Ever noticed the extraordinary homes and hideouts owned by villains? Their places have it all — enviable locations, fantastic gadgets and unlimited budgets. Crime pays, architecturally speaking. Leastways it does in the movies.
That’s the premise of “Lair: Radical Homes and Hideouts of Movie Villains.” This upcoming book is the first volume in Tra Publishing’s Design + Film series.
The book’s editor, Chad Oppenheim, FAIA, selected the lairs using what he calls an idiosyncratic process. Still, the reader receives a panoramic behind-the-scenes tour of 15 of movieland’s iconic set designs.
The collection of how-we-did-it interviews included in “Lair” are themselves treasures. Interspersed among the book’s 15 richly illustrated case studies of villainous lairs are first-person accounts from production designers, directors, actors and others. They are but one reason those who love movies and moviemaking will want a copy of “Lair.”
Mr. Oppenheim and his guest commentators suggest a collective mindset among filmmakers for associating unsavory persons of the criminal sort with modern architecture. The lairs in the book somewhat confirm that theme, down to the construction materials. Concrete, glass and steel are the usual specifications.
The book’s contributors say this evil vernacular sharpens the villain’s persona when contrasted with the forces for good, who are ensconced in genteel, traditional interiors. The heroes get Sister Parish while the criminals get Mies van der Rohe.
Mr. Oppenheim selected lairs of those he deemed “truly evil movie villains.” Cat burglars, safecrackers, double-agents and bent politicians need not apply. Think megalomania on a galactic scale.
One such villain practiced his evil onboard a lair a long time ago, in a far-away galaxy. Movie audiences met this villain in 1977’s “Star Wars: Episode IV-A New Hope.” The film launched the character of Darth Vader, an instant inductee to the cinema villain’s hall of fame.
Darth Vader’s stature among his celluloid brethren guaranteed his Death Star’s appearance between the covers of “Lair.” The Death Star is a substantially different lair than its earthbound kin. Its evil is portable.
An armored space station, the Death Star’s engines thrust it to galactic fields of battle. Once aimed in the proper direction, its death ray can take care of business. The telling of the Death Star’s creation is the sort of story-behind-the-movie in which “Lair” excels.
One of these stories comes from “Star Wars” set decorator Roger Christian. His work on the project earned him an Academy Award for Best Art Direction-Set Decoration. Mr. Christian recalls the inspiration for the look of the Death Star’s interiors.
The script by George Lucas didn’t detail the evil world’s aesthetic. The painting by Ralph McQuarrie, illustrator for the production, of a corridor inside the Death Star became canon. How to create that look in the scope and number of sets for filming became a dire problem to solve.
As Mr. Christian explains in “Lair:” “We took a massive gamble and bought a machine that could print out panels in cheap plastic. And we could stamp out these panels and staple them onto wood frames.”
The art department had two and a half months to create everything to shoot the movie. Mr. Christian remembers the pressure being horrendous.
“I had to create the Millennium Falcon out of scrap,” he said. “I bought tons of junk, truckloads.” From this lowly resource came that iconic movieland spaceship and much more. “I had to take old weapons and stick bits on them,” he said of the humble origins of the equally iconic lightsabers and other weapons in the movie.
Before “Star Wars” was a giant hit, it was an enormous risk. Insiders once referred to “Star Wars” as Hollywood’s most expensive low-budget movie. That translated into the production of evil on the economy plan. George Lucas had $10 million to make the movie. The line item for set construction and lighting on the film was a trifling $1.6 million.
Reversing 10 years of inflation, that would have been an even million dollars a decade earlier. It would have paid for just one set in 1967’s production of “You Only Live Twice.” Remember which British Secret Service agent appears in this movie?
It’s Bond. James Bond. The Ken Adam-designed set, the one establishing the standard for evil lairs, appeared in this production, the fifth movie in the Bond series.
In his choices for “Lair,” Mr. Oppenheim includes forensic examinations of four movie villain lairs designed by Ken Adam (1921-2016), one of the industry’s most influential production designers.
Were production designers to establish an empire of their own, there would likely be a holiday in honor of Ken Adam. His name and his work receive frequent mentions in “Lair.” That’s because no discussion about movie sets is profound or informed unless it includes Ernst Stavro Blofeld’s volcano.
One might wonder how writer Ian Fleming arrived at having villain Blofeld’s lair inside a volcano. He didn’t. Mr. Fleming’s book defined the lair as a Japanese castle with a poison garden. In “Lair,” Mr. Oppenheim includes what happens next, and it is indeed a remarkable tale, excerpted from a more extensive study of Mr. Adam’s work by cultural historian Sir Christopher Frayling.
If described in a script, the setting would be an airborne helicopter carrying a crew scouting locations for a big-budget spy thriller. They’re ending three weeks of choppering seven-hours a day, having now covered two-thirds of Japan and finding nothing.
The source material called for the aforementioned castle of evil. Except Japan doesn’t have castles like Europe has them. Cut to an exterior of the helicopter overflying a range of extinct volcanos.
Here, Mr. Adam’s recollection from Sir Christopher’s interview takes over: “It looked like the surface of Mars or the Moon. I can’t remember whether it was me, but somebody said, ‘Wouldn’t it be interesting if our villain had his headquarters underneath one of those craters.’ It was the first major breakthrough.”
Ken Adam flew back to London to begin planning in earnest. On seeing the sketches, Albert Broccoli, the Hollywood producer forever associated with the Bond franchise, liked what he saw.
Continuing from Sir Christopher’s interview, Mr. Adam recalled: “Broccoli said, ‘That’s quite good. I wonder how much it’s going to cost?’ I said, ‘I have no idea.’ He said, ‘If I give you a million dollars, will you do it?’ And I said, ‘I’ll do it.’”
Although it’s been about 60 million years since the last volcano was active in England, in 1966 a very active one took shape on the grounds of Pinewood Studios, just north of London. This volcano’s exterior was visible from three miles away. Its interior was about 120 feet high, with a diameter of 460 feet.
“Everyone in the film industry thought I was crazy. They told me I’d never find a cameraman capable of lighting it,” said Mr. Adam. “In hindsight, it took a lot of courage, or perhaps foolhardiness, but once I had an idea, and I was convinced it was the right thing to do, I had to go ahead with it.”
Even if the physicality of his courage has long since vanished, Ken Adam’s courageous designs are on film for eternity. Also on film are the distinct and arresting designs of architect John Lautner (1911-1994). That came after the move-ins of their real-world, non-villain owner/occupants.
Despite regular appearances of Lautner houses in film and on TV, the typical viewer likely knows nothing of the man and his work.
That may change with the publication of “Lair.” Mr. Oppenheim includes three Lautner homes in the book. Described as “a protégé of Frank Lloyd Wright, who called him “the world’s second-best architect,” Mr. Lautner’s center of activity from the late 1930’s onward was Southern California.
In “Lair,” Mr. Lautner explains why he continued working in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, which he found essential and bedeviling in equal portions. His comments come from a 1986 interview with the UCLA Center for Oral History Research.
“People say, ‘Well, why don’t you move?’ I’ve tried to figure out how I could move, and there’s no way I could be in a place with less population-I get maybe ten [clients] a year out of seven or eight million [people]. The individuals who are looking for something real in architecture are very few.”
Mr. Lautner described these clients: “They were actually looking for architecture, looking for imagination, rather than the latest style, or stock, or this-or-that, or façade, or what-have-you. They wanted something real.”
Leonard Malin was one such individual. He had a budget in mind and a steep fallaway site off Mulholland Drive. On that ground, John Lautner sited an iconic home for the Malin family overlooking the San Fernando Valley. The octagonal house sits atop a concrete column, hovering like a flying saucer above its Hollywood Hills setting. Eventually, it was the ground zero of villainy in Brian De Palma’s “Body Double” of 1984.
The Elrod House, 1968, sits on a craggy site in a Palm Springs, CA, neighborhood. Client Arthur Elrod couldn’t have known the fame that lay ahead for a residence he commissioned John Lautner to design. The property appears as a Bond villain’s lair in 1971’s “Diamonds Are Forever.”
So ideal was the Elrod House to its cinematic purpose that even the extraordinary Ken Adam of Bond production design fame could not improve upon it. “I couldn’t have designed it better myself – it looks incredible in the film.”
Each lair is a self-contained profile in the book, so readers can turn to favorite movies and discover new ones in the order they prefer. Mr. Oppenheim, as the book’s editor, included the movies whose designers and art directors are blazing new trails in live-action and animated feature films.
Ralph Eggleston, art director on “The Incredibles,” (2004) shared some knowledge he received from noted production designer Richard Sylbert (1928-2002). Mr. Sylbert’s credits cited in “Lair” include “Chinatown,” “Dick Tracy” and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf?” He imparted a “truism” to Mr. Eggleston.
“No one cares what a film looks like,” he said of the lesson he received. “They want to be caught up with the characters and the character’s emotions.” Of what happens when the sets dominate, he said, “If anyone notices what you’re doing, then you really haven’t done your job. It should be in the background. It’s visual subtext.”
“Our process is always to throw out the language of sci-fi, the language of cinema, the language of culture that we have [heard],” said Mr. Digby to Tra Publishing for “Lair.”
“There is a whole bunch of sci-fi language that was great thirty years ago,” continued Mr. Digby. “We imagine that’s how it has to be, and it doesn’t have to be like that. We think about characters and their space and their environment. From that comes the architecture.” In speaking about the designs for the villain’s lair in “Ex Machina,” he said, “I’m very pleased that we didn’t end up with a white California modernist building.”
What’s refreshing about “Lair: Radical Home and Hideouts of Movie Villains” is that Mr. Oppenheim doesn’t drift into movie-speak, but rather stays within a general pop culture vocabulary and presents as an architect who likes movies and production design. Between his efforts and those of Andrea Gollin, his co-editor, they’ve covered a broad swath of classic, near-classic and design-relevant films.
Where does one begin choosing just 15 lairs from filmmaking’s hundreds upon hundreds of villainous abodes and workshops? That is, beyond belonging to truly evil villains.
One criterion called for a lair being the sort of place Mr. Oppenheim himself would want to inhabit. Whether buried underground, inside a volcano or adrift in outer space, the lairs held appeal for him as living space or workplace. All of the lairs he chose have, to some degree, influenced Mr. Oppenheim’s architectural practice.
In a monograph reviewing Oppenheim Architecture’s work, a Cornell professor of architecture identified certain qualities and characteristics in the firm’s projects shared with sets created by Ken Adam. Mr. Oppenheim’s firm, founded in 1999, has headquarters in Miami, with offices in New York City and Basel, Switzerland.
The lairs and their owner-villains in the book span films made from 1959 to 2017. These include “North by Northwest,” “Blade Runner 2049,” “The Ghostwriter,” and more, including those mentioned here. The 296-page, hardcover book has November 5 as its publishing date, making “Lair” available for holiday gift-giving.
What else can readers expect from this first installment in the Tra Publishing’s Design + Film series? As they say, buy the book and find out.
As researcher, writer and commentator, Stephen Witte reports and advises on trends shaping the future for the A&D community, manufacturers and distribution channels. His background includes corporate roles in product management, product development and public relations. He can be reached at stephenmwitte@gmail.com.
