julian_craster

From The Times
July 2, 2008
Harry Lange: film production designer


Harry Lange: he was introduced to Stanley Kubrick by Arthur C. Clarke

In a plot worthy of a James Bond novel Harry Lange escaped across the border from communist East Germany into the West under cover of night and wound up working at Nasa on ambitious futuristic space projects with a former Nazi rocket scientist.

But his story took an unexpected twist when he defected for a second time, switching allegiance from the US space agency to a maverick individualist with his own distinct vision for the world. His new employer was Stanley Kubrick, who paid him £150 a week — considerably more than he was getting at Nasa — to design realistic spacecraft for a film that Kubrick was planning, called A Journey to the Stars.

An initial six-month assignment evolved, as these things inevitably did when Kubrick was involved, into two and a half years, during which time Lange and his family relocated to England, where production on the film was based.

The title of the film changed to 2001: A Space Odyssey. It was released in 1968 and became one of the most celebrated entries in the canon of science-fiction cinema. It brought Lange an Oscar nomination and a British Academy Award for Best Art Direction, along with his collaborators, Tony Masters and the veteran designer Ernie Archer, and it launched him on a new career as a film production designer.

He specialised in science-fiction and worked on the James Bond film Moonraker (1979), on which he had the title space art director, Superman II (1980) and the original Star Wars series (1977-83), winning a second Oscar nomination for The Empire Strikes Back (1980), the second instalment, which is the fifth episode in the weird universe of George Lucas.

Hans Kurt Lange was born in 1930 in Eisenach in Thuringia. At the end of the war this region became part of Soviet-controlled East Germany. “As I refused to take part in rallies and wear the red flag on my lapel, I got into trouble with some people,” Lange later recalled in an interview with the BBC.

After escaping across the border he studied art in West Germany and he relocated to the US in the early 1950s, where he initially worked in advertising — “but couldn’t stand to draw shoes and washing powder all my life.” During the Korean War he produced graphics for military flying manuals.

Subsequently he worked for the Army Ballistic Missile Agency in Alabama on designs for spacecraft and was head of the future projects section at Nasa, working on designs for deep-space projects in association with a team headed by the German scientist Wernher von Braun, with whom he also worked on the book The History of Rocketry and Space Travel (1966).

While at Nasa, Lange met the writer Arthur C. Clarke (obituary March 20, 2008) who wrote the short story that inspired 2001 and would also co-write the screenplay with Kubrick. It was Clarke who introduced Lange to the famously perfectionist director — “I was virtually the first person, and the last person, to work on the project with Stanley Kubrick,” Lange said.

Kubrick demanded realism and accuracy. “I’d seen real hardware at Cape Canaveral and in Nasa’s research laboratories and hangars, so I knew what the equipment had to look like. A piece of board with blue squares stuck on it may do for TV, but not when you want to do something on a Cinerama screen. It had to be absolutely perfect. I kept that idea in my following films: Star Wars, Superman, James Bond.”

Lange produced a vision of a strikingly pure, clean and almost graceful future technology. It was a world where everything seemed shiny and new, and it all worked (until the computer went haywire). 2001: A Space Odyssey was a landmark in sciencefiction, though later films, such as Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), would present an influentially grungier version of the future.

Lange’s other films include the Clint Eastwood war film Kelly’s Heroes (1970), Zero Population Growth (1972), The Great Muppet Caper (1981), The Dark Crystal (1982) and Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (1983).

Lange is survived by his wife and two sons.

Harry Lange, film production designer, was born on December 7, 1930. He died on May 22, 2008, aged 77