How ‘White House Plumbers’ Nails The Look Of The Early 70s

The Watergate break-in that brought down the presidency of Richard Nixon is one of the iconic events of the 1970s, so much so that the historical period itself is almost a character in the story. The hit HBO series White House Plumbers introduces a new generation to the comically improbable cascade of events that began with a couple of down-on-their-luck right wing political operatives, Howard Hunt (Woody Harrelson) and G. Gordon Liddy (Justin Theroux), being a little bit too eager to impress their bosses in the Committee to Re-Elect the President. While the writing and acting in the series are its marquee selling points, a big part of its success is how well it recreates the ambiance of the early 1970s visually, down to the last detail.

That’s where production designer Anastasia White comes in. White said she and director David Mandel (Veep, Seinfeld) knew they needed to recreate a moment that was still within the living memory of a portion of the audience, but is now known to history mostly for its garish excesses. “Both David and I didn’t want it to feel like a typical modern day representation of the seventies,” she said in a phone interview. “We didn’t want to use too many acid greens and oranges or overdo that whole look.”

Part of the reason is that White House Plumbers is set in a cultural milieu diametrically opposed from the counterculture that popularized the flamboyant styles of the time. Hunt, a former CIA operative, has a cushy home in the suburbs of Washington, DC. The Liddy family has more modest digs, but staying up to date with the latest fashions or emulating the aesthetics of the hippie movement was not really part of the Nazi-loving Liddy’s gestalt.

White, too young to remember the actual 70s, did a lot of research on the era and consulted with some of the older members of the production crew. She says one of the biggest challenges was turning back the clock on the Watergate hotel and office complex, which is still a Washington, DC landmark but has undergone a series of renovations and modernizations to its interior.

“We had to rebuild the sign at the front because they had updated the typeface,” she said. “We wanted that original 60s-70s font.” They also did some alterations to the interior when shooting the lobby and parking garage.

One specific scene from Episode 2 shows how far the design crew went to get every detail perfect. After Liddy and Hunt had been put in charge of the reelection committee’s dirty tricks department, Liddy had the CIA produce a series of flip chart illustrations of various “Gemstone” operations he concocted to disrupt the Democrats in the upcoming election.

As Liddy giddily proposes one crackpot scheme after another to his incredulous bosses, the camera lingers on the flip charts that masterfully recapture the style of 1960s and 70s-era illustrators like Bob Peak and Robert McGinnis. The authenticity completely sells this pivotal moment in the story.

“Important plot-driven artwork is one of the hardest things to create in a movie/TV show,” said Mandel. “For Plumbers, Liddy tells how he picked up CIA artwork for the Gemstones pitch and then later having to destroy it, but there’s not much else to go on. It was the early 70s and Liddy had a sense of the theatrical, so I really wanted to treat it like an advertising agency pitch, with Nixon as the client. I wanted these things to feel like they came right off of Bob Peak’s drawing table. This may be a comedy, but there could be nothing funny about the art. The art had to seem real to make the pitch real, so when Liddy goes off the rails and the pitch is ruined, that is what’s funny. Not the pitch itself. Not the art.”

To recreate the style he had in mind, Mandel, a noted collector of original comic book art, turned to one of the medium’s singular talents: Bill Sienkiewicz. Sienkiewicz, best known for his work on titles like Moon Knight, New Mutants and Elektra, is a versatile stylist, a student of the history of illustration and a keen observer of politics and culture. He says he leapt at the chance to participate in the project.

“It’s fun to revisit those moments in history,” said Sienkiewicz. “They gave me a list of what they wanted, all these goofy conspiracies. The whole thing has that David Mandel surreal absurdity that I love.”

Sienkiewicz produced the black and white artwork, which was then colored by award-winning color artist Laura Martin. The illustrations give Liddy’s brainstorms the alure of James Bond films, and perfectly highlight the comical distance between the Plumbers’ grandiose ambitions and the tawdry reality of their low-rent black bag operation – a distance that is fundamental to understanding the entire Watergate fiasco.

According to White, there are a number of visual Easter Eggs like that in the series that reward sharp-eyed views. Among the details to look for:

· In the house of ITT executive Dita Beard (Kathleen Turner), look and listen for wind chimes that evoke Turner’s breakthrough performance in the 1981 neo-noir thriller Body Heat.

· The mural on the side of George McGovern’s campaign headquarters is inspired by a scene at the end of the 1974 paranoid political thriller The Parallax View, which was itself inspired by the events of Watergate.

· The interiors of the executive office building, the Liddy’s living room, and Howard Hunt’s basement rec-room are all meticulously hand-created by the art department and full of classic early 70s design touches.