On a recent evening in Georgetown, Rich Klein paced the red carpet (which was actually white), waiting for Jamie Foxx. It was the Washington première of Roland Emmerich’s “White House Down,” the movie in which a band of snarling mercenaries lays waste to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Klein had been hired by the filmmakers to advise on issues of accuracy. “Every room in the White House was re-created in Montreal,” Klein said. “Then every room was burned down, blown up, and turned into rubble.”
Klein, who is forty-eight, has a trimmed goatee and an earring. He served in the State Department under Bill Clinton and now works for McLarty Associates, the advisory firm run by Clinton’s former chief of staff Thomas (Mack) McLarty III. In 2006, the firm helped the director Peter Berg get access to shoot “The Kingdom” in Abu Dhabi, since Saudi Arabia was impractical. When Michael Bay wanted to film “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” at Giza, in Egypt, Klein helped make arrangements. And he is responsible for the shot, in “Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol,” where Tom Cruise dangles off the side of Dubai’s Burj Khalifa tower.
“I was so not a movie guy,” Klein said. “I didn’t know anything about this business until getting thrown into it.”
A whoop of screaming erupted as Foxx arrived. In “White House Down,” he plays the President, who, together with an aspiring Secret Service agent, played by Channing Tatum, must save Washington and prevent World War III. As Foxx signed autographs, the movie’s screenwriter, James Vanderbilt, and its producer, Brad Fischer, joined Klein. “I did a lot of research, a lot of it online,” Vanderbilt said.
“But we couldn’t have done it without Rich,” Fischer said.
Klein counselled the filmmakers on how an evacuation of the White House would unfold. “We knew people who were in the White House on September 11th,” Klein said. “They said there was no alarm. It’s just the Secret Service running from room to room, yelling, ‘Get the fuck out of here!’ ” When the producers wanted to know what kind of coffee cups White House staffers would be holding, Klein suggested M. E. Swing, the coffee shop at Seventeenth and G, and the crew arranged to have a stack of cups shipped up to Montreal. “They liked that,” he said, adding, “It’s so expensive to license Starbucks.”
Hollywood cares about verisimilitude only up to a point. When Emmerich wanted a locker stocked with guns in the White House, Klein decided that it would have been churlish to object that, as far as he knows, there isn’t one. There isn’t a motor pool in the basement, either, but the studio needed one—for a car chase.
“It’s not a documentary,” Fischer said. “The movie is supposed to be a fun ride.”
Inside the theatre, McLarty stood at a microphone and greeted his fellow former chief of staff John Podesta and Clinton’s White House spokesman Mike McCurry. “This’ll be a happy walk down memory lane for many people here,” McLarty said. “We are particularly honored that Secretary Janet Napolitano is here,” he said, nodding to the current head of Homeland Security. Napolitano, holding a bag of popcorn and slouching in her seat, smiled.
“When we came here a year ago and scouted in Washington, Brad and I had a little encounter,” Emmerich told the crowd. “We saw Henry Kissinger in the Hay-Adams. It was like, for us, for Hollywood people—Oh, my God, he exists!”
Foxx observed that, a year ago, he was playing a slave in “Django Unchained,” and that playing the President is “a lot better.” Then he gave “a shout-out to all the Presidents” and launched into a decent Ronald Reagan impersonation and a very good Barack Obama. As the lights dimmed, Channing Tatum said, somewhat ominously, “Hopefully, this will never happen in real life.”
Klein, who had not seen the finished film, sat with his wife and two kids, and his agent. Emmerich has destroyed Washington before (he directed “Independence Day”), and no expense was spared in digitally pulverizing D.C. The Capitol Building collapses in on itself like a soufflé. Secretary Napolitano’s fictional counterpart is taken hostage. During a scene in which the President opens a drawer to reveal a secret stash of Nicorette, an insidery laugh rippled through the theatre.
“That was great,” Klein said when the lights came up. He shrugged. “It’s a popcorn movie.” There was no after-party. “This is D.C.,” Klein said. “You throw a party at ten-thirty on a Friday night, nobody will come.” ♦
