Has a movie ever been filmed inside the White House?
Over the years, the White House has been almost as big a movie star as any of the icons who have played presidents living within its hallowed walls. There isn’t a year that goes by where a glut of movies and TV shows don’t feature plots set in and around the 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue address, and the Oval Office has become one of the most instantly recognisable rooms in the world thanks to its countless appearances in Hollywood fare.
From stately political dramas like The American President and Dave, sci-fi disaster spectacles like Independence Day and Deep Impact, and spikey satires like Don’t Look Up and Wag the Dog to politically charged action movies like In the Line of Fire and Clear and Present Danger, the White House has been the setting for many, many kinds of drama, from the fiercely realistic to the wildly over-the-top.
Lest we forget, after all, the world-renowned building has been directly attacked by terrorists a bunch of times, most notably in Olympus Has Fallen and White House Down, while a teleporting mutant once tried to kill the incumbent president on top of the historic Resolute desk in X-Men 2. In Hollywood, there’s never a dull moment at the White House.
Here’s the million-dollar question: Were any of these movies filmed inside the White House? The short answer is no, while the long answer is, regrettably, also no. According to Neel Lattimore, Hillary Clinton’s press secretary in 1997 during her first term as the First Lady, “We do get requests to film here. And we’re as gracious as we can be, but the answer is no. The White House is a historical property, and it’s not used for commercial purposes. It’s not a set.”
Hollywood’s long obsession with faking the Oval Office
OK, so it’s unlikely that Gerard Butler would ever be able to brutalise terrorists inside the real White House, and Meryl Streep was never going to sit in the real presidential seat of power to ‘hilariously’ send up modern politics with Jonah Hill, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Jennifer Lawrence. However, that just means Hollywood’s production designers have been making recreations of the famous structure’s interiors for decades, and, over time, viewers have seen the same ones pop up over and over again in different films and shows.
Interestingly, the White House Industrial Complex – as I’ve decided to call the preponderance of Oval Office replicas seen in Hollywood – began in earnest in the 1990s. Production designer J Michael Riva constructed the first full-scale replica of the building for Dave, the 1993 comedy starring Kevin Kline as a hapless lookalike for the president who becomes stuck in the role when the real president suffers a stroke, on Stage 18 at Warner Bros’ Burbank, California studio. It proved extremely popular with other productions, with movies such as Hot Shots! Part Deux, In the Line of Fire, The Pelican Brief, and Clear and Present Danger all making good use of it.
Then, Castle Rock Entertainment built its own White House for 1995’s Michael Douglas vehicle The American President, and it was used again by Oliver Stone’s Nixon, Independence Day, Contact, Wag the Dog, and Armageddon. Interestingly, when Warner Bros purchased Castle Rock, the set was taken apart, but its best features, the Oval Office and Mural Rooms, were repurposed for Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing, which ran from 1999 to 2006.
However, when the Dave set began to look a bit worse for wear after being re-used so many times, production designer Nelson Coates built what he considers the best of these three Oval Offices for the 1997 Wesley Snipes thriller Murder at 1600. “Ours is the most architecturally accurate,” Coates told The New York Times. “In niches and alcoves, what had been regular shelves on other sets are really coffered octagons in ours. We have sliding doors that slide; in Warner Bros’ set, they were hinged. Joe Blow audience member may not go, ‘Oh, that’s wrong’. But a million visitors see the Oval Office every year.”
Rather amusingly, Coates revealed there was one critical way that he departed from reality in his construction of the perfect Oval Office. He chose not to replicate the decor of then-President Bill Clinton’s room, as the colour scheme was “cream, gold and red with alternating-width bands”. Couple that scheme with yellow drapes and blue rug, and Coates joked, “It looks like you’re at the circus. If we’d put Clinton’s exact fabric on the sofas in our film, people would have thought we were mocking it”.
