The following piece is a continuation of a series, Behind the Frame by Chris Rogers, which analyzes how the built environment has been represented on the big screen. Interiors will post future pieces on INTJournal.com.

Historically, most ‘Hollywood’ films have indeed been shot in Los Angeles, and there is one building in that city that has been used more often, to represent more places, than any other: the Bradbury. Completed in 1894 on a corner plot just a few blocks from City Hall, it has always housed individual businesses, each with their own front door within the building. Two dozen features have been shot there in the last seventy five years, its very particular architecture – and the skills of filmmakers – allowing it to pass for a number of other building types across a wide range of genres.

The Bradbury was designed by George H. Wyman and named after its owner, gold miner-turned-developer Lewis Bradbury. Its modest height – just five floors – and Italianate brick façades are seldom seen on screen, because it is not the outside of the Bradbury that attracted productions over the decades. Two entrances lead to a narrow passageway with walls of glazed and plain brick and ornate ironwork. Open to the glazed roof, this space widens at the first floor to leave galleries supported on iron columns, from where the remaining commercial units are accessed and which overlook the ground floor. This stepping back exposes the lifts, which now read as freestanding iron towers, their cars, cables and counter-weights animating the space. Two flights of stairs with scrolled iron balustrading switch back and forth across the walls as they climb towards the large skylight.

The Bradbury made its film debut in China Girl (1942), a World War 2 drama set in the Far East, playing the ‘Hotel Royale, Mandalay’. Immediately, it was the spectacular atrium that proved the draw. Many scenes are set on its stairs and galleries, which – richly finished in ceramic, hardwood and marble – already lent themselves to representing a hotel and required only exotic plants and louvred doors to evoke a Burmese setting. Studio sets extended and supplemented the building using imitations of its ironwork. Moving to the European theatre of the same conflict, the Bradbury became a London hospital in The White Cliffs of Dover (1944). Now the same galleries were lined with beds full of wounded soldiers, with new arrivals triaged on the Mexican tiled floor of its lobby. Portrayed in the film as standing across the Thames from the Houses of Parliament, the setting is probably intended to be the real-life St Thomas Hospital whose Victorian buildings would have been a reasonable match for the American stand-in.

Contemporary drama of a different kind saw the Bradbury begin its most enduring relationship, that with film noir. Beginning with Double Indemnity (1945), the Bradbury appeared repeatedly in films of this genre over the next decade, each showing the building in a slightly different way. In D.O.A. (1949) the Bradbury is named as housing the Phillips Import-Export Company, around which the plot revolves. Its exterior, revealingly, is substituted with that of another building but the Bradbury lobby is seen briefly as the lead character pursues his own killer, whilst the galleries and one of the staircases are used for the climactic confrontation. At the beginning of Shockproof (1949) the Bradbury’s upper levels contain a parole office and the height of the atrium permits a scene that tests characters’ and viewers’ reactions alike in the context of the film’s title. Two years on and M (1951) remade Fritz Lang’s earlier film in which both sides of the law pursue a child-killer. This time he takes refuge in the Bradbury, which is again named as such in the script and accurately described as “the building on 3rd Street”, prompting an architectural manhunt. This is both thorough (the criminal gang consults plans) and lengthy (comprising a sixth of the film’s running time) and moves from the basement to the roof, dwelling in the lobby and galleries. Befitting the story’s German origins, director Joseph Losey and cinematographer Ernest Laszlo – returning to the Bradbury after working on D.O.A. – brought a strong Expressionist sensibility to the sequence, employing acute low and high camera angles, shadows as defining elements and deep focus. Two years later again and the Bradbury is the office of private investigator Mike Hammer for I, The Jury (1953), based on the novel by pulp author Mickey Spillane. Here the Bradbury’s exposed ironwork helps support the illusion that it stands amongst New York’s tenements, known for their external fire escapes. Once more one of the Bradbury’s staircases provides the setting for the film’s major clash which, unusually for the period, is shot hand-held.

The 1960s saw a new wave of cinematic comedies, and the Bradbury gamely played its part. A flirtation with farce at the end of Good Neighbor Sam (1964) had Jack Lemmon’s identity-swapping character complicating his life for the final time in its lobby – acting, once more, as that of a hotel – before finding happiness. It is not known what the Bradbury’s management felt about the liberal use of house paint in the scene. Inevitably film noir was not safe from such treatment and the other literary giant of that genre, Raymond Chandler, provided the source for Marlowe (1969), in which James Garner as the title character investigates a complex mesh of murder, blackmail and missing relatives. Thanks to modish deconstruction, though, he does this in a lighter, more self-aware manner than his predecessors; the Bradbury hosts the offices of this dogged private eye too.

Thrillers with a twist emerged in subsequent eras, and the Bradbury remained adaptable. The heritage of film noir was honoured and extended in Blade Runner (1982), which had a femme fatale, urban pursuit and moody cinematography yet was also set forty years into a future of artificial life, flying cars and video phones. The Bradbury’s interior became that of a decaying apartment block abandoned by all but one resident, his unexpected guests causing another investigator to prowl its stairs and galleries; visible through its skylight was a drifting blimp advertising off-world travel. This was appropriate, given Wyman claimed his designs for the Bradbury were inspired by a passage in a then-recent novel of speculative fiction. Exploitation sequel Avenging Angel (1985) may lack polish but its final gun fight does exploit the horizontals of the Bradbury’s galleries and the verticality of its lifts and stairs through fast tracking shots along the former and careful character positioning on the latter. Horror visited the Bradbury in Wolf (1994), although this story of a middle-aged literary editor ousted by a younger rival but releasing his inner beast after a rural bite is as much metaphorical as it is literal. Will Randall stands on a landing of the Bradbury atrium in astonishment, eavesdropping on his company’s staff with newly-heightened senses.

One of the Bradbury’s more recent film incarnations presented yet another disguise for the building that also acted as a fitting summary of its contribution to that industry to date. In The Artist (2011), made as a near-silent movie melodrama in homage to that era, the Bradbury is the interior of Kinograph Studios where the lead characters work. In a key scene the fading star of the silents walks down the iron staircase, meeting a rising talent of the talkies on her way up. They chat and reminisce before each continues on their journey, although they will meet again.

The Bradbury has had a similar appeal to allied industries – many television programmes, pop promos and photo shoots have been undertaken there too – but George Wyman’s Los Angeles office block is likely to remain the location of choice for features wherever and whenever they are set.

Chris Rogers writes, speaks and creates tours about architecture and other aspects of visual culture. He has written three books, including How to Read London – A crash course in London architecture (Ivy Press, 2017), a publisher's best-seller. His work and thoughts on architecture, film, art, design and television can be found at www.chrismrogers.net

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Beyond the Frame #20: Director’s Cut – The Bradbury Building

Interiors