Evil somehow seems more palatable when it comes dressed in a tux. In the case of “L.A. Confidential,” the movie’s dinner jacket takes the form of the crisp white cliffside house in the Hollywood Hills that was designed in the late 1920s by Richard Neutra.
The house is presented as the home of a character in the thriller about police corruption and sordid doings in Hollywood.
“I wanted Pierce Patchett to have that Howard Hughes quality of being the mysterious puller of strings behind the scenes,” said the director, Curtis Hanson. “To have him live in a house that is architecturally significant and on the modernist edge gives him an artistic flair that makes him difficult to tag.”
If for Shakespeare all the world’s a stage, for directors in Hollywood the stage that matters lies within a 30-mile radius of the intersection of Beverly and La Cienega Boulevards.
“The zone,” as it is called in the film industry, is not only convenient for equipment caravans and impatient actors. (Unions charge a per diem fee at locations beyond the radius.)
It also is the set of sets, where architecture history meets film opportunity as location scouts and directors cast modernist and contemporary classics.
The right houses telegraph information about character, attitude, social standing and period; they help establish tone. With their wide-angle views over the cityscape and their tangles of bougainvillea and manzanita, they immediately say Los Angeles.
Though created to maximize light, space and a sense of well-being, modernist buildings in Hollywood have set the scene for many moody, murderous movies.
Guns drawn, the heroes of “L.A. Confidential” descend the staircase in the Neutra house with tense balletic machismo, the abstract planes of the strictly angled house framing their ratcheting movements.
Hiring these houses as movie sets amounts to a thriving cottage industry within the film business, and an unintended result is that millions get to peer into otherwise very private dwellings designed by Los Angeles’ great architects.
This is where Frank Lloyd Wright, his son Lloyd Wright, R.M. Schindler, John Lautner, A. Quincy Jones, Ray Kappe and other great first-, second- and third-generation modernists built, and where the current crop of architectural talent, including Eric Owen Moss and Michael Rotondi, have erected adventurous descendants of modernism.
“There’s a lot of demand for these contemporary houses,” said Walter Roshetski, director of commercial marketing at Universal Locations. “There may be 100 in the area, 60 in the zone and 20 to 30 that are filmable.”
Look at the shadowy apartment in “Blade Runner” and experience the haunting interiors of the Ennis-Brown house, by Frank Lloyd Wright.
Strip away the gadgets and girls from the James Bond movie “Diamonds Are Forever” and find John Lautner’s circular concrete and glass Elrod house, set among dramatic rock outcroppings.
“This is a class of houses unique to Los Angeles–almost all are in the Hollywood Hills–and there’s nothing gaudy about them,” said Wayne Middleton, a freelance location manager. “The architects appreciated and embraced the environment. It’s an extraordinary architectural period.”
Middleton arranged to rent a daring steel and glass showcase structure that is cantilevered off a hillside high above Hollywood. It is the setting for “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?,” Gregory Nava’s film opening in October, about the wives of the ’50s pop singer Frankie Lymon.
With its hovering roof, floor planes and plate glass walls, the house serves up its occupants to the forever view like canapes on a tray.
The glamorous spectacle, luminous at night with lights carpeting the Los Angeles basin, explains in a single image just what makes the city cinematic.
Still occupied by its original owners, Buck and Carlotta Stahl, the house was designed and built in 1960 by Pierre Koenig, who pioneered the use of steel in postwar residential structures in Southern California.
“The relationship of the house to the city below is very photogenic,” Koenig said, explaining why the location scouts keep returning. “The house is open and has simple lines, so it foregrounds the action. And it’s malleable. With a little color change or different furniture, you can modify its emotional content, which you can’t do in houses with a fixed mood and image.”
“My gripe is the movies use them as props but never list the architect in the credits,” Koenig added. “Architects, of course, get no residuals from it. The Stahls paid off the original $35,000 mortgage for the house and pool in a couple of years through location rentals, and now the house is their entire income.”
Stahl, who typifies the retirees who occupy many of these houses, said, “I get $5,000 a day for movie shooting, $1,000 to $1,500 for a fashion shoot and $2,500 to $3,000 for commercials, so it’s helped.”
His wife added that agents took up to 33 percent of the fees. But still, the income of a few choice hillside houses ranges between $100,000 and $150,000 a year.
Nava used the Stahl house in “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?” to convey the character of Zola Taylor, a singer who was a member of the Platters in the 1950s and ’60s.
“She was a flamboyant person, and to her it was the most beautiful, most spectacular place ever, and we want the audience to feel that,” he said.
