Another good work set was Taxi. The card table, vending machines, double doors for the cabs, and the dispatcher’s cage. Probably not enough to keep a New York City taxi fleet going, but it had the right mood.
For movies, I loved the look of Brazil. Sam’s apartment was a facade of efficiency and uniformity, obviously designed by someone who never planned to live in it. His first office with the rows of hard working clerks, until the boss’s back is turned. After the promotion, he finds his way through the warren of corridors, and has a private office but has to share a desk. And his mother’s apartment and the restaurant they go to show that there are still people of privilege who want to show it off.
Every time I saw the show, I tried to figure out the layout of his apartment, because most apartments fit into a rectangle and his clearly didn’t. (His bedroom was off to the upper right, while there was another room off to the upper left, seeming to intrude into the hallway.) Seinfeld’s apartment had the same flaw; his bathroom and bedroom seem to intrude into the hallway.
Oscar Madison had a huge apartment for a bachelor sportswriter who had problems paying alimony. I always wondered what would have rented for, had it been real.
The War Room in Dr. Strangelove is one of the all-time great sets.
The scary movie Session 9 mostly worked because of the set – which was in reality exactly what it was in the script: a huge, abandoned mental hospital built in the 19th century. Spooky as hell, and if ever there was a place to have restless ghosts, that might be it.
Also the HQ of the 12th Precinct on Barney Miller- you could believe it as a small detective’s office. It was rare to see the homes of the detectives, but when you did IIRC they were believable as well; Wojo (who was low man on the totem pole) had a tiny efficiency, Barney (an officer with a wife who had a professional job) a larger multi-room place, and Harris (who had additional income from writing and lived above his means- I always assumed he was a closet case as well) had an immaculate 1 BR that he shared with Dietrich for a while when D was evicted for some reason; made for some ‘odd couple’ comedy, which is ironic since later the same actor played Felix to Demond “Lamont” Wilson’s Oscar in an all black Odd Couple remake.
Speaking of Demond Wilson, Fred and Lamont’s place on Sanford and Son was not only generally believable (though the exterior shots in the credits couldn’t have been the same place as the interior sets, but that’s minor) but reminded me a lot of my grandmother’s house. (She was a pack rat and completely uninterested in housekeeping of any kind, which is evidently hereditary.)
For best movie set? The Cheyanne Mountain War Room in Wargames. C’mon, honestly, that’s probably the one room most people here imagine when they think about WWIII. Beyond iconic. Legendary.
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It’s very nearly an exact replica of the real room in NORAD. They curtailed the field trip tours for a while after War Games was released, but I’ve been in there twice – once before the movie and once after.
The Jeffersons had that problem as well. As near as I can figure the apartment was shaped liked a linear Z (upside down) since the bedrooms were in the back and to the right, which is where Bentley’s apartment was.
The Bunker house on All in the Family actually made sense; you could imagine a working class family living there, it worked fantastically that they bought the furniture and bric-a-brac second hand, and it made sense upstairs and down. (Again, the exterior opening shots didn’t work, but the set itself did.) Likewise, the apartment on One Day at a Time was believable. Norman Lear evidently took major pride in such details.
The title character’s tiny 1 BR apartment on Alice was appropriately minute. Damned if I wouldn’t have made Tommy (the teenaged son) sleep on the pullout sofa if I was her though. IIRC, Flo lived in a trailer, which was also believable.
There are books??!! I saw the entire miniseries in a room on the bazillionth floor of that hotel in/near the Peachtree Center/CNN Center area of Atlanta with the spirally atrium that is so unkind to those of us who do not care for heights. My husband had a conference there the week between Christmas and New Years 1996. The only channel I could watch without having to watch the freshly dead Jon Benet Ramsey sing “I Wanna Be a Cowboy’s Sweetheart” over and over was the one with The Awakening on in a repeating loop of marathon. I watched the series two and a half times while my ten month old daughter started walking, pressed up against the glass of the floor to ceiling windows that fascinated her. She took enough time away from the windows to find a Penthouse hidden between the mattress and box springs, so it’s not that we were without other distractions. we just preferred The Awakening.
Great ones- extremely well researched but also extremely readable. One of them (can’t remember which) won the Pulitzer Prize. The names are the same as the episodes of the miniseries (which, as much as I love it, I’m not sure even I could watch twice in a row ).
The Amazon links (though most large public libraries will have them and you can usually find cheap paperback versions at half.com or brick & mortar used places):
The miniseries was very true in general, though as usual a lot of side plots, back stories, and non-central characters were either merged or done away with. Also, as mentioned above, the Lucketts had more children (not all of whom are developed in detail- there are just too many) and the story runs longer, following Sayward until she’s a very old widow on the eve of the Civil War. (If you remember her little sister, Sulie I [as opposed to her daughter Sulie II], the one who was abducted by Indians and thus didn’t grow up to be Jane Seymour, the most important side-plot deleted from the miniseries is Sayward’s reunion with her in middle age [won’t spoil it, but while it’s not a horror story neither is it a Movie of the Week happy ending].)
But, how about something on topic from me? I love the set of Gilligan’s Island because it is exactly as most-modernly inauthentic as the premise of the show. That kind of balance is rare.
I like the Walton’s set because it is fairly believable, and because they made great, smooth use of indoors to outdoors transitions (and vice versa). The sound of the screen door on the Walton house is probably one of the most generally recalled (and rarely mentioned) sounds in popular culture. I was a little puzzled by the three or so steps up to Grandma and Grandpa’s room, and why Grandpa built such a big house… apparently in early anticipation of his son’s fertile union with Olivia.
One episode involved Grandpa’s much older sister-in-law (widow of his Confederate veteran much older brother) who lived in the family home place, a super authentic mountain cabin that was being demolished to build the Blue Ridge Parkway. I’m not sure, but IIRC that was one of the episodes actually filmed partly in Virginia.
ETA: It was mentioned on some episodes that Grandpa and Grandma had another son who died in WW1. I’m not sure if there were kids besides the two boys or not; in the Hamner family there were lots and lots (as there were in Spencer’s Mountain, where the John Sr. character calls on the aid of his many brothers in building his house). I think there was also evidence of the entire clan cannibalizing some of the members when winters were harsh and they felt the angry mountain gods needed to be appeased.
All in all they did a great job capturing the “feel” of the 1930s, which while I didn’t live through them myself most of the houses from my childhood were built in that era and it’s when most of the old people then alive “defaulted to” in their mindsets (the time of life when they were in their 30s/40s and at the top of their games).
Speaking of steps, I was actually watching GWTW today. Scarlett’s bedroom had steps leading down from the hall, and in the hall itself there are shuttered exterior windows implying that her bedroom opens onto either the front or back of the house. There’s also a fireplace in what seems to be the downstairs hallway. I’ve never seen an accurate floor plan of the house as depicted in the movie (there are floorplans on line but they don’t agree with the sets) but I’ve wondered before about that hallway fireplace and exactly what the upstairs bedroom situation is. The exterior of the house in the movie is far more like the description of Twelve Oaks in the book, while Tara in the book is described as a huge whitewashed plain-to-ugly house “built according to no architectural plan whatever, with extra rooms added where and when it seemed convenient”, so maybe the hallway fireplace is an homage (though I doubt it).
They seem to, but I don’t think they do. When there’s a shot that shows both Seinfeld’s and Kramer’s apartment doors, you see that the hallway indeed stops just a bit their apartment entries. So Seinfeld’s bathroom is neighbouring to the hallway. And assuming that Kramer’s apartment is the mirrored version of Seinfeld’s, then their bathrooms are neighbouring eachother.
The apartment in Good Times had a similar problem.
Going towards the back of the set you had (from left to right) the doors to (i) the parents’ bedroom, (ii) Thelma’s room and (iii) the bathroom. Forget that the bathroom would only have been the width of its door if you take into consideration where it was behind the kitchen and its dimensions.
The bigger problem is, when you entered Thelma’s bedroom, the door is on the extreme lefthand side of the space; from there, the room spreads out to the right and takes up an enormous amount of space.* Considering that the door to this room and the bathroom door were right next to each other and there was no space carved out to accommodate the bathroom spatially, there was no way this layout made sense. Add to that again, the kitchen would have been right there and it makes even less sense.
Not really that big of a headscratcher. At one point in my childhood, my family lived in public housing and the spaces were huge; all cheap, but with huge rooms, roomy closets and cheaply made sliding patio doors.
Can’t have a thread like this without bringing in Friends. Rent control or not, nobody in their employment situations would be able to afford such apartments. Monica’s landlord would have found a way to get her out on her ass, probably by refusing to repair the place. As long as she had lived there, the joint would have been falling apart.
Full House’s house was a tardis–little tiny narrow outside, enormous in-side. 4 bedrooms? Same with the Cosby’s brownstone, which had enough rooms for a private doctor’s office, which would have to be at least two examining rooms, waiting room and private bath. The outside doesn’t show enough space.
MASH looked like a MASH with all the little tents.
I used to wonder “Is that even legal?” (zoning an obstetrician’s office in an upscale residential unit). The Huxtables also had the standard cliches of:
1- immaculately clean walls/floors/furniture/bookcases/bedspreads/curtains/etc. even though they had 5 active kids
2- the almost inevitable back staircase (I know there really are houses that have them, but not many)
3- the Formal Dining Room of Requirement (it’s there when needed and goes away otherwise- the house on Family Ties had one as well)
4- the weird hallways on the upper 2 floors (the house had the office level, 1st floor, and at least 2 BR floors, and on each of the upper floors the hallways wound around)
Of course the main sitcom cliche COSBY SHOW suffered from was the one termed Time Pornography. Cliff’s a doctor subject to being called 24/7 by his pregnant patients, mom’s a partner in a successful law firm (corporate I assume) and they have five kids, but there’s time to choreograph and costume lip synching musical numbers, clean a teenaged boy’s bedroom to the bare walls and impersonate characters in teaching him a lesson about finances (ever tried cleaning any room that’s been lived in for several years to the bare walls? It takes a hell of a lot of time. Then add that it’s a teenage boy’s room, which is for so many hundreds of reasons not a good idea to go through too closely anyway.
Another great MOVIE SET AS A MAJOR CHARACTER: Sunset Boulevard. A perfect job of making a mansion look at once palatial and dilapidated (though with Norma’s money I didn’t really understand the dilapidation unless it was phobia of workmen).
Although the Cosbys are supposed to live in Brooklyn Heights, I actually used to work in the public library in Manhattan across the street from the brownstone they show as being the residence in the establishing shots.
This could definitely be enough room for all of this. I live in Brooklyn, in a neighborhood of almost nothing but brownstones similar to the one shown on the show. They are always narrow across the front and deep with rooms. There would definitely be enough room for a one-doctor office there on the ground floor level. There is a dentists office in the ground floor of the building across the street from me, and it’s perfectly legal.
By ground floor, An entrance directly from the yard level (under the stoop, or steps which go up to the next level; usually the main entrance*). The entrance we see into their living room is actually up that flight of steps where we’ve seen Cosby and some of the kids sitting occasionally. Counting that level (the parlor floor), there could very well be a total of 3 floors of living quarters (like the building I live in) and, as such, could contain the living space and number of rooms/bedrooms indicated on the show. Although it could have a formal dining room, the layout the show would not be possible, nor the weird hallways – they would have been straight back.
This difference in entries actually started back when these brownstones were single-family dwellings for the rich. The entrance on the ground level was for servants, deliveries, etc.
I read somewhere that the cockpit of the B-52 in Dr Strangelove was created purely by guess work, the USAF not wanting to let anyone see inside the air plane at the time. When the film was seen, the military were allegedly puzzled by how close it was to the real thing.
As for TV, I’ll take any of a thousand polystyrene planets from Star Trek, Lost in Space etc, but the BBC holds a special place in my heart. No SF series can be complete without an eerie planet, at night, on a crappy plastic stage (Dry ice fog a bonus extra)
If I remember correctly, there was some show that explored whether or not TV characters could afford their residence. I think Frasier was that only one that had a reasonable place for the amount of money they figured he had.
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(Dry ice fog a bonus extra)