When you're working on a television series based on historical events, one of the most important jobs is getting everything as close to historically accurate as possible to make that show seem more realistic.
That's the job of Ruth Ammon, production designer for WGN's Manhattan, a series that tells the story of the men and women who lived on the top-secret Los Alamos, N.M., base during the Manhattan Project, the government venture that gave us the first atomic bomb.
But what exactly does a production designer do? What exactly is Ammon's job? Not only does she determine that the overall look of the series works on film, but she also makes sure that each detail is perfect: right down to the scientific labs and equipment used by the actors portraying scientists on the series.
"It's help finding the locations, building the sets, working with colors, compositions and sort of overall visual storytelling," says Ammon of her duties on set.
But Los Alamos was a real place and the Manhattan Project really happened. So getting things just right takes more than imagination: it also takes a lot of research and delving into historical files. However, at the time of the Manhattan Project, Los Alamos didn't exist on any map and everything that went on there was top-secret. Of course, that made Ammon's job more challenging, but she managed to find the information she needed.
"Recently, there's been a lot of material declassified, so you can find it on the Internet," says Ammon. "And then you find people who are Manhattan Project geeks and they help out a lot. We have two people here, Alex [Wellerstein] and David [Saltzer], who sent me some research."
This season of the series also deals with the Trinity test, the first detonation of a nuclear weapon. That made things even trickier because there's very little footage of the actual test and what that bomb looked like. "Alex Wellerstein's color footage of Trinity is really the inspiration for season two," says Ammon. "It's probably the only color footage existing of the Trinity project, and I think it was declassified a couple of years ago. He made sure we had a copy of it. And I literally took screengrabs of every other frame of that, and that has been the inspiration for this year."
When it comes to designing things like bombs, as well as scientific equipment, it's challenging if you aren't a scientist, so that means looking over everything with a fine-toothed comb, or in this case, a magnifying glass, which Ammon says she did. That helped put all the knobs and indicators in their right places on the Trinity bomb, as well as helped set the color palette for the overall look of the series.
So how well does Manhattan capture Los Alamos? Comparing those recently declassified photos with a tour of the set shows that the series did well in capturing the time and place.
Also, the second season of Manhattan revolves around the Trinity test, so the production crew built a new set just for that, in the desert outside Santa Fe, near the site where the real Trinity test occurred. Ammon says that being on location makes all the difference for the series.
"We have two locations that are completely essential to the look of the show," she says. "One is our whole compound at the university, which is a 1945 former World War II hospital: we've taken that and remodeled that and just having those buildings accessible to us to convert and change any way we want helped build our set very specific to our story. And we have the ranch, having this incredible landscape to work with, to build our new sites for Trinity."
Here's what those Santa Fe buildings looked like in the 1940s:
Here's what they look like today, as part of the Manhattan set:
Although there aren't a lot of photos available to the public of the original Trinity site, the Manhattan version looks authentic, complete with a ranch and military outpost built just for the series:
Here's a typical security checkpoint: this photo is actually of the facility at Oak Ridge, Tenn., another site where scientists conducted research on building the atomic bomb.
Here's the checkpoint on the Manhattan set:
Even the billboards are similar, with the same kind of signs. Here's a billboard from the real Manhattan project:
Here's a billboard on the Manhattan set:
Another important aspect of getting everything right includes the make and model of cars often found on the original Los Alamos site. Here's a photo from the actual Manhattan project:
And here's a car on the Manhattan set:
Ammon's job meant a lot of extra work and research, but the Manhattan set feels accurate, right down to the never-ending dust kicked up in the desert. Just count that authenticity and attention to detail as another reason to watch Manhattan.
Catch the re-airing of season one of Manhattan on WGN on Sundays (or watch the full season on Hulu). Season two arrives Oct. 13.
Photo credit: Robin Burks
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