Some Drivel On...Production Design

Recently The Ringer published an Oral History of Mike Judge’s 1999 white collar cult classic “Office Space.” The entire piece is superb, with all sorts of revelatory information, big and small, the anecdote about a Michael Bolton softball video improv that failed to make the final cut actually making me laugh out loud. But what I really enjoyed was the deep dive into production design. You might not think about production design when it comes to a movie like “Office Space”, and Sanford Panitch – then 20th Century Fox VP – might say that Judge “didn’t really believe in production design.” But that sounds like something a VP would say. Indeed, the evidence indicates Judge cared a lot about production design, with leading man Ron Livingston explaining how initially the principal office set looked “kind of the way an office would look in ‘When Harry Met Sally’” and that Judge went about discarding extraneous décor to render a “soulless, impersonal environment.” My favorite detail in the piece, though, was learning the film’s two T.G.I. Friday’s inspired chain restaurants – Chotchkie’s and Flingers – were actually filmed in the same restaurant with minimal variation, eliciting that sensation of being stamped out from a cookie-cutter, identical to its overall presentation of suburbia.

That cookie-cutter (non) sensation often seems contrary to production design, or at least how the Academy sees production design. The year “Office Space” was released the Oscar winner for Best Production Design was “Sleepy Hollow.” True, the work of Rick Heinrichs was excellent on its own terms, creating an entire village on a soundstage and wringing maximum effect from gloomy architecture. But it, in the vein of all the other nominees that year, was a period piece, a chance to look through a cinematic kaleidoscope, or something, rather than holding up a mirror, which is how Daniel London deemed the production design of “Office Space.”

I like looking through a cinematic kaleidoscope, or something. Indeed, I have long cited my favorite house in a movie as the Victorian marvel of Vincente Minnelli’s “Meet Me in St. Louis” (1944), a triumph of production design and art decoration, its interior as carefully curated as Alfonso Cuarón’s ode to his childhood home in “Roma.” When I drifted off to “Meet Me in St. Louis” while still awake again recently on Turner Classic Movies to emotionally combat a wicked mid-December illness, my eyes frequently wandered away from the actors to revel over the carpets, the curtains, the drapes, the lampshades, the light fixtures, the knick-knacks, and everything in-between. The house wouldn’t be the house without everything that goes into it, and it wouldn’t be the house without the era’s Technicolor, providing a crucial fanciful kick, a Zillow ad seen through the prism of a cotton candy machine.

“The Aviator”, which won the Oscar for Best Production Design in 2004, was similar to “Meet Me in St. Louis”, not so cotton candied, perhaps, but still with an optic presentation, to quote Q-Tip, that sizzled your retina. I mean, getting to recreat the Cocoanut Grove is any production designer’s dream! It won the Oscar for Best Production Design in 2004 with Dante Ferretti beating out the aforementioned Rick Heinrichs for “Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events”, as well as “Finding Neverland”, “The Phantom of the Opera”, and “A Very Long Engagement”, all period pieces or fantasies. Not nominated that year was Henry Bumstead for “Million Dollar Baby.” He had won twice previously, for “The Sting” and “To Kill A Mockingbird.” Do I need to say they were both period pieces?

“Million Dollar Baby” was more akin to “Office Space”, not just in the sweaty, thrifty aesthetic of The Hit Pit, where so much of the action takes place, but everywhere, including the home of Frankie Dunn, which is the antithesis of the “Meet Me in St. Louis” house, holding up a mirror.

That front door, glimpsed over Frankie’s shoulder is like holding up a mirror. I swear half the homes in my hometown had front doors just like it.

That doormat? Man, that doormat looks like Bumstead picked it up from Lowe’s on the way to the set that morning.

This closet? The sparse set decor of a man who basically wears the same three outfits over and over and over.

And finally, Frankie’s bedroom. A door that looks worn away from years of use and a bedspread that is purely functional, its color, or lack thereof, mixing with the wall and closet door to evince something far south of vibrant and much more muddied, an interior design of griminess, like Frankie himself, as much an expression of the character’s soul as Eastwood’s weary grimace.

5 Favorite Movie Houses

On Saturday I found myself passing for roughly the ninetieth-dozen time this particular house in my Chicago neighborhood that I have affectionately come to call The Meet Me In St. Louis House. Admittedly the two homes are not precise comparisons. The house in my neighborhood is classified as Colonial architecture whereas the Smith household in the 1904-set “Meet Me In St. Louis” is Victorian, and yet I compare them because they both evoke such an old-timey feel. Whenever I jog past the house in my neighborhood, with its wraparound porch, white picket fence and illustriously turreted window, I imagine a horse and buggy pulling up to drop off its family. I imagine them entertaining guests at the grand piano in the parlor room. I imagine someone sitting on the porch in the warm afternoon sun, sipping iced tea and reading The Saturday Evening Post. I imagine Jean Harlow seeing me from an upstairs window seeing the house and sassing me for gawking. “What do ya staring at, funny boy? Haven’t ya ever seen a dame in a three story home before?” All together now…… Sigh.

This house is right down the block from me.

Where was I? Right. The house in my neighborhood. Passing it yet again on Saturday finally, as it inevitably had to at some point or another, got me to thinking. What are my favorite houses in the movies? And before we get to the requisite list, let me make one thing clear – this is Cinema Romantico. When it comes to movie houses, we are not going to be interested in, shall we say, futuristic houses. In Des Moines, where I grew up, there was a house in the countryside referred to by the locals as The Spaceship House – as in, a colossal raised home that looked like a spaceship. It would have been right at home in Woody Allen’s “Sleeper”. But The Spaceship House compared to the house in my neighborhood isn’t the same ballpark. It isn’t the same league. It isn’t even the same sport. So you won’t find The Vandamm place in “North by Northwest” or or Tony Stark’s semi-bachelor pad in “Iron Man” or The Lake House in “The Lake House” or some such thing. No, these houses are more of the, shall we say, classical variety. These are the houses that hold court in the strange imagination of Cinema Romantico.

My 5 Favorite Movie Houses

5. The Goonies 

Despite barely being in the movie, the "Goonies" house drives the plot - they need the money to save it - and perhaps for that reason retains a popular place in pop culture imagination. But the house. Take "The Goonies" themselves out of the equation and just take the house at face value and, heck, it's not really that different from the Meet Me In St. Louis House in my neighborhood, is it? You can hear the whimsical creak in the floorboards, can't you? You can imagine looking out a second-story window and gazing at the ocean, can't you? You can hear the pitter-patter of rain on that porch awning, can't you, and smile?

4. Atonement 

Yes. I get it. I understand. I know what happens in this house in the movie, and that so much of it is awful and depressing and Debbie Downer Masterpiece Theater, etc., and I don’t care. You know why? BECAUSE IT’S THE TALLIS HOUSE, YOU AUTOMATONS!!!

3. Top Gun

To be sure, any house could probably look like The Greatest House On Earth with a little Tony Scott-ization. You know, he serves the orange sunset and the billowing drapes in the soft focus with the Berlin on the soundtrack but that's only half the battle. I mean, the house is parked under the palm trees and the Pacific Ocean is right over there and, well, heck this is the house on the list that I don't simply love but want to live in. Mansions really aren't my style. All I want is a seaside bungalow in California with my little front porch to drink my morning coffee while I gaze romantically at the water. (One great regret I have in life is the fact that my friend Jed and I on our infamous California road trip that found us in Miramar also found us in Oceanside, the location of this house. I had no idea. This was 14 years ago. You couldn’t just Google “Charlie’s House Filming Location” on your iPhone. C'est la vie.)

2. The Myth of Fingerprints

Originally erected all the way back in 1791, the Merrill-Poor House of Andover, Maine that served as the foremost location of my third favorite film of all time is a luxurious rental property with twenty-five rooms. Which, of course, is why the film never feels as if it runs out of space, why every room feels new and different, even as the film cleverly obscures the fact that the house is actually so freaking huge. And even if the characters and their feelings can often come across as cold, the house onscreen comes across so genuinely lived in, so astonishingly tangible, just like a childhood home, not simply a place but a thing ingrained in your psyche.

1. Meet Me In St. Louis

Well, if this wasn't the most obvious # 1 in the long history of Cinema Romantico's blatantly obvious # 1's. What can I blather about to summarize it? Just look.