On the set at "24": it's not what it seems

By ROB OWEN
Friday, April 13, 2007

Jack Bauer's current bad day got off to an explosive start this season on "24" with a nuclear device detonating in a Los Angeles suburb. Since then, it's been business as usual for the secret agent played by Kiefer Sutherland: breaking into a foreign embassy, making a deal with a former corrupt American president and communicating with CTU headquarters by cell phone.

Ah, CTU, the Air Traffic Control of the "24" universe, filled with moles, political in-fighting and more barking than you'd hear at the dog pound.

"Check your SIP adapter!" Chloe (Mary Lynn Rajskub) snapped at a co-worker earlier this season. "You've specified the wrong slot assignment."

On the Chatsworth, Calif."24" set that is home to the show's technobabble hubbub, director/executive producer Jon Cassar noted that the current CTU is actually the third iteration of the set.

"When they did the pilot, they couldn't afford to build a CTU, so they went to Fox Sports," Cassar said during a January set visit. "It was a very new building and had an upstairs office. Then they re-created it for the (series)."

That second steel and glass CTU set was used in the show's first two seasons. The series moved to a new soundstage for season three _ a decidedly low-tech, warehouse-like building that was once a pencil factory _ where the current, solid-looking CTU set was built.

But looks can be deceiving. All the bunker-like walls that appear to be foot-thick concrete on TV? It's really wood and plaster.

"Plastering is one of the keys to this business," Cassar said. "Good painters and plasterers, they're worth their weight in gold."

The current set's design is strategic. Designers and directors learned what worked and what didn't from the earlier sets and built the current CTU to fit their needs.

"We always love to be looking through things," Cassar said, noting that bars in a divider that surrounds one desk area are the perfect width to film someone's face between. And Chloe's desk is purposely situated at the center of CTU.

"From her area, you can see everything," Cassar said.

Well, everything except people actually entering the CTU building, something producers purposefully avoid showing.

"There's no outside door whatsoever," Cassar said, surveying the set. "It would be a massive security thing and to show someone going through it in real-time would be intensely boring, a 10-to-15-minute process we never want to see."

It's not just the set that's changed since the pilot episode. The emphasis on time has evolved. While still a "real-time thriller," viewers now only see the time when going to and coming from commercial breaks. In the pilot, clocks were everywhere on set, Cassar said.

"We actually have more freedom than we thought to move (scenes) around (in editing), so we actually go out of our way not to show the time," he said. "In production meetings, the writers will have, 'We'll be there in three minutes' in the script and we'll change it to 'We'll be there soon.' "

As for when the series is taking place, that's up for debate, even among the show's crew. Some say it takes place in the present, but if you do the math from the first episode _ with all the elapsed months between seasons and presidential elections that have come and gone _ "24" should really be set several years in the future.

"We avoid dates," Cassar acknowledged. "We never show them, never even on a piece of paper."

For the purists, the CTU phones show the date in true "24" time. The year is 2012.

"The only reason we've got that is for all the people on the Internet," Cassar said.

While viewers at home may not see the date stamp on the CTU phones, they may notice some product placement. Apple and Dell computers and Cisco System telephones are on desks throughout CTU.

"Those are not really show-related as much as they are Fox related," Cassar said. "Big Fox makes a deal, and we have to abide by their deal."

(Rob Owen can be reached at rowen(at)post-gazette.com. For more stories visit scrippsnews.com)