7 Secrets of The West Wing Sets
Photo: Eric Liebowitz/NBCU Photo Bank
Back in 1999, Aaron Sorkin gave audiences a key to the White House. With his political drama The West Wing, which ended in 2006, the showrunner, alongside production designers Jon Hutman and Kenneth Hardy, created a painstakingly accurate reproduction of the iconic building. The sets, built on a 20,000-square-foot Los Angeles soundstage, were designed under the eye of former White House staffers, who were hired as consultants to advise on the layout and details of the space. In fact, the Oval Office set reportedly matched its counterpart so closely that the White House didn’t allow Warner Bros. to offer tours to visitors, out of concern for security.
When liberties were taken, it was all for the sake of Sorkin’s storytelling. “They did make changes, especially in the Roosevelt Room, like adding French doors, which allowed for the cast to move around the West Wing to do the famed walk-and-talks,” Ron Simon, curator at The Paley Center for Media, tells AD. (As a salute to the series, earlier this year, the New York City museum featured an exhibition called “Inside The West Wing,” featuring props, costumes, and artifacts from the show—including the pressroom podium and an original model of the fictional White House.)
To mark 25 years since the show premiered on September 22, 1999, here are some little-known facts about The West Wing’s labyrinth of sets.
The fictional White House is more glamorous than its real-life counterpart
The West Wing
When asked in a 2001 interview how realistic the sets of The West Wing were, Katharine Q. Seelye, a former White House correspondent, noted that the production team gave the place a facelift.
“The set of the show is much glossier than the reality. The real West Wing, particularly the pressroom, is worn and scruffy and home to the occasional rat (the feral kind),” she explained. “The show’s open and airy workspace, with glass partitions and all-window corridors, is also manufactured.”
The reason for all that glass, Sorkin later explained in an interview with Empire Online, was to offer “more visual interest” onscreen. Plus, Richard Schiff (a.k.a. Toby Ziegler) noted, the windows in the Roosevelt Room allowed audiences to see the maze of rooms that had been intricately built just outside.
That said, the Oval Office is nearly an exact replica
The West Wing
John F. Kennedy Jr. Exploring His Father's Desk
Hutman tried to get The West Wing’s Oval Office as close as possible to reality, with the White House allowing him inside for a closer look at the floor plan and design details for inspiration. The desk that President Bartlet (Martin Sheen) uses is a reproduction of John F. Kennedy’s oak timber desk, minus the trap door, which his son, John F. Kennedy Jr., was famously photographed playing inside.
Aaron Sorkin repurposed the Oval Office set from his film The American President
Michael Douglas And Rob Reiner In 'The American President'
If President Bartlet’s office looks eerily similar to President Shepard’s in The American President, a 1995 romantic comedy penned by Sorkin, that’s because it’s actually a hand-me-down. Sorkin and Hutman saved pieces from the set to incorporate in The West Wing, leaving the film’s Oval Office and Mural Room entirely intact.
The lobby design was inspired by the Kennedy-era White House
The West Wing
While offering a behind-the-scenes video tour of The West Wing set, Hutman shared that the spaciousness of the White House’s lobby shifted after Richard Nixon became president. Walls were moved in closer, creating a smaller, more narrow space for visitors to enter. That design didn’t work for Hutman, who took inspiration from John F. Kennedy’s lobby design, which featured an open floor plan and elegant white columns.
“There needs to be grandeur when you first come into this place,” West Wing director Thomas Schlamme noted in the video. “In the real West Wing now, that doesn’t exist. We needed that, no matter what, for our show, for our audience, to feel the grandness of this lobby.”
Lighting was key when it came to differentiating rooms
The West Wing
As the cast traveled from one space to another during their lengthy walk-and-talks, cinematographer Thomas Del Ruth employed lighting tricks to make sure that the maze of rooms felt appropriately different from one another.
“We use some deep blues in the fluorescents to characterize different parts of the White House working areas, to separate them from the white-lit areas we have just come from,” Del Ruth told The American Society of Cinematographers. “It makes a nice complimentary palette when you’re using a Steadicam and going through 15 rooms at one time. Each room can have its own feel and look, and it can be done fairly quickly because all of the lights are on dimmers.” (A Steadicam is a device that stabilizes a camera and is used during moving shots.)
You can still visit some of the real-life locations
US-HEALTH-VIRUS
Fans who want to step inside the world of The West Wing should look no further than Southern California, where a few scenes were filmed on location. The Hilton Checkers Hotel, located in Downtown Los Angeles, doubled as a Washington, DC, hotel in the episode “Take This Sabbath Day,” where Joey Lucas (Marlee Matlin) stays when she comes to town.
Head to Pomona College’s Bridges Auditorium in Claremont, California, to check out the space that doubled as the White House’s East Room in the episode “No?l.” Though smaller than the actual East Room, production designer Kenneth Hardy thought it had a similar feeling and filled the rooms with replica chandeliers, chairs, flowers and presidential portraits for added effect.
The fishbowl in C.J.’s office was filled with easter eggs
The West Wing
Look closely at the fishbowl in C.J. Cregg’s (Allison Janney) office and you’ll find hidden easter eggs snuck inside by prop master Blanche Sindelar. Each offered a nod to the theme of their respective episode, including a mini ballot box in “Midterms,” a podium in “Inauguration: Over There” and American flags in “War Crimes.”
While the props might not have caught the casual viewer’s eye, Schlamme recalled the crew delighting in discovering Sindelar’s latest additions.
“For all of us it became this thing; we could not wait to see what she had done with the fishbowl,” he told Empire Online, “and the first day of every episode we would all go into C.J.’s office to see what was in there.”
Originally Appeared on Architectural Digest
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