‘I would like to see the underground War Room’
The guide hesitated, ‘Sorry it doesn’t actually exist. It was a film set’
‘Are you sure’
‘Quite sure Mr President’
A disappointed Ronald Reagan continued his tour of the White House.
After seeing the first James Bond film, Dr No, director Stanley Kubrick wanted the visionary set designer to work for him. A former World War II pilot Ken Adam had a very slim budget and no time to present sketches. He took a risk in using new materials and the resulting set, with its extraordinary angles, led Kubrick to employ him for his iconic film, Dr Strangelove. In Adam’s War Room a circular table, some 22 feet across sits in the centre of a jet-black floor and is lit from above by a ring of white light. The starkness and sobriety of Adam’s design creates an intense atmosphere in which the generals and politicians are playing with the world as though it were a game of poker. Adam’s War Room has been repeatedly copied and referenced in other movies and Steven Spielberg called it ‘the best set that’s ever been designed’.
Adam would work with Kubrick again on the film Barry Lyndon and his designs saw him awarded his first Oscar, but it had been hard won as Kubrick had been a very demanding director and Adam ended up in hospital following a breakdown. The two men remained friends but Adam vowed never to work with him again. He also produced further visionary sets for another six Bond films, which included the challenge of designing something no one, not even the Presidents of the United States had ever seen, the inside of the US Treasury’s bullion store at Fort Knox for Goldfinger. Adam built a cathedral of gold and, he said in one interview, they developed a special lacquer finish for the gold ingots that made them look better than the real thing. In a departure from hi-tech fantasy Adam created the sets for another Fleming novel, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. One of his most difficult tasks, he said, was to design a car from the early 20th century which was also sexy. Among his other film credits are the Michael Caine espionage thrillers, The Ipcress File and Funeral in Berlin, as well as Sleuth, Addams Family Values and The Madness of King George for which he won his second Oscar. Adam was knighted in 2003, the first for a film production designer, and appointed a Royal Designer for Industry six years later. He enjoyed a long life and died in 2016 at the age of 95.
I wrote this for a competition on the theme of ‘Vision’
