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"White City" Coming to the Big Screen08-20-15 | News

"White City" Coming to the Big Screen
Anthony Hopkins in Frederick Law Olmsted Role

The 1893 Chicago's World's Fair is said to have ushered in the City Beautiful movement and modern city planning. The landscapes, promenades and structures showcased the comprehensive, integrated designs of a multidisciplinary team of planners, landscape architects and architects. The Grand Basin (pictured), a huge rectilinear reflecting pool in the Court of Honor, was meant to represent the sea voyage of Christopher Columbus to the New World. The exposition's 200 buildings were temporary structures, but two of them were meant to last and still do??"the Palace of Fine Arts (renovated into the Museum of Science and Industry????"Jackson Park), and the World's Congress Auxiliary Building (now the Art Institute of Chicago??"Grant Park).
Photo: Wikipedia Commons

The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America is a 2003 New York Times best selling nonfiction account by Erik Larson of the macabre serial killings of Herman Webster Mudgett (aka Dr. H.H. Holmes) at the Chicago's 1893 World's Fair.

The book is not just about a sick, homicidal man, however, but a snippet of another time and era, including the influence of landscape architecture. The landscape architect for the exposition landscape was none other than Frederick Law Olmsted. Architect and urban designer Daniel Burnham was the fair's director of works.

The book is now set to come to life on the big screen. Leonardo DiCaprio bought the movie rights and will personify the serial killer. Martin Scorsese will direct. Anthony Hopkins will portray Frederick Law Olmsted; Nick Offerman ("Parks & Rec") will personify Burnham; and George Clooney will incarnate George Washington Gale Ferris, Jr., the American engineer who created the Ferris Wheel for the exposition.

The fair celebrated the rebirth of Chicago from the destructive fire of 1871, and the 400th anniversary of the arrival of Columbus in the New World. The Grand Basin, a huge rectilinear pool in the Court of Honor, represented the explorer's sea voyage. Burnham and a bevy of architects, along with Olmsted, showed off what a city might aspire to. The lavish and spectacular exposition covered some 600 acres, with 200 temporary buildings, including 14 "great buildings" designed by various architects, all constructed in the neoclassical style. The building facades were made of plaster, cement and jute fiber??"all painted a gleaming white. This effect, plus the extensive street lighting, garnered the Court of Honor the name "The White City."

The six-month exposition was a world event attended by 27 million people from 46 countries. The exposition, an optimistic look into what many thought was a bright exciting future, also bore witness to the depravities of man. The coup de grace came on the last day of the fair with the assassination of Chicago Mayer Carter Harrison Sr., by one Patrick Prendergast, a deluded man who believed his support in the mayor's reelection campaign warranted an appointment as the city's chief legal officer.