From the silent era to streaming, from indies to blockbusters, filmmakers have been flipping sets upside down for over a hundred years.
This video essay came from a casual discussion with a friend about how the characters ran along the walls and ceiling in Inception.
I told her they just flipped the hallway over, and she asked, “How do you turn a hallway upside down?”
“Well, they obviously built the set, it’s not a real location.”
“It’s obvious to you, because you’ve had too much film school.” Then she gave me a little stare in case I didn’t pick up the hint that I have a whole YouTube channel for explaining these sorts of things.
So, I did a deep dive into rotating sets, which took way longer than I had intended. The result is the lengthiest video essay I’ve ever made. It covers six movies in detail and takes illustrative examples from a dozen more. It’s a doozy.
YouTube hit me with some copyright objections, because a few of the interviews I found have background music from the movies in question. So, paid subscribers get a slightly longer video with more first-hand accounts.
To get this and other uncensored videos, you should become a paid subscriber today!
Source Clips
The six main films/shows/videos covered in this video essay are: When the Clouds Roll By, Royal Wedding,1 2001: A Space Odyssey, Dancing on the Ceiling, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Inception, and the pilot episode of Euphoria.
Other movies with rotating sets that I didn’t go into detail on are: Lucy, Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, Road to the Stars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Boat, Poltergeist, Interview with the Vampire, Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo, The Matrix Reloaded, Head Over Heels, High School Musical 3: Senior Year, No Tears Left to Cry, The Quiet Earth.
And the rest of the clips were from: Alice in Wonderland, X-Men, The Chump Champ, The Barn Dance, Capricorn One, The Fresh Prince of Bel Air,2 Upside Down, Or the Human Flies, Aliens, THX-1138, Batman, L'équilibre Impossible, Barbarella,3 Mary Poppins Returns, Virtual Insanity, His Majesty, the American, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Stranger Things, All That Jazz, Big City Greens, The Green Mile, Die Hard, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Double Dare, Grease, Bojack Horseman, Margin Call, The Simpsons,4 Orpheus, The Shining, Scream, Labyrinth.
When the Directors Roll By
D.W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks formed United Artists in 1919 as the first serious attempt by directors and actors to emancipate themselves from the studios. Fairbanks was elected to kick off the endeavor. At around the same time, he had been meeting with President Woodrow Wilson, and promised to include positive representation of the League of Nations in his next movie.
So, Fairbanks hired Joseph Henabery, who he had enjoyed working with before, to write and direct. In his autobiography, Before, In, and After Hollywood, Henabery worried that the propaganda, especially a long exposition on Wilson’s Fourteen Points, would overwhelm the story.
He needn’t have been concerned. During production, negotiations at the Paris Peace Conference went badly, and not long after, the US Senate refused to join the League. Despite being the original inspiration for the story, all of the political propaganda had to be cut, with new footage re-shot to make the story coherent.
Somehow (no one quite remembers how), this included removing the bizarre dream sequence and the rotating room. UA later took that footage and repurposed it for Fairbanks’s next film, When the Clouds Roll By. It was the directorial debut of Victor Fleming, who went on to direct The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind, for which he won a directing Oscar.
Fleming was the cinematographer on His Majesty, The American.
In his autobiography, Henabery simply wrote, “In fact, some trick stuff I made for the picture was used in later pictures.”
It’s a situation that almost certainly couldn’t happen today. The DGA now has a rule informally called “One film, one director.” Taking a whole sequence and just plugging it into someone else’s film, without credit, would not be allowed.
But as Tracey Goessel writes in The First King of Hollywood: The Life of Douglas Fairbanks—”Film historians have been lavish in handing credit to fledgling director Victor Fleming for this witty, surreal sequence, not knowing that this section was directed by Joseph Henabery for Fairbanks’s previous film.”
Maybe my little video essay, along with Goessel’s book, will help correct the historical record in some minor way.
Back Issues
I used to work at the USC Film Archives back when I was a student there. In addition to thousands of reels of film, we for some reason had a big collection of old American Cinematographer magazines. While I was there, the university was pushing us to make everything digital, which meant the magazines were going to be thrown out.
I saved a few, including the June, 1968 issue covering 2001. I dug it up and re-read for this video, only to discover that the cover article was saved by the Internet Archive. If you’re into cameras and lighting, you’ll find the vintage ads almost as interesting as the article itself.
Evolution of Behind the Scenes
I’ve loved behind-the-scenes videos since I was a kid, although I didn’t realize until later in life that they were part of the marketing campaign, and thus unlikely to tell the real story behind the making of the movie.5 Even so, they remain interesting cultural artifacts, and provide insight into what the filmmakers and studios want you to think.
While making this video essay, I found some surprisingly old BTS videos, and I accidentally observed their evolution over time. This video from 1966, two years before Space Odyssey was completed and released, contains a ton of amazing B-roll from the production of the film. But it also covers a lot of real world scientific research that’s only kinda related to the movie. Warner Brothers clearly wanted to emphasize the realism of the film, and not the trippy, psychedelic visuals it became famous for later.
HBO produced a making-of video for Dancing on the Ceiling, which is longer than the music video itself! Because Dancing is essentially two scenes, the BTS has a lot of what most normal people would consider filler. But anyone who’s genuinely interested in production gets a fascinatingly detailed look at the production of what was, at the time, the most expensive music video ever made.
As time went on, BTS videos became less documentaries about the filmmaking process, and more short-form “content” for DVD extras. Case in point, the special features for Inception. Collectively, they add up to a longer film than either of the preceding videos, but it’s been divided up into bite-sized chunks for easy consumption. There’s no narrative through-line, as each short video can be watched independently of the rest. The coverage is broad, but not deep.
By the time we get to Euphoria, HBO is no longer even trying to pretend this is anything but promotion for the show. There are interviews with the series’ creator/showrunner Sam Levinson, and star, Zendaya (who’s first-hand experience is, admittedly, interesting). Not even the director gets screentime, much less any of the crew who actually did the work.
Royal Wedding is in the public domain, but for some reason the quality of the copy on Amazon is crap. That’s why I linked to Kanopy’s, instead.
Did you know there was a long version? I had no idea!
Really, the only good thing about this movie is the title sequence.
The very first Treehouse of Horror!
An exception to the rule would be The Sweatbox, a documentary about the making of The Emperor’s New Groove that was so honest, Disney refused to release it.