CHATSWORTH, Calif. -- Jon Cassar may not know where all the bodies are buried on “24,” but he knows where they fell.
“You can ask me where people were shot, where people died, whatever,” said Cassar, a chatty, unassuming Canadian expatriate. He's taking a break from his duties as director and co-executive producer of “24” to show a gaggle of TV writers the place that he and überagent Jack Bauer both call their workplace.
Here inside a former pencil factory in the San Fernando Valley north of Los Angeles, is the cleverly designed, ultra-versatile set for CTU, the fictional Counter-Terrorist Unit, the nerve center on the action thriller “24,” now in its sixth season on Fox.
When he points out the spot where beloved roly-poly CTU agent Edgar Stiles died in a gas attack while his colleagues looked on helplessly through a glass wall, critics glance at it and say, almost sorrowfully, “Ohhhhh.”
Producers have spent millions on eye-popping set designs for TV shows that lasted 13 episodes or less. But “24,” which captured the Emmy as outstanding drama series last year and has become one of television's most influential shows, employs a set that is short on bells and whistles and long on nooks and crannies.
Fake walls and ceilings drop out so cameras can film interrogation scenes or top-secret meetings in small places. The set is filled with glass walls and open stairwells so cameras can shoot through them, filling the picture frame with close-ups.
The CTU work pods that look bunched together on the show are actually spaced far apart to accommodate all the extras and crew that go into every scene. The trick is that the scenes are almost always shot tight. The result is a “claustrophobic” look and feel that keeps up the show's unrelenting tension.
Cassar and the show's director of photography, Rodney Charters, have co-authored Twenty-Four: Behind the Scenes
According to Cassar, the book simply bubbled up. “All of us have been on this show five, six years, none of us have left, and we have all these pictures,” he said.
For the record, this is actually the third CTU. For the pilot episode, a set of offices at Fox Sports were used as the spy agency. When the series was picked up by Fox, a knockoff based on the sports division's glass-and-steel offices were built. I toured that CTU back in 2001, and it did look like something that had been heisted from a failed dot-com.
That took place a month after 9/11, and I remember interviewing Kiefer Sutherland outside. He told me that in the days after the attacks, he had staggered around in “this real fog, I'd say depression … I kept seeing the faces of people, desperate, looking for their husband or wife. Outside of that, what could possibly be important?”
Well, getting on with things is important, and if there is one significant contribution “24” has made to popular culture, it is in figuring out how you could talk about the unthinkable after the unthinkable had happened. In short, you put a Teflon-coated hero at the center, someone willing to sacrifice his wife, his kid and, this season, his brother and his father, to keep the worst-case scenario from occurring, and then redeems himself by coming home with the scalps of the evildoers.
As Sutherland pointed out at the time, “Entertainment has always been so successful in World War II or the Great Depression or other tragic times. We need to step out of reality, because reality can be really, really tough.”
For despite the jitter-cam and real-time gimmickry, “24” is essentially an escapist cartoon, with Jack absorbing an absurd amount of punishment from an endless parade of outlandishly evil bad guys (which is why Arab and other groups occasionally launch protests against the show).
More than that, “24” is the first 21st-century hit for TV, because it anticipated and fed the needs of today's appetitive, impatient, multi-platform TV viewers. With its trademark picture-in-picture approach, it lavishes eye candy on the growing number of “24” addicts who watch the action on their big screens. Though its real-time approach has become a tired gimmick -- or was I the only one amazed at how little time it took Jack to shave and clean up from two years in a Chinese prison earlier this season? -- “24” now basks in the glow of godfathering a whole wave of successful serial dramas, from “Lost” to “Heroes.”
Once it became clear that the show was here to say, the producers decided to build a new CTU between seasons three and four, one that could better serve Cassar and the other directors as they tried to keep up with an insane production schedule. They chose a new location, on the site of an abandoned pencil factory, and when I asked if that meant we could call it Fort Ticonderoga, Fox publicist Josh Governale said why not.
If you didn't notice the switch to the new CTU, you're not alone: “It's a testament to the way we shoot the show,” Cassar said. "We have an unwritten rule that if you can see the floor (in the picture frame), you're too wide."
The current CTU set allows two, three, even four camera operators capture the action at the same time from different angles without getting into each other's shots. Stuffed with location shoots and two more hours per season than the usual TV drama, “24” is done with a minimum of fuss and an emphasis on speed. Cassar and other directors on “24” will usually knock out a scene in three takes or fewer, then move on to the next.
The set's design, filled with fake concrete that makes a hollow, Styrofoam sound when you knock on it, has what another producer, Evan Katz, called a “James Bondian” design, with curvy beams and lean, spread-out feel. On-screen, it has a cold, blue look that sets it apart from any other scene on “24.” The color change, achieved with lighting, is to make up for the fact that “24” almost never shows the outside of the CTU building. Putting that view, known in the industry as an establishing shot, into the episode every time the action shifted back to CTU “would slow us down too much,” Cassar said
Around the corner is the bunker where the new President Palmer, played by D.B. Woodside, had to camp out after a nuclear bomb hit suburban L.A. It was also the place where the retreat was built for acting president Charles Logan (Gregory Itzin), one of “24's” all-time bad guys.
“The real tragedy,” observed Katz, “was knocking down the Logan's retreat set. I would've lived in it.”
By the way, how do actual government officials react to the storylines in “24”? Katz said, “We get a level of military support that's great. A lot of government people seem to like the show, too, even though it's not a policy show. I like to think it's because it feels real and our hero is noble.”
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