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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.
Published in General
No, but Woody Allen could hear that Rickenbacker from the future.
Great post, as usual. Hoo boy, so much.
Designed, as I’m sure you know, by the great Harper Goff, whose early credits include set designer for Casablanca – which meant Leagues was the second time his work was inhabited by Peter Lorre. AND he did the Proteus for Fantastic Voyage, which, as you note, had a pretty good control room set. (The shots of the facility, when they’re zipping around on golf carts, was a California sports stadium, if I remember correctly.)
As I wrote elsewhere, it’s telling that the architecture of the late 60s and 70s could be repurposed for futuristic dystopias with ease. It was already in their DNA.
Woman in the Moon isn’t my favorite Lang movie, but his model work on the rocket base is incredible. And prescient. As I think I wrote before here, Von Braun saw it while a young man, and it seems to have made an impression. Metropolis remains an astonishing work of art.
Robby’s fate is better than Electro, the 1939 World’s Fair robot who ended up in a cheap 50s college sex romp. I recently learned that Robby was inhabited, so to speak, by a short guy who’d been a successful child actor (and Disney voice actor), Frankie Darro. He’d been lushing it up for a few years, and was happy for the work, I’m sure. The voice of Robbie was Marvin Miller, who was everywhere in old radio and TV, mostly notably as the announcer on The Whistler. One of his last roles was voicing a character on the animated version of Fantastic Voyage.
And then there’s Ken Adams, who deserves a post of his own.
And then there’s Star Trek, which started with buttons and sliders, then locked itself into reconfigurable touchscreen interfaces. They had a persistent omnipresent computer environment, but it’s held at arm’s length, suggesting a cultural decision to make the computer a servant instead of an ongoing participant. Then there’s Star Wars, which has control rooms galore, but doesn’t seem to have anything to do with computers at all. I’ll shut up now
I have always been fond of Tony Stark’s basement workshop in the Iron Man movies. And the big computer table in Hawaii 5-0.
Your readership is appreciated as always, Judge! According to imdb, the real location was the UC Irvine campus. To the state’s credit, it tried to deal with the postwar GI Bill college influx by adding campuses sensibly. Irvine was then a center of Orange County Republicanism.
I spotted some connecting shots of buildings and sidewalks in Century City, a planned, posh Sixties-modern shopping and office neighborhood. (Subject of an up-tempo 1979 song by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.)
As its name suggests, Century City was a business venture of 20th Century Fox Film Corporation and their investment partners. The reason Fox got into the real estate development business is because they owned the land, which was most of its back lot. The then-brand new Century Plaza Hotel is where Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan celebrated their victories. Fox saved travel money and subtly promoted their own real estate profits by relentlessly using it as a location for films and TV shows. You couldn’t beat the convenience.
Almost all of “A Guide to the Married Man”, a comedy directed by Gene Kelly, was filmed all of about 1000 feet outside the studio gate. Construction workers building a skyscraper, office flirtations, restaurant liaisons, city streets and sidewalks, furtive meetings at the supermarket, men philosophizing on the golf course; not one of them is even a one minute drive to “location”.
It even has a blink-or-you’ll-miss-it cameo in the opening scene of Fantastic Voyage. A security motorcade carrying a Soviet defector takes him from the airport. In the geographically incoherent way that movies use Los Angeles geography to their own ends, the night scene shows the cars roaring westward along Pico Boulevard and for a couple of seconds you can see a vacant lot with a sign advertising the new development.
That 1978 version of the Fortress, its design echoing the Kryptonian architecture that began the picture, was impressive to be sure. But as a Fifties kid, I miss that era’s version. That Fortress was secured by an absurdly large lock, whose key was an airways marker. Inside, there were rooms and rooms of scientific and engineering workshops, where the solitude promised by the name was conducive to building robots and other super-inventions.
Hollywood is actually pretty good–usually–about specific details that can be filmed or recorded. It’s the invisible stuff they tend to screw up; power relationships, historical context, motivations that may be obvious to people in real life, but don’t exist on film if you don’t find a way to make them visible. A prime example is Flight. As noted in one of Vince Guerra’s recent contests, it’s a fine role for Denzel. The procedures for an airliner taking off are reasonably accurate. The cockpit instruments, the callouts, “V1, rotate” as the plane lifts off the ground, that part is real; but airline pilots laugh at the film. Mostly, at how people interact.
Contrary to the general impression you’d get from Flight, the first officer is not a quivering apprentice serving at the beck and call of the Sky God in the left seat. (admittedly, before the Eighties, that might have been the case sometimes.) A real first officer would have told the captain, “are you out of your mind?”
WarGames had an ICBM silo’s authentication and launch room, one of the first scenes of the movie. IIRC, they didn’t tart it up; it looked like your photo.
Plus an expletive or two, for emphasis.
What I loved most about WarGames was Strategic Air Command’s dialup connection open to the plain ol’ telephone service.
The Millionaire is only a faint childhood memory, but in the Fifties it was a popular night time soap opera, an anthology series about an unseen, off screen man of seemingly infinite means who makes anonymous gifts of $1 million to a different deserving person each week. Each week’s encounter teaches a lesson about a fundamental virtue, or a fundamental error in life that can be overcome with humility and resolve. Marvin Miller was the heard, but unseen billionaire’s personal assistant, the one recurring character, the messenger who breaks the news to the new millionaire. It was hokum, but it was compelling, if compellingly corny TV.
Anthologies seem more popular in the past, when they were a TV staple for decades. The co-producer of the Twilight Zone series saw the pilot, “The Time Factor”, and didn’t realize at first that Earl Holliman wasn’t going to continue to be a weekly character, that it was going to be new people every week. Fifty or sixty years ago there were anthology shows like Suspense and Kraft Mystery Theater.
Lockheed Martin Skunk Works and Top Gun Maverick:
I supported the technology in an executive board room for a large organization. The table was an oval, with auxiliary seating against the walls. Yes, they couldn’t hear each other. Each station at the table had it’s own mic. Later, they decided the wall seating needed (ceiling) mics too. All the mics had to be balanced, and needed echo cancellation for conference/video calls to prevent feedback. BIG contract job.
The oval table was hollow, but I had to put a step ladder on it to change projector lamps. Got scolded once for a “safety violation” and told to move the table (with all the concealed wiring). Had to wait till the room was empty.
Screens are ALWAYS behind people unless they are correctly planned in the design stage.
Lighting was controlled by touchscreen. That was always a challenge for management.
There’s always something that gets cut out of a post, usually for length, and so I passed up a sub-topic that deserves a look: Atom bombs on screen. I’m not counting documentaries, like the excellent Trinity and Beyond, or dramatic recreations of the Manhattan project, like the BBC’s Oppenheimer of 40 plus years ago, or Fat Man and Little Boy. Nor am I concerned here with comparing nuclear detonations on film, a subject that deserves its own post, with films like Terminator II, True Lies, and Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull. This post is about props, and movie nukes differ a great deal in realism.
Strangelove‘s airborne bombs are coldly realistic megaton-range thermonuclear city busters. When I visited the National Museum of Atomic Weapons in 1977, it was still located on base at Kirtland AFB. The hollow cylindrical casings of actual weapons were lined up as casually and approachably as a used car lot. The ones in Strangelove were stenciled, “Nuclear Weapon. Handle With Care.” The real-life ones said, “Do Not Roll”.
Superman II, True Lies, 24: featured “small” or tactical nuclear weapons. Seemed like okay props, but basically the explosion was the main focus.
What qualities made the relatively unrealistic atom bomb in Goldfinger so effective and convincing as a prop? For one thing, suspense: as in The Andromeda Strain, the race is to stop a detonation, not cause one. The main reason, though, is the actor, Sean Connery. In the terms of professional wrestling, he really “sells” the bomb as the normally ultra-smooth Bond is clearly frightened as he tries to figure out how to shut it off.
As for the prop design itself, once he pries it open: the inner core rotating like a cement mixer is clearly made up, unless you believe that like certain reactor moderators, it was made of liquid sodium and molten salt. It’s a great example of imagination being better on film than reality. But the timer and detonation control being a plug-in module looks like believable industrial design.
You get a lot of conical designs in the modern stuff, representing the tips of individual MIRV vehicles (yeah, I know). They’re usually taken off a Soviet era missile.
Similarly, one thing I smiled at in Brainstorm was their ability to send the unimaginable bandwidth of raw human thought through the cups of a 200 baud acoustically coupled modem.
Brainstorm has the same problem that middle-brow SF movies have had since at least the days of Destination Moon: Interesting ideas and great visuals are saddled with only fair-to-face-palm-inducing dialog. But what Brainstorm did have was a good sense of how hand-patched laboratory equipment that can fill an entire room gradually becomes desk-sized, then suitcase-sized, and finally fits into an attache case. The accompanying sensor band for the brain starts off the size of a beauty salon’s hair dryer, then shrinks to the size of a helmet, and ends up as an earpiece.
The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty started a trend of seeing bombs and missiles dismantled, most notably in The World is Not Enough, and the dissolution of the USSR focused fear on the possibility of sold or stolen Soviet nuclear weapons. You’re right about the frequent presence of conical bombs, once derided by the anti-nuclear crowd as “dunce caps for the arms race”.
Working with puppet “actors” had several advantages. One of them was production efficiency; with multiple copies of each character, you could film the same one in three different scenes at once. Also, since the dialog was pre-recorded and played back at the time of filming, there was no live sound recorded, so crew members could talk and make noise during shooting.
“Supermarionation” was basically Gerry Anderson’s gimmick of using solenoids in the puppet’s head to flap their mouths open and closed in response to pre-recorded speech. At one point in the Andersons’ career, the jaw mechanisms were made smaller, so their characters no longer had such strangely rock-headed, lantern-jawed facial features.
For everyone who has made it this far into the thread, my visual thanks!
For me, the out-of-proportion heads worked better than the Barbie-doll marionettes from Captain Scarlet onward. It’s a similar effect as in Japanese anime. Faces with large eyes appeal to us on a subconscious level because they look like babies, which we are hard wired to like. Working with puppets had a lot of limitations; since they don’t change expression they can’t hold a scene for long, so there are a lot of cuts. The worst one is that they can’t walk convincingly since they can’t shift their weight forward.
I have found that if the stories are good, pretty soon you forget you are watching marionettes. I discovered Supercar when I was eight and loved it; years later when I got a DVD with the original episodes I was surprised at how well it stood up, especially the first season, which was written by Martin and Hugh Woodhouse. Thunderbirds had some very good scripts, especially the straight rescue stories like Inferno in the Atlantic. Of the later Anderson productions, I enjoyed UFO. The first episode of Space:1999 I thought was excellent, but the second one ruined the rest of the series for me.
Team America: World Police was spectacular on this score — and they keep playing up the marionette angle. It worked because the puppets had faded as you say into the story.
I didn’t know the name Derek Meddings before this discussion, but I now realize that he was responsible for the visual effects in the (somewhat obscure) 1969 science-fiction film Journey To The Far Side Of The Sun (also known as Doppelganger). This was one of Gerry Anderson’s feature-film projects, and didn’t involve any marionettes.
I recently rewatched this film, having not seen it since I was a kid, and I was surprised at how good it was. The basic premise (that a duplicate Earth exists on the other side of the Sun) is absurd, but once you get past that, it’s a remarkably intelligent film with a very credible depiction of space travel. One of the things that struck me was how good the visual effects were; few films from that era have effects that have aged so well. (The other most notable exception, of course, being 2001: A Space Odyssey.)
I worked with a company one time that did conference room systems for the military and other government entities. There was some sort of problem with the automatic control of a projection screen and I asked the head engineer why they didn’t just have a switch or knob and let the person at the lectern turn around and watch the screens progress and stop it when it was where he wanted it.
The engineer very seriously said “This is a General we are talking about!”
Gerry Anderson never wanted to work with puppets; it was that or bankruptcy, so he decided they would do puppets with a difference. Reg Hill, his art director, worked on the lip sync concept; the eyes moved too. They found a company that would make them prosthetic glass eyes at 1/3 normal size. Each main character had three heads with different expressions. They would sneak in quick cuts of a human actor’s hand when someone had to grab something, but kept that to a minimum since the actor had to get paid scale. They did a Western called Four Feather Falls which never made it to the US but was very popular in Europe. Supercar came about because Anderson figured putting the characters in futuristic vehicles would mean less walking; hence the jet bikes in Fireball XL-5 and all the moving walkways in Thunderbirds.
There’s another story in one of the Anderson biographies about how he visited the plant where they were designing and building the Concorde, and there were pictures of the Thunderbirds vehicles pinned up all over the place.
Doppelganger had some excellent vehicles and cool space stuff; the crew vehicle that docked with a service module for the long trip was slick. Somewhere I have some of the music from the movie; the sequence written for the part where the astronauts are put to sleep to endure the voyage is really something. That’s another thing about the Anderson productions: the music, which was mostly written by Barry Gray and produced by an orchestra he hired and conducted. The incidental music for Thunderbirds is still performed by orchestras, especially in Japan.
And boy, if you enjoy watching stuff blow up, nobody did it better.
Fifty-three years years later, and still nobody has topped the end of Doppelganger on that score. I’m not sure it’s possible.
Yup. You just can’t do that with CGI. (Yet, I suppose.)
Journey to the Far Side of the Sun did have some nicely designed vehicles and equipment. Roy Thinnes, the star of the film, had just come off the TV show The Invaders, so he was already associated in the public mind with science fiction. A subplot is his relationship with his wife, who accuses him of being sterile. He refutes her by proving that she’s on birth control (he waves the pills packet on camera). It wasn’t a sex scene or anything like that, but it was oddly disconcerting for the kids in audience.
This was years before the Ariane boosters were in production, so at the time I thought that the European Space Agency was something made up for the film.
A good production picture! Here’s one from 1951’s When Worlds Collide.
Flash Gordon for the win!
In the months before Destination Moon was released in 1950, Rocketship X-M was rushed into production, a black and white cheapie without Moon‘s distinguished pedigree–Robert Heinlein story, Lionel Lindon behind the camera, the most realistic space effects on film up to that time. X-M‘s production design was heavily influenced by Thirties SF; the interior of their spaceship looks like a cross between a naval vessel and a generator room. It looked like Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon.
Though it must be said that Rocketship X-M (and, BTW, The Woman in the Moon (1929) did have something that Destination Moon didn’t: staging. Heinlein’s Luna was nuclear-engined and was what we’d now call SSTO (Single Stage to Orbit).