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Give ‘Em Props – and Sets
Props and settings can have a great effect on how authentic, imaginative, and even how much fun a movie is. This is especially true when the prop is something that doesn’t actually exist or may never exist. The technology behind the gadget often can’t really be explained, yet a skilled production designer can suspend a lot of disbelief, making a made-for-the-movies device seem dramatically real.
Back in the day, Walt Disney, the man and the studio, had a particular knack for great model work and props, whether it was Jules Verne’s Nautilus, re-imagined in 1955 as a 19th-century atomic submarine in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, or using a flying Model T Ford as a testbed for anti-gravity in 1961’s The Absent-Minded Professor, or that same year creating an inventive-looking but believable space-age toy fabricator, a 3D printer 50 years ahead of its time in Babes in Toyland. Clever movie props make something that you know to be impossible into something you want to believe in.
A stainless steel-bodied DeLorean sports car is a scientifically preposterous time machine, but audiences still accept and enjoy it, just as moviegoers 25 years earlier accepted that a time machine could be a retro-Victorian plush chair with a big spinning brass wheel behind it and a vivid turn of the century-styled time display. All it takes is imagination and the skill to put it over.
If your movie is set in the future, or even just a reimagined present-day, and you’re going to show a high-tech center, secret government lab, or villainous scientist’s lair, it has to be convincing.
Let’s acknowledge that not everything has to be designed or built especially for a film. A Clockwork Orange (1971), THX-1138 (1971), Woody Allen’s Sleeper (1973), and Futureworld (1976), showed even a half-century ago that filming in carefully chosen, carefully framed existing locations can make for a convincing world of the future.
Most of the time, though, if you need an imaginary labyrinth of computer screens, consoles, and technicians in color-coded uniforms, it will be made to order on a studio sound stage. James Bond-style control room scenes conveyed an air of sinister genius, with hyper-modern architecture and vast shining floors of mysterious equipment.
The style was largely pioneered by a German director who moved here in the ’30s, Fritz Lang. He directed Metropolis and The Woman in the Moon in the ’20s, so he knew how to use the movie magic of his time to create evocative pictures of possible futures. Matte work can make an already large set look impressively huge on screen. Scale models and matte work can insert actors into painted dioramas of imaginary scenes.
Lang had a signature series, Dr. Mabuse, that spanned 30 years. The Doc was a sort of proto-Goldfinger, a reclusive combination of Michael Corleone and Mark Zuckerberg, a crime lord who controlled an entire city’s underworld with the help of his omniscient network of closed-circuit TV cameras and microphones. A generation later, someone who learned from Fritz Lang’s example was Ken Adam, the German-born, British-based designer of the early Bond films, creator of Dr. No’s control room and SPECTRE’s posh, memorably lethal Parisian conference room in Thunderball.
Ken Adam was also one of Stanley Kubrick’s collaborators, most notably on Dr. Strangelove. Kubrick wanted two things at once for his War Room: he wanted something physically credible, workable in fact, as an underground bunker and information display, but he also wanted a knockout design that people would remember. He got both, with one of the most iconic sets in postwar American movies. Even for people who’ve never seen the movie (most people, especially these days), the image of Strangelove’s War Room is still instant pop culture visual shorthand for World War III, still part of the collective imagination 60 years later.
Not that Strangelove lacked other memorable visuals, not at all. Much of the B-52 in-flight nuclear bomb arming procedure in Dr. Strangelove was loosely based on USAF press releases and what few scraps of information appeared in defense publications, which Stanley Kubrick devoured in that preparation period. He bought samples of military-grade switch gear and panel lighting, to create realistic looking, if necessarily speculative, flight electronics for his film. Those toggle switches with finger guards play a major role in the bomb arming scene, showing the careful redundancy that required two levels of safety catch removal, and for opening the bomb bay doors, with no less than four options, all of which fail.
When it comes to non-Bond, non-Kubrick movies with that Fritz Lang/Ken Adam look, an honorable mention should go to the underground headquarters of the CMDF, the Combined Miniature Deterrent Forces in 1966’s Fantastic Voyage, especially the inner chamber where the mysterious shrinking process takes place. Even in the book, Isaac Asimov never even tried to invent a plausible explanation. This is “science” fantasy, a pure what-if story. But the film’s set design is generally sharp. Proteus, the big-windowed submarine that will carry the vastly miniaturized cast through the human bloodstream, feels believable.
Computers in the movies began with an electromechanical analog calculator in Destination Moon (1950) and When Worlds Collide (1951). They moved on up to a more modern digital groove in the Spencer Tracy-Katharine Hepburn office rom-com Desk Set (1957), beginning to take the form that became familiar to baby boomers: blinking lights, tractor printers, and tall cabinets of spinning tape reels.
These early computers were not presented as anything but what they were, data processing machinery, pure and simple. If that’s one end of a sentience/consciousness spectrum of artificial intelligence in the movies, Kubrick’s HAL 9000 is at the other end, with full, or close to full, human consciousness. When 2001 was being made, Arthur C. Clarke shared the era’s misplaced general optimism that machines were more likely than not to be conscious by the beginning of the 21st century.
Billion Dollar Brain (1967), The Forbin Project (1970), and WarGames (1983) are all classic “control room” movies about giant computers whose actions threaten the world. (BTW, none of these three films tries to be an artistic masterpiece, but all are pretty good entertainment, worth seeing). From the AI standpoint, Billion Dollar Brain is the most modest and reasonable. Its machine, programmed to provoke a Soviet collapse, isn’t an artificial human mind, but something closer to the consciousness level of a chess-playing computer. It has no personality of its own, but can “speak” over the telephone with a sort of analog text-to-speech. As far-fetched as the movie is, its “brain” is something that could actually have been built in 1967 if you had, say, a billion dollars.
The other two are cybernetically implausible, but exciting thrillers about the rather unfortunate awakenings of consciousness inside a pair of national security guardians, Colossus and WOPR, respectively. Both have limited personalities that eventually emerge on a near-human level, with synthesized voices. And both want to share their very definite ideas about world peace.
This brings us to almost everyone’s favorite AI-based characters, robots, especially humanoid ones. They can be scary — Metropolis (1926), The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), and The Black Hole (1979) — or they can be near-human companions and servants — Forbidden Planet (1956), Star Wars (1977), and Short Circuit (1986).
I think the robot trio in Doug Trumbull’s Silent Running (1972) comes across as particularly realistic because they don’t stretch credibility. Although Huey, Dewey, and Louie sometimes display a silent touch of sly humor on a “Dogs Playing Poker” level, Silent Running’s three little robots don’t talk, or otherwise act human. Their consciousness is not on a human level, but it’s real.
Like many other Hollywood robots, from Metropolis’s False Maria to Star Wars’ C3PO, Huey, Dewey, and Louie were made possible by human actors inside the suits. A new difference with Silent Running was the need to use little people, dwarves, and midgets, to inhabit smaller robots, an idea copied several years later by George Lucas for R2-D2.
The Time Tunnel (1966) was another notable “control room” show, a one-season flop that’s nonetheless remembered to this day for its main set, its central prop. Lost in Space, The Time Tunnel, and The Man From U.N.C.L.E. were among the TV shows that used the same dummy computers, hollowed out inside the cabinets but rigged by prop men to flash their lights and look busy. They were available through prop rental houses, some of which specialized in science fiction and horror movie material.
Key props like these sometimes have a sad, boulevard-of-broken-dreams life cycle in fickle Hollywood, going from the glamor of theatrical films to the back-of-the-chorus routine of hit TV shows, finally coming to rest in an obscure corner of the back lot, dragged out nowadays only for the occasional music video.
But not always. Forbidden Planet’s Robby the Robot was sold in New York at Bonham’s Auctioneers on November 21, 2017. Robby had fallen on hard times, spending cheap, tawdry decades in side street warehouses as anybody’s robot for rent. But freshened, restored, and redeemed, Robby fetched $5,375,000, making it the most valuable movie prop in history.
Now there’s a sentimental Hollywood comeback story! If you’re a robot, anyway.
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Excellent as always, Gary.
Another good choice of futuristic looking (at least at the time) set location was in The Conquest of the Planet of the Apes. It was a newly completed, but still empty complex, built in a modern style.
Oh, and the Norad control room in Wargames made the real Norad guys jealous. I expect movie design has probably had a direct impact on control room designs.
Around that time the Maltese Falcon was sold at auction. I forget the figure it raised, but the lead bird, complete with scratch marks to prove it’s not merely coated with enamel, raised at auction a higher price than the wild figures Caspar Gutman named for the gold and jewel encrusted bird he coveted. The stuff that dreams are made of indeed.
I’m told that Navy ships now have their command decks designed after the Starship Enterprise model. I’m not sure how seriously I take that.
Hehe
Visionary? Cutting edge? Six of one, half a dozen of the other. Not 3D printing – yet. The patents for 3D printing didn’t start popping up for almost another ten years. It became more of a materials science problem then, as well as programming. The programming took too long and cost too much because that’s what programming does.
Cool post, Gary.
Reading this, it’s no control room, but I kept thinking of Superman’s Fortress of Solitude. Totally believable.
OT:
Next thing I heard was “Mixture — Rich.”
In both cases, there’s a form-follows-function process dricing design. What Kubrick and Roddenberry got right (among other things) was to extrapolate the unchanging needs of humans to “command and display” their resources and data respectively into the future, while orienting things suitably for the camera.
Somebody here (I think) posted a link to somebody’s online book about the development of NTDS. Here’s a link to a section of that book, with photos of cardboard mockups of the set-up and then physical mockups, then the actual system being built on land in something like a warehouse to analyze how people move and interact while using the system. Set design for the Real Thing. Fascinating stuff.
Console design did not originate here, but it sure is fascinating for a guy who “grew up” chained to a console, loving every minute of it.
It used to be that the computers were all “somewhere else” from the bridge perspective. Now they’re up there too, which is a blessing and a curse. A big part of the responsibility for the 2017 or so John S. McCain fatal collision was the damnable decision to use touch-screen displays for what has traditionally been some big honking brass machinery on the bridge.
Anyway, the modern bridge looks a bit like the Star Trek bridge because now there are computers on the bridge. Likewise, modern command centers look like Strangelove because now there are ubiquitous big screens. Note that this only applies to locations with the real estate to support that sort of “each console sees all screens” data integration.
Here’s a shot of a console (and more) aboard an Aegis Cruiser. Note that the red/orange “big screens” overhead are actuallyjust side-lit plexiglass, and the data is written on them using grease pencils.
Note that this would work poorly for most camera purposes, for a number of reasons.
That, sir, is an Atari 2600! Never had one — but my friends did.
Thanks for the very interesting post, and especially thanks for mentioning Sleeper. The background jokes, like peeling a banana the size of a canoe and slipping on the peel, or the McDonald’s sign with “1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Sold” made the movie for me. The Orgasmatron was just a fiberglass shower stall.
In the world of special effects, Derek Meddings is rightfully venerated. Getting his start on the Gerry Anderson marionette programs (where even the actors were models) he did remarkable work making realistic model sets and explosions. I’ve spoken before about how much I loved Thunderbirds, and in my old age it stands up pretty darn well. The remake, from Pukeko Pictures, cleverly integrated real models and explosions with CGI characters who, unlike the marionettes, could walk convincingly. The folks who made Thunderbirds are Go grew up with the original show, and it is filled with homages to Anderson and Meddings. Meddings himself directed special effects for the first Superman movie (the collapsing Hoover Dam was his work) and Moonraker before his untimely passing. Doug Trumbull, who directed SFX for Silent Running before designing amusement park rides, and Brian Johnson, whose model work were the only parts of Space:1999 that I could stand, worked with Meddings and have talked about what they learned from him.
My recollection is that they weren’t little people; they were double amputees, which was an even cleverer approach. By using amputees to inhabit the drones, they were able to design robots whose shape didn’t even conform to something we think of as human. It doesn’t look like a person in a suit, because there’s no way it could be.
One of my favorite examples is Robert Wise’s The Andromeda Strain. The set design of the Wildfire facility, and the scientific equipment we see, are an essential component of what makes that movie work; they create a unique, self-contained world, one that feels both alien and claustrophobic. (To use the cliché, the setting itself is a character in the film.) In 1971 it was futuristic and high-tech; now it feels retro but still high-tech, like an Apollo spacecraft.
I find that it’s a movie that has aged remarkably well: you can still accept it as a period piece. A lot of that is down to the set design and props, which created a speculative technological environment that nonetheless felt grounded in the reality of the time.
Wow, a great walk through cinematic history from a very interesting perspective.
Great post, Gary!
In my first job, I was the programmer for a prototype of an automatic radar jamming system. It was designed to allocate its jamming power to the worst threat. That is, a missile radar is much more important than a long-distance warning system. Anyway, for some reason, our marketing department decided to have an advertising movie made to show various Pentagon officials and they brought in a professional film crew to film the prototype in action as part of the film.
The jamming system was based on a mini-computer back in the day when they had multiple front panel lights. You could show the program counter (where the program was currently active) or various data registers. I always left the selector showing the program counter so I could see how the system was responding to inputs.
The film crew asked me to set it up so it ‘looked like a computer’. No problem, I thought, I just set it up to show the program counter.
“No, make it look like a computer, please”
I tried various data registers and got the same reaction.
I finally wrote a small program that just incremented a data register value with a time delay to make the change visible. The result was that the rightmost light blinked several times a second and each light to the left – out of 16 – blinked at half the rate.
“That’s perfect!”
To any programmer, that is a computer just wasting time.
To this day, I notice that type of ‘high tech’ equipment in a movie as defined by some marketing type. My other pet peeve is an oscilloscope which shows a ‘signal’ which is just a sine wave.
Thank goodness, things are getting better.
I bet you worked for Hughes.
A lot of the oscilliscopes out there have built-in function generators. Getting a sine wave out of one of those is as simple as turning it on and setting it up to generate the wave displayed. Don’t need no wires or probes or plugs or nuttin’!
yeah, for a long time people were really disappointed when they toured the real NORAD and the control room looked like a conference room. It’s a little better now, but they still use a staged room for the “Tracking Santa” thing every year.
OTOH, the control room for FedEx is awesome.
unfortunately, I can’t find any pictures just now.
IMHO, network operating centers and power grid management centers are some of the best-looking command centers. That’s where the money meets the nerd. In my experience, military stuff looks like bog-standard crappy PCs and some big screens that were probably on sale.
Intelsat, in northwest Washington, DC has a great looking control room, suitable for impressing legislators and big money investors. They hosted a reception when we presented the 25th anniversary of 2001: A Space Odyssey at the nearby Uptown Theater. Intelsat didn’t have to be asked twice. “Arthur C. Clarke is involved? Sign us up!”
A photo I took of the interior of a Titan III missile silo south of Tucson. Pretty basic, but as the Brits would say Hollywood could ‘Tart it up a bit’ for a movie.
The Andromeda Strain‘s elaborate underground isolation lab was supposedly five levels deep. Each donut-shaped ring was a different color, making it easier to show when one of the characters was moving from level to level. Universal thriftily just made one and repainted it four times. Doug Trumbull was still billing himself as “the special effects wizard of 2001”, which irritated Stanley Kubrick no end. Much of Trumbull’s work on this film involved primitive computer animation and video-based material that would be displayed on screens. The pulsating, multiplying images of the Andromeda virus were Trumbull’s.
Andromeda came out in early 1971, at a time when science fiction movies were becoming popular with college-age stoners. This one was a bummer, man. Don’t ask me how I know.
The Time Tunnel. Only the area on the right, of the mouth of the tunnel and the floor with people and equipment is real; the rest is a matte painting. The tunnel was smartly designed; the rings in front were large and real; as it went back to its vanishing point, the rings were only painted on the inside of a large cone, which could be moved to line up perfectly with the camera angle. If great production design could keep a show on the air, Time Tunnel would have outlasted Gunsmoke; as it was, lame scripts finished it off in only one season.
Fantastic post and comments! Thank you!
Strangelove‘s War Room benefitted visually and dramatically from the way the wall of screens tilts forward, as if the fate of the world was literally looming over the characters. Even the ring of lights over the ring of seats is part of the vivid design.
Someone should note the bad luck of Fail Safe, a better than decent thriller about doomsday, coming out the same year as the far more acclaimed Dr. Strangelove. Fail Safe also had notable War Room scenes, and probably more realistic ones. It was based on a best seller that was vastly better known than Red Alert (aka Two Hours to Doom), the launching point for Strangelove.
Sidney Lumet, the director of Fail Safe, had started as a director of live television, so Lumet’s films were often influenced by the look of TV control rooms. Strangelove’s screens, as good as they looked, were static. The ones in Fail Safe‘s War Room are dynamic; often, they zoom in on a section of a map while Lumet’s camera pans and glides.
There’s a bit more visual design genius here as well. I’ll assume that all of this is intended, since it’s Kubrick:
The round table implies (in our canon) equality, with a leader still being first among equals — there is no “head chair.” Yet this table is far too large. There is no way for this many people to have a conversation as a group. Nevermind the heirarchy of the military itself, here’s the military with the President in the room, and only those close to him will even hear what he has to say. This is one small high-ranking group, with different groups forming along the rim which may as well be galactic for all the good it does them to be seated at the “round table”.
The table is filled in as well, whereas modern setups this large, even if round or oval, are hollow, with the center being available at least for equipment (projectors) or for support folks to un-hose your mic or bring you water, or report on the proceedings, operate the screens, or something. Nobody could even dust that table without crawling around on it.
The screens are only on one side of the room. This makes them useless for a third of the people present, and degraded for a good half. “Round table” my foot. I think it’s intentional contradiction to raise the BS flag.
Less likely to be intentional (but hey), the support for the ring of lights is not a ring, but a hub and spoke arrangement, dark and spiky, outstretched, menacing. It’s above the lights, so it wouldn’t be lit, of course, but the ceiling above it is lit. It’s the darkest thing in the room outside the border of the screens.
Visual design of the bad guys.
What I find most interesting about the War Room is that apparently it was catered.
Fail Safe had the misfortune of trying to play it straight. Something as momentous as the fate of the world can only be properly dealt with in satire.
Wait, did Lemmy get the name Orgasmatron from a Woody Allen movie?
Yup.