WHAT IS A PRODUCTION DESIGNER?
Production designers develop a visual plan for an entire production, including sets, props, costumes, color schemes, lighting, and frequently the entire flow of a film. Because film is a visual medium, the “look” the production designer establishes can involve the audiences emotionally as much as story lines and dialogue.
Up until the late 1930s, the title “art director” generally meant the same as “production designer” does today, but when David Selznick gave special recognition to William Cameron Menzies for his comprehensive work on Gone with the Wind, this special title later came into general use. Because art directors became “production designers,” art directors now carry out the production designers’ overall plans for films.
According to Bruce Block, visual consultant for the Meyers/Shyer Company, Burbank, CA:
Real production design means that you have designed the production. If it’s on stage, you design the sets, costumes, and the lighting, and you’re through. If it’s a movie, you have to figure out what the camera is doing. The visual components are space, line, color, movement, and rhythm. That’s what production design is all about.
The production designer has to understand what the movie is about. It’s not the plot; it’s what I like to call point of view—what you want the audience to feel about the movie.
In Father of the Bride, we wanted the house to be a character in the movie. The house was not a backdrop; it was a part of the family like Steve Martin was, so we had to find a production designer who was smart and understood what point of view means and who could bring something to the table besides wallpaper and paint samples.
THE PRODUCTION DESIGNER’S PLACE
The production designer has several bosses: the producer, the unit production manager, and the director. Assisting the production designer are the art director, who executes the production designer’s plan; an art department coordinator, who handles the paper work and tracks the budget; one or more set designers, who do the construction drafting; a set decorator; and an illustrator, who creates sketches. The art director and production designer also supervise the work of the construction and paint departments.
Production design has a strong history in films. As the popularity of special effects films escalates, the respect awarded production designers, whose imaginations create fantasy worlds inhabited by heretofore unimagined characters, increases as well. In some productions, a production designer can have as much authority as the director has.
WHAT DOES A PRODUCTION DESIGNER DO?
The production designer makes a thorough study of the script, does research, and confers with the producer and director to develop the “look” and flow of color and design from one sequence to the next.
Companies usually retain a production designer for the duration of production. Sometimes producers hire the designer to create a general design scheme and the designer – after providing them with detailed information on the design plan for the film – turns the project over to a staff of art directors and set designers.
Early Production Designers
Who originated the title production designer? In America in 1939, David O. Selznick first bestowed the title on William Cameron Menzies for his contributions to Gone with the Wind, which included the direction of some sequences. Before that, art directors were responsible for everything that didn’t move, but they didn’t have the comprehensive visual authority of today’s production designer. To understand how the profession of art direction and production design evolved, let’s start with the early development of the film medium.
Scholars can argue endlessly about when motion pictures were first invented, in what country, and by whom. We know that in 1888 the Thomas Edison Film Laboratory demonstrated a primitive motion picture device, which was the forerunner of a revolution in popular entertainment.
Few paid much attention to motion pictures at first, because they were regarded as only a fascinating novelty. When movies lengthened, though, the public went for them in a big way. People paid a nickel to watch anything that moved as they peered through the machine eyepieces or marvelled at images on flickering screens in rented halls.
The Audience Increases
The novelty of simple movement wore off before long, however. Motion picture producers saw that they needed to make longer and better films, so they turned to the most obvious source of material – the theater. With the actors and plays came theatrical sets and painted backdrops, as well as theatrical techniques.
Filming took place outdoors to take advantage of free sunlight. Producers perched cameras and sets on rooftops where tall buildings did not block the sunlight. They hoped the wind would not be strong enough to ripple canvas backdrops and flats or flap the dining room tablecloth during dinner party scenes. The audience would laugh in the wrong places. Wind, rain, snow, and ice would slow production and deprive clamoring audiences of amusement and the producer of cash.
Filming moved inside glass-roofed stages, which solved producers’ problems with the elements for a while. If they didn’t want to hire a set designer, producers hired local carpenters to build realistic rooms. It became apparent, however, that filmmakers needed the talents of set designers. Sets built by house carpenters and decorated by the producer’s sister did not look right on film. The camera’s eye demanded more.
Movie Makers Move On
Producers ground film through their cameras, processed and edited the footage, and rushed the finished product out to any exhibitor who paid the rental fee. Due to some unpleasantness over camera mechanism patents, producers moved south and west to distance themselves from the patent law enforcers and to enjoy more shooting days per year than the weather allowed in the northeast United States.
Florida, Arizona, and the San Francisco Bay area in Northern California had thriving film studios, but the variety of terrain and reliable weather in Southern California attracted the major part of the growing film industry. An added attraction was the proximity of the Mexican border, which allowed producers to throw their clandestine cameras into cars and to speed across the border to safety, leaving the process servers hired by the camera cartel on the other side of the border.
Movie moguls discovered that once they owned a piece of land, they could build their own plaster-and-chicken-wire cities, western towns, and mountains. The lot system also gave movie companies some control over the weather. Many studio backlot sets included cables stretched over the streets that could support opaque canvas covers to provide shelter from unwanted rain and could help simulate night during the day. Overhead perforated pipes could spray rain, which might fall gently or be whipped into hurricane force by motor-driven fans. Some studios constructed dump tanks, into which portions of ships were deluged with tons of water for sea storm sequences.
Walter Winton, a studio staff set decorator during the 1930s, recalls:
Everything we needed was right there on the lot: upholstery shop, drapery department, electrical, carpenters, painters, greens. We hardly had to go outside unless we needed something very special. The property department was huge; full of furniture and accessories that had been made or bought for other productions.
The Studio Production Line
The studio lots became film factories, cranking out features and shorts on a production-line basis. In the 1930s, MGM had 117 backlot sets, 23 soundstages, and made a feature film a week. Its regular payroll supported over 2,000 employees. Studios recruited designers from the theatrical worlds of New York and Europe. They designed portions of cities on Hollywood lots and in the barnlike stages. If a picture needed a French drawing room, carpenters built the set on a stage and decorators dressed it with appropriate furniture and drapery. The next day the standing set could be dressed as a townhouse or gambling casino.
The lot system delighted movie producers. They wanted to keep production under their close scrutiny. Studios kept dozens of actors under contract and assigned them to emote in one picture after another. Each studio had its backlot versions of the cities of the world. Many of the directors, as well as art directors, were from Europe, so the flavor of backlot architecture varied according to designers’ nationalities.
At first, theatrical set designers looked down their noses at the movies’ vulgarity, but many changed their attitudes as the quality of films improved and creative possibilities revealed themselves.
Architects put their skills to work in the film industry, seizing the opportunity to put their imaginations to work on never-never lands of plaster fantasy. They could say goodbye to dull apartment houses and office buildings and live in the magical world of motion pictures.
Studios recruited art directors from architecture schools and put them to work on castles, roads, curving city streets, and villages with town roads and city halls. The management lured designers from the theater and put them to work on musical films.
Both groups had to adjust to working with surfaces rather than internal structure; easier for the illusion-experienced theater people than for the architects who now had to design surfaces and portions of buildings rather than complete structures.
Some Art Directors Became Stars
As the major studios grew, they employed many staff art directors. Supervising or executive art directors guided the art department designers and developed the studio’s visual style, much as today’s production designers create a look for an individual film.
MGM’s Cedric Gibbons became one of the most colorful art department heads. Some say that Mr. Gibbons never picked up a pencil, while others claim to have seen him laboring over an architectural detail. He created the Art Deco-influenced Big White Set look, which became Metro’s trademark in the 1930s. Walter Winton remembers:
Even though we [the set decorators] were pretty independent, Mr. Gibbons kept close watch on what we were doing. He wanted the most rich look we could get; cost be damned—an ideal situation for us. Mr. Gibbons always had the final say, even over producers and directors.
Although many art directors made notable stylistic contributions to Hollywood films, here are several who stood out.
WILFRED BUCKLAND, New York stage designer
Brought to Hollywood by Cecil B. DeMille in 1915
Championed the use of artificial lighting.
VAN NEST POLGLASE, RKO’s supervising art director
Studied architecture and interior design
Designed Art Deco musicals
WILLIAM CAMERON MENZIES, Freelance art director
Directed some sequences of Gone with the Wind
Awarded first Production Design credit
TELEVISION CHANGES THE FILM BUSINESS
The United States saw its first public exhibition of television pictures in 1927, but not until after World War II did this new electronic medium become as fascinating as motion pictures were in their infancy. Television receiver design progressed from huge revolving disks and forests of wire and tubes behind tiny, blurry screens to an acceptable piece of furniture that dominates many living rooms today.
Seeing this trend, and alarmed at the way people stayed home to watch free television, the motion picture studios developed wide-screen processes, enhanced sound systems, and epic movies to lure people back into theaters. Just to be on the safe side, the studios produced programs for television as well.
Just as theater designers had been reluctant to work in films, many motion picture art directors did not want to work in television. Television had lower budgets, limited production time, and lower prestige.
Make Way for the Sitcoms
Major studios and independent producers jumped on the television bandwagon. Large studios had the facilities and used them to feed television’s growing appetite. Staff art directors accustomed to big budgets and plenty of time were now assigned to television series that had neither. They used the big outdoor sets and standing sets on soundstages. Sometimes a series used sets built for feature films not released until after the set had been seen on television. Studios that were accustomed to finishing a picture a month now had to crank out what amounted to a picture a week for television.
Film to Tape Transfer
Videotape recording changed television practices and programming. During the live television days, film cameras aimed at cathode ray tubes recorded broadcasts. These film records – called kinescopes – were the only visual record of broadcasts. Later, magnetic tape recording eliminated that laborious and technically inferior process, and gave the appearance of a live television broadcast when played back. Programmers no longer feared mishaps. They could be edited out much more easily than on a kinescope film. Present day digital editing techniques have improved tape editing as well as film processing.
Improved Technology Affects Art Directors
In its infancy, television equipment made many demands on art directors. They had to work with a limited range of gray values, and had to avoid extreme contrasts of value as well as certain patterns. The old camera tubes could retain an image if held on the same picture too long. The system required high, even light levels, which limited the amount of contrast and atmosphere sets could present.
Motion picture color film process suppliers required the services of color consultants who needed art directors to work within the limits set by laboratory processing. Film art directors had to work with limited color palettes and saw their sets flooded with intense flat light. Mood and atmosphere took a backseat, the same as in early video.
As video and film technology improved, art directors had a greater range of choices. They could use glitter, lights shining into the camera lens, and a more subtle color range. Many art directors chose to specialize as the programming range widened. Some freelancers set up design studios that specialized in situation comedies, game shows, or news broadcasts.
The onward march of technology, including high-definition video and digital manipulation, will change the role of the art director. Virtual reality systems, which use two small color screens placed in a headset, and sensor-equipped body suits can place viewers in synthetically created environments.
Art directors are already creating new visual worlds, and some predict the day when drawing boards will be artifacts of the past. Perhaps all sets will be made of zeros and ones stored in chips, and some predict the same fate for actors. Will you be ready?
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The next chapter discusses what qualities art directors and production designers need to have, and how they can put their talents and technical skills to work.