Structures Play Supporting Role in Filmmaking : Architecture: Film, in turn, influences skylines as set designers build cities of the future.

In Ayn Rand’s 1940s bestseller “The Fountainhead,” architect Howard Roark blows up a housing complex he designed because the developer changed its style.

It was a dramatic act and a dramatic role for an architect. And when the book became a movie starring Gary Cooper, producers asked the dynamic real-life model for Roark--Frank Lloyd Wright--to design the movie sets.

While Wright never became the film’s designer (his fee was too high), “The Fountainhead” movie made glamour boys of modern designers and confirmed Hollywood’s long fascination with architecture.

In filmmaking today, “Blade Runner” designer Lawrence Paull said, architecture and architects continue to play major roles.

“In architecture and in movies, the crossover between fantasy and reality has a history as old as film itself,” said designer Syd Mead, a “Blade Runner” collaborator.

“From the beginning, the distinction was blurred,” said Mead, “especially in Southern California where many buildings have the fancifulness and flimsiness of sets.”

Los Angeles’ popular “programmatic” architecture, in which buildings mimic the shape of the things they sell is derived directly from the construction techniques of movie set design. The hot dog-shaped Tail O’ The Pup fast-food stand in West Los Angeles is a good example.

In a more dramatic blurring of art and life, D. W. Griffith’s splendidly decadent Babylon set from the movie “Intolerance” glorified the intersection of Sunset and Hollywood boulevards for years after the 1916 movie’s debut.

In 1927, the architecturally prophetic movie “Metropolis” was released. Director Fritz Lang’s gloomy Teutonic masterpiece modeled its menacing 150-story skyscraper on an unbuilt Ludwig Mies van der Rohe design for a glass tower in Berlin.

“Film and modern architecture grew up together,” architect Craig Hodgetts recently told a USC symposium on architecture and film. “Both disciplines explored new ideas about the representation of space, and both disciplines shared--and still share--a profound ambiguity about the contemporary world.”

Some critics argue that film set designers have been far more successful than modernist architects in winning acceptance of new ideas about how a changing world should or might look.

“Modern architecture itself may have left the public cold, but modern architecture in the movies caught its imagination by embodying . . . their fears, hopes and aspirations,” wrote Donald Albrecht in his book “Designing Dreams.”

“The Versailles of the modern movement is the nightclub of the Hollywood musical; its Gothic cathedral is the skyscraper of the futurist epic,” wrote Albrecht. “Film . . . helped shaped popular perceptions of architectural modernism.”

That perception was ambiguous, split between the sleek new streamlined styles of 1930s musicals such as George Stevens’ “Swing Time” and the dark menace of “Metropolis.”

“Film set design reflects the social and political realities of the day,” said Paull. “As the most directly visual manifestation of those realities, architecture is our primary inspiration.”

“Film resembles architecture in its capacity to conjure potent public imagery,” Hodgetts said, “but film is the more powerful visual medium. And ‘Blade Runner’ shows us brilliantly the collision between modernism and reality.”

“Architectural modernism rejected any sort of darkness in its clean, white Cubist spaces,” Hodgetts said. “(Yet) darkness haunted the visions of modernist movie set designers when they were creating images of the future.”

Today, the citizen’s mixture of delight and distrust in the modern metropolis is rendered graphically in films like “Blade Runner,” “Brazil” and the computer generated imagery of “Tron.”

“ ‘Tron’s’ graphics were pure Third Reich,” said “Tron” design consultant Syd Mead. “The images were derived from alienating architectures to create a sense of terror in this digitized world. We set out to develop geometry as destiny. . . .”

A more ironic look at the anti-human elements in modern architecture is offered in Jacques Tati’s 1960s comedies “Playtime” and “Mon Oncle.”

In “Mon Oncle,” Tati tangles with the hard edges of an ultramodern Parisian house, whose rigid geometries seem more suited to metal and plastic objects than to soft-bodied human forms.

Not all the influence flows from architecture into film. The traffic of ideas runs both ways, said Los Angeles architect Glen Small.

Small designed a “Tron”-like “eco-city” that crowds all of Los Angeles into a mile-high, hollow mountain enclosed in glass. This “Green Machine,” which resembles a monstrous vertical trailer park, is a serious suggestion by Small for solving the problems of urban sprawl and environmental pollution.

“Film helped me envision a good future,” Small said. “For me, movies communicate optimism about our capacity to solve problems by means of humane and inventive technologies.”