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Perhaps aware of its place in the history of architecture and film, the house is not humble. It sits astride a Los Feliz hillside peering out over the Los Angeles basin, secure atop a massive restraining wall of geometrically patterned concrete blocks. Los Angeles is home to both abundant architectural landmarks and the film industry, so it seems unsurprising that the structures of the city are not strangers to film. Evaluating the relationship between the city's architecture and its most famous product, however, is difficult. But the Ennis-Brown residence (1925) is different, exceptional for two reasons: it is the crowning achievement of Frank Lloyd Wright's experimental "textile block" style of architecture, and it has been the backdrop for over sixty films, television shows, music videos, advertisements and magazine photo spreads. The residence's popularity with producers, directors, photographers and location scouts is tied to Frank Lloyd Wright's artistic impulses and architectural faculty, and its portrayal in media, like that of so many other Los Angeles landmarks, has affected its history. The Ennis-Brown house is a lesson in space for architects, but also for media scholars; the rooms, blocks, walls and windows-its spaces-have been manipulated to portray everything from a laboratory to a mansion, and have been transformed from a setting for high art to the Marla Maples Workout Video. Drawing upon this broad resume enables us to view the Ennis-Brown house as a touchstone to examine the relationship between film and architecture.
Measuring this relationship conventionally takes the form of placing a film's use of sets along a continuum of how loudly this setting "speaks" within the narrative: is it a relatively silent backdrop or does it participate more loudly, as in the case of more "expressionist" cinema where design exteriorizes emotional states? In the movies, architecture is most prevalently the somewhat mute background against which the story is set; though art direction seems largely ignored by the movie-going public1 its impact on the "look" of the film, and thus the entirety of the experience of it is immense, from the gritty noir sensibilities of the Big Sleep (1946) and Blade Runner (1982) to the surrealistic oddity of The 5,000 Fingers of Doctor T (1953). In film sets evoke a mood, contribute to narrative, provide...