Bill Gorlin is an award-winning structural engineer and Vice President of the prestigious McLaren Engineering Group’s Entertainment Division. He has called Briarcliff home since 1998 and wouldn’t have it any other way. He loves the access to NYC, the woods and rolling hills, the great schools, and proximity to family in southern Westchester.
“I grew up in Westchester; I love the progressive attitudes, the excellent schools, and the vibrant culture. You have Tarrytown Music Hall, Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville, which is an absolute jewel, The Jazz Forum, a world class jazz club in Tarrytown, Purchase College, and ArtsWestchester, an incredible organization that produces fantastic events supporting the arts,” said Gorlin.
From Blueprints to Spotlights
Bill had many influences that shaped his career path including working with an amusement ride manufacturer, different theatre scenery shops, sets of iconic concerts like The Rolling Stones, various TV & film productions, and many live events.
He developed the Entertainment Division at McLaren Engineering in 2000, where he still is today. “In my world, success is based on: Did the show or event happen on budget, on time, and was it enjoyable for the audience? As opposed to: Did I save 3% on the weight of steel? Which is a more relevant question when building a high-rise,” Bill explained. “If I get hung up on a certain engineering issue, I may lose sight of the big picture.”
Crafting the Magic
Gorlin described a difficult project he worked on last holiday season for the Christian Dior holiday display on Saks Fifth Avenue in Manhattan to suspend an eight-story display over the building’s façade. “When the audience, the people in the street, looked up, they saw the flowers, the lights, and the beautiful parts of the display – the steel framework we installed was imperceivable. The eye sees what it wants to,” Gorlin said.
In essence, engineering is the “magic” in a magic trick, and this is especially so in Gorlin’s line of work: entertainment engineering. They say a magician never reveals his tricks, and that is certainly the case in entertainment where much of Bill’s work is a tightly controlled trade secret. Back to the Future – The Musical (on Broadway now) has a fantastic mechanical effect with a flying DeLorean but unfortunately, we can’t talk about it,” said Gorlin.
Vision To Reality
“A good design of a bridge, for instance, celebrates the structure. The Mario M. Cuomo bridge is a very functional design that’s also very elegant,” Bill said. The difference between entertainment and function is just that – Gorlin’s clientele wants to suspend their disbelief, rather than suspending lanes of traffic! Think of an engineer as the rhythm section in a Broadway musical – they are in the background so that the soloist can look like they’re shining effortlessly. But take the rhythm section away and you find out just how important they are to the magic of the show!
“Sometimes clients want us to help market an event. For instance, House of the Dragon (a Game of Thrones sequel now on HBO) had a promotion where a huge dragon ‘landed’ on the spire of the Empire State Building. We were involved with the engineering, and they encouraged us to promote it on social media to create more buzz,” Gorlin shared. He stressed how important the secrecy and discretion of most projects can be in creating happy clients and excited audiences.
“Virtual reality and CGI can always defy physics, whereas engineers have to deal with it straight on. If we’re doing a physical performance with real people and real equipment, we can’t make something fly the way you see it on screen,” said Gorlin. With Back to the Future, Gorlin’s team and the special effects vendor had to create something from the ground up, rather than simply trying to emulate the special effects in the original movie.
In the show, the DeLorean time machine, from the classic ‘80s blockbuster, flies above the stage of the theater, as opposed to in the movie where it’s limited to the 2D screen. Gorlin’s job as an entertainment engineer required him to transport the audience through the fourth wall of the movie screen to pull off an effect meant for live theater goers only.
The Overweight Production
When live entertainment shut down during COVID, the small screen was all we had, and the scale and beauty of performance disappeared. One of Gorlin’s first projects upon the return of the live entertainment industry was the long-awaited revival of The Music Man. “That was an important show because it was a big musical with big stars that was coming out right after the pandemic ended,” said Gorlin. Unlike a movie premiere where the final film can be done months prior to the opening, The Music Man came in right under the wire.
The show was set to open at the Winter Garden Theater (the same theater as Back to the Future) and when Gorlin and his team came on, he was astonished to find out that the show equipment above the stage had exceeded the venue’s weight limit by a whopping 40,000 pounds. Gorlin had upgraded the weight limit of the theater nearly a decade prior, and even still the production was almost doubling the limit. Back to The Future got to take advantage of the upgrades constructed to support the heavy Music Man set, and so will the next show, and the next show after that. There’s a lot of momentum in the Broadway culture of paying it forward,” Bill said.
Migrating Elephants
Bill was recently involved in another very high-profile project. This is one of largest outdoor installations in NYC, ever! If you’re walking around downtown Manhattan, you might stumble upon a herd of 100 life-size elephant sculptures in the Meatpacking District – The Great Elephant Migration.
These elephants are on a special mission to raise funds for non-profit conservation organizations and to create awareness about the challenges that wildlife face. Bill’s team was responsible for anchoring each of the five types of elephant structures to the ground so they could withstand such environmental issues as wind and earthquakes. “The anchoring consisted of stakes and/or ballast (weights) that were unique to each site, depending on local weather and seismicity and the supporting grade and soil composition,” explained Bill. Each of the sites for this installation has different challenges. Next the elephants head to Miami Beach!
Success & Happiness
Gorlin was chosen for the 2024 “Backstage Legends and Masters” Award Winner by the Broadway Technical Theatre History Project. “After three decades of providing engineering support for 200+ Broadway productions and renovation work on 40+ Broadway theaters, this recognition was truly a lifetime achievement,” Bill said.
For now, Bill seems to have found the perfect mix of engineering and entertainment. “I love my job because I get to solve challenging problems and create designs incorporating science, art, 3D spaces, and human interaction,” Bill shared. “I get to collaborate with talented people who are intensely driven to create something meaningful.” The work of engineers is all around us, but it’s rarely visible or the center of attention, and that’s exactly the way it should be.
