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"The Sets of Hemingway &amp;amp; Gellhorn\nHBO's latest original film recounts the story of the romance between one of the 20th century's greatest novelists and a pioneering war reporter\nThe designers of Hemingway &amp;amp; Gellhorn faced the technical task of integrating the actors into historical footage from the Spanish Civil War and World War II\u2014including scenes of battles and German concentration camps\u2014taken from tapes in the Library of Congress. \"One of the main challenges was deciding on how to go from color to black-and-white footage,\" says Geoffrey Kirkland, who explains that the process was basically the same one used in The Right Stuff, the 1983 film he worked on with director Philip Kaufman. \"We tended to veer toward a monochromatic palette, and we desaturated the color. We didn't want the jump from stock footage to the real actors to be glaring.\"\n\"San Francisco is a wonderful city\u2014both modern and old in parts,\" says Kirkland, noting that it offered numerous settings for 1930s and '40s period sets. The Hotel Florida in Madrid, which underwent numerous bombings during the Spanish Civil War, was the place where Hemingway and Gellhorn fell in love and took refuge with reporters and political figures during the conflict. To re-create the hotel, the designers used Oakland's abandoned 16th Street train station, designed by architect Jarvis Hunt at the beginning of the 20th century. The decaying station already possessed an old-world look, so the designers simply added a hotel sign to its exterior.\nInside the train station, which has dramatic floor-to-ceiling windows, the designers covered the graffitied walls with fresh paint and draperies. By adding a chandelier, period furniture, antique rugs, and a bar, they were able to simulate an intimate lobby setting that was consistent with the luxurious Hotel Florida.\nThe home in Key West, Florida, that Hemingway shared with his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, was re-created with his signature accoutrements\u2014animal-skin rugs and taxidermied heads (he was an avid hunter), artwork, books, and eclectic artifacts from his travels. Erickson explains that the budget was modest compared to those of many big-screen releases, \"so a lot of the items came from prop houses, and the animal heads were rented from local collectors.\"\nAfter marrying in 1940, Hemingway and Gellhorn moved into a home in an estate outside Havana called Finca Vigia (\"Lookout Farm\"), where he wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls (Gellhorn is said to be the muse for the novel), The Old Man and the Sea, and A Moveable Feast. Erickson says his team studied archival photographs from the Hemingway museums in Cuba and Key West's Old Town to loosely reconstruct the home's spaces, including the living room, shown here. The 1940s-style club chairs and the sofa with hunter-green fabric came from a San Francisco antiques store. The painting of a matador on the wall is similar to ones owned by Hemingway, who was famously passionate about bullfighting.\nIn this scene, Owen plays Hemingway working at his desk in Cuba, bottles of booze at the ready. Because of a leg injury, it was customary for the writer to work on his Royal typewriter while standing up, hence its placement atop the chest behind him. While such details are essential for creating credible settings, Kirkland explains that the goal isn't always precise historical accuracy. \"We are telling a story\u2014we're not just rebuilding history,\" he says.\nFrequented by writers and artists such as John Dos Passos, Henry Strater, and Waldo Peirce, Sloppy Joe's in Key West was one of Hemingway's favorite watering holes. (It was also the site of his fateful first meeting with the woman who would become his fourth wife, Mary Welsh, around Christmas in 1936.) The designers converted Old St. Anthony's Church on San Francisco's 10th Street into the nautically themed bar, complete with wood wainscoting and fish mounted on the walls."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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