Housed inside the Venetian Hotel, which lies on the site of the old Sands Hotel and '60s Rat Pack flick Ocean's Eleven, the WB Stage 16 restaurant capitalizes on its Hollywood connection to serve up a taste of Tinseltown glamour with four themed dining areas based on Warner Brothers' hits: Batman, Casablanca, Golddiggers of 1933 and Ocean's Eleven.
"The idea was that the Venetian was built around this old soundstage-which it isn't-and that soundstage is Stage 16," said project manager Lynn Rosenbaum of Fitch Inc. The dining areas are actually reproductions of the original Hollywood sets from stills and blueprints-or rather, real rooms made to look like sets. Authentic studio lights mounted on greenbeds handle the bulk of the lighting throughout the restaurant. The vintage fixtures were gutted and replaced with UL-listed incandescent sources (150-250W) in the 3200-3600K range to eliminate their characteristic glare. "What I did in all of the spaces was to get actual old studio fresnels." said New York-based lighting designer Marsha Stern. "We retrofitted the inside of the fixture because we wanted the realism of using the actual studio fixtures, but people really couldn't sit under hundreds of thousands of watts of light and have dinner."
To light Rick's Café-a dead-on reproduction of the 1942 Casablanca set-Stern employed four greenbeds. roughly 20 modified studio 2ks and an assortment of PAR washlights and ellipsoidal spotlights. "Everything was done with warm rich tones-pink actually," said Stern, who was lucky enough to find a new "Moroccan Pink" filter for the room. "Everything was supposed to be softer, warmer." Templates and breakups are used on the ellipsoidals for texture and to project palm fronds on the walls. Battery-operated table lamps were custom-designed based on the movie.
With a 65-It-high ceiling and 80-guest capacity, The Golddiggers of 1933 is the largest of the four spaces. The decor is lifted from the "We're in the Money" song and dance number in the movie and features several large coins flanking a mock stage. In this area, larger retrofitted 10K studio lights are hung from greenbeds to reliect those in use at the time of filming. Again, PAR washlights and ellipsoidal spotlights also contribute to the effect. Three-circuit mini-strips provide downlighting on the coins and stage.
The Gotham room borrows its iconography from the Batnian series of lilms. The room's fantastic theme presented an ideal venue for creative lighting, but also imposed several restrictions due to structural elements in the space. Working from artists' diagrams, Stem tackled translating brushstrokes into real lighting. "That was my dilemma: How do I make it look like what the artist wants when I don't have any obvious place to put lights?" commented Stern. "Plus, the plans kept changing on what seemed like a daily basis-beams moving around, etc."
Lighting several of the space's unique design elements demanded special attention and a touch of theatricality. Contributing dramatic dimension to a Medusa relief, fiber optics powered by two metal-halide illuminators are combined with gels to add softness and color. In-grade exterior bronze fixtures, lamped with SOW MR 16 sources, illuminate a second, larger relief and a pair of gargoyles. An open-grate staircase lined with neon descends against a cityscape of Gotham painted by Warner Brothers' scenic art department and backlighted with a series of three-circuit mini-striplights. Splashes of color from dichroic filters are used throughout Gotham to enhance the darker, more somber atmosphere, while automated units project the "bat signal" on the walls.
Ocean's Eleven has a loungey '60s hipster feel upstairs, where the main challenge was to avoid glare from the room's many mirrors. As a result, this was the room with fewest fixtures. According to Stern, "This was a very hard room to focus because no matter where you aimed a light and positioned it how you wanted it, if you walked to another part of the room, there'd be a horrific glare-it was a nightmare." Undaunted, Stern was able to light the room successfully, using modified studio 2Ks and a few PAR fixtures. Downstairs at Ocean's Eleven, where Dean Martin does his lounge-lizard show in the film, scoop fixtures wash the center of the room and provide textured lavender and purple light. Special care was taken with the stage lighting, which was recreated with distressed PAR cans mounted to an overhead pipe.
Lighting designer: Marsha Stern
Lighting Design & consulting-Marsha Stern
Interior designer: Fitch Inc.
Photographer: Mark Steele
Lighting manufacturers: ETC; 4 Wall; L&E; Altman; Architectural Details; Kim Lighting;
APRIL 2001
ARCHITECTURAL LIGHTING www.lightforum.com
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