A White House set made for just $90,000 ultimately became one of the most ubiquitous backdrops of the 1990s…
Clint Eastwood prowled his cameras around it for the tepid 1997 thriller Absolute Power. Lloyd Bridges stood in the middle of it as ‘Tug’ Benson in Hot Shots! Part Deux. It’s on display in 1990s hits The Pelican Brief and In The Line Of Fire. Yet the $90,000 White House set that was designed by a production designer called J Michael Riva was actually built for a rather sweet comedy: Ivan Reitman’s 1993 hit, Dave.
If you’re unfamiliar with the movie, Dave sees Kevin Kline in the title role, as an everyday man who becomes President of the United States. He uses this office for kindness, doing good, and fighting for the impoverished rather than the ric… okay, I’ll move on. Co-starring Sigourney Weaver, the $28m movie earned over $90m at the box office, and picked up an Oscar nomination for its screenplay.
But for Warner Bros, that funded the film, the set that was constructed for the movie would prove to be quite the asset. “It was standing at Warners for a long time,” noted Fred Baron, when he was senior vice president of feature production at 20th Century Fox, “and you would just go over and shoot right there”. Rival studios happily hired it because of its appearance and convenience, with bookings getting so copious that the Wesley Snipes thriller Murder At 1600 in the end had to fund a second White House set in Canada, as it couldn’t get space on the Warners lot.
Still, as you might expect, you can’t just let anybody into the White House. When faced with the challenge of mirroring its look on film, Riva firstly requested permission to take photographs of the interior, so that he could look to mirror it on screen. Not allowed, in much the same way that the production team of 1997’s Air Force One weren’t allowed to take images of the Presidential plane’s interior.
However, with Air Force One, then-President Bill Clinton did allow them on board. Riva, though, went a little bit rogue. He booked himself on an official tour of the White House, and – as per a Premiere magazine article of June 1993 – ‘surreptitiously filmed’ in on an 8mm camera. He told the magazine that he wasn’t nervous, but “the people I was with were nervous.” For Riva though, he reconciled that “I’ve been arrested before, so I didn’t worry about it”.
J Michael Riva, who passed in 2012 at the age of just 63, had already by this point worked on films such as Lethal Weapon, The Goonies and Ordinary People, and would go on to movies such as Congo, Spider-Man 3, Iron Man 2 and his final picture, Django Unchained.
For Dave though, he and his team constructed the Oval Office from the White House, as well as the dining room. After describing seeing the real White House interiors as an “anti-climax”, he admitted that in the end, they exaggerated everything, and also made the corridors a bit more straightforward to follow.
Read more: 1993, and the three huge Hollywood thrillers that hit big in one month
He spent $90,000 on the set, using the John F Kennedy era as a touchpoint. Carpets were purchased from the company that was actually supply the White House, and the telephones used on the set had been used for real in the Oval House. Then, they were sold to a film company making 1964’s Seven Days In May, and Riva discovered them languishing in a warehouse.
The American Secret Service (hello, if you’re reading!) did, of course, become aware of the production, and Warner Bros did seek and get some official permissions. Arguably the trickiest official shot to get was a view from the Oval Office. While the film had been denied permission to film inside the White House, it did get the nod to take some shots from the lawn. This was very much under the watchful eye of the Secret Service though, and they weren’t happy.
A key shot required a scissor lift, to raise the height of the camera and get an overview of the White House lawn. However, as Riva relayed to Premiere, the Secret Service “made us take everything down two or three times because it was the perfect sniper position to shoot the President through the living room window.”
Understandably too, officials made their presence known during the capturing of the shot. Five police officers, two sniffer dogs, and umpteen Secret Service personnel were present across the four days it took to capture the shot. Riva would lament that it should have taken 15 minutes, and had they been filming on a studio lot. His desire to work in Washington again was suitably diminished.
Yet his set was acclaimed, and turned into an unexpected and welcome income stream for Warner Bros. Its head of facilities at the time, Gary Credle, argued that “it’s something that’s very distinctive, and a lot of people want it.” It was estimated that Warner Bros had made a profit on the set from renting it out, even before Dave arrived in cinemas.
It had taken some six weeks to construct, and was built in a way that it could be physically relocated to other studios as well. For instance, it turned up in 1994’s Clear And Present Danger, but moved to the Sony lot.
There’s a piece over at Filming Locations that details every instance the site spotted where the set turned up. You can read that here.
It’s since been dismantled, of course, but not before it was used by dozens of other productions. Few replicas, though have managed to make the White House interior look as warm as we saw it in Dave. In fact, when people were taken on a tour, the feedback Riva and his team were getting was that it was much nicer than the real thing.
Not bad, for a couple of months work in all, on a fairly tight budget. Even the David Zaslav era of Warner Bros might consider that money well spent.
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