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Production designers
Written by Filmshi
Friday, 14 October 2005
Production designers are responsible for the visual design of movies
and television shows. Supervising an art department that includes the
art director, scenic artists, set decorators, a dressing crew, and
more, they translate the director's ideas into a physical environment.
This may involve constructing sets and/or finding and modifying
existing locations.
The production designer begins work early in pre-production. She reads
the script to determine location requirements, and arrives at a budget
estimate that must be negotiated with the producer. During
pre-production, the designer and director discuss visual themes and
search for appropriate colors, patterns, and motifs, often reviewing
paintings, photos, and other movies to establish a common vocabulary.
With a budget, a complete breakdown of set requirements, and continuing
creative input from the director, the designer and design staff prepare
sketches, create blueprints and technical drawings, build
three-dimensional models, and scout locations. Designers must closely
coordinate their work with the director of photography and the costume
designer. In designing the sets, they must take into account the
cinematographer's plans for lighting and camera movement. With the
costume designer, they work to harmonize sets and costumes.
Production design requires some technical background and facility with
colors, as well as knowledge of art, costume, interior design,
lighting, photography, and history. Most designers begin their careers
in other positions in the art department and ascend through the ranks;
training and experience can also be gained in art, theater, or film
school.
William Cameron Menzies was born in New Haven, Connecticut on 29 July
1896 to Scots immigrant parents. He studied at Yale and the University
of Edinburgh, and after serving in the US Army during World War I he
attended the New York Art Student League, then joined Famous
Players-Lasky (later to evolve into Paramount) working in special
effects and design. He went independent in 1923 to work with prominent
directors of the period such as Allan Dwan, Raoul Walsh and Fred Niblo,
and soon made a name for himself as one of the most individual and
gifted of cinematic designers. His status was confirmed at the
first-ever Academy Awards ceremony, when he won Best Art Direction
Oscar for The Dove (d. Roland West, 1927) and Tempest (d. Sam Taylor,
1928).
In 1931 Menzies took up direction, and made half-a-dozen pictures - but
always as co-director. The art director Lyle Wheeler, who worked with
him later at Fox, felt that Menzies was "no damn good as a director...
He wanted to photograph ceilings and didn't give a damn what the actors
were saying" (Frayling). His first solo directing commission came in
1935, when Alexander Korda invited him to Denham to direct the
massively ambitious science fiction project Things to Come (1936).
The script was adapted from HG Wells's futuristic novel The Shape of
Things to Come, and Korda had ill-advisedly given Wells control not
only over the script but, as Raymond Massey noted, "he had
contractually agreed to [Wells's] interference in every phase of the
production, in the direction, design, cutting, even in the promotion of
the finished picture" (Frayling). Korda, it seems, hoped that Menzies
would make up for the novelist's lack of visual imagination.
In the event the easy-going Menzies found himself hamstrung and out of
his depth. Wells took against him, describing him as "an incompetent
director... a sort of Cecil B. de Mille without his imagination; his
mind ran on loud machinery and crowd effects and he had no grasp of my
ideas" (Frayling). Lacking experience with actors, Menzies could do
little to help his cast with Wells's stiff, didactic dialogue, and the
film is constantly toppled into pomposity by its script. Its strengths
are almost entirely visual, for which Menzies can surely claim some
input, although the shimmering Bauhaus-influenced sets were partly the
work of the uncredited László Moholy-Nagy, and Korda's brother Vincent
took final credit for set design.
Menzies directed one more film in Britain: The Green Cockatoo, a quota
quickie thriller, with John Mills as a tap-dancing night-club owner,
made for a Twentieth Century-Fox subsidiary in 1937. It featured some
striking visual images, and Graham Greene's story, set against a
background of racetrack racketeers, offers intriguing pre-echoes of
Brighton Rock (which he published in 1938). But the producers were
unhappy about Menzies' direction of the dialogue sequences and brought
in another expatriate American director, William K Howard, to re-shoot
scenes and supervise the re-editing.
Back in the USA, Menzies won an Oscar for art direction on Gone with
the Wind (US, d. Victor Fleming, 1939) and directed a few more films,
of which the best was the cold-war science-fiction allegory, Invaders
from Mars (US, 1953). He died in Hollywood on 5 March 1957.
Courtesies to The Art Directors Guild and the Museum of the Moving Image
The Craft 
