There will be skyscrapers on Mars sooner than architects replace cowhands, cops, humanoids or furry cartoon creatures as film heroes.
The architectual T-square, computer and trademark button-down shirt are not the stuff of Hollywood mythmaking. When King Kong boosted himself up the Empire State Building, nobody bothered to mention that the architect who designed the place was William Lamb.
But there must be something to the Tower of Babel mystique at that. Architects (males, generally) have been turning up as romantic movie leads in the last few years. When will it be the turn of dentists and heating engineers?
Spike Lee’s “Jungle Fever” may have touched off this less than signal trend. The movie flipped the cliches: Wesley Snipes played a successful black architect in an interracial affair with an office worker (Annabella Sciorria). Snipes even was known as Flipper Purify in the film.
Two years later, it was Tom Hanks’ turn as a widowed young architect in a misty cross-country romance, “Sleepless in Seattle,” with Meg Ryan.
“Sleepless in Seattle,” like many a Beaux-Arts building of the monumental sort, was based on a French model–a remake of an old French movie.
So was “Intersection” (1994), with Richard Gere as a Vancouver architect involved with the eternal triangle as well as the fraternal T-square.
Gere is pictured as the designer of a museum and is given the chance to say some things about architecture. His big problem, however, is choosing between his office-partner wife, Sharon Stone, and a steamy newswren, Lolita Davidovich. The movie is boilerplate, but the British Columbia scenery is first-rate.
But why this Hollywood spin on architects? You might as well ask, Why not?
“People are interested in architects and what they do,” according to Alice Sinkevitch, executive director of the Chicago chapter, American Institute of Architects.
“And using them is a good way to get an attractive background into the film–buildings and models and such.”
The height of something or other in that regard was reached a good 20 years ago in the disaster thriller “The Towering Inferno.” This is the one that’s sometimes blamed for all the disaster movies that came after it.
It opened in 1974, the same year as Sears Tower, the world’s tallest building. But Sears’ 110-story reach was dwarfed by the film’s fictional 138-story tower that catches fire.
That scenario was set in San Francisco and was ridiculous in view of that city’s earthquake history and general antipathy to megascrapers. Nothing that high would have been built there. Not that there’s anything absurd about a high-rise fire. There have been deadly ones.
The movie has plenty of stunt effects and grisly deaths. Paul Newman plays the architect of the building, victimized by cheesy electrical wiring. O.J. Simpson is in the star cast and rescues a cat.
Even before “The Towering Inferno,” the movies had a history of dramatizing architecture and cityscpaes as backgrounds or props. Fritz Lang’s 1920s silent classic “Metropolis” set a sci-fi pattern with its engulfing skyscaper canyons and robotic themes.
The funniest tall-story silent was “Safety Last,” with Harold Lloyd’s breakneck climb up a building facade.
In our times, filmmakers often have used the designer skylines of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco. Chicago is the setting for such thrillers as “The Untouchables” (1987), with scenes in landmark buildings, and the slapstick “Blues Brothers” of 1980.
But the bizarre big daddy of architect movies is “The Fountainhead” (1949), directed by King Vidor. “The Fountainhead” stars Gary Cooper as architect Howard Roark, super-idealist and individualist. When a building doesn`t measure up to his plans, he blows it up.
“The Fountainhead” was based on Ayn Rand’s best-seller novel of that name. Supposedly she drew for inspiration on the career of America’s best-known though not best-selling architect, Frank Lloyd Wright. He was a mighty individual and egotist himself.
If there was any Wright Stuff in “The Fountainhead.” he didn’t think so and Rand also denied it. He did design an exciting house for her that never was built.
Wright also was approached to do the architectural drawings that Cooper was to work on in the movie. But Wright apparently asked for a lot more money and control than the movie makers wanted to give.
In any case, Wright didn’t go around blowing up buildings. He left that to Hollywood.
