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May 01, 2002
The Politics of Design
Behind the Scenes of the Emmy Award-Winning Television Series The West Wing
Text by Michael Frank
Photography by Fred Licht
Architectural Digest
THINK OF IT AS HISTORY through stuff," says Ellen Totleben, the Emmy Award-winning set decorator for The West Wing, Aaron Sorkin's bravura and groundbreaking NBC television series that has made politics sexy, dramatic and surprisingly cool. "It's amazing how much a man reveals himself through his belongings."
Kenneth Hardy, the show's production designer, readily agrees: "Of course you learn about government through our elected officials' actions and decisions, their speeches and their writing, but you can peek behind their public faces and know them from the rooms they live and work in, and how they go about conducting daily life. There can be a whole world of information, let me tell you, in the contents of a desk drawer."
Hardy and Totleben should know: They've had the privilege of pawing through quite a few of them in Washington, at least during the Clinton administration, when The West Wing was originally conceived (with its avowedly liberal slant, the show has no access to the White House these days). Working on three vast soundstages on the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank, California -- the set is said to be the largest in the history of the medium -- Hardy and Totleben have perfected the craft of marrying historically correct architectural or design re-creation with the special needs of TV. These include vividly painting rooms (lights tend to wash out pale colors, which prevail at the actual White House), constructing walls that drop away (for better camera angles) and choosing architectural details that are more elegant than they are in reality, where the exigencies of busy office life have turned sections of even the White House into an unattractive tangle.
But there is a more artful component to Hardy's and Totleben's work, too: the continuing, subtle relationship the pair negotiates between actual people and places and their imaginary counterparts -- the way, in short, they help develop and present character through design. "Part of our mandate is to add visual layers to Aaron's remarkable stories," Totleben points out. "Sometimes we respond to a note in the script, sometimes we have to invent out of thin air, but always we keep an eye out for the nuance, the detail, the revealing note or quirk."
Consider the show's protagonist, President Josiah "Jed" Bartlet, and the most famous room he occupies, the Oval Office. It was designed by Jon Hutman, Hardy's predecessor, who was responsible for about half the sets seen on the show today. Although the Oval Office is perhaps the team's most exact reproduction, the designers made certain beautifying changes, such as molding doors that in the White House are hidden and eliminating the bulletproof glass shields that rather unaesthetically -- but necessarily -- stand between the windows and the president's desk.
Then came the creative part. "The Oval Office is probably one of the most photographed interiors in the country," says Totleben, "but the interesting thing is that when it's photographed, it's often depersonalized and made more `official.' When we visited in the last administration, we saw all kinds of personal objects: Clinton's collection of coins and medallions; his first editions and his bound papers; his pens, his awards, his glass paperweights and his photographs." All this Totleben has approximated and tried to layer in for Bartlet, contributing objects and books that relate to his interest in national parks and conservation. In the Oval Office, as throughout the West Wing set, the artwork consists of images scanned from paintings in the White House collection and afterward given texture. The desk is a replica of the Resolute desk presented to Rutherford Hayes by Queen Victoria (the wood came from HMS Resolute); Franklin Delano Roosevelt later added a front panel to conceal his wheelchair from visitors and the camera alike. No busts of Republican presidents are on display because, as Totleben explains, "Bartlet -- sorry, Martin Sheen -- refuses to be in the same room with them."
This somewhat zany interplay of the actual and the pretend took a further turn when, during the 2000 Democratic Convention, White House staffers visited the set and asked if they could have photographs taken of them sitting behind the Resolute desk. "Apparently this is forbidden in the White House," Totleben says. "They were like tourists, like kids. They went around stroking the curtains, touching the books. `It's amazing,' they said. `You've even got the right stripes on the chairs.' As it happens, the stripes were right because I called the White House, found out who made the fabric and ordered the same pattern."
Notable Washington visitors over the three seasons the show has been on the air have included Chelsea Clinton, Al Gore's and Joe Lieberrnan's families and Betty Currie, but the more revealing visits are certainly those that Hardy and Totleben paid to Washington, where they sponged up dozens of illuminating details about the way the White House is really used and then implemented them on the set. These include the prevalence of interment flags in triangular frames ("Lots of White House people seem to have had family in the military," Hardy observes); televisions that run around the clock and are sometimes stacked two or three in an office; shoes in drawers and garment bags hanging on doors ("No one has time to go home and change before dinner," explains Totleben); red telephones that say "Crash" (to be used in the event of a security breach); microwaves for on-the-run meals; and a "Potus Locator Box," a clock radio-like contraption that constantly discloses the whereabouts of the president (Potus), the first lady (Flotus) and the vice president (Vpotus).
"One of the most important things we saw was, quite frankly, the disorder," Hardy confesses. "The West Wing is choked with desks sticking out of closets, copy machines and cell-phone chargers stuffed into beautiful period fireplaces -- a huge swell of paperwork. People would rather work out of a closet -- literally -- if it keeps them close to the president. Proximity to him is all."
Hardy and Totleben's reinterpreted White House features a chief of staff's office that reflects the nautical interests of its fictional occupant, Leo McGarry, in marine paintings and alludes to his stint in the air force with a prized model plane. There is a Roosevelt Room, where the architecture has been improved over the original -- and made more camera-friendly -- with the addition of columns, glass panels set into doors and a bolder use of color. There is the president's secretary's office, filled, like Betty Currie's, with children's art, some of it made by Totleben's daughter. There is a presidential bedroom that doubles as a presidential study and a lobby that reflects the grandeur of the White House lobby from about seven decades back, before it was subdivided into a much-needed office space.
And there is a Mural Room, which has painted instead of (as in the original) wallpaper murals depicting battles from the Revolutionary War, authentic furniture, and flowers that change with the season. "We use it to receive people before they see the president," Totlehen explains. Hardy adds: "It's an elegant, flexible space, a room to shake hands with an ambassador, to have a delicate meeting about, say, the death of a loved one." For a moment, as the pair talks, gravely and authoritatively, about all the diplomatic encounters that take place in this interior, it seems as though these magicians of make-believe have forgotten that the encounters -- like the rooms themselves -- are entirely invented. Something similar happens to TV viewers across America, every Wednesday at 9:00.
Posted by MorganG at May 1, 2002 11:39 AM