Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/929567
68 P E R S P E C T I V E | M A R C H / A P R I L 2 0 1 8 Graham's personal secretary. Nothing beats the right sources. The conversation was remarkable. Quinn and Small gave us a firsthand view of the characters, Bradlee's charisma, and his New England upbringing. We sat surrounded by objects from his family, including early, classic American furniture, and blue and white Chinese porcelains from seafaring forebears. From them we learned of Katharine Graham's "womb room" (her words). This was not her official study photographed and published in Architectural Digest of the time. This was not a public room for entertainment. This was a comfortable downstairs den filled with art and photographs, with a television for nightly news, where she often took dinner. If I may paraphrase Evelyn Small, "It was the room in the house in which Mrs. Graham could usually be found." All of the above influenced the decoration of Bradlee's home set. And, it led to the addition of this "womb room" to the set of Kay Graham's home, with key scenes being moved to this specific room. But, I digress from the newsroom. On Evelyn Small's lap sat a stack of photos and papers. They were items from Kay Graham's personal archives, and Small began passing them around the circle. There were the shots from Architectural Digest; there were early black- and-white views of parties in her backyard; and then there were The Post photos, the photos of the old newsroom. The L Street space was a great working mess of a newsroom. This was the newsroom that she had inherited from her husband Philip Graham, and before him, her father Eugene Meyer. Here was the trove of original photos that were missing from the research. These became the essence of the newsroom. We are grateful to Quinn and Small for their generous aid. The quick nature of the production's genesis in New York made locking in big stages there difficult. Additionally, the budget had no fat and the newsroom required a large scale. This pushed a strategy to build on location for The Post. This strategy dovetailed with a desire to shoot much of Washington, DC, in New York. This would afford added budget savings, and also lessen the complications of shooting in DC— especially with big protest scenes. Location manager Lauri Pitkus focused on possibilities in White Plains. The city, a county seat, offered large-scale Brutalist architecture, reminiscent of areas of DC and Rick's vision of it, as well as a plethora of empty office space. An early 1960s office building in White Plains would be The Post newsroom. Rick, myself and Set Designer Michael Auszura studied the location for the best newsroom layout. We began with the siting of A B C