A PRODUCTION DESIGNER ON LOCATION
Leaving the convenience of the stage to work on location presents a different set of requirements for the art director, as well as for the rest of the crew. The art director and crew must carefully document the location scene, because they will have to make some of the stage work match.
Colin Irwin, art director on the film JFK, describes some work done to make a location in Dallas, Texas, match documentary film footage used in the movie:
We did a lot of adding to locations, but not much building. We rented the oval office set from Paramount. In Daly Plaza we added to and changed it to match the 8mm film footage used in the movie. We had to trim the trees back, move signs and lampposts, and bring in 10 or 12 truckloads of dirt to cover the concrete parking lot. We also put in styrofoam railroad tracks as the original metal ones were no longer there.
The distance factor is a major consideration for the producer. A location may require minutes to days of travel, and unknown and unpredictable factors can be expensive and time-consuming.
A television network has funded one filmed pilot episode of the Iowa drama. Our producer hopes network programmers will be so enchanted with the result that they will order six more episodes, that the series will run for more than one season, and that it will become a syndicated product.
The producer decides to film all the interiors and the park scene on stage and to find a nearby small town that can be used, with some alterations, for exteriors. The producer and director do not feel that existing movie-lot exterior sets are convincing enough for the mood of the story.
Marian Lerner, who specializes in location work, has signed on as art director. She has contracted for six weeks’ work and has received a check from the company for one-third of her total fee, the other portions of which are scheduled to appear at two-week intervals. After presenting sketches, models, and construction drawings, Marian is ready to go on a location-survey trip.
Marian’s research tells her a lot about the kind of town they are seeking, so she gets information on nearby small towns from the state motion picture office. She confers with the producer and production manager and they decide to look at two towns: Clarion and Two Forks. Both are in flat country and have stores and houses of adaptable style.
They drive to Clarion to see the town and countryside. The landscape is indeed flat, as the film office said, but they didn’t mention the range of hills in the distance. Marian sees that while Clarion’s main street has some older buildings, suitable with some alterations for the flashback scenes, present-day merchants have done complete refacings and erected big signs – complicated and expensive to remove.
Meeting the Mayor and Documenting a Location
The group meets with the mayor, who is eager to see the town on television—it would be good for business. The producer makes it clear that they are considering other towns and that their decision will be based on many factors, although Clarion is a fine-looking place.
Marian gets a street map of Clarion and takes many photographs of Main Street, individual buildings, the newspaper office, and residences. She places a yardstick, marked off at one-foot intervals with white tape, in each photograph so that if she needs to make scale drawings of the buildings, the size of the buildings will be apparent.
Down the Road a Piece and Back
The crew drives a few miles down the road to Two Forks. While this town is similar in appearance to Clarion, it does not have adequate lodging facilities for the cast and crew. Also, its main street features many palm trees, which are rarely found in Iowa, in the Main Street’s center divider – a problem for aerial establishing shots. Also, the mayor is not eager to see his town overrun with “movie people” in spite of increased income for merchants. As no other likely looking towns been located, the producer chooses Clarion.
The survey group returns to their base and the production manager prepares letters of agreement and contracts for individuals and businesses that will be involved in the production, and returns to Clarion a few days later to get the required permits from the mayor’s office.
Marian and George, the assistant art director, go back to Clarion for some more preproduction work. They visit the newspaper office and explain that during the production they will need to fasten a temporary sign over the existing sign on the outside of the building. The new sign will arrive with the shop-built scenery and props a few days before the first day of shooting.
How About Dusty Rose, Mrs. Jones?
The design crew visits Mrs. Jones’s house, which will represent the exterior of script character Patty’s residence. The efficient production manager has arranged, with Mrs. Jones’s permission, to repaint the front of her house, which currently is an unsuitable color combination for Patty’s character. Marian explains that if Mrs. Jones wishes, after the shoot finishes, they will repaint her house in the original colors. Mrs. Jones says that she will wait and see how she likes the new paint job.
Marian and George scrutinize the business and street signs in the areas to be seen on camera and photograph the ones that will need to be replaced or covered. They also notice that a tree to be seen in the shots covering the outside of the newspaper office is a southern climate tree that will need some masking foliage appropriate to Iowa.
The Union
Because the pilot episode will be made under union rules, the basic crew will be taken to the location and laborers and some assistants will be hired in Clarion. If Clarion had its own union locals, the local office would provide all the working personnel.
Two weeks later, when the construction shop is building the stage production sets, Marian and George pack their location survival kits: comfortable shoes, rain clothes, cameras, and basic drawing supplies, as well as changes of clothes and personal necessities. Living in a motel can be a dreary experience, but because the art staff usually spends the major part of the day and evening running around solving problems, they won’t spend much time in their rooms staring at the bad paintings screwed to the walls.
Marian and George arrive in Clarion two days before the first shoot day. The new signs and props have arrived by truck. They supervise sign installations, the repainting of Mrs. Jones’s house, and the disguise of the tree in front of the newspaper office—all observed by fascinated town residents who ask many questions. Marian and George meet with the locally hired helpers and provide them with schedules for each of the shoot days, as well as meal vouchers redeemable at a local restaurant.
On the first day, Marian meets George and their crew in the motel lobby at six A.M. The crew consists of a head prop person, assistant prop person, a truck driver, and four greenspeople who will make the Jones house and yard area look as if it’s winter. Marian goes over the day’s schedule, which includes the first setup in front of the newspaper office, and after lunch, winter at the Jones house.
Art directors on location try to think of everything they need to take with them, but frequently they have to do their own legwork. Set decorator and art director Robert Cecchi recalls this about another location shoot:
I was doing a western in Arizona and I asked a local guy where I could get some kerosene. He gave me a blank stare and said he didn’t know, but I found a hardware store and bought it there. The same with lamp chimneys. Locals should know where to get anything, but I had to go out and waste my time.
The Shoot Continues
Marian sends the greenspeople to the house and she, George, and an assistant go to the newspaper exterior location. They supervise the tree foliage alteration, and the cast and crew are ready to begin the first shot of the day. The actor playing Patty’s role will park her car in front, get out of the car, and enter the office front door. An assistant director in charge of atmosphere will see that cars move down the street and local extras hurry down the sidewalk. Marian looks at the video monitor, which shows what the film camera sees, and notices that some of the natural unwanted tree leaves show in the shot. She asks a crew member to move more of the artificial branches to cover the leaves.
To deal with problems that come up during the morning, George stays with the company, and Marian goes to the Jones house to supervise winter. Marian has the crew spray more snow on the porch roof and frost the side windows that will show in an angle shot. The crew has turned a leafed-out summer shrub into a snowman and is snowing the lawn.
The company arrives after lunch. By six P.M., when the light has changed too much to continue day scenes, everyone goes to dinner, only to come back to the house for night scenes. Marian and George have to spend much time during the day waiting for the next camera setup, and preparing the set for the next setup.
After dinner and the night scenes finish, Marian and George meet with their crew and go over the next day’s schedule. George collects receipts for cash he has given them during the day for emergency items. The production manager gives George cash, for which he must account, and also has to set up a drawing account at the local bank for the art crew. When George returns to the motel at the end of each day, he balances the receipts and cash, and places them in an envelope.
It’s ten P.M. and all has gone well except for a noisy aircraft and a balky camera. George sets his alarm for five-thirty A.M. and turns on the television news. There they are at Mrs. Jones’s winterized house as a reporter in summer clothes exclaims over the wonder of it all. Clarion is already famous!
When the location work wraps, Marian and George return to their familiar haunt, the soundstage, and supervise the setup, set decoration, and daily shooting process. Because the producer wants a realistic view of production problems if the network buys six more episodes (the producer hopes), the company takes one week to shoot the pilot episode. This procedure gives Marian and George time to evaluate what their work will be like on a weekly basis.
Deborah Lakeman, an experienced weekly series set decorator, describes the process on a typical production:
Ideally, we have a script on Monday, but that gets totally rewritten by Tuesday. There’s a production meeting just to talk about what’s going on that week and maybe the next so you can get a head start. We try to be a week or two ahead.
I read the script and make lists of what I will need to find, discussing it with the art director, who gives me samples of the wall colors. Most of the time I have a budget to work with, but it’s not always realistic. We sometimes choose the colors together.
With the list, I go to the prop houses and take Polaroid shots of the pieces I want to use and the prop house puts a tag on each piece to hold it for our show. I then show the pictures to the art director, director, producers, and sometimes the star. A lot of times, the producers and star will base a choice on their own personal taste or what they have at home instead of what is appropriate for the characters. After the decisions are made, I have a truck pick up the rental pieces and bring them to the stage where the crew puts them in place.
If we are a week ahead, I can combine working on two episodes at once. I have a beeper and a phone in my car, because as the director and actors get into the set, changes start happening. The set is never finished. Rewrites happen every day.
As Deborah Lakeman said, sometimes actors’ wishes influence her job, but Robert Cecchi reports that their frailties can influence a set decorator’s job too:
When I worked on a film starring Barbara Stanwyck, I always had to provide her with something to lean on. She was in her seventies and the ludicrous thing was that her character was supposed to be having a love affair with a rodeo rider! On another job, we were working in an airport control tower and one of the actors couldn’t remember his lines, so someone wrote them on pieces of paper and I arranged the set so that the action could be staged with the actor always behind a computer terminal or some piece of equipment where the papers could be placed within his sight.
Either George or Marian is present each shooting day to make sure that all is well with the set and to take care of unexpected changes. When they view the footage at the postproduction house where the program is edited, they ignore the dialogue and watch the pictures, focusing their attention on the work they did to alter the small-town environment, of course. If the sign over the newspaper office door had been a little lower, it would have established itself better. They also notice that the snow cover outside the house did not quite obscure some grass at the bottom of the frame, but because this was a night shot, a cast shadow covered the error. George is glad he took pictures of the frost on the front windows of the Jones house so they can duplicate the pattern on the stage set windows. As a whole, however, George and Marian felt their work was convincing to the camera.
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Many art directors prefer to do location work, because it presents challenges and opportunities for improvisation, miles from nowhere. In the next chapters, we will see what an innovative art director can do with commonplace design problems.