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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
The pilot for “Buck Rogers in the 25th Century” provided die-hard fans of the genre with a treat. You could tell the hard core from the rest when this snippet ran.
In the days before home video, you had to have watched the serials to recognize “General Gordon.”
SSTO nukes — launch site selection matters.
How Gerry Anderson’s crew did it in 1966.
How they would have liked to do it if they had the technology.
The new series was made with a lot of love for the old one. I can’t think of a lot of other examples of a remake being just as good as or better than the original.
Another movie left out of the post: First Men in the Moon (1964) is a runner-up in the Victorian-era science fiction sweepstakes, a mostly worthy imitator of the overall look of George Pal’s 1960 The Time Machine.
The opening scenes are cleverly done and interesting: the first landing on the Moon is an international effort. It’s celebrated with a montage of cheering crowds all over the world. But the astronauts are astonished to find a tattered Union Jack and a handwritten note testifying that people had landed there some seventy-odd years before. On Earth, newsmen find the extremely old Englishman who wrote that note, and his tale becomes the flashback.
First Men in the Moon was done by Ray Harryhausen. Like all of the films listed in this thread, actual scientific believability takes a back seat to visual and dramatic plausibility. The film designers did a good job of finding turn of the century equivalents for modern space equipment, using deep diving suits as space suits.
But for me, that just-plausible-enough spell was broken by their not wearing gloves, a stupid mistake and unnecessary: even in the 19th century, gloves had been invented. Any old pair of leather gloves would have got by.
It’s been so many years since I saw First Men in the Moon, it never occurred to me: do you suppose the idea that Brits had gotten there first were subtle revenge for Amundsen beating Scott to the South Pole? That was a huge blow to the national pride of the UK.
I bet the ubiquitous but humble oscilloscope showing up as anything from a death ray confabulator to a gravity-measuring instrument may have made you smile as well, when watching 1950’s sc fi shows.
Here’s one being used as a landing radar display in 1950’s Destination Moon. For the era it was made in, it’s a very accurate landing. I saw a screening of this film in Santa Monica more than a quarter-century ago with Buzz Aldrin in the audience. Of course, the effects didn’t come up to the standards of reality. But Armstrong and Aldrin had the same problem as the fictional astronauts, nearly using up their landing fuel in a last-minute dodge of a boulder field.
The sex scene was incredibly funny.
Did somebody say lighted plexiglass screens?
And speaking of control rooms, this is the firing room for the test stand at Marshall Space Flight Center where they tested the Saturn V first stage.
This is the test stand – for scale, in the small open space below the round silver tank, you can kind of make out the nozzle of a Space Shuttle Main Engine.
(Pre-9/11, the tours you got to take when you went to Space Camp where WAY cool! I also have pictures of me standing underneath that engine nozzle.)
In late 1981, the Air Force opened a huge parking area at Edwards AFB to the public, to witness the landing of the second space shuttle flight. It had a tailgate party atmosphere, and we were thrilled that the shuttle came in right over our heads, low and fast. I regret that today’s kids will have no idea how open access was to so many things.
Re: the control room at Marshall. In the late Fifties and early Sixties, Aviation Week magazine was loaded with ads for display lights and illuminated pushbuttons. Years later, I’d sometimes see components like that for sale in the electronics surplus stores, like the ones along New York’s “Radio Row”, Courtlandt Street.