HOLLYWOOD ARCHITECTURE: Design Inspiration From Dreamland

Many years ago, a client of mine sent me to see a film called Memoirs Of An Invisible Man. “The movie was lousy,” he said, “but I really liked the house in it.”  

He’s not the first person to get hooked on Hollywood architecture—lots of us admire the spectacular homes we see in movies.    

Gone With The Wind's Tara consisted of the two walls
facing the camera, and a great deal of matte painting
 to either side. Yet how many fans of antebellum
architecture have been inspired by this image?

Unfortunately, many of these famous Hollywood houses are almost entirely imaginary.  An artist simply creates a painting or  “matte” of a house to save the studio the expense of constructing an entire real one. For example, the exterior of Tara, the grand Southern mansion of Gone With The Wind, actually consisted only of a few sections of wall;  the rest of the house—columns, chimneys, trees, everything—was matted into the shots afterward.  

As for the imposing staircase that Scarlett O’ Hara descended so dramatically, it was just that—an isolated stairway built on a soundstage. Much of the imposing architecture was simply matted in later.

Just because Hollywood architecture is make-believe, however, doesn’t mean it can’t provide design inspiration. In fact, sets are often excellent inspirations precisely because they’re make believe. Set designers aren’t encumbered by mundane requirements like bearing walls and watertight roofs the way we architects are. They can concentrate on the essence of the thing. The result, in visual terms at least, is a remarkably pure form of architecture.  

The post-war Tara staircase, a stand-alone set built at the
Selznick International Studio in Culver City. Note
the obvious matte painted background
of the ruined countryside beyond the carriage.

Hollywood has already helped start some architectural trends of its own. The breakfast nook, for example, caught on after a number of films of the Twenties showed romantic couples having their morning toast and coffee in lovely little sun-filled spaces (in these movies, of course, the cheerful "sunlight' came courtesy of a high-intensity arc lamp shining through the set's windows).

Despite all this artifice, however, you shouldn’t hesitate to find inspiration in Hollywood's  papier-mache monuments. Next time you see a good film (or even a bad one), make a mental note of any architectural spaces that strike your fancy—perhaps a particular room shape, or a style of furniture, or a dramatic lighting technique. You may well be able to adapt that feature to your own use someday.  

More than once, I’ve cribbed an archway or a flight of steps from some old Boris Karloff movie. And why not?  The film industry routinely spends millions to create a charismatic “look” for sets, often employing exceptionally talented designers. Hence, movie sets are the furthest thing from fluff. They’re carefully calculated to evoke a certain mood or to reflect a character’s personality—which is exactly what good architecture does.    

The gargantuan "stone" portal built for Cecil B. DeMille's
epic The Ten Commandments (1927). Bits and pieces
 of these structures still occasionally surface
sat the film's Guadalupe Dunes location.

Incidentally, Hollywood sets aren’t just limited to buildings alone: for his 1927 epic The Ten Commandments, director Cecil B. DeMille once constructed an entire Egyptian city in the desert-like Guadalupe Dunes near Santa Barbara.  The main set consisted of a ten-story-high stone portal flanked by colossal Pharaohic statues. The whole thing was approached via a vast avenue lined by sphinxes.  

Of course,  DeMille’s towering "stone" structures were really just flimsy, hollow sets built of wood and plaster. After shooting finished, his Egyptian city was pulled down by a few men with cables and buried beneath the dunes, where you can  find fragments of them to this day.

That’s the big difference between Hollywood’s monuments and your own.  Yours will last a lot longer.