How Philip Roth’s nightmare was recreated for ‘The Plot Against America’

Sixteen years before the current pandemic gripped us, writer Philip Roth envisioned a different kind of plague. In “The Plot Against America,” aviator and Nazi sympathizer Charles Lindbergh wins the presidential election against Franklin Roosevelt, unleashing a flood of anti-Semitism that leaves families cowering in their homes. That 2004 novel is the inspiration for HBO’s …

Sixteen years before the current pandemic gripped us, writer Philip Roth envisioned a different kind of plague. In “The Plot Against America,” aviator and Nazi sympathizer Charles Lindbergh wins the presidential election against Franklin Roosevelt, unleashing a flood of anti-Semitism that leaves families cowering in their homes.

That 2004 novel is the inspiration for HBO’s new miniseries of the same name, which runs Mondays through April 20. Roth, who died in 2018 at 85, hewed close to his roots in writing about the Levin family in 1940s Newark, NJ. He even called the couple’s younger son Philip.

And so, when David Simon and Ed Burns adapted Roth’s book, they made sure the setting around the working-class, American-Jewish Levin family looked like the real thing.

“We decided that accuracy was important,” says production designer Richard Hoover, who oversaw the first three of the show’s six episodes. “It’s not as if we were creating a world transformed by an alien invasion.”

To re-create Roth’s world of 80 years ago, Hoover toured the writer’s hometown, the Weequahic section of Newark.

“Roth’s house is still there,” he tells The Post. “I met people [who] said, ‘We knew Philip, but we didn’t want to talk to him because we didn’t want to be in his novels.’ ”

“The Plot Against America.”Michele K. Short / HBO

Today’s Newark is riddled with un-’40s-like power lines and aluminum siding, so Hoover’s team found a good stand-in for the Levins’ house in nearby East Orange. They scoured New Jersey for “bits and pieces,” shooting store facades in Paterson and Jersey City and a theater marquee in Elizabeth.

One place that hasn’t changed much is the Newark public library, where Bess Levin (Zoe Kazan) researches a possible move to Canada. “The architecture’s all there, echoing the real history,” Hoover says. “I looked at the doors and hardware and knew they were there back then. It was amazing.”

Dina Goldman, the production designer for the final three episodes, oversaw one of the show’s most chilling scenes: a street of shattered storefronts and anti-Semitic graffiti.

“It was our own version of Kristallnacht,” she says of the “night of broken glass” in 1938 Germany. She says her crew took great care in re-creating that atrocity on Jersey City’s Martin Luther King Boulevard.

“We made sure to board everything up at night so it wasn’t visible when we weren’t shooting,” she says. She says the production team also met with neighbors to explain what it was they were doing.

Prop master Peter Gelfman wrangled the show’s vintage cars, cameras, buses and trains. One of his biggest gets: a working replica of the Spirit of St. Louis, the plane Lindbergh flew over the Atlantic. The original hangs in the Smithsonian, but Gelfman found a copy at the Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome in upstate Red Hook, NY. He filmed its takeoffs and landings there, digitally manipulating it to other locations.

Of the two vintage buses he found, one was red: a production no-no. Gelfman wrapped it with sheet vinyl that his crew painted yellow and green.

“Our color palette was very specific,” says costume designer Jeriana San Juan. “Because of its significance and tie to Nazi swastikas, we were very careful about introducing red.” The first red we see is the lipstick worn by Winona Ryder’s character, Evelyn, who falls for a Lindbergh-loving rabbi. As America turns fascist, red bleeds through scene after scene.

To get that ’40s look, the costume designer’s team combed through historical archives and the wonderful street scenes shot by photographer Helen Levitt.

“I used an image she took of a young boy playing marbles,” San Juan says of a pair of short pants she made for young Philip (Azhy Robertson). “I made it out of a beautiful chevron wool, then washed it about a hundred times . . . There’s a lot of work that goes into making new clothes look and feel like old clothes!”

Her favorite piece is the housedress she made for Bess, a replica of an antique one she’d found and accessorized with blue piping, the same shade as Kazan’s eyes. “She conveys so much emotion through her eyes,” she says. “I wanted all the lines to direct you there.”

The costumers made several copies of a faded leather jacket for Anthony Boyle’s tough-guy character, Alvin Levin. “At the end of the day, one of [them] may have walked away with him,” San Juan says.

But that was the exception. So devastating is Roth’s story, she says, “I think many people wanted to walk out of those costumes and back into their own life.”