To bring to life the nefarious corporation at the center of the dystopian thriller “Severance,” the director of photography Jessica Lee Gagné needed to find the right location for a fictional headquarters.
As she scoured the internet for abandoned malls, she stumbled upon a blog with photos of a decaying, hollowed-out midcentury office building called Bell Labs. There was an eerie emptiness, even as its wraparound internal walkways, triangular skylights, magnificent sunken lobby and giant planters built into a vast atrium remained.
Ms. Gagné typed “Bell Labs” into Google Maps and zoomed into Holmdel, a rural town in central New Jersey. “When I saw the overhead of it, I was like, this can’t be true,” she said. “Is this a real place?”
Within days, she and Ben Stiller, the director and an executive producer of the serial for Apple TV+, went to New Jersey — they drove up the winding access road, passing a looming, three-legged white water tower shaped like a transistor radio. The building had been renovated since the photos were taken, but the developers had not dulled the impact of its corporate frigidity.
“There was a part of me that couldn’t believe how perfect it was,” Ms. Gagné said of seeing the mirrored building that she saw in the summer of 2019. “It was this mind-blowing moment.”
This would become Lumon Industries — it is as much a character on “Severance” as the employees, who’ve agreed to surgically sever their brains, cleaving their work selves from their home selves. The building is the breakout star of the breakout hit: Fans have turned Bell Labs, now a mixed-use complex known as Bell Works, into a tourist destination and a social media darling on Instagram and TikTok.
Decades before the building became an ode to the soul-sucking dread of corporate America, it was a creative powerhouse for Bell Telephone Laboratories, the research arm of AT&T, the telecommunications giant of the 20th century. It was nicknamed the “Black Box” because of its opaque, rectangular exterior, according to “The Idea Factory,” the 2012 book about the rise and influence of Bell Labs, “an intellectual utopia” of its time.
What Was Bell Labs?
The researchers who worked at Bell Labs made discoveries that would fuel the modern age. At its height, Bell Labs employed about 15,000 people, including 1,200 with Ph.D.s, spread out at various locations, many of them in New Jersey, where Bell Labs was headquartered. One of the company’s locations was on 460 acres of Holmdel farmland that the company purchased in 1929. The scientists and engineers there pioneered the technology for microwaves, touch-tone dialing, cellphones, and satellite and fiber-optic communication. Among the Nobel Prizes amassed in Holmdel was the 1978 award in physics for detecting the eerie space sounds that proved the Big Bang theory.
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