Most folks know Frank Lloyd Wright as America’s most influential architect. What’s lesser known is he loved the movies, and Hollywood loved him.
“Wright was a big fan of the movies. He really admired Walt Disney, and even gave his staff advice on designing some of their most famous films in the 1930s and ’40s,” says Mark Anthony Wilson, an art historian and professor living in Berkeley. “And Hitchcock admired Wright, although they never communicated directly.”
At least 20 feature-length movies have used Wright’s buildings as set pieces in California alone. The earliest was 1933’s “Female,” a Warner Bros. production partly shot at a Wright house in the Hollywood Hills, and the latest is “DreamQuil,” a yet-released thriller with John C. Reilly and Elizabeth Banks that uses the Marin County Civic Center. In between there’ve been movies both lauded and forgotten: Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner,” Jackie Chan’s “Rush Hour,” Ben Stiller’s “Permanent Midnight,” the 1980s Bill Maher comedy “Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death.”
Now people can read about Wright’s connections to Hollywood thanks to Wilson’s book published this summer, “Frank Lloyd Wright in the Movies: Iconic California Sites on Film” (The History Press, $25). The book details architecturally significant filming locations from L.A. to Carmel to the Bay Area, three of which are usually free for the public to visit.
The book contains contemporary, intimate scenes of Wright’s buildings thanks to the involvement of San Francisco architecture photographer Joel Puliaitti. These are juxtaposed against documentary footage of how they appeared on film, preserved by Hollywood historian Marc Wanamaker’s Bison Archives. There’s even trivia about TV shows and music videos that featured the architect’s work, like “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and Dr. Dre’s 2011 single, “I Need a Doctor.”
Wilson recently took the time to chat about Wright’s interest in film, what drew famous directors to his architecture and how Wrightian motifs wound up in a Disney theme-park bathroom. (This interview was edited for brevity.)
Q: You’ve written books about architects Julia Morgan and Bernard Maybeck. What led you to consider Wright?
A: It originated in my living room during movie night with my family. My daughter and I were watching (1959’s) “House on Haunted Hill.” I suddenly sat upright when I noticed at the start of the film was the Ennis House in L.A., the largest single-family residence ever designed by Wright in terms of square footage. I said, “Pause, pause! What on earth made them pretend a Frank Lloyd Wright house would make a good setting for a haunted-house movie?”
Q: Do you have connections to the film industry?
A: My brother John J. B. Wilson is the founder of the Golden Raspberry Awards (aka the Razzies)…. Also, I was once a movie scout. It was a one-off thing in the early ’80s for the movie “The Right Stuff.” I picked the U.S. Custom House on Market Street in San Francisco, and they loved it, but they couldn’t get permission so they never used it.
Q: What drew directors to Wright’s work?
A: These houses just lend themselves to movies. Marc Wanamaker, a respected Hollywood historian who wrote the book’s forward, summarized it in essence by saying these homes were so far ahead of their time even in the 1920s. Directors saw these dramatic visual effects that are so cinematic. And specifically for “Blade Runner,” Ridley Scott once said: “Frank Lloyd Wright’s architectural pattern strengthens the film’s decadent and postmodern feel.”
Q: One house in particular, the Ennis House in L.A., has featured in at least 13 films. Tell us about this place?
A: That was the actual exterior for when Harrison Ford’s character in “Blade Runner” pulls up to his apartment. It was in another Ridley Scott movie, “Black Rain,” when Michael Douglas gets ready to go into a house with a yakuza boss. Then “Rush Hour” did it, and then the “The Replacement Killers” with an overlord-type crime boss. Many directors have used the Ennis House for powerful Asian characters, because they thought it had an Asian influence to it. But of course, that’s not the style Wright thought of — he was thinking of Mayan-revival architecture.
Q: The Marin County Civic Center has starred in several sci-fi movies: 1997’s “Gattaca,” George Lucas’ “THX 1138,” Alex Prager’s upcoming “DreamQuil.” Why do you think that is?
A: The whole building evokes a futuristic feel. It’s been called Space Age-style. It was produced in that era when the Seattle Space Needle was built, in a period with the idea of travel to other planets. It has a “needle” that was designed to be a radio-transmission tower, and it looks like a rocket launching off the building. There are lots of sweeping lines and the place has a modernistic feel – it was ahead of its time.
Q: Did Wright personally like to watch movies?
A: Oh, yes. He screened them for staff an average of once a week at Taliesin West (in Scottsdale, Arizona). You can still see the theater there. And he was friends for decades with Walt Disney. Both Wright and Disney had their own plans for perfectly planned communities. They knew of each other’s ideas, and agreed that people shouldn’t be crammed into overly crowded spaces.
Q: Somehow, Wright’s designs wound up in a Disney bathroom?
A: At Disney California Adventure Park in Anaheim, the restroom facilities are based on the John Storer House in L.A. If you look at a photo of it, you’ll see it’s very similar. Wright might’ve found that ironic or somehow odd – but he wouldn’t have objected.
– “Frank Lloyd Wright in the Movies: Iconic California Sites on Film” by Mark Anthony Wilson and Joel Puliaitti is published by the History Press, an imprint of Arcadia Publishing (arcadiapublishing.com)