stalwart. “I mean, I love a pirate bar anyway.”

Other cities, such as New York City, Boston and Chicago, are rightly proud of their own bar scenes. Sie, who shot her last movie in New York City, says Los Angeles has something unique that other places don’t.

“What L.A.’s bars have that no other city I’ve ever been to has is what L.A. in general has,” Sie says. “Which is this just kind of absurd playfulness and whimsy. It doesn’t take itself too seriously. I’m a big fan of theme-y stuff, so I love a good themed bar. I love kitschy stuff that is done lovingly and reverently, not with like a sneer.

“I just feel like L.A. is this city where everything is ridiculous and it owns the fact that everything here is a little bit frothy,” she says. “Some of that gravitas that other cities have, L.A., I think, just kind of rolls its eyes at. And I think the bar scene has that. Just kind of goofy, but in a loving way.”

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