Polly Platt: Hollywood Production Design and Creative Authorship 3030821196, 9783030821197

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Polly Platt Hollywood Production Design and Creative Authorship Aaron Hunter

Polly Platt

Aaron Hunter

Polly Platt Hollywood Production Design and Creative Authorship

Aaron Hunter Department of Film Trinity College Dublin Dublin, Ireland

ISBN 978-3-030-82119-7    ISBN 978-3-030-82120-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82120-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover Illustration: Polly Platt on the set of Paper Moon. Courtesy of Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, and the estate of Polly Platt. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Gail, Cindy, Patty, and all the single working moms of the ‘70s who raised us.

Acknowledgments

Much of the research for this book came during a two-year postdoctoral research grant from the Irish Research Council (IRC), which I undertook at the Department of Media Studies at Maynooth University. I thank the IRC for taking a chance on a project titled “Women and New Hollywood: How the Auteur Paradigm Marginalizes Women’s Creative Labor,” and my colleagues in media studies, who were encouraging of my work and supportive of the seminars and conferences I organized to help explore further avenues of research and share the results. In particular, I thank Maria Pramaggiore, my mentor on the postdoc. She patiently listened to every digressive idea, every nugget of research, every thought about a new direction for the project, always providing succinct, thoughtful feedback that helped realign my thinking about women in the 1970s, especially as the project morphed from one about women in New Hollywood to one more specifically about Polly Platt. Maria’s dedication to feminism and her rigorous approach to research inspire me as a scholar, and I cannot imagine this project seeing the light of day without her guidance. Several people made themselves available to talk about their lives and careers with Platt, and special thanks go to Cameron Crowe, Frank Marshall, and James L. Brooks, whose personal memories about working with Platt provided incredibly useful insight into her thinking about film and her approach to filmmaking. Karina Longworth of You Must Remember This was kind enough to speak with me about her research process and some of her findings for her series about Platt, “Invisible Woman.” Platt’s vii

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daughters, Antonia and Sashy Bogdanovich, were generous with their time, and I cannot thank them enough for providing me with Platt’s unpublished memoir, It Was Worth It—the project changed dramatically once I was given the opportunity to include so much of Platt’s own voice. Special thanks to Lina Aboujieb and her staff at Palgrave Macmillan, particularly Emily Wood and Saif Md. Much of the writing of the book took place just before and during the Covid-19 pandemic, which brought about unforeseeable complications and disruptions for so many of us. Not only was Lina’s interest in the topic vital to the book’s publication, but without the kind patience of her and her crew, I would not have been able to finish it. Thanks to the wonderful librarians and staff at the Lilly Library at Indiana University—which houses the Peter Bogdanovich archives—and also at the Margaret Herrick Library in Los Angeles. Emily Wittenberg at the American Film Institute (AFI) library was a lifesaver in providing me with digital copies of several AFI seminars after the pandemic forced the cancellation of my final research trip to Los Angeles. Matthew Youngue in licensing at Twentieth Century Fox kindly helped me navigate the many production and legal documents concerning Platt’s years at Gracie Films, which helped me better understand her work as a producer. I would also like to thank the feminist film and screen scholars of Ireland for welcoming me into their fold. It fills me with great happiness to think of how supportive many of them have been of me and my work. In particular, I can’t imagine my scholarly life without Jennie Carlsten, Ciara Chambers, Anne O’Brien, Sarah Arnold, Liz Greene, Jennifer O’Meara, or Sian Barber. Martha Shearer has been a fantastic colleague in much of my New Hollywood research, and her deep knowledge and understanding of feminist film scholarship and 1970s Hollywood cinema have been profoundly influential on my thinking. Finally, and as ever, my love and thanks to Betti and Otis, without whom, nothing.

Contents

1 Introduction  1 References  20 2 A Life in Brief 23 Youth  30 Teens and Young Adulthood  33 Bogdanovich  40 Mother and Motherhood  45 Conclusion  49 References  52 3 Set Design and Attention to Detail 55 Details in the Design  59 Theme  63 Genre  64 Setting  67 Authenticity  69 Consistency  72 The Last Picture Show   73 References  85 4 Location and Design 89 Location and New Hollywood  91 Platt and Macro-location  95 Platt and Micro-location  98 ix

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Contents

Designing on Location 102 The Bad News Bears  104 References 116 5 Color in the Films of Polly Platt119 Film Color and Design 121 Platt’s Approach to Color in Film 125 Color and Character Psychology 128 Color and Narrative Metaphor 131 The Witches of Eastwick  133 References 142 6 Platt’s Costume Design145 Platt on Costume Design 147 Polly Platt: Costume Designer 151 What’s Up, Doc? 158 References 165 7 Design and Authorship in Paper Moon167 Polly Platt, 1972 170 Location 173 Casting and the Script 175 Production Design 178 Exteriors 178 Interiors 184 Platt on Set 187 A Hat, a Photo, a Mirror 191 References 199 8 Epilogue: Production Designer to Producer … And Everything in Between201 Platt’s Later Career 205 But She Didn’t Direct 211 But Was It Sexist? 214 References 218 Index221

List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2 Fig. 7.1 Fig. 7.2 Fig. 7.3 Fig. 7.4

Jacy’s radio can be seen in the lower right. (The Last Picture Show, BBS/Columbia) 56 The Popper’s wall decoration includes a gun pointing toward Sonny’s head. (The Last Picture Show, BBS/Columbia) 80 The baseball diamond Platt designed. (The Bad News Bears, Paramount)108 The dinged-up fencing of the dugout. (The Bad News Bears, Paramount)111 Van Horne’s swimming pool and fireplace. (The Witches of Eastwick, Warner Bros.) 136 Van Horne courts the witches and their children with thousands of pink balloons. (The Witches of Eastwick, Warner Bros.) 138 In Howard’s hotel room, Judy’s shirt, the bedspread, and the overnight bag are color coordinated. (What’s Up, Doc?, Warner Bros.)161 In Eunice’s hotel room, her house coat and the bedspread share a different color coordination. (What’s Up, Doc?, Warner Bros.) 161 Reflections in the diner window of the opposite shop fronts. (Paper Moon, Paramount) 179 The shop fronts opposite, now seen through the diner window. (Paper Moon, Paramount) 180 The General Merchandise shop, where Moze buys Addie’s dress. (Paper Moon, Paramount) 181 Vivians Dress Shop, where Moze buys dresses for Trixie, and which bears the name of Platt’s mother. (Paper Moon, Paramount)182 xi

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Fig. 7.5 Fig. 7.6 Fig. 7.7 Fig. 7.8

Interior of the shop where they buy Addie’s ribbon. (Paper Moon, Paramount) Interior of the shop where they buy Addie’s dress. (Paper Moon, Paramount) Addie’s greatest treasure—a photo of her with her mother. (Paper Moon, Paramount) Addie poses in the mirror like her mother in the photograph. (Paper Moon, Paramount)

186 187 193 194

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

In December of 1977, production designer Polly Platt took part in a Harold Lloyd Master Seminar at the American Film Institute (AFI) in Los Angeles. These seminars offer film practitioners the opportunity to speak directly with film students and scholars who are excited to discuss the intricacies and practicalities of filmmaking. The relaxed setting and the enthusiasm of the participants often create an environment in which filmmakers can share refreshingly frank thoughts about their own work and the work of their peers. On this occasion, Platt seems to have gotten the time of the seminar wrong and had to rush to the AFI.  A bit frazzled throughout, she sometimes forgets people’s names, film titles, or, after indulging the occasional tangent, the original question she is responding to. At one point, just over an hour into the seminar, she informs the organizers she can stay longer if somebody will phone her house to ensure her daughters are safely home and being properly supervised. There is a feeling of rushed breathlessness to some of Platt’s discussion. In one sense, this should be no surprise—Platt had spent much of her life on the go. Her childhood as an army brat during and after the Second World War saw Platt move homes frequently. In her earliest years, this meant around the United States and then, from late 1946 onward, in Europe, where she spent several stints living in Germany and France. Her father, John, a member of the army’s Judge Advocate General corps, adjudicated in various war-crime tribunals, including at Dachau. According to Platt, it was seeing the destruction of war-torn Europe that first kindled © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Hunter, Polly Platt, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82120-3_1

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within her a desire to build (Platt n.d., 18), and it was on one of her trips home from Europe that she first wandered backstage at a performance of summer theater and decided she wanted to be a part of the design and creation of costumes and sets. She would go on to study art at Skidmore College, and then theatrical design at Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie Mellon), where she was consigned to costume design because, as she was told, women “couldn’t physically handle the work involved in scenic design” (Platt n.d., 59).1 As a young adult, she would switch from moving between colleges to moving between states, from her family home in Massachusetts to California, Arizona on several occasions, and New York, seeking work in the theater and then film. She also took odd jobs such as sewing gowns for the Mormon Tabernacle Choir (Platt n.d., 68) or typing copies of well-known movie scripts to be sold at Larry Edmund’s Bookshop in Hollywood (Platt n.d., 116). Both jobs later fortified her work as a production and costume designer, and also as a writer and producer with an intimate knowledge of film structure. Once she began her career in feature film with Targets (1968), she worked continuously on location, her films set variously in Texas, Kansas, and Missouri, both southern and northern California, Arizona, and Louisiana among other locales. Throughout her unpublished memoir, Platt repeatedly describes a desire to settle down, while also loving the work that demanded she move from place to place with regularity. During this visit to the AFI, perhaps due to her restless existence, or perhaps simply due to her own nature—she describes herself as a “ballsy chick” who speaks her mind—she is refreshingly forthcoming about her own practice and the work of other filmmakers. As an example, a little over thirty minutes in, she is asked a question about relationships between the costume designer and the production designer (Platt served as costume designer or advisor on all her 1970s and most of her 1980s films). She gives a long, rambling answer that is worth quoting at length for its fascinating insight into her approach to filmmaking and the impact she made on 1970s Hollywood cinema (slightly edited for brevity and clarity): The best thing I would say for a director is to have a talented costume designer … I think the way I do it is the best way … because the sets for me are totally dictated by the characters. So therefore, the clothes that the character wears have to be related to what I designed. I mean, in other words … everything goes together. So, if Edith Head is out to do her shtick with … excuse me Edith (audience laughter) … I mean you know, if she’s going to

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go do … I mean, when I went to the movies, I used to think, “these clothes don’t have anything to do with these characters. What is this constant tailored suit doing on every single person that Edith Head ever designs?” Alfred Hitchcock stamped a tailored suit on Edith Head, and that was it. We never got anything out of her. Oh, that’s going to be in the archives, and you’re all going to be like (audience laughter) … it’s not even going to be funny in the archive. They’re all going to read it, and say “aw” … And I used to say, why don’t people design the clothes to match the people? Why does everybody look like a Vogue magazine person? Why is Sophia Loren, why is she wearing these weird clothes when she’s supposed to be somebody else? I remember Charade drove me crazy. Audrey Hepburn in these Paris fashions. In a sense, it almost worked because … but it didn’t. It really didn’t work. And also, Two for the Road, again, Audrey Hepburn, dressed by the same designer. And I said, “oh my god, this is not a person, this is just a fashion person. This is a person who doesn’t care about anything, and she’s only …”, and in my opinion it really hurt the film. And I always thought the men’s clothes fit too well. And I always thought that clothes shouldn’t fit correctly. What’s funnier than a guy with a shirt too … with the shoulders hanging down or the sleeves too short. I think that’s character. I mean, character comes out of design. That’s why I think that the production designer should have the total say so. But boy you have to be … That’s how I got fired by Mike Nichols, off of The Fortune. By trying to push my weight, and there were too many other heavyweights around there, and I got “schweet” (sound like getting yanked). I got fired. (Platt 1977)

Here and throughout the session, she repeatedly returns to the subject of power dynamics on film sets—who gets their way and why, and what one must do, especially a woman, to have her voice heard and her ideas accepted when she knows they are right. In the above statement, she intimately ties her grasp of those power dynamics to three components of filmmaking: firstly, to her conception of film artistry generally; secondly, to her belief in the importance of a realist design aesthetic, which sprang in part from her critical eye for the superficial trappings of Classical Hollywood design; and finally, to the role design plays in film authorship. Engaging with Platt’s conception of these aspects of design and the complex ways they interact with each other—both within a production setting and in their contribution to a filmic utterance and its potential for meaning—is necessary for understanding the essential nature of Platt’s influence on Hollywood design history and, more specifically, on the development of New Hollywood’s visual style.

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Platt makes two seemingly contradictory statements: first, early in the discussion, that “sets are totally dictated by character”; then, near the end, that “character comes out of design.” This chicken-and-egg contradiction becomes less flummoxing when one is aware of Platt’s intimate knowledge of screenwriting and the pre-production and production processes. When Platt says, “everything goes together,” she is not simply describing the relationship of different aspects of a film production. She is articulating a conception of film art and production in which all these aspects of the creative process continually inform each other, rely on each other, develop out of each other, and change—sometimes in unexpected ways—based on this constant interplay. Character in a given film, as originally prescribed by the writer, consists of words on a page, and it requires a combination of visions to breathe life into character—most obviously, those of the director and performers, but also, as Platt argues here, the production and costume designers. Does the bowler hat exist because of the Little Tramp or is the Little Tramp, as audiences know him, possible because of the hat? Would a different hat, a different suit, or different facial hair change the character regardless of writing or performance? Likewise, how would viewers’ complicated mix of empathy and revulsion for Norma Desmond change had she lived in a less elaborate, less garishly decorated mansion, or even, say, in a Hollywood bungalow? What Platt is articulating here is not simply a relationship between character, narrative, and design, that the three should complement each other, but rather an existential bond, part of the foundation of film artistry. In the kind of films that Platt was designing in the 1970s and into the ‘80s,2 that bond was grounded in a new realism that sought to reorient design away from a Classical Hollywood approach that had become increasingly extravagant in the 1950s and ‘60s. Platt’s contemporary Dean Tavoularis described this as “the Pillow Talk, Hollywood movie look” (Harris 2008, 253), while film scholar Merrill Schleier describes the era’s design strategy as “geared to heighten viewers’ awe and engender a vicarious experience” (2015, 74).3 Like many designers who came before her, including those of the heightened reality era of the ‘50s and ‘60s, Platt believed design should be “invisible,” that it should not call attention to itself. For her, however, such an outcome was most likely when design was grounded in a realism of setting, location, costume, and anything else that contributed to a performer’s appearance or a film’s mise-en-scène. Thus, windows might be dirty, rooms messy, and clothes ill-fitting. These conditions create the world in which the characters move and the narrative

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unfolds, but they also facilitate the creation of character and narrative, thereby affecting their reception by viewers. It becomes no surprise then that Platt would take issue with one of Hollywood’s major establishment figures, Edith Head, nor that she would find the notion of characters being dressed by European fashion designers inauthentic.4 This is not to say that Platt did not admire fashion or the fashionable—like many of her peers in the ‘70s, she held Classical Hollywood in great esteem—but she also believed that the heightened reality of much of its output infringed upon a film’s ability to portray the “real.” Describing working on The Last Picture Show in her unpublished memoir, she writes: I wanted to make a movie where the actors looked like real people. I had the idea that Cybill’s hair would be in pin curls when she was putting on cold crème to take off her make-up during the scene with her mother. The actors in all the thousands of movies I had seen looked picture perfect. They even had on make-up and their hair was combed when they woke up from a night’s sleep! I wanted people to look real in this movie, and I was in a position to do that. (Platt n.d., 157–158)

This approach to design has become commonplace in Hollywood, but at the time it ran counter to Hollywood expectations of design. It might be a stretch to describe this “counter-cinema” approach as feminist, but her desire to abandon the shiny veneer of Classical Hollywood was at the least rebellious (it helped that her first two films were independent productions: Targets (1968) for Roger Corman and Picture Show for BBS Productions). Platt shared this desire that people, locations, and props “look real” with several of her contemporary designers, including Tavoularis, Richard Sylbert, Michael D. Haller, and Patrizia von Brandenstein. This is not to say that these production designers lacked flair or an admiration for dynamism or beauty. As I intend to show in this book, one of Platt’s great strengths was her ability to deploy color in ingenious ways; another was her talent for constructing idiosyncratic interiors that retain an organic fidelity to the characters that live, work, and play within them. But her outspokenness about the tailored suits and “fashion people” of Classical Hollywood was grounded not just in a desire to overthrow the old, but in a very conscious aesthetic of reality, of mundanity when necessary, but also of exuberance when called for. Platt’s drive to actualize this aesthetic in film would play a lasting role in changing the way Hollywood films look.

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Platt’s fundamental, albeit subtle, final suggestion is that design’s contribution to a film’s authorship is significant. She does not state as much directly—most non-directing practitioners in the mid-70s would have shied away from claiming authorship or describing themselves as auteurs. However, it resides in her observations about design’s connection to everything, in her claim that “character comes out of design,” and in her conclusion “that the production designer should have the total say so.” This latter claim is quite remarkable considering that it comes at the very height of the auteur era when it was understood, often tacitly on film sets, but quite explicitly in the wider film culture, that directors had the final say on everything. The entire architecture of New Hollywood history and scholarship is built upon a foundation of director-centered auteurism. While much research has enumerated and interrogated the various factors that allowed the New Hollywood era to flourish, however briefly,5 most of that research, as varied and intricate as it may be in some aspects, promulgates an era of “directors’ cinema.” There has been resistance to this framing. In the 1960s, Pauline Kael famously disputed Andrew Sarris’s formulation of an auteur theory (despite the director-centered nature of much of her own film criticism); in the ‘70s, Richard Corliss made eloquent claims for a screenwriter-centered criticism, and Graham Petrie argued that auteurism distorts the actualities of film history; feminist and production studies scholars have long argued that auteurism is an incomplete model for understanding film production. In recent years, a variation on these earlier critiques of auteurism has emerged, often termed “collaborative,” “collective,” or “multiple” authorship (I prefer the latter, which best conveys the delicate overlap of combined individual talents with the collaborative whole of the film crew). This is the notion that films—particularly Hollywood films—are “authored” by more than one individual. Multiple authorship recognizes that directors can be artists with personal visions, but also articulates clearly that other filmmakers on the crew are capable of making creative contributions to a film that affect its reception and potential for meaning. The archival turn in film studies and the concomitant expansion of production studies have shed light on the ways that directors who have historically been conceived of as single-author auteurs benefited from close collaboration on a much deeper and more creative level than previously assumed.6 Combined with attentive formal analysis, this approach has made it increasingly clear that non-directing practitioners often develop a personal style noticeable in their work regardless of director—in fact, that

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directors often call on these practitioners precisely because of their individual artistry. For example, an understanding of how cinematographer Gordon Willis approached his filmmaking and the freedom he was given to design lighting setups and camera movements, combined with an analysis of films he shot that were directed by different directors, shows an artist making clear, consistent creative choices on his films that significantly influence their meaning and thematic development. With even a cursory look at The Landlord (United 1970), Klute (Warner Bros. 1971), and The Godfather (Paramount 1972) a kinship of visual style can be detected, regardless of director (Hal Ashby, Alan J.  Pakula, and Francis Ford Coppola, respectively). However, despite such efforts to construct a more nuanced critical and scholarly apparatus for understanding New Hollywood filmmaking, the auteur paradigm continues to dominate the functional organizing of New Hollywood scholarly and popular engagement.7 Furthermore, though, when scholars do contest director-centered auteurism, they rarely turn to production design as a potential locus for authorship. Some scholars, such as C. Paul Sellors (2010) or Alan Lovell and Gianluca Sergi (2005), include production designers in their discussions of which cast and crew present authorship potential. Recent scholarship, though, has seen intriguing arguments for screenwriting, cinematography, and performance as modes of authorship, sometimes complicated by the increasing reliance on digital technologies in filmmaking.8 These interventions, insightful and welcome, tend to avoid a major paradox at the heart of authorship studies and the ensuing role those studies have played in formulating a framework of New Hollywood. The original articulations of auteurism, as expressed by François Truffaut and his colleagues in the pages of Cahiers du Cinéma, devised a strategy for discerning auteurism by means of analyzing mise-en-scène and detecting a consistent visual style despite the rigid constraints of the studio system. For the Cahiers writers, the auteur did not so much impose his vision upon a film, as smuggle it into the film via patterns of shot selection, framing, or camera movement and details of location, set, and prop. This notion was expanded upon by Ian Cameron, Andrew Sarris and others to insist that visual consistency was only one of the necessary components of auteurism: the work of a true auteur must also exhibit a consistency of theme and idea. Ideally, the two marks of authorship would be intimately combined. As Sarris put it: “The way a film looks and moves should have some relationship to the way a director thinks and feels” (Sarris 1962, 64). This expansion of the concept significantly influenced the popularized

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notion of auteurism that emerged in 1970s Hollywood. Unlike the formulation of the Cahiers writers, for post-Sarris auteurists, a director’s vision is imposed upon the film. The paradox, then, becomes one of rhetoric versus practice. Rhetorically, assigning everything of value in a film to its director serves many functions in the categorizing, marketing, and canonization of films. For example, the term a “Scorsese film” at once describes a type of film—gritty, urban, criminal (despite Scorsese’s frequent forays into other genres)—but also a product for film consumers (“I like Scorsese films, I’ll purchase a ticket to see this one, too”), and a status (a film by one of global cinema’s “greats”). The rhetorical function also makes attribution of quality much easier: if we recognize something of value in a film, we can assign it to the director. Over time, as that director’s reputation for quality grows, we can assign quality to him as an artist and all his output, not just to his films of quality. Speaking practically, on the other hand, a film crew consists of numerous practitioners who add to the visual style and themes of the filmic utterance. Film scholars and critics know this and, on occasion, acknowledge the contributions of writers and cinematographers or, less frequently, production designers. This is particularly true when the cinematography or design calls attention to itself, such as with stunning golden hour shots or the exuberant design of some musicals and science fiction. Yet, once the acknowledgement is made, discussions generally return to the director. Thus, even though the concept and nuances of auteurism have changed and developed over time, the result still involves attributing a film’s mise-­ en-­scène and its potential meanings to the director. The resultant paradox, then, is that mise-en-scène rests at the heart of auteurism, which would seem to imply an authorial function for production design; yet auteurism as it is configured and employed to define Hollywood filmmaking eschews acknowledgement of production designers almost completely. Which brings us back to Polly Platt, arguing that “the production designer should have the total say so”—while that may never be the case, Platt’s ability to conceive of such a situation displays her awareness of design’s authorial potential. This book is a study of Polly Platt’s career between 1968 and 1987, when she worked mainly as a production designer, but also as a writer, location supervisor, and costume designer, often jointly filling many or all those roles on the same film. I argue that Platt’s contributions to Hollywood cinema exceed best practice or even excellence in design; rather, she was a central figure in changing the way Hollywood films were

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designed and, therefore, in the way they looked, developing and implementing changes that continue to influence certain strains of filmmaking today. Understanding Platt’s influence is not simply a matter of changing trends or even aesthetics. Part of what appealed to audiences of New Hollywood cinema was the ways in which they cast off, or at least complicated, norms of American filmmaking—not only in design, of course, but also in the treatment of narrative subject matter, character construction and development, and in the various ways that cinematographers, sound designers, special effects artists and others took novel and exciting approaches to their crafts. New Hollywood cinema flourished in part because a huge swath of the industry was invested in changing the way Hollywood films looked and were produced, and Platt played a vital role in articulating the necessity of some of those changes, but also in her ability to convey to others, particularly directors, the importance of implementing them. In arguing for Platt’s historical position and influence, I work to resituate production design closer to the center of film studies. I do not intend to redefine the study or definition of production design so much as build upon the vital work, albeit scant, that has already been done in the area. Articulations of the history and evolution of production design, and theorizations of design’s centrality to both the production process and a film’s potential for meaning are major components of most production design studies. In his influential text Caligari’s Cabinet, first published in 1970, Léon Barsacq describes the film set as an “ever-present character, the director’s most faithful accomplice” (1976, 122). Barsacq makes what has become a standard observation about sets as characters, but not simply to comment upon a set’s presence or its level of visibility. On the contrary, he goes on to explain that regardless of a set’s noticeability, its very presence is an act of authorship that directly affects reception of the film utterance. Two decades later, in delineating their taxonomy of set design’s potential for actively influencing a film’s potential meaning, Charles Affron and Mirella Jona Affron write that “Sets of all levels of design intensity are coded for genre and culture. It is the intensity of the design that allows the reading to move away from the formulaic to the subversion of the codes themselves” (1995, 37). Scholars of production design repeatedly make such arguments—that set design not only enhances character and narrative, but in many detectable ways, it determines character and narrative, or even has, as the Affrons argue, the potential to counterpose or undermine character and narrative as scripted or performed.

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Because production design has been written about so infrequently, there is a tendency for scholars of the field to revisit key moments when design flourished artistically or important developments of the profession. Barsacq, with his focus on location shooting and stylized design, tends to emphasize the work of European art designers. Likewise, while C.  S Tashiro includes some Hollywood films in his introduction to Pretty Pictures: Production Design and the History Film (1998), he too places European films at the center of his analysis. While scholarship has been produced covering a wide array of Hollywood design, it tends to focus on the classical era—the development of in-house design styles and the rise of art directors and production designers like Cedric Gibbons and William Cameron Menzies (to whom the title “production designer” was first applied, by his producer David O. Selznick for his work on Gone with the Wind). These two areas are linked, of course, by the influence of European art styles—Art Deco, Art Nouveau—on Classical Hollywood cinema as well as by the influx of European designers into Hollywood during the 1930s and ‘40s. Building on the work of the Affrons and Tashiro, Geraint D’Arcy’s Critical Approaches to TV and Film Set Design includes a wide array of Hollywood films, ranging across eras. Aimed at developing an interpretive model for reading set design in film and television, D’Arcy provides a welcome, rigorously critical template for better understanding how design influences strategies for interpreting films’ meanings. D’Arcy positions the text’s approach to interpretation as being from the viewpoint of “an audience member, sitting in the cinema or in their own home” (2019, 5), and he argues for a reading of “the design of the whole film as the text itself and not as a collection of contributions from the entire creative team” (2019, 5), the result being that he rarely mentions individual production designers of any era by name. I take a different approach in this book, articulating production design as creative practice that has the potential to influence a film’s meaning. It may be possible to interpret a film without any consideration of the creativity and labor that went into its production, but doing so has the potential to perpetuate an auteurist framework by erasing the very real contributions of the people who made the film. Examining production design through the lens of Polly Platt’s career creates an opportunity for an extended analysis of an era of American cinema when design changed drastically in ways that continue to influence Hollywood filmmaking. Furthermore, a thorough understanding of Platt’s career and contributions reorients New Hollywood away from a

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cinema of genius directors toward a more practically understood cinema of overlapping creative talent, in this case a woman. In fact, a further link between the designers of Europe and the flourishing of design during the Classical Hollywood era, of course, is that the designers in question are almost all, invariably, men. Likewise, most of Platt’s production design peers during New Hollywood were also men, and, to be sure, the work of several of those male production designers was arguably as influential as Platt’s, including: Dean Tavoularis (Bonnie and Clyde, The Godfather films, Apocalypse Now); Richard Sylbert (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Chinatown, Shampoo); Paul Sylbert (One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Mikey and Nicky, Heaven Can Wait); Michael D.  Haller (The Last Detail, Bound for Glory, Being There). While these men came from a variety of art and design backgrounds—Tavoularis studied architecture and animation, Richard Sylbert went to art school—their design sensibilities overlapped with Platt’s in their understanding of the intertwined nature of character, narrative, and design, their approach to a realist aesthetic, and their dedication to integrating design and location work. As with many of their colleagues in screenwriting, cinematography, sound design, and other departments, the creative labor of these practitioners has mostly been overlooked in the construction of a New Hollywood discourse that centralizes directors as the driving creative force of the era, along with some performers, particularly those who espoused or practice some variation on method acting. For example, little to no mention is made of production design or any individual production designers in Robert Kolker’s A Cinema of Loneliness (2000), Geoff King’s New Hollywood Cinema: An Introduction (2002), in Lester D.  Friedman’s edited collection American Cinema of the 1970s (2007), or Elsaesser, Horwath, and King’s edited collection The Last Great American Picture Show: New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s (2004). In David Cook’s otherwise exhaustive Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam 1970–1979 (2000), a book with a section dedicated to cinematography, the Sylberts and Tavoularis are all mentioned once in passing, and Platt is not mentioned at all. While many of these texts include extensive visual analysis of the films in question, those artists responsible for much of the films’ visual content remain marginalized or ignored completely. Furthermore, when Platt is mentioned in assessments of the era, it is almost always in relation to her former husband, director Peter Bogdanovich. In Peter Biskind’s popularized, sex-drugs-and-rock-n-roll

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account, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Platt features extensively in early parts of the book as she and Bogdanovich are building their careers together. However, once Bogdanovich leaves her for Cybill Shepherd and then their creative partnership ends after Paper Moon (1973), Platt virtually drops out of the book except for occasional comments on Bogdanovich’s later career or relationships. This is in keeping with the masculinized, director-­ centered framing of the era in which creative women are often relegated to “wife” or “girlfriend” status, regardless of their actual individual accomplishments or contributions—as though they might not have made those contributions had they not been granted access by their more accomplished, brilliant husbands (others include Toby Raffelson and Marcia Lucas). The result of these various framing apparatuses is that for many creative women in Hollywood, the celluloid ceiling is double-glazed—both professionally in terms of their actual careers, but also historiographically in the way their achievements are recounted, credited, and analyzed. First there is the standard and pervasive sexism that suffuses Hollywood as much as any other industry, and which historically and today has made it difficult for women to attain and retain positions of creative power—specifically as directors. According to an Inclusion Initiative study, for the 1200 top-grossing Hollywood films between 2007 and 2018, 4.3% of directors were women (2019). Secondly, because film scholarship remains grounded in an auteurist paradigm that marginalizes the creative labor of non-directors, the significant creative achievements women have made in Hollywood are regularly assigned to their directors or subsumed within the mythologizing process that elevates directors above all other creative film practitioners. Thus, the double-glazed ceiling. Amid these overlapping structures of centering and exclusion, Polly Platt’s work as a production designer serves as a useful, instructive case study in a project of reorientation with at least three strands. First this book argues for a resituating of production design more centrally as one of the pivotal components of Hollywood authorship. Second, in focusing primarily on Platt’s work in the 1970s, I build on previous arguments that New Hollywood was much more than just a directors’ cinema, that the innovations of form, narrative, character, and technology that made New Hollywood flourish for a time depended upon the artistic and imaginative contributions of numerous non-directing crew, including editors, cinematographers, sound designers, and most definitely production designers. Finally, by focusing on Platt as an example of New Hollywood production

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designer rather than one of her male peers, I argue that the history and analysis of the era’s films have obscured if not outright erased how fundamental the contributions of women were to the formal and aesthetic developments that mark New Hollywood as a distinctive era of creativity in American cinema. In exploring how Platt’s career intersects with and can be read as a counter to the above-outlined director-driven, male-centered formulations of ‘70s film history, this book relies upon three scholarly approaches, the first of which—archival research—is, itself, subject to another form of institutional sexism. There is no Polly Platt archive. Like other creative women in Hollywood, Platt’s work has not been deemed relevant or vital enough to warrant full archival treatment, so her papers, letters, contracts, and memos are spread across a variety of different sites. In researching this book, I spent time in the Peter Bogdanovich papers at Indiana University, the Gracie Films contract archives at Fox, and sifted through various film, filmmaker, and studio collections at the Margaret Herrick library. Additionally, I listened to several hours of audio archives from the AFI. Secondly, I interviewed several people who knew, lived, and worked with Platt, including both her daughters, Antonia and Sashy Bogdanovich, and former colleagues such as Frank Marshall, James L.  Brooks, and Cameron Crowe. Finally, Sashy and Anotina kindly granted me access to Platt’s unpublished memoir, It Was Worth It. These resources combined paint a picture of a woman with a deep and complex knowledge of how filmmaking works, how film productions can be run, and how vital design is to those processes. They also detail how hard Platt worked on each of her films. Finally, building on these resources, throughout the book I perform extensive formal analysis of Platt’s films. Each chapter is focused on a particular aspect of design, and I spend part of each chapter ranging across Platt’s body of work, examining her novel contributions to the films and consistencies in her approach to design as a component of character and narrative. I then turn to specific films for case studies that more deeply illuminate Platt’s authorial contributions to the films. Platt worked as a production designer into the late 1980s, and while the case studies in this book mainly focus on her work from the 1970s, I also draw extensively on her ‘80s films. Furthermore, as I make clear throughout the book, Platt’s design work was not limited to production design—she also regularly acted as costume designer and location scout and manager for all her

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1970s films. As I consider her design work throughout, I also include her costume and location work. Platt also worked as a screenwriter, most famously on Pretty Baby (1978), and later in her career moved into production, especially during her time at Gracie Films, and in which role she acted as a mentor to several burgeoning filmmakers who have since become well-known American directors, people like Cameron Crowe, Wes Anderson and J. J. Abrams. These are important stages in Platt’s Hollywood career, and by focusing on her work as a production designer, I do not mean to downplay or overlook these later contributions. However, the thrust of this book is mainly an examination of her career as a production designer. I begin in Chap. 2 with a sketch of Platt’s life, both before and during her career as a Hollywood production designer. This is necessary. Platt was a highly trained artist. Beginning in high school, she worked every summer as a theatrical scenic designer for a decade. She went on to study art, costume design, and architecture in university, and then worked as a professional theatrical designer in Arizona and New York City after university. She was also a highly sensitive and empathic artist whose upbringing endowed her with heightened awareness of the pain of human experience. As a young girl, she lived in Europe while her army officer father presided over German war-crime trials, and she saw the deprivation that war had brought. Her family life was riddled with tragedy, from the alcoholism and mental illness of her mother, Vivian, to her own tragic early pregnancies. However, she also experienced periods of great joy and freedom—drinking cocktails in Arizona jazz bars in the early ‘60s, visiting film sets and watching directors like Sam Peckinpah and John Ford work. These experiences informed Platt’s later work. By the time she began working in film in the late ‘60s she had developed sharp insights into human drama, and she drew from those insights as she designed films to enhance their drama. A familiarity with some of the key experiences of her life will enhance an understanding of her approach to designing Hollywood films and the attention to detail she brought to her work. Chapter 3 develops a taxonomy of Platt’s attention to detail as a designer. There is a conundrum inherent in the analysis of Hollywood production design in that, on the one hand, the standard across eras has been that design be unobtrusive, undetectable. Platt herself has commented: “nobody should be aware of the sets … people should not be aware of your work” (Platt 1977). On the other hand, though, for design to act as an extension of narrative and character, or even as the crucible out

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of which character arises, it must be noticeable to a certain extent, even if somewhat subliminally. Building on previous taxonomies articulated by the Affrons (1995) and Tashiro (1998), the chapter outlines specific areas in which Platt’s attention to detail can be detected and analyzed across her body of work, including films shot on studio lots and those shot on location sets. In doing so, the chapter argues that these details—even when seemingly mundane—create a distinctive, palpable environment that adds textual layers to the film’s potential for meanings by developing certain themes, adding nuance to them, or even undermining them. Building on this, I then perform a case study of The Last Picture Show, a film on which Platt had near complete control over every visual component. Her attention to every facet of detail on the film, her deployment of a variety of costuming, prop, architectural, and design strategies endows the film with more than a visual sensibility. Rather, in Platt’s hands, the town of Anarene, the buildings inside and out, the costumes, the hair, even props glanced only briefly onscreen combine in ways that add meaning and depth to the script and performances. Chapter 4 moves on to discuss Platt and location. Like many of her contemporaries, Platt’s role as production designer included overseeing location decisions. This was a key facet of New Hollywood filmmaking, particularly early in the era. While filming on location was hardly a new phenomenon in Hollywood, a combination of factors meant that the number of films shot on location increased dramatically during the era. Such factors included the development of new, lightweight sound and camera equipment, budgetary concerns related to studio costs, the increased drive for onscreen “authenticity,” and New Hollywood filmmakers’ desire to remove their productions from the reach of the “suits.” Lawrence Webb describes the phenomenon as “symptomatic of a new type of storytelling and a different approach to production design,” and effort to overcome the “slick artifice and illusionism of studio production” (2019, 124–125). As location managing became increasingly necessary, it was often production designers who took on the role in the early 1970s— like Platt, Richard Sylbert, Dean Tavoularis, Mike Haller and other early New Hollywood production designers managed location decisions. On several of Platt’s films, this extended not only to finding appropriate internal or external shooting locations within a specified town or city, but to choosing the actual city itself, sometimes overriding initial production decisions. For example, it was Platt’s idea to shoot What’s Up, Doc? (1972) in San Francisco, to relocate The Thief Who Came to Dinner (1973) to

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Houston from the novel’s Chicago, and to film Paper Moon in the wide-­ open spaces of Kansas and Missouri. Such decisions stemmed from the visual way she read and understood scripts and her efforts to set her films in  locations that would work best cinematically. Platt’s design work for each of these films was, then, intimately related to her location work, especially as she determined which interiors and exteriors to build, to repurpose, or to leave nearly as they were. A foremost instance of her approach to location and design comes in the 1976 film The Bad News Bears, which is set and shot mainly at a little league baseball field. A film that unfolds almost entirely at one location set hardly seems exemplary of the complex relationship between location and design that Platt excelled at finessing. However, when one considers Platt’s role in making major adaptions to the script, in choosing the locations, in designing and building the entirety of the baseball field, it becomes clear how her hand guided construction of the film’s mise-en-scène. Chapter 5 examines Platt’s effective and various deployments of color. Her work as a designer first came to widespread attention on The Last Picture Show, a black-and-white film, but her understanding of the possibility of color to channel subtle expressions and shadings of character and narrative was apparent from her earliest film work. On her first feature as production designer, Targets (1968), Platt uses the color of walls, clothes, cars, and props to convey psychological information about her characters and to create understated contrasts between the film’s dual protagonists, their friends and lovers, and the situations they find themselves in over the course of the film’s two days. Platt would continue to find ingenious expressions of color throughout her career. Indeed, color is one of the key tools in a production designer’s kit, and Platt is hardly alone in the history of film production in using color in ingenious ways. However, due to her combined role as production designer, costume designer, and location manager, and in conjunction with her beliefs about how character and narrative are born out of design, Platt worked constantly to make color more than a complement or ornament, but rather an integral component of the film’s narrative strategy. In The Witches of Eastwick (1987), her final film as a production designer, Platt’s use of color not only enhances the script and performances, but layers complex clues about social class and money, characters’ attitudes about their own lives and pasts, and about key relationships between the primary characters and the film’s fiendish antagonist. As in her earlier films of the ‘70s, color works in hand with her

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attention to detail and the ways she develops locations to add complexity and deepen the film’s potential for meaning. As the extended quotation above and interviews elsewhere make clear, Platt recognized production design and costume design as part of a continuum of filmic design that was not easily apportionable, and Chap. 6 examines Platt’s role as a costume designer. In the hierarchy of Hollywood filmmaking, costume design can sometimes fall under the purview of the production designer and sometimes act as a more independent department within the larger art department. For Platt, character, clothes, and set design all dictate each other, interplay with each other, and continually inform each other. On each of her films of the 1970s, Platt acted (often uncredited) as costume designer alongside her production design duties.9 The result is a palpable physicality in the relationship between costumes and sets that endows each with more expressive possibilities. This again, though, raises the question of how effectively her design becomes invisible or unnoticeable. Jane Gaines describes the relationship between costume and narrative as “antithetical” because of the way that costume does not complement but rather distracts from it (1990, 181). Gaines contrasts this with set design, which she sees as serving “the higher purpose of the narrative” (181). However, if Platt uses her attention to detail and flare for color to create a dialogue between costume and set, one might consider whether and how costume might be subsumed within that “higher purpose,” or whether all facets of her design might be described as “antithetical” to character and narrative in exactly the way she argues against. Chapter 5 examines these potential contradictions in her work, particularly in What’s Up, Doc? (1972), in which nearly every sequence in the film includes a restrained but detectable interplay between costumes and set that performs a variety of filmic duties: tying characters to location, tying characters to each other, heightening the comedy of some scenes or the romance of others, adding to the film’s confusingly zany hijinks, or helping to reveal the truth at their root. Taking up strands from previous chapters and teasing out the intersections between their various arguments and themes, Chap. 7 engages with Platt’s often deeply personal approach to design, an approach that guided her authorial impulses as she developed a practice that was at once visionary, but that also worked in close conjunction with her key collaborators, including writers, directors, and cinematographers. Paper Moon (1973) is especially apt in this regard. For the fourth and final film in her collaboration with her ex-husband Bogdanovich, Platt was reluctant to take

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part—personally, she was distraught over the end of her marriage, professionally she was searching for work with other filmmakers. However, despite these potential hindrances, Platt crafted one of her richest, most revealing films. While film scholarship regularly engages with film as an expression of director personality and autobiography—even in a supposedly post-auteur-theory era—it rarely affords such considerations of personal investment to non-directing crew like production designers. Yet Polly Platt had been preparing to design films for much of her life, and while she always strived to serve the films, she maintained a deeply personal investment in her work throughout her career. Elaborating upon emerging research on multiple authorship, the chapter argues not that Platt was a singular author of her films, but rather that she was an equal contributing author whose creative marks can be recognized across her body of work. Finally, an epilogue considers Platt’s design work in relation to the writing and producing that she did later in her career, particularly in her work with James L. Brooks and on her most successful produced script, Pretty Baby (1978). In sourcing the thematic concerns that come out in Platt’s writing and which guided her decision-making as a producer, the epilogue reiterates the argument that Platt’s awareness of theme, of character and narrative development were apparent in her design as well. Maintaining a focus on multiple authorship, the epilogue makes a clear and convincing argument that Polly Platt was one of the primary authors of all the films she designed, and that she also played a key authorial role in the films she produced. Because Platt worked on so many of the foundational film texts from the 1970s through the ‘90s, centralizing her creativity and labor will create a richer understanding of the role that design played and the role that women played in authoring the films of these eras. In 1972 Polly Platt became the first women accepted as a member of the Art Directors Guild. She was not the first woman credited as an art director or production designer on a Hollywood film, nor was she the only women designing films during the New Hollywood era. For example, some female costume designers worked so extensively on a particular film that they were credited with art direction or production design, like Irene Sharaff on A Star is Born (1954), and though rarely credited Dorothy Hold Redmond is well known for her profoundly important design work on several films directed by Alfred Hitchcock (among others). Toby Rafelson quickly followed her contemporary Platt into the Art Directors Guild, while working on films like Five Easy Pieces (1970) and The King of

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Marvin Gardens (1972). She also shares with Platt the distinction of having her work assessed through the lens of her husband’s directing. My intention with this book is not necessarily to elevate Platt above the women who came before her or worked alongside her, as production designers or as other innovative contributors to New Hollywood style. However, because she was charged with so much creative oversight on her films, Platt’s artistry and career allow for imaginative reassessments of the role that production design plays in film authorship, and the vital, but underexplored, role that women played in the development of one of Hollywood’s most explosively creative eras. In that AFI seminar in 1977, Platt argued that design, character, narrative, and theme are always and intimately connected. In this book, I intend to show how thoroughly her understanding of those connections imbues her films and contributes to their authorship.

Notes 1. As she would often in her career when she faced sexism, Platt tried to turn it to her advantage. Her time in Hollywood would greatly benefit from her training as a costume designer. As far as scenic and set design, as she put it: “I would get what I needed from Summer Stock work. I took a drafting class in the Architecture department so I could read and draw blueprints” (Platt n.d., 59). 2. Platt acted as production designer on the following films: Targets (1968); The Last Picture Show (1971); What’s Up, Doc.? (1972); The Thief Who Came to Dinner (1973); Paper Moon (1973); The Bad News Bears (1976); A Star is Born (1976); Young Doctors in Love (1982); The Man with Two Brains (1983); Terms of Endearment (1983); The Witches of Eastwick (1987). On most of those films she also served as costume designer and location manager. She also did uncredited production, costume, and location work on a variety of other films. In the ‘80s she moved increasingly into film production, which she would continue to do primarily throughout the rest of her career. 3. Schleier discusses this trend in post-war Hollywood design, considering factors including: the influence of wide screen and color; the increasing independence of designers after the Paramount decrees; the aim of designers to increase the visibility of their profession; the influence of the 1945 strike by the Conference of Studio Unions.

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4. Platt’s confusion over the fashion designers on Charade (1963) and Two for the Road (1967) is one example of her discombobulation throughout the talk. While both films were directed by Stanley Donen, they featured different costume designers (with as many as six listed for Two for the Road). And while Audrey Hepburn’s costumes were regularly designed by Givenchy for many of her films starting with Sabrina (1953), Donen famously pressed her to forgo Givenchy for Two for the Road. 5. Like other scholars of the era, I recognize that terminology and dating are contested. Here, I use the term “New Hollywood” to describe the period dating from 1967 (the release of Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate) through 1980, for a variety of well-known reasons. 6. See, for example: Cowan (2012), Tait (2014), Daniels et  al. (2015), and Hunter (2016a). 7. See for example, The Other Hollywood Renaissance (Edinburgh University Press 2020), which examines the careers of several New Hollywood directors “in an auteurist vein” (2), and which gives little consideration to “wider industry and cultural developments,” including the work or contributions of non-directing talent. 8. Some useful texts that recontextualize film authorship: screenwriting: Boozer (2013), Husebye (2008), Ryfle (2018), Spicer (2007); cinematography: Cowan (2012), Greenhalgh (2010), Lieberman and Hegarty (2010); performance: Baron and Carnicke (2008), Hunter (2016b); digital: Clarke (2017). 9. One famous exception comes in A Star is Born (1976), in which Barbra Streisand provided her own wardrobe, from, as the credit reads “her closet.” Streisand insists the credit was her idea because she wanted viewers to know she had made the costume choices. According to Platt, on the other hand, it was her idea to let Streisand take the credit because Platt did not want viewers to think she had designed the costumes, which she didn’t like (Platt n.d., 241).

References Affron, Charles, and Mirela Jona Affron. 1995. Sets in Motion: Art Direction and Film Narrative. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Baron, Cynthia L., and Sharon Carnicke. 2008. Reframing Screen Performance. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Barsacq, Léon. 1976. Caligari’s Cabinet and Other Grand Illusions: A History of Film Design. New York: New American Library. Boozer, Jack. 2013. Novelist-Screenwriter Versus Auteur Desire: The Player. Journal of Film and Video 65 (1–2): 75–86.

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Clarke, Jamie. 2017. Elegies to Cinematography: The Digital Workflow, Digital Naturalism and Recent Best Cinematography Oscars. In Collaborative Production in the Creative Industries, ed. James Graham and Alessandro Gandini, 105–123. London: University of Westminster Press. Cowan, Philip. 2012. Underexposed: The Neglected Art of the Cinematographer. Journal of Media Practice 13 (1): 75–96. D’Arcy, Geraint. 2019. Critical Approaches to TV and Film Set Design. New York: Routledge. Daniels, Richard, Peter Krämer, and Tatjana Llujic, eds. 2015. Stanley Kubrick: New Perspectives. London: Black Dog. Greenhalgh, Cathy. 2010. Cinematography and Camera Crew: Practical, Process, and Procedure. In Theorising Media and Practice, ed. Birgit Braüchler and John Postill, 281–302. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Harris, Mark. 2008. Pictures from a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood. New York: Penguin Books. Hunter, Aaron. 2016a. Authoring Hal Ashby: The Myth of the New Hollywood Auteur. New York: Bloomsbury. ———. 2016b. Performance as Authorship: Sarah Michelle Gellar and Buffy Season 6. Journal of Film and Video 68 (3–4): 51–68. Husebye, Sylvi Jane. 2008. The Screenwriter as Auteur: Nora Ephron’s Heartburn. Edda 108: 3–17. Lennard, Dominic, R.  Barton Palmer, and Murray Pomerance, eds. 2020. The Other Hollywood Renaissance. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Lieberman, Evan, and Kerry Hegarty. 2010. Authors of the Image: Cinematographers Gabriel Figueroa and Gregg Toland. Journal of Film and Video 62 (1): 31–51. Platt, Polly. 1977. American Film Institute: Harold Lloyd Seminar. December 7. ———. n.d. “It Was Worth It.” Collection of Antonia and Sashy Bogdanovich. Unpublished Memoir. Ryfle, Steve. 2018. The Eclipsed Visions of Bill Gunn: An African-American Auteur’s Elusive Genius, from Ganja & Hess to Personal Problems. Cineaste 43 (4): 26–31. Sarris, Andrew. 1962. “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962.” In (1981) Theories of Authorship, ed. John Caughie, 62–65. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Schleier, Merrill. 2015. Postwar Hollywood, 1947–1967. In Art Direction and Production Design, ed. Lucy Fischer, 73–96. London: I. B. Tauris. Spicer, Andrew. 2007. The Author as Author: Restoring the Screenwriter to British Film History. In The New Film History, ed. James Chapman, Mark Glancy, and Sue Harper, 89–103. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Tait, R. Colin. 2014. When Marty Met Bobby: Collaborative Authorship in Mean Streets and Taxi Driver. In A Companion to Martin Scorsese, ed. Aaron Baker, 292–311. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell.

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Tashiro, C.S. 1998. Pretty Pictures: Production Design and the History Film. Austin: University of Texas Press. Webb, Lawrence. 2019. The Auteur Renaissance, 1968–1979. In Hollywood on Location: An Industry History, ed. Joshua Gleich and Lawrence Webb, 124–154. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

CHAPTER 2

A Life in Brief

Recently married, Polly Platt and her new husband drove an old Ford across the United States from the East Coast to Southern California. Their plan was that he would continue writing, but also take up his education again. She would work to support him until they achieved some financial stability, then she would return to working as a set and costume designer in the theater. On arriving in Los Angeles, one of her first jobs was as an industrial seamstress. As she tells it: I got a job doing piecework in a factory that made robes for the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They also made red vests for the Mormons. I sewed these robes on a factory machine and was very adept at it. I learned how to sew fast, without cutting the thread between the pieces to save time. Cut them later as I was turning in my piecework for pay. Everything I sewed went into a big basket behind my machine, and a full basket meant more money. The robes look just like a judge’s robe, black with heavily fluted sleeves. I was so good that I got a better job cutting out patterns for the red vests. I used a band saw to cut through at least twenty-five layers of corduroy, making hundreds of parts of the vests. (Platt n.d., 68–69)

Within a few months, the couple had left Los Angeles for Tucson, Arizona, where friends were starting a community theater project. Platt would oversee the building of the theater space (in an old Salvation Army building) and would supervise set and costume design. She was elated: “I had © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Hunter, Polly Platt, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82120-3_2

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work! Artistic work” (n.d., 70). By the end of that year, 1960, the theater project had fallen apart and Platt’s husband, Philip Klein, had died in a car accident on his twenty-first birthday.1 Platt—who, in the previous eighteen months, had borne a child that she had given up for adoption and then had a complicated, painful miscarriage—was twenty-one. The start of this story may sound familiar to some readers. In 1964, Platt would make a similar journey, taking a different beat-up Ford across the country from east to west with her newlywed husband. Except, on this second trip her husband was Peter Bogdanovich. The plan was once again that her husband, who had been directing off-Broadway plays in New York, would continue writing (film criticism), but also that he would attempt to break into film directing, with Platt again working to support him. Thus begins a narrative that many scholars, critics, and fans of the New Hollywood era know well. It has been recounted in Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, and by both Platt and Bogdanovich in numerous interviews. A ubiquitous Hollywood story, it remains one of very few widely known details about Platt’s life, the rest of which could probably be listed as follows: meets Bogdanovich in New  York in the early 1960s; drives across the country with him to LA, where, broke and looking for work, they befriend numerous members of Hollywood’s old guard; they get a break when they meet Roger Corman, who, impressed with some of their assistant work, hires them to direct the film that would become Targets (1968); they make a total of four films together between 1968 and 1973, during which time they also have two daughters; on their second film, The Last Picture Show, Bogdanovich begins an affair with Cybill Shepherd, which leads to the dissolution of their marriage; Platt keeps working until she dies in 2011. Attentive fans and students of the era might be aware of Platt’s earlier marriage, or maybe that she was the first woman to join the Art Directors Guild. Some of her later professional highlights are becoming better known, like writing the script for Pretty Baby (1978) or her long creative relationship with James L. Brooks, which included introducing him to the work of Matt Groening. But even still, little remains widely known about Platt’s personal life and how her life’s experiences may have influenced her work. One might ask whether the events of Platt’s life are fundamental—or even relevant—to an understanding of her work and its impact in Hollywood based on critical, production, and historical analysis. If this book is arguing, as it is, that Platt’s design work on her films was not only fundamental to their authorship but also a highly influential component of

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the aesthetic changes that developed in Hollywood during the late 1960s through the early 1980s, then including a biographical chapter might be considered superfluous or even unorthodox. I would argue, on the other hand, that it is necessary. As feminist film scholars have been articulating and arguing for decades, the erasure of women’s labor goes hand in hand with the erasure of women’s life stories. This has consistently reinforced and perpetuated what Molly Haskell referred to as “the big lie”: the “idea of women’s inferiority” (Haskell 1987, 1). The roots of this lie and its insidious relationship with film history and film scholarship are too numerous to recount in full, but four are worth reiterating here to help explain my inclusion of a short overview of Platt’s life. First, the erasure of women’s labor stems from various manifestations of sexism within the film industry, most notably the inaccessibility of most front-facing positions of artistic or production power to women throughout most of Hollywood history and the downplaying, papering over, or complete lack of acknowledgment of women’s labor and creativity in the positions they could attain. In her monograph Never Done: A History of Women’s Work in Media Production, Erin Hill has established the breadth of creative labor performed by women in Hollywood, and how much of that labor has historically been gendered and obscured by official and scholarly history. While much of Hill’s work in Never Done pertains to the studio era, she makes clear throughout and especially in her epilogue that while women have played a creative role in the film industry for decades, avenues toward positions of visible and creative decision-­ making power remain limited: “The truth is that, unlike older industries that were exclusive to men for decades or centuries before women sneaked in as clerical workers, women have been present in and around media production all along, often subsidizing growth through their labor’s cheaper cost” (2016, 220). With the recent growth in archival research, scholarship has begun to show just how integral specific women were to the success of the men that Hollywood history has deemed particularly creative. For example, Helen Hanson has illustrated just how important Lela Simone was to the success of Arthur Freed and his music unit at MGM (Hanson 2020). These historical recalibrations of women’s creative work in Hollywood have come about, in part, due to the archival turn in film studies that expanded rapidly over the past two decades. As scholars gain greater access to production documents, memos and telegrams, internal studio reports, payment records, and more, the clearer it becomes that the success of

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Hollywood films and the entire creative apparatus of American movie making has been dependent on far more creative talent than the producers and directors and (sometimes) stars who have received most of the historical credit. This is true for men working below the line as well as women, but it is particularly pernicious with women because the erasure of their below-the-line work has been coupled with their lack of access to the above-the-line positions that history traditionally deems worthy of recognition. However, while this archival turn has already shed brilliant light on women’s creativity in Hollywood history, it also suffers from limitations of institutional sexism. This leads to a second way that the false perception of women’s inferiority has impacted the study and recounting of film history—namely, there are few archival collections dedicated to the work of women. Partly, this is the natural extension of a historical apparatus that has marginalized women’s work for decades: if the institutions have remained stubbornly unaware of women’s contributions for so long, how would they know to dedicate space and resources to preserving those women’s archives. It is also, likely, due in part to persistent sexism that continues to lionize the labor and creativity of men even as scholars like Hill and Hanson demonstrate just how vital women’s roles have been. Third, and sadly, is the fact that many women, acutely aware of how the system devalued their work, simply did not save their papers—official or personal—in large-enough quantity to warrant archival collection, whereas “great” men, ever sure their every thought would inspire future inquiry, saved everything. Whatever the reasons, there are few archival collections dedicated specifically to the work of women in film. Efforts to unearth women’s historical contributions often require the archival researcher to turn to the archives of institutions, such as studios or production companies, or of the men with whom women worked closely. For example, there is no Polly Platt archive. In researching this monograph, I visited the Peter Bogdanovich papers at Indiana University, the Gracie Films legal archives at Fox, Paramount script archives at the Margaret Herrick library, and benefitted from the digitization of the Harold Lloyd seminar archives at the American Film Institute. All of these libraries and collections are wonderfully curated and helpfully staffed, but the time and expense required to visit a variety of archives often spread across multiple states and (for some researchers) even countries are further hindrances to the recovery of women’s history. Such impediments exemplify what Hanson describes as the way that “relations of power … structure so many of the forms of documentation that historians draw on” (2020, 825). The result of this,

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as articulated by Alicia Kozma, is that “Feminist interventions into film histories and their associated archives, then, are continually necessary and yet unsparingly fraught” (2022, forthcoming, 1). A fourth relevant issue relating to the relegation of women’s labor to the margins of history, particularly the history of Hollywood in the 1970s, is the role that the auteur paradigm has played in shaping historical reception of that era. Born in the 1950s (with antecedents), auteurism first focused on French filmmakers and Classical-era Hollywood directors like John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock, and figures transitioning between the Classical era and the New Hollywood, like Nicholas Ray. Scholars of New Hollywood have regularly rehearsed how the concept of auteurism (or, we might say, auteurisms, considering how splintered and multivalent the concept has become) slowly morphed from a debate within the pages of a French film journal into a governing principle of Hollywood film production and marketing by the ‘70s, aided by the collapse of the studio system, the retirement or death of the Classical-era producers and studio heads, and the early financial successes of films directed by New Hollywood-era figures. Furthermore, whereas early autueurist writing tended to recognize that close reading of films could uncover a particular director’s style despite studio restraints, by the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, various strains of auteurism had filtered through university film programs and the newspaper and magazine columns of movie critics into popular and wider spread notions about film directors’ “visions” and their ability to purposefully stamp their visions upon their films. Geoff King writes of auteurism: “The issue is of particular relevance to New Hollywood because it was at the start of this era that it became a major influence on the study of popular cinema” (King 2002, 86). But it was not only the study of popular cinema, but also its promotion—for example, the use of possessory credits by directors expanded dramatically during the decade (DGA 2004).2 Regardless of the level of one’s ambivalence toward auteurism as a policy for understanding film meaning, there can be little doubt that its rise as a dominant paradigm for delineating film artistry and particularly its close association with 1970s Hollywood filmmaking has meant that non-­ directing crew have seen their artistic contributions to American filmmaking diminished. Despite a tremendous wave of imaginative input by cinematographers, editors, sound designers, writers, production designers, and more in the 1970s, very little scholarly or critical attention has been paid them beyond cursory lip service. There are no scholarly books about Gordon Willis, Dede Allen, or Richard Sylbert. Their films are not

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packaged and sold in DVD box sets. And while film studies students might take an entire course on Stanley Kubrick or Martin Scorsese, this is unlikely to be the case for any of the many non-directing filmmakers of the 1970s who did so much to make the decade’s films stand out. Effectively, auteurism puts up a barrier to considering the artistry of non-directors. This becomes doubly damning for women practitioners, working within a system that, with few exceptions,3 essentially barred them from attaining any positions of creative control throughout most of mid-century Hollywood history. However, as Maya Montañez Smukler points out, women began to re-enter the industry in large numbers in the late ‘60s and through the ‘70s, even as “that number of women is very small” (Smukler 2019). Furthermore, even with this influx, women remained excluded from the uppermost positions of decision-making and creative power, particularly directing films. According to Smukler, sixteen women directed feature films in the United States during the 1970s, and most of them were working outside the Hollywood system, making arthouse films, self-financing their work, or working in low-budget exploitation (Smukler 2019). Only two, Elaine May and Joan Darling, were able to make studio-financed films during the era. “The idea of women having creative and financial power, having the budget to be able to really explore their artistic vision—male studio executives were so unfamiliar with this. They seemed to meet it with shock” (Smukler 2019).4 Thus, the sexism of the system kept women out of directors’ chairs at just the moment when the wider film culture and the industry itself were embracing auteurism and its notions about directors as the sole creative geniuses behind the making of a film. A major result of this is that women’s creative labor in the 1970s was marginalized at the time by the industry and has been marginalized since by a scholarly and critical apparatus that remains ensconced within the auteur paradigm. For women, it seems, the celluloid ceiling is double glazed. A significant result of these acts of exclusion is that women’s actual, measurable contributions to films and film history have been concealed by a history that has willfully misunderstood their labor or ignored it completely. This is true of cases like Lela Simone, whose extensive creative work on films like Singin’ in the Rain (1952) and others that Arthur Freed worked on are obscured by assumptions about her role and job titles (“Assistant Scorer” and later “Music Co-Ordinator” (Hanson 2020, 828)). It is just as true, though, of women whose positions and titles would seem to imply creative influence, for example Polly Platt’s

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production design. This is another result of auteurist framing, and a contradictory one at that. On the one hand, early auteurist writers insisted on a close analysis of mise-en-scène and its relationship to camera framing and movement—seemingly the purview of production designers and cinematographers—while, on the other hand, it argued (and continues to argue) that a film’s visual components result entirely from the director’s vision. Thus, while Simone’s contributions are obscured by a system that would not give her a title or salary5 fitting the work she was actually doing, Platt’s are obscured regardless of her title. In other words, regardless of the roles they take, the titles they have, the salary they receive, or the actual, measurable contributions they have made, women’s authorship on their films has been, at best, ignored by history. As Shelley Cobb explains, “historically, women’s authorial signatures have been hidden and obscured” (Cobb 2015, 2). A secondary byproduct of women’s authorial exclusion has been that their biographies have also been written out of film history. Auteurism requires, or at least has been historically supplemented by, a knowledge of directors’ lives in order to better understand and then “read” their personal visions. For example, Andrew Sarris’s early articulations of “auteur theory” in English relied heavily on the “distinguishable personality of the director” (Sarris 1962, 42–43), and discerning a director’s personality has relied upon unearthing and explicating their biographies as an important component of the analysis of their films. The relationship between Martin Scorsese’s Catholicism and depictions of guilt, redemption, and Christian iconography in his films have been rehearsed by critics and scholars for decades.6 Likewise with Paul Schrader’s austere Calvinist upbringing, Francis Ford Coppola’s childhood polio, or Bogdanovich’s relationships with Platt, Cybill Shepherd, and Dorothy Stratten. The personal stories of these directors have been told so often, mined for details that might provide insight into the intentions behind their filmmaking and the meanings of their films, that the details have become woven into the fabric of film history. The result being that critical assessments of their films benefit from easy, shorthand reference to their lives. Women like Platt have not benefitted from that kind of discourse, so including elements of her personal biography, especially as narrated by her, plays an important role in moving her professional work closer to the center of film history. In the summer of 2020, Platt was the subject of Polly Platt: Invisible Woman, a ten-episode season of Karina Longworth’s critically praised You Must Remember This podcast series. Longworth did

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extensive archival research for the series and interviewed numerous individuals from Platt’s life—family, former colleagues, friends. Like myself, Longworth had access to Platt’s unpublished memoir, which provided much of the podcast’s biographical framework. This was a crucial intervention into film history, and the overwhelmingly positive response7 to the series exemplifies how vital such acts of recovery are to film history and how thirsty film audiences are for these stories. While there may be some overlap between this chapter and Longworth’s work on the podcast, what I aim to achieve here is to provide a rationale for instances later in the book where I argue that key moments in Platt’s life inform her creative decisions. This is similar to how film history has invoked the biographies of male directors to better understand the personal nature of their filmmaking. Thus, in accounting for women’s creative labor and for the filmmaking decisions that they have made, and in arguing that these contributions constitute elements of authorship, reclamation of their personal, biographical stories becomes necessary by providing insight into the authorial process. Such insights have remained a de facto component of director-based criticism for over fifty years.

Youth Mary Polly Platt had an itinerate childhood. Her father was a colonel in the United States army, and during the early 1940s, like many military families, the Platts moved around the country. Born in Fort Sheridan, Illinois, on the north shore of Chicago in 1939, by the time she was six years old, Platt had lived at Randolph Air Force base in Texas, Balboa Island in Southern California, and then, after her father’s first deployment to Europe, in Newburyport, Massachusetts with her mother and younger brother. Interestingly she would later work on films in or near almost all those locations except for Chicago, which, in her capacity as location manager, she would choose specifically to avoid on the films What’s Up, Doc? (1972) and The Thief Who Came to Dinner (1973). At Christmas time, just before her seventh birthday,8 she and her mother and brother set sail for Europe to join her father, who was assisting the US Army at the Dachau trials. During the family’s first stint in Europe, they lived in Erlingen and then Munich for a total of roughly two years. In 1949, the family returned to Europe, living first in Bremerhaven, Germany, then in Paris and Orleans, France. They returned to the United States in 1953.

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Thus Platt spent roughly half of her first twelve years living in post-war Europe, and while a great deal happened during that time, including a bout with polio, three things are worth mentioning. First, her response to the German people once she arrived was not what she had expected. She describes how, during her first journey to Europe by ship, she fantasized about killing Nazis: It was December on the Atlantic and we hit storm after storm and I lay seasick in my bunk and dreamed of taking my father’s regulation 45 automatic and shooting every German I saw when we got to Bremen. They had fought a war with us and my cousins were killed and I hated the Germans with all the passion my six-year-old soul could muster. They were the enemy. (Platt n.d., 9)

However, she describes a different Germany waiting for her when she arrived: “Something was wrong. I saw no Nazis, no guns, no men at all, only young boys scrambling for cigarettes. My plans were confounded. I felt nothing but compassion for those children: children like me but with lost limbs” (Platt n.d., 11). Her capacity for empathy grew throughout her stay in Germany. She and her brother befriended displaced children living in a camp near their home: “Czechs, Slovenes, Polish, Austrian, Romanian and many other countries throughout war torn Europe” (14). Also, her father often spoke to the family about the trials at dinner, took her and her brother to visit the Dachau concentration camp, and showed her numerous photographs of murdered Jews. The intensity with which she describes the horror and rage she felt as a little girl on comprehending the depravity of the Holocaust is palpable: “My parents wondered why I couldn’t eat. Jackie [her brother] couldn’t twist my arm and a grown man was stomping a baby to death. It was more than horrible” (23). At a young age, Platt developed a complicated understanding of evil, but also a deep and nuanced understanding of trauma and empathy for its survivors. This also led her to atheism: “I could not imagine a God who would let those Jews die in the gas chamber I had been in. I suddenly made a very adult decision. This was so evil that there could be no God. I dismissed him from my mind. I became, at the age of seven, a nonbeliever” (23–24). The development of these feelings is linked to a second key occurrence from Platt’s time in Europe, which was the kindling of her desire to fix and build things, specifically structures. Of the Germany of the late 1940s, where she discovered such devastation, she writes: “I longed for

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supernatural powers to rebuild the towns and feed and clothe the starving people” (17). Furthermore, she became acutely aware that not all the devastation was caused by Germans: The American artillery and bombs had flattened the nine hundred year old city to nothing. I wondered why we came. The gate to the city was intact and a few churches were standing and there was just enough splendor to Nuremberg for me to imagine what the city had looked like. My desire to shoot Germans had gone. I saw only suffering and misery everywhere. I was glad to be an American and to have warm clothing and food, powdered and canned milk nonetheless, but I felt guilt toward all the women and children of Germany. (Platt n.d., 18)

It would be trite to suggest that Platt’s future in Hollywood was formed completely by these experiences; however, it is unflinchingly clear that the depths of devastation and depravity she encountered in Europe made a deep impression upon her. And at one point, she makes an explicit link between these experiences and her future career: “I think my later accomplishments as a Production Designer in movies came out of my overwhelming desire to see these buildings rebuilt and pristine” (18). It was during her first trip back to the states that her inchoate desire to build and rebuild found a purpose. As her second summer in Germany approached, Platt and her mother were called back to Newburyport to care for her maternal grandmother, who was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. Platt finished that school year—fourth grade—in America, and that summer, her mother took her to a summer stock performance of George Bernard Shaw’s Arms and a Man, where she had another epiphany: I didn’t understand the play but I was mesmerized anyway by the lights and the costumes and the grace and beauty of the leading lady. During the act break my mother went outside for a cigarette and I wandered away from her toward the back of the barn that was a theatre. There, with the great barn door open, the stage lighting poured out into the black night and the actors and actresses from the play were standing in the glow, smoking and laughing and talking. These were real human beings! They were wearing their beautiful costumes and wearing a lot of makeup and they were alive. Real people did this! Somehow I had thought they were like the people I had seen on the screen, images, not human. I watched the leading lady swivel her high button boot sole on a cigarette, putting it out and blowing the smoke up into the air. I knew right then that this was what I wanted to do. I wanted

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to be part of the theatre and design the sets and costumes. I had a dream. (Platt n.d., 27–28)

By the time she was approximately ten years old, at least as she recalls from adulthood, Platt’s experiences crisscrossing the nation, living in post-war Europe, and developing empathy for the victims of extreme trauma had developed within her a desire to fix, to build, and to create beauty. She herself casts this as an early impetus for her career as a production designer. However, Platt was also a writer and a producer. Furthermore, as I argue throughout this book, her production design was intimately linked with her understanding of narrative, character, and theme—she saw design as both extending and enhancing a film’s script. Her understanding of these relationships was built on her ability to empathize with characters, however flawed, and to construct a reality around them that could convey aspects of their personal narratives that might not be written directly in the script.

Teens and Young Adulthood Platt would continue to move frequently, including crisscrossing the nation on several occasions, throughout her life and career. Even after they returned from Europe for the final time, as the family settled in Hingham, Massachusetts, Platt attended boarding school in Bethesda, Maryland (Holton Arms), then transferred to Milton Academy outside of Boston as a day student. This was the mid-1950s, and she recalls awakening to the plight of African American impoverishment and poor treatment. She describes a trip through Baltimore on her way to Holton Arms: The stench of garbage was overwhelming. Even in the rubble of Germany I had never seen anything like it. I knew they were the descendants of slaves and why did they have to live like this? Hadn’t they suffered enough? I was horrified. This was my great America? This was unacceptable. (Platt n.d., 45)

Later, describing a family trip to view the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, Platt displays her penchant for metaphor and narrative when she describes how “the crack signifies Slavery … the great sin of our country” (46). Around the same time, she rejected the communist conspiracies being woven by Senator Joseph McCarthy and his acolytes—“I didn’t believe a word of it” (46).

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Platt’s family was one of privilege, but of the precarious sort, at least for the white family of an Army officer in the post-war era—both of her parents came from socially prominent family backgrounds, but money was often tight for them. Her father went to work for Civil Defense and her mother returned to the job she’d had prior to marriage, working for the Boston investment firm Loomis Sayles, only now instead of working with her own portfolio, “she was older and was humiliatingly relegated to ‘research’ for investments” (Platt n.d., 47). Throughout the memoir, Platt describes her mother as afflicted with nervous conditions—likely anxiety and depression—which are compounded by the constant moving, the family’s wavering finances, her desire to keep up appearances, and her and Platt’s father’s dependence on alcohol, which they drank constantly and began to give to the children at an early age. Platt would develop a similar, sometimes debilitating, dependence on alcohol as an adult which she details extensively in the memoir. Her mother took the work and accepted living in a smaller house than she would have preferred so they could have the money to send Platt and her brother Jack (Andover) to the tony private schools she deemed necessary for their education.9 In fact, their education seems to be where almost all the family’s money went. Platt recalls having to make her own clothes, sometimes to appear like she had more money than she did—drawing a line up the back of her legs with eyebrow pencil to replicate nylon stockings (47), or making dresses out of curtains (49), sometimes to humiliating results. Her mother also insisted that Platt debut in Boston, which she agreed to at first, including doing community service as a hospital candy striper. But Platt found the process dehumanizing and distasteful: Godless, wild radical that I was and poor to boot, I rebelled at the whole debutante charade and went to a debutante party dressed in shorts and a T-shirt. I got in by wearing a long black velvet coat so no one could see what I was wearing underneath. The matrons were not amused. I went to the bar where there was free booze. It was like a slave auction block, I told myself. Wanting to be rich and pretty was nothing compared to working in the theatre. There it was all about talent and good plays.

While these experiences shaped Platt in a variety of ways, some of which can be read in her later work and her decisions about life and family, her descriptions of this era in her life are mostly taken up with, and most enthusiastic about, her growing love for working in theater production.

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Platt’s first mention of theater work comes after she transfers to Milton Academy for her junior year: “I loved theater class and the plays … I was building scenery and painting it and being the prop girl and generally was very happy” (Platt n.d., 48). She continued to work in the school’s theater department—she mentions putting on production of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, which she describes having recognized as “a veiled diatribe against the McCarthy Hearings and his hysterical Commie accusations” (48)—and she was accepted to Skidmore college, where she spent two years studying art and drama and continued to design sets for university productions. While at Skidmore, she took up a lot of typical college behavior; she smoked, pined for a local boy who acted in some of the plays (Skidmore was still a women’s collage at the time), but her focus continued to remain on improving her art skills and working in the theater. She describes herself as a competent artist, but found little joy in painting pretty pictures until she developed a way to combine her two fields of study: I realized that if I interpreted the plays I was studying I could have vision within the confines of the play itself. The play gave me ideas as to what the set should look like and what to do for the actors who walked the boards. I could also study, as I did later, the periods of the plays and dutifully design sets “in the period.” This seemed to me the right way and I devoted that year to reading plays and imagining the sets, drawing them and indicating lighting in my watercolors. This was very satisfying for me. (Platt n.d., 57)

This is the first time in the memoir she describes the process of interpreting scripts and re-imagining them as set designs, an approach that would guide her throughout her career. While she does not mention costumes here, her approach to visualizing “what to do for actors” comes strikingly close describing costume design but it also foreshadows comments she makes later in life about how her design work for film is intended to enhance character development. She also continued developing her creative practice in the summers, teaching drama at a summer camp in Maine after her first year and working in summer stock near Pittsburgh after her second year, where she worked under Ernie Coombs10 (Platt n.d., 58). That second summer she worked alongside a group of students from Carnegie Tech (which would later develop into Carnegie Mellon) who were different from her peers at Skidmore and seemed to be getting a different education in the theater;

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they were “talking about plays by Bertolt Brecht, De Ghelderode, Henrik Ibsen and Eugene O’Neil. I knew none of these plays” (58). She resolved to transfer to Carnegie Tech, where drama was its own major and not a part of the art department. She describes the transfer as igniting a “new passion” within her, but at the same time she ran into one of the first instances of institutional sexism that she would repeatedly encounter in her later career: I wasn’t permitted to work in scenic design; there were no women in those classes and I was told I couldn’t physically handle the work involved in scenic design.11 I didn’t care. I was happy to learn costumes design. I would get what I needed from Summer Stock work. I took a drafting class in the Architecture department so I could read and draw blueprints. (Platt n.d., 59)

Like many of the women practitioners in 1970s Hollywood, Platt came up against such sexism regularly throughout her career. Director Joan Micklin Silver recalled being told by a studio executive that women directors are “a problem we don’t need” (Gates 2021), while Brianne Murphy, the first female cinematographer to join the American Society of Cinematographers, was told by an executive on applying to join the union: “My wife doesn’t drive a car, and you’re not going to operate a camera. You’ll get in over my dead body” (Reed 2003). That Silver, Murphy, Platt, and so many others persevered and thrived in the face of such opposition is remarkable, sadly clouded by the realization that for so many women similar hurdles likely put an end to their dream of working in the film industry. In Platt’s case, the resilience she displays is twofold and indicative of how she would turn similar situations to her advantage in future. She remained undaunted in her pursuit of a career in scenic design by continuing to work in summer stock. Also, though, she took the opportunity she was offered, to study costume design, and worked hard to develop it as a complementary skill. She writes: “I learned how to make a bustle, petticoats, bodices, men’s cutaways and Shakespearean costumes, cut patterns or create patterns when there were none” (Platt n.d., 59). While Platt is credited as a production designer on her films of the 1970s and ‘80s, on almost all those films she also served as the (uncredited) costume designer. The combination of these two skills on set would give Platt immense latitude in designing much of her films’ visual pallet. At Carnegie Tech, Platt also fell in love for the first time. She’d had a few fleeting relationships before, including with the local boy while at

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Skidmore, but this was different. Philip Klein was a blue-eyed Jewish playwright who played guitar, and they spent all their time away from class with each other, “Sleeping together in his tiny flat in the basement of a big Pittsburgh house with no heat” (Platt n.d., 59). In the autumn of 1958, she became pregnant, which was a major crisis. She was afraid to tell her parents, fearing their disapproval, and she was afraid to tell Philip, fearing he might reject her. Abortion was illegal. She devised a plan—she told her father she was dropping out of school to work with Ernie Coombs in his children’s theater, and he agreed to send her hundred-dollar maintenance checks once a month. She told Philip she was moving to New York to live with two girlfriends and work in the theater, and she found a young couple in Pittsburg who let her stay in their spare bedroom for free. She then hid out for the next several months awaiting the arrival of a baby that she had decided to give up for adoption. She slept days and stayed up nights reading as much literature as she could. In her memoir, she describes this plan as making the best of it, and compares it to dealing with polio in Germany, “like rolling over and taking the shot in Munich so many years ago” (Platt n.d., 63). Platt managed to keep the pregnancy a secret from nearly everybody in her life, including her family. However, she felt a pressure to give birth before her due date as her brother’s marriage was planned for late June of 1959, so her obstetrician induced labor with Pitocin on June 10th and she endured forty-eight hours of agony before giving birth to a healthy girl. Her description of the adoption process is heart wrenching: Because I was giving her up, they didn’t give her to me and I was whisked away to a surgery ward, not the maternity ward. However, there is a cruel law (to protect the child I am sure) that the natural mother has to take the child out of the hospital and hand her over to the welfare authorities. I dressed the baby in the white outfit and blanket provided by the adoptive parents and carried her out into the night where I handed her over to two women who presumably took the child to her new parents. (64)

She was retrieved from the hospital by Ernie Coombs, her Summer Stock mentor, who took her to his house to recover before she left for Massachusetts and her brother’s wedding a little more than a week later. While Platt was able to keep the pregnancy, birth, and adoption secret from her family, in the end she was not successful in keeping it hidden from Klein, the baby’s father. News spread amongst their group of friends

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and eventually he found out and approached her. At that point, while she was still pregnant, Klein was seeing somebody else. He was also hurt and angry—as Platt acknowledges, “I had lied and manipulated” (63). However, when she returned to Pittsburgh later in the summer to work in the Children’s Theater Group, and then to return to Carnegie Tech, she and Klein rekindled their relationship. Klein had been forced to withdraw from university because his father did not want to pay for a degree in playwriting. They developed a plan to move to California and establish residency so that Klein could resume his studies at UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles). Her family were not incredibly supportive of this plan, but became more so when she agreed to marry Klein, which she did in May of 1960. Soon after began the cross-country journey recounted at the beginning of this chapter: Platt and Klein, driving her parents’ old Ford to California where they met up and lived with a couple with a young baby that they knew from Carnegie Tech (Platt n.d., 68). The next eight months were a whirlwind for Platt, and included the excitement of adventure and the potential for a new life working in the arts as she had long dreamed. But it was also a period of intense personal tragedy and sadness. Platt had a knack for finding work that would benefit her future career. She had studied costume design at Carnegie Tech and now she took a job as a seamstress in which she became adept at using industrial sewing equipment, including factory sewing machines and band saws. She was very good at it, learning to sew very quickly, and was given more responsibility with larger equipment. Later in her career, when she was designing costumes for her films, Platt would often make use of the equipment in studio costume shops to cut and sew the costumes that she had designed. Klein got a job selling women’s shoes, and they were able to move into a house in Glendale. Platt soon became pregnant again. The couple had very little money and no insurance, so when she started bleeding regularly, she avoided going to the doctor for several weeks. She describes the terrible agony of the cramps and having to spend long stretches in the bathtub because she was bleeding so much (Platt n.d., 69). When she could no longer go to work, Klein and their friend Sam Bernhart insisted on taking her to the hospital, but, because they had no insurance, they were turned away from several hospitals (one nurse “took pity” on her and gave her a shot of Demerol), until they discovered they could get free care at the Los Angeles County Hospital, a teaching hospital. Platt was placed in a ward with several other women awaiting the dilation and curettage (D & C)

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procedure for miscarriage. There was no clearly communicated timetable of when she might get her procedure, but every day she was not allowed to eat breakfast or lunch in case she was called down for the procedure, and she was so distraught and in so much pain that she could rarely eat anyway. “I had no appetite and got thinner and weaker … I got so sick that they surrounded my bed with curtains” (70). It was while she was in the hospital awaiting her D & C that she found out about an opportunity to move to Tucson to work in a new repertory theater being organized by friends from Carnegie Tech. Soon after her procedure was completed, Platt and Klein moved to Tucson to work in the theater, where she would be in charge of designing sets and costumes for their first play, Thieves’ Carnival by Jean Anouilh. Platt describes this time in her life as one of great joy. She loved the work and living with friends devoted to a common artistic cause—to bring New York style theater to the retired people of Tucson. They lived like beatniks or proto-hippies— Platt describes herself and her friends as being “arty and poorly dressed” with “shaggy hair” and causing lots of talk among the locals. While the troupe suffered some setbacks and delays, they pressed on into the autumn of 1960. Platt oversaw not only the design for the play, but also the design and construction of the theater itself, inside an old Salvation Army building. Tragedy struck again in early December. On his twenty-first birthday, Philip Klein decided to drive to Nogales, Mexico with some friends. Platt tried to convince him not to go—she had planned a surprise party for him and didn’t want him to miss it—but he promised he would be back by evening. Unfortunately, though, Klein was killed in a car accident and never made it back home. Klein’s parents abdicated any responsibility for his body or funereal services, so while grieving his loss, Platt also took care of his remains. She recounts a horrific story about how the lawyer who helped her navigate the insurance paperwork kindly invited her to stay with him for a few days, but then drugged her and tried to rape her soon after Klein’s death, while his wife slept upstairs. She fought him off and the next morning he acted like nothing had happened. Platt had Klein cremated, and she scattered his ashes in the mountains around Tucson. But the bad news kept coming. The theater troupe had run out of money and several of its members left town, causing the whole endeavor to collapse. Suddenly, in late 1960, Platt’s dreams seemed dashed—she had lost her husband, her work, and her art. She describes her mindset at the time:

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I would live my life differently now. Death changed everything. I would never love anyone again. I would become the mistress of a very wealthy man and live out my life of sin. I did scatter Philip’s ashes all over Mount Lemon; I think it’s called. I had some money from Triple A, the settlement over Philip’s death and I bought a small car and a gun to protect myself. I lived this strange life, going out late at night to Jazz bars and listening to Jazz while I drank my martinis, my new drink. (Platt n.d., 76)

Platt befriended a young Black woman named Diane who was dating a musician who played at one of the jazz bars Platt was frequenting. She also began an affair with an Apache artist named Mana Pardeathan, who lived in the art colony at Tubac. She spent early 1961 driving around Arizona with Pardeathan during the days, helping him sell his jewelry and learning from him about Navaho and other native traditional art—weaving, pottery, jewelry, and more. At night, she would meet up with Diane and drink martinis in jazz clubs. This is how she grieved the loss of Philip Klein and the theater. Also early that year, two events occurred that redirected her thinking about life. She heard about a film being shot at the movie set in Old Tucson, which would eventually be released as The Deadly Companions directed by Sam Peckinpah. Platt visited the set for several days, watching Peckinpah direct and beginning to learn about the differences between film and theater productions (77). Later she saw the film One-Eyed Jacks, which Platt found “brilliant.” She describes how the film changed her thinking about life: “I decided to go on with my life as an artist. If they made movies this well in Hollywood, well, I wanted to be a part of it. The only way I knew to get into the movies was to work in the theater in New York” (80). She left Tucson and took a meandering route through the South and then up the East Coast back to New York, where she ended up sharing an apartment with future celebrated lighting designer Jules Fisher, whom she had met at Carnegie Tech.12

Bogdanovich When told in the past, much of Platt’s story has been framed by her relationship with Peter Bogdanovich. They met sometime in the late winter or spring of 1961 (accounts differ slightly), when a friend of Fisher’s put her in touch with the young director who would be working at the same summer stock theater as her later that year. After a brief courtship, they began

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a romantic relationship that would last roughly ten years, and a highly collaborative professional partnership that would last a bit longer. During their lives together, they would be informal participants in the “Corman school” of filmmaking that so many of New Hollywood’s young talent would pass through; they would then make four highly regarded films together—one of which, The Last Picture Show (1971), is generally considered one of New Hollywood’s foundational film texts and one of the greatest American films of the 1970s. They would also have two daughters, Antonia and Alexandra (known as Sashy), who would bind them together for the rest of Platt’s life (she passed away in 2011). During the making of The Last Picture Show, Bogdanovich would meet, cast, and fall in love with Cybill Shepherd, for whom he would eventually leave Platt, ending their marriage, although they would work together closely on two more films, What’s Up, Doc? (1972) and Paper Moon (1973). In most recounts of her life, the story often ends there, only to be taken up again when she meets James L. Brooks ten years later, building another highly successful creative partnership. Thus, Platt’s life is generally constructed in popular film history as if she were an accessory—albeit a highly desirable one—to the lives of extraordinary men. Her biography is most extensively recounted in Peter Biskind’s popular, hazy Easy Riders, Ragin Bulls (1998), and to be fair to Biskind, he pays Platt a great deal of attention throughout the early parts of the book, giving her credit for her work on the films she  made with Bogdanovich (as the book is about the 1970s, it does not mention her later work with Brooks). However, once Platt and Bogdanovich split up, she virtually drops out of the book except for a recurring role commenting on the continuing saga of Bogdanovich’s personal and professional failings. There is no mention of her work on The Thief Who Came to Dinner (1973), The Bad News Bears (1976), or A Star is Born (1976), nor of her work writing Pretty Baby (1978). Biskind mentions only very briefly her working relationship with Robert Altman which led to her uncredited location supervision on Nashville (1975). Like many of the creative women in Biskind’s book, Platt is a key figure only while she remains with her better-known husband (Toby Rafelson and Marcia Lucas receive similar treatment). This is most obvious in the way Platt’s history is treated post-Bogdanovich, but it’s there in the coverage of her life before meeting him as well. Her life before Bogdanovich is compressed into two paragraphs, far less coverage than Bogdanovich receives, and her many creative contributions to the early projects they

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worked on for Corman are reduced to a short description of the making of Targets (1968): “Peter and Polly collaborated on the script and editing, which was done in the kitchen of their home on Saticoy Street. She designed the costumes and sets, wrote the checks. They were a great team” (Biskind 1998, 116). The reality is that Platt’s creative work, her persistent and tenacious efforts to develop her talents throughout the 1960s—both while she and Bogdanovich were still in New York and after their move to Los Angeles—were formidable and were largely responsible for her preparedness when the time came for them to work on Targets, their first feature film. Biskind’s text and style are breezy and he has a lot of topics to cover, so it is understandable that he cannot go into every detail of all his subjects’ lives. However, he is far more inclined to cover the formative years and experiences of men than women, which serves to perpetuate the notion that the creative women of the ‘70s were only so via their association and relationships with men—call it the “director’s wife” syndrome. For all these women, including Platt, the reality was far different, and far more expansive. In Platt’s case, after her summer stock experience with Bogdanovich in ‘61, she continued to work in production design in off-Broadway theater in New York city. When the story of their New York life is told, it tends to focus on Bogdanovich’s work programming film exhibitions like the Forgotten Film Series at the New York Theater or his director retrospective programs at the Museum of Modern Art. At the same time, the couple were cultivating a group of fellow cineastes in their apartment at 93rd and Riverside Drive, and Bogdanovich was developing the writing skills that would soon garner him work at magazines like Esquire. They were a part of a burgeoning New York film appreciation scene that would flourish in the ensuing years as retrospectives like those Bogdanovich was programming as well as an influx of foreign films would help create audiences for the New Hollywood films (shot in New  York with increasing frequency) that would soon explode on the American film scene. Platt was instrumental to Bogdanovich’s work at the time. She helped plan and organize the shows, on occasion she worked the reel-to-reel projector at screenings, and her social skills—like introducing Bogdanovich to Esquire editor Harold Hayes (Platt n.d., 94)—helped the couple make the numerous industry connections that would open doors for them once they relocated to Los Angeles. Throughout these years, she continued to work in the theater. By the time they decided to move to California in the summer of 1964, Platt had been developing her skills as a set and costume designer

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for nearly a decade. She had taken courses in architecture, worked in a variety of theaters, acquired industrial sewing skills, and visited several film sets. She was far more than simply a director’s wife; rather, she was an accomplished young professional in her own right. She would continue to find ingenious ways to develop her filmmaking skills throughout their early days in Los Angeles during the four years between their arrival and the making of Targets in 1968. In Los Angeles the couple was constantly broke. Bogdanovich had a job writing for TV Guide and would occasionally be commissioned to write pieces for Esquire, some of which allowed the couple to travel to places like London—Platt regularly accompanying him, and helping him with his interviews. Also, though, Platt again found a way to employ herself with a job that would later benefit her film career: We knew the owners of a movie bookstore called The Larry Edmund’s Bookshop. They gave me a copy of Citizen Kane, the shooting script, and asked me to type up a copy of the script on mimeograph paper (this was before Xerox was invented), which involved typing the script on a dark blue paper and later on rolling the paper in a mimeographing machine which would crank out copies of the original pages. The owners would then sell the copies of the script to movie buffs that came to their store. It was my experience in typing “Citizen Kane” and other movie scripts, which taught me a lot about screenwriting. It came in handy later, very handy. (Platt n.d., 116)

Platt’s pragmatic approach to developing her filmmaking skills would blossom under Roger Corman. When they first met, Corman knew of Bogdanovich as a writer, so he offered them the opportunity to pitch script ideas that he might finance. While none of their ideas panned out, he eventually hired them to rewrite the script for the exploitation biker film The Wild Angels (1966), and then hired both as production assistants on the film—Biskind mentions only Bogdanovich getting the job (1998, 115), but according to Platt they were each paid five hundred dollars a week for their work on the film (Platt n.d., 119). On set, Platt and Bogdanovich shadowed Corman and performed assistant tasks he required of them (although, as Platt recalls, Bogdanovich was often “irresponsible” and “fundamentally arrogant” about which tasks he would perform, traits she admits to admiring at the time because “it was just what he needed to become a director” (120)). It is fairly well known

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that after principle photography wrapped, Corman asked Bogdanovich to shoot second-unit pickups, but Platt also made herself incredibly useful. She learned from Corman how to differentiate between film stock, how costume companies in Hollywood worked, where to acquire Hell’s Angels motorbikes, and—based on a sketch Corman drew on the back of a napkin—how the 180-degree rule worked (Platt n.d., 121–122). Much is often made of the effect the “Corman school” had on the films of New Hollywood. In his extensive survey of 1970s Hollywood, David Cook mentions how many of New Hollywood’s most celebrated film directors had “apprenticed with producer-director Roger Corman” (Cook 2000, 133), scholar Robert Kolker discusses how Corman “offered them an entry into the film business” and “taught his pupils to work quickly and cheaply” (Kolker 2000, 176), and Biskind describes how Corman became “celebrated for allowing many of the movie brats to pass through his shoot-today-edit-tomorrow low-budget motion picture academy” (Biskind 1998, 31). In all these cases, the same names come up repeatedly: directors like Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, John Milius, and Bogdanovich; writers like Robert Towne; performers such as Bruce Dern and Jack Nicholson; and cinematographers such as Laszló Kovács. Platt is never mentioned among this cohort, yet she attended the “academy” as well, and developed the same knack for working quickly, effectively, and cheaply while shooting on location. In describing her second-unit assignments, she writes: “I got everything we needed, including those crazy Hell’s Angels, and we were off to Palm Springs to shoot the second unit” (Platt n.d., 122). Later, she would help Bogdanovich edit the second-unit footage on a Moviola they brought to their house on Saticoy Street: I learned to code the film, enter the codes in a notebook so that we could find any scene’s footage and I became an assistant cutter, learning to put all the “takes” from each scene and put the film on the racks so that Peter would have all the pieces of the scene when he was cutting it together. It was fun and a great lesson. Peter learned to cut, splice and tape the film together. I was good at repairing the Movieola and keeping the film as clean as I could, off the kitchen floor. So the chase sequence went together and it was wonderful. We had a safe place to make mistakes and learn from them. (Platt n.d., 125)

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Platt and Bogdanovich would continue to work for Corman for two more years, first shooting additional footage to be inserted into a Russian film he had bought the rights to which would eventually turn into Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women (1968), and then taking the opportunity to update an old Boris Karloff film, The Terror (1963), and turn it into their first feature together, Targets (1968). On the latter, Platt co-wrote the script and designed all the costumes and sets, including building a model miniature of the Los Angeles drive-in movie theater for the film’s climax (LoBrutto 1992, 157). Again, she and Bogdanovich edited the film together on a Moviola in their kitchen (Biskind 1998, 116).

Mother and Motherhood Around the time that Platt was working on The Wild Angels she received news that her mother had passed away. Throughout the memoir she paints her relationship with her mother as difficult and often contentious, and when she passed away, Platt writes, “it was hard to grieve for her” (Platt n.d., 120–121). Vivian Platt was a “nervous” “fastidious” woman, concerned about her station in life and society, but also dedicated to her children. Platt does not go into great detail about the reasons for her mother’s nervousness, but her descriptions align with the “widespread unhappiness” of women of her era as described by Betty Friedan. She seems to have suffered from psychological distress at the least—Platt does not mention specific diagnoses, but she discusses her mother suffering nervous breakdowns on several occasions. She also describes an instance, around the time that Philip Klein passed away, of her mother being committed to an “insane asylum,” being administered “shock treatments,” and coming home “all calmed down” (Platt n.d., 75–76). Vivian drank alcohol incessantly throughout Platt’s childhood and teen years. So did her father, and Platt describes several occasions as a child when her parents let her and her brother drink alcohol, encouraged them even, starting as early as age six or seven while she was living in Germany. Although Platt is not explicit about the reasons, some combination of Vivian’s nerves and drinking led her to physically abuse Platt on occasion. Platt describes some of these beatings during the years in Germany with her typical stoicism: “My mother would occasionally go into fits and rages and beat me, but what of it? Children were being stomped to death. I had no compassion for myself. Only these unnamed victims” (23). Even with this behavior in mind, Platt concedes throughout the passages concerning

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her mother that she, too, was somewhat to blame for their tempestuous relationship. She describes herself throughout as non-conforming and rebellious. In fact, the very first line of the memoir reads, “I was a difficult child, belligerent and self-willed” (1), and throughout her young life Platt resists her mother’s wishes and rules. As her children drift away from her,13 she drinks more and more, and one of Platt’s last lengthy descriptions of her mother before her death comes in the lead up to her brother’s wedding, when she finds the house full of hidden empty vodka bottles, stashed in drawers, under the bed, in the storeroom where they kept their luggage. Platt writes: “she didn’t want the neighbors to see how much liquor she was drinking so she didn’t put the bottles in the trash” (64). It was in part because of this state of her mother that Platt felt uncomfortable telling her about her first pregnancy: “Telling my broken-down mother was also impossible. My father was busy taking care of mother who wandered around our house in her pajamas and cried all the time” (60). In her career as a filmmaker, Platt would make several films with mother-daughter relationships at their heart: to some extent, The Last Picture Show, Paper Moon, The Bad News Bears, Pretty Baby, and Terms of Endearment all feature such relationships, several of them including mother figures who never appear onscreen or who disappear from the films for long stretches. Of the above-named films, she is credited as writer only on Pretty Baby, but as I demonstrate throughout this book, Platt was particular about the films she chose to work on, and she often articulates very personal reasons for choosing to work on films. Furthermore, she was regularly involved with key scripting decisions (often uncredited), and she reiterates time and again how her design strategies were both driven by the scripts and intended to enhance or propel narrative and character development in ways not present in the script. Thus, when examining the role that mother-daughter relationships play in several of her films, it is worth understanding that she chose to work on such films precisely because she was interested in exploring those relationships and designing for them in ways that expanded them beyond their scripted version. A little more than a year after her mother passed away, Platt gave birth to her and Bogdanovich’s first daughter, Antonia. Two years later, during pre-production on The Last Picture Show, her second daughter Alexandra (Sashy) was born. Throughout the memoir, Platt is frank about her difficulties with motherhood: establishing a work–life balance; parenting and getting along with her daughters; co-parenting after her separation from Bogdanovich soon after Sashy’s birth; and the many, mostly negative,

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effects that her drinking had on her relationship with her daughters. In many ways, her parenting was vastly different from her own mother’s. Vivian was, for most of Platt’s life, a homemaker in a stable, if highly dysfunctional, nuclear family, concerned with appearances and overwhelmed by the demands put upon the mid-century American housewife of means. Polly, though, was free-spirited and always on the move, whether for travel or work. She dressed like a hippie before the term was popular and later took to bringing the Native American and desert fashions she had picked up in Tucson to New York and Los Angeles. On the other hand, her fears that her work and her drinking led her to neglect or abandon her daughters pervades the memoir, and leads to descriptions of often contentions relationships, particularly with Antonia. While Vivian’s neglect was emotional and psychological, Polly’s was physical and geographical. Both were compounded by the effects of heavy drinking (Chap. 6 discusses this in more detail). Platt spends stretches of her memoir discussing her complicated feelings about motherhood and her relationship with her daughters. Early on, soon after Antonia’s birth, these include the typical feelings of being exhausted from early motherhood—the sleepless nights, the feedings— but they are compounded by Bogdanovich’s reluctance to engage with the difficulties of rearing an infant: I would get no sleep at night and then she would sleep the whole day through! I never got enough sleep so I became irritable, nervous and tense. Not good for me. Not good for the baby. I was breast-feeding her and she was decidedly a fussy baby and just feeding her didn’t seem to do the trick. I tried all the things I knew: changing the baby, feeding the baby, rocking the baby in my rocking chair, but nothing seemed to soothe her in the night. Just about when the sun came up, she would be ready to go to sleep for the day! Peter would wake up refreshed and ready for his day and I would be exhausted … Having a child was, I now know, the beginning of what would be the sad end to Peter’s and my marriage. He was only doing what he had learned from his parents, and America and Europe in general for that matter. He never got up to feed Antonia for me or walk her to sleep. I began to resent the way he just wanted our life to continue the way it had been. (Platt n.d., 135, 137)

Later, after the birth of Sashy, she describes the difficulty of being pulled between family life and work: “I loved my baby and my Antonia, but I loved my work too. It was a terrible choice to have to make. I wanted so

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much to have a career in movies. So I had the hard decision to make as to what to do with my children during the months I was to be working on [The Last Picture Show]” (157). Very soon after Sashy was born, Platt left both of the girls with a nanny and Bogdanovich’s parents, now living in Arizona, and returned to Texas to continue working on the film. Much of the girls’ young lives would be split between their mother, their father, and nannies and grandparents when both Platt and Bogdanovich were away on films. Between 1970 and 1975, Platt worked on films in Texas (The Last Picture Show, The Thief Who Came to Dinner), San Francisco (What’s Up, Doc?), Kansas and Missouri (Paper Moon), Arizona (The Other Side of the Wind), and Tennessee (uncredited location work on Nashville). Each time, she would leave her daughters behind, and each time she describes feeling increasingly worse about it. For example, on the set of Paper Moon, she developed a motherly relationship with young Tatum O’Neal. “I felt guilty that I was giving all this attention to Tatum when my own two children were home and not getting any loving from me” (Platt n.d., 216). Later, she relates this guilt to both her drinking and her lack of strong desire to direct films: My problem, what I felt I drank over, was my continuing sense that I was failing my children, leaving them to go and work for months at a time making movies. People were constantly asking me why I didn’t direct and very few of them, mostly men, were able to understand my reluctance which was mainly due to fact that I would see even less of my children than ever if I were to direct a movie. In despair, and I do mean despair, I drank more and more, torn between my desire to make movies and my responsibilities at home. I was a mother and that meant in its deepest sense, that I loved my children beyond reason, really. Love for a child is unreasonable. I wrote letters to my brother, telling him that I was a failure as a mother. (Platt n.d., 246)

She writes frequently about wanting to work closer to home. And while at times she does find stretches of work in and around Los Angeles—for example working on The Bad News Bears (all Los Angeles) and A Star is Born (Los Angeles and Arizona) kept her at home for much of the mid‘70s, as did work on Young Doctors in Love (1982) and The Man with Two Brains (1983) in the early 1980s. Inevitably, though, her work would take her away from home again and again on films like Pretty Baby (Louisiana 1978), Terms of Endearment (Texas and Nebraska 1983), and The Witches of Eastwick (Massachusetts 1987).

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Conclusion If Polly Platt had been a director, such an eventful life and flamboyant personality would be read as the personal, psychological material from which she drew much of her inspiration. She zig-zagged across the states as a girl and lived in war-torn Europe, where she visited recently liberated Nazi concentration camps. She had a painful family life, and her introduction as a young adult to the heartbreak of adoption, miscarriage, and the untimely death of her first husband, while traumatic, surely compounded her already well-established sense that life is often cruel and unfair. She was a dedicated artist who knew what she wanted to do in her early teens and spent her life developing her skills and mastering her work in educational and practical environments. Such a complex mixture of lived experience, rich internal life, and dedication to her craft is the fodder for auteurist critics. For Platt, however, because she never directed a film and because, frankly, she was a woman, such considerations of the influence of these life experiences on her work have never been explored, or hardly considered. The same could be said of most female practitioners in Hollywood history. The sum of Platt’s life—personally and in film—extends far beyond what I have written here, and certainly much farther than the ten years she spent as “Peter Bogdanovich’s wife.” She had further relationships, both collaborative and romantic, including marrying again later in life and helping to raise her husband Tony Wade’s two children, Kelly and John. In 1983, she was hired by James L. Brooks to design Terms of Endearment, leading to an extended collaborative relationship at Gracie Films that would see her gradually shift from designing to the role of producer on films like Broadcast News (1987), The War of the Roses (1989), Say Anything … (1989), and Bottle Rocket (1996), among others. In the latter two films, she also acted as a mentor to young directors making their first films—in fact, in her career, Platt worked as production designer or producer on five films by first-time directors.14 She also achieved several milestones and garnered industry recognition and accolades. For example, in 1972 she became the first women member of the Art Directors Guild. In 1983, she was nominated for an Academy Award for designing Terms of Endearment, and in 1994, she accepted a Crystal Award from the Women in Film organization. For many years, feminist film scholarship has argued for the necessity of exploring films that, as Sue Thornham writes, “bear the signature of women” (Thornham 2012, 1). For even longer, some feminist scholars

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have argued that auteurism is a patriarchal construct that deifies the (usually) male individual over the creative collective that actually works to make a film. Sharon Smith wrote in 1972 that, “behind every ‘masterpiece’ of male intelligence are hidden women, the editors, continuity girls, script girls who are forgotten in that most incredible of all male film fantasies, the auteur theory” (Smith 1972, 18–19). However, when investigating the signature of female filmmakers, the impulse has often been to explore the works of directors. The auteur paradigm is a powerful construct—scholars and film critics regularly acknowledge the collaborative nature of filmmaking, the potential of the “editors, continuity girls, script girls” to contribute to a film’s utterance and potential for meaning, while at the same time maintaining the focus on directors when considering a film’s authorship. Until recently, much of Platt’s creativity and labor outside of the four films she worked on with Bogdanovich and, to a lesser extent, her collaborations with Brooks have remained little commented upon. Certainly, her personal life beyond her marriage to Bogdanovich has been virtually non-­ existent in film history and scholarship. Karina Longworth’s 2020 season of You Must Remember This centered Platt in her own story15 for the first time. My aim in this chapter has been to accentuate some of the information that Longworth presented, but also to expand upon it and focus upon elements of Platt’s life that are central to her filmmaking practice. This book is not an auteurist endeavor per se. Platt was a highly accomplished, highly creative, and well-trained filmmaking professional who was able to draw upon a deep reservoir of historical, cultural, theatrical, and cinematic knowledge in her work. As I analyze that work in the following chapters, my aim is not to tie every decision Platt made to her biography, nor, necessarily, to mine her life’s tragedies for insights into every aspect of her work. At the same time, however, I do intend to show how Platt was one of the authors of that work and how, at times, her authorship was driven by both the personal and the professional. Polly Platt was a film artist, and like all successful artists she had access to a rich vein of imaginative material. I have highlighted parts of her biography in this chapter to illustrate how, at key moments in her films and her professional life, her very personal signature can be read.

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Notes 1. Platt’s dating in her memoir can be loose and contradictory in spots. When she describes the events surrounding her marriage to Klein, their moves to Los Angeles and Tucson, and Klein’s tragic death, she sometimes sets events in 1959, sometimes 1960. 2. This was partly due to a change in the Directors Guild of America (DGA) rules in 1968. The DGA was serious enough about letting directors make use of the possessory credit (with certain guidance) that they threatened a strike in the spring of 1968 (DGA 2004). 3. Dorthy Arzner and Ida Lupino are the only two women to have directed Hollywood studio films during the Classical era, up to Elaine May’s directorial debut, A New Leaf, in 1970. Other examples included editors Anne Bauchens and Anne V. Coates and costume designer Edith Head. 4. It may be worth noting that even as Smukler performs invaluable service in unearthing the vital contributions female directors made to 1970s American cinema, she does so through a director-centered lens, which, perhaps unintentionally, perpetuates the presumption that only directors could “really explore their artistic vision.” 5. Hanson discusses Simone’s struggles over pay (2020, 827). 6. In the Third Edition of A Cinema of Loneliness (2000), Robert Kolker describes Scorsese’s Catholicism as “often-commented-on” (190). Numerous scholars since then have continued the discussion. Writing in Journal of Religion and Film in 2001, scholar Christopher Garbowski even finds a “Catholic imagination” in Scorsese’s concert film The Last Waltz. 7. Polly Platt: Invisible Woman was included on several publications’ year-end lists of best podcasts of 2020, including Variety, Time, Teen Vogue, and Sight and Sound, which named it the best film podcast of the year. 8. On occasion when describing her childhood, Platt confuses the year in which events occurred. For example, she writes about her first residence in Germany commencing in January of 1947, then two summers and winters pass, and she describes leaving in 1948. (See Platt n.d., 12, 15, 18–19, 27, 28.) 9. Platt’s brother Jack would later have his own military career, eventually becoming a case worker for the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) during the Cold War. His espionage exploits are written about extensively in Best of Enemies: The Last Great Spy Story of the Cold War, 2018, Gus Russo and Eric Dezenhall (New York: Twelve). 10. Ernie Coombs was a children’s theater set designer and puppeteer who would go on to serve as assistant producer to Fred Rogers in his early television endeavors, including a four-year stint on Canadian television for a program called Misterogers. When Rogers returned to Pittsburgh in 1967,

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Coombs remained in Canada and started the television series Mr. Dressup, which was broadcast on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation from 1967 to 1996. 11. Elsewhere Platt is blunter about not being able to study set design, describing the department at Carnegie Tech as “uncooperative” (LoBrutto 1992, 156) and claiming it was specifically because she was a woman (Biskind 1998, 113). 12. Roughly fifteen years later, Platt would hire Fisher as a lighting designer on her film A Star is Born (1976) (Platt n.d., 241–242). 13. In addition to her disapproval of her daughter’s life choices, Platt describes her mother as having been firmly opposed to and disappointed with her brother Jack’s choice of wife (Platt n.d., 64–65). 14. The films Platt worked on with first-time directors are: Targets (Peter Bogdanovich); Young Doctors in Love (Gary Marshall); Terms of Endearment (James L. Brooks); Say Anything …(Cameron Crowe); Bottle Rocket (Wes Anderson). 15. While Longworth interviewed several of Platt’s friends and family members, she made the decision not to interview Bogdanovich. She said she felt his version of the story had already been given voice repeatedly over the years and she wanted to center Platt’s story (Longworth 2020).

References Biskind, Peter. 1998. Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-And-Rock ‘N’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood. New York: Touchstone. Cobb, Shelley. 2015. Adaptation, Authorship, and Contemporary Women Filmmakers. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Cook, David A. 2000. Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam 1970–1979. Berkeley: University of California Press. Directors Guild of America. 2004. Possessory Credit Timeline. DGA Magazine, February. https://www.dga.org/Craft/DGAQ/All-­Articles/0402-­Feb-­2004/ Possessory-­Credit-­Timeline.aspx Garbowski, Christopher. 2001. The Catholic Imagination in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz. Journal of Religion and Film 5 (2). https://digitalcommons. unomaha.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1782&context=jrf Gates, Anita. 2021. Joan Micklin Silver, Director of ‘Crossing Delancey,’ Dies at 85. New York Times, January 1. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/01/ movies/joan-­micklin-­silver-­dead.html Hanson, Helen. 2020. Looking for Lela Simone: Singin’ in the Rain and Microhistories of Women’s Sound Work Behind the Scenes and Below the Line in Classical Hollywood Cinema. Women’s History Review 29 (5): 822–840. https://doi.org/10.1080/09612025.2019.1703537.

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Haskell, Molly. 1987. From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Hill, Erin. 2016. Never Done: A History of Women’s Work in Media Production. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. King, Geoff. 2002. New Hollywood Cinema: An Introduction. London: I.B. Tauris. Kolker, Robert. 2000. A Cinema of Loneliness. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kozma, Alicia. 2022, forthcoming. The Rothman Renaissance, or, the Politics of Archival (Re)Discovery. In Women and New Hollywood, ed. Aaron Hunter and Martha Shearer. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. LoBrutto, Vincent. 1992. By Design: Interviews with Film Production Designers. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger. Longworth, Karina. 2020. Conversation with the Author. May 13. Platt, Polly. n.d. “It Was Worth It.” Collection of Antonia and Sashy Bogdanovich. Unpublished Memoir. Reed, Christopher. 2003. Brianne Murphy. Guardian, September 10. https:// www.theguardian.com/news/2003/sep/10/guardianobituaries.film Sarris, Andrew. 1962. “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962.” In (1981) Theories of Authorship, ed. John Caughie, 62–65. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Smith, Sharon. 1972. The Image of Women in Film: Some Suggestions for Future Research. In Feminist Film Theory: A Reader, ed. Sue Thornham. New York: New York University Press, 2006. Smukler, Maya Montañez. 2019. Interviewed by Dan Schindel. Hyperallergic, January 23. https://hyperallergic.com/481079/liberating-­hollywood-­maya­montanez-­smukler-­ucla-­film/ Thornham, Sue. 2012. What if I Had Been the Hero?: Investigating Women’s Cinema. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

CHAPTER 3

Set Design and Attention to Detail

A radio sits atop a long narrow table that serves as the head of a teenage girl’s bed. In the room, which is brightly lit, a few shadows cast against the white walls and furniture suggest evening time. The radio, surrounded by collectable figurines, mostly animals, mostly horses, plays Tony Bennet’s version of Hank Williams’s “Cold, Cold Heart,” a number one song in that year of 1951. This is The Last Picture Show (1971), and the bedroom belongs to Jacy Farrow (Cybill Shepherd), the teen queen object of desire and lust in the small town of Anarene, Texas. Jacy’s father struck it rich in oil, and her pristine, well-kept bedroom displays the tasteful trappings of a well-to-do high school senior: the figurines that populate most surfaces and the few, discrete plush toys that lie in repose upon her bed convey lingering traits of girlhood and pre-adolescence; magazine pinups of Montgomery Clift and Marlon Brando, school awards, and framed portraits of her boyfriend Duane (Jeff Bridges) mark her teenage years; and a vanity table cluttered with sophisticated perfumes, makeups, and creams foreshadows the expectations of burgeoning womanhood and the role that standards of beauty and its maintenance will play in her adult life. These props act as subtle shadings of the conversation that Jacy is having with her mother, Lois (Ellen Burstyn), who is trying to convince her daughter to lose her virginity to Duane so that she can realize how “not special” he is and move on to dating richer boys. Throughout the conversation, Jacy’s demeanor flickers from innocent and coy to mature and even spiteful, and the room’s décor reinforces all those attributes. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Hunter, Polly Platt, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82120-3_3

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Fig. 3.1  Jacy’s radio can be seen in the lower right. (The Last Picture Show, BBS/ Columbia)

The radio, on the other hand, almost asks not to be noticed, appearing for no more than a few combined seconds in three separate shots (Fig. 3.1). It does “announce” itself through its broadcast of “Cold, Cold Heart,” which, like all the music in the film, is diegetic with a visible source. The radio is also the only item in the room that could be described as non-­ gendered. Whereas most of the scene’s props connote femininity (at least within the context of a 1970s film set in the early 1950s),1 the radio is more neutrally coded—this particular model would feel just as at home on a kitchen countertop, the desk of a study, or in a teenage boy’s bedroom. Its presence, though, accompanies and expands upon the meaning of the room’s other decorations—its other props. The radio connotes age (much as would televisions, desktop computers, or laptops for teens of later generations), but it also connotes something about Jacy’s family and their class position. Jacy’s radio is pristine and new and works very well, compared with the miniscule model in Sonny (Timothy Bottoms) and Duane’s jointly owned pickup truck2 or the much older table model in Sam’s (Ben Johnson) pool hall, both of which are old and dingy and have fuzzy reception. The entire set is designed to reflect Jacy’s situation at that point in the film as a late teen, on the verge of adulthood, so how much can the radio

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be said to matter within that milieu? The film’s director, Peter Bogdanovich, has spoken on several occasions about his decision to feature only diegetic music from the era in the film (“The Last Picture Show: A Look Back” 1999), and a point is made throughout the film of displaying the source of that music: radios, juke boxes, and record players abound. In that sense, Jacy’s radio simply acts as another signifier of authentic source music. Aesthetically, while the radio appears to be new,3 it is neither flashy nor a novelty model. With its sleek, understated design and light coloring, it is clearly modern, but it also blends in to the background. The question might be asked, then, why even mention it. If its significance is mainly to act as onscreen proof of the film’s authentically diegetic score and, secondarily, to provide superficial emphasis of Jacy’s class status in relation to her peers, might not there be other production details more worthy of attention? The bedroom set, and this sequence in particular, does include other more obvious markers of Jacy’s status, her relationship with her mother, and her emotional and sexual maturation, and I will return to some of those later in the chapter. In the case of the radio, though, it is worth remembering that effective film set design resides in such details. Jane Barnwell argues that “production design is integral to an understanding of the text” (2004, 25), by which she means that every element that is visible on the screen carries the potential to produce meaning for the viewer. Understanding those elements and their potential for meaning, even (or perhaps especially) when onscreen only briefly, is fundamental to assessing the role that design plays in a film’s authorship. Barnwell elaborates: Simply thinking about what possessions characters surround themselves with, either intentionally or otherwise, can add depth to the story while providing visual interest to the screen. Whether it is a kitchen full of empty takeaway boxes (Withnail and I (1987)) or a houseplant that is transported to each new hotel room (Léon (1994)), the simplest and most everyday items provide a key to character. (2004, 56)

In that light, anything that the radio’s presence in her bedroom conveys about Jacy enriches a reading of her character and motivations. Furthermore, though, and more to the intentions of this book, that radio’s presence can begin to inform our understanding of production designer Polly Platt’s close attention to detail in her design strategy and the role that such details play in deepening a text’s potential for meaning and in enriching the viewer’s interpretive interaction with the text.

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When it comes to the concept of “attention to detail,” though, it is worth probing what it means because the terminology is potentially slippery—“attention to detail” is, after all, a requirement of the job. However, the nature of the details in question can shift, and their potential for meaning can change within the contextual framework of a specific film, genre, period, or stylistic approach. Are the details that are important to a film directed by Peter Bogdanovich the same as those in one directed by Michael Ritchie, or James Brooks? Are the details of a period drama the same as those of a slapstick comedy? In his foundational study of film design, Caligari’s Cabinet and other Grand Illusions, production designer Léon Barsacq articulates the many factors that can determine an effective approach to a film’s design, including the psychology of the characters, the amount of onscreen action, and the “spirit of the film” or its atmosphere. He then observes that effective sets are constructed in consideration “of the style of the film. The same interior or exterior must be treated differently according to whether the film is a drama, thriller, comedy, musical, or so on” (1976, 122–126). Such being the case then, the meaning of “attention to detail” will also change from one film set to the next. However, simply because the term is potentially slippery does not mean that a more precise understanding of what is meant by it cannot be articulated. Delineating different contextual categories of design detail can assist in determining how much attention is paid to each of them in any given film production. For example, Barsacq suggests genre, which is one useful starting point. One can consider what constitutes a well-designed kitchen, or kitchen table, or kitchen window, or even the view through that window, as crafted for a horror film compared to one crafted for a comedy or a period drama. In considering Platt’s career as a production designer, and the oft-described precision of her attention to detail, as well as the design of New Hollywood films more broadly, it is worth delineating precisely how one measures attention to detail. This chapter articulates five categories of design that can guide an analysis of details and their potential for meaning: theme; genre; setting; authenticity; and consistency. As with all aspects of production design, these five categories overlap, but they do so in different ways from film to film. For example, the design details of a costume drama set in nineteenth-century Britain are likely to differ if it is a horror thriller set on the northern moors or a romantic comedy set among affluent London society, even while they share details of costume, modes of transportation, or technology. Likewise, Platt’s deployment of various design strategies differs on What’s Up, Doc? and The Bad News

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Bears although both are contemporary comedies, or on The Last Picture Show, The Thief Who Came to Dinner, and Terms of Endearment, although all are set in Texas and feature elements of sex and romance against a backdrop of the negotiations between affluence and poverty. The chapter articulates how each of these categories affects the design of specific films to clarify how Platt’s creative, artistic attention to detail from one project to the next enhances her films. Like most creative film practitioners, Platt’s different approaches depend on a variety of other conditions and requirements as well, from narrative and character to budget, to the personal and labor climate of a given production. However, there is a detectable consistency to her approach that exemplifies her firm grasp of the mechanics of filmmaking and storytelling. Elucidating Platt’s set design and attention to detail within the categories demarcated above and across a selection of her films clarifies how each detail, within each context, deepens narrative and character development and, as a result, enhances the films’ potential for meaning. After developing this approach, the chapter moves on to examine examples from several of her films to illustrate the contributions her design made to the authorship of her films. Finally, it moves on to a more in-­ depth analysis of one specific film—The Last Picture Show—in order to examine precisely how that radio as well as several of Platt’s other design details added to the making and meaning of that film.

Details in the Design In Hollywood, production design is intimately wedded to all phases of production. As Lucy Fischer writes: “The craft’s purpose is a comprehensive one: to produce an overall pictorial ‘vision’ for the work.” As such, “production design spans the entire filmmaking progression” (2015, 2). At the same time, though, for a craft that so thoroughly imbues the entirety of the filmmaking process, most Hollywood production design makes a remarkable effort to remain invisible. Whether the Art Deco sets of the 1930s, the blazing color of the 1950s “pillow talk” approach, or the lived-in realism of the 1970s, the aesthetic, as Fischer points out, was “largely designed to be unobtrusive” (2015, 2). These two aspects of design—its pervasiveness and its invisibility—might seem paradoxical, but they regularly go hand-in-hand. It is the intensity of the designer’s involvement in the production that allows her to craft sets detailed enough that their verisimilitude renders possible the design’s invisibility. Verisimilitude

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here need not be in relation to the “real world” as inhabited by all of us, film viewers and non-viewers alike—although that is a clear possibility. Rather, it applies to the construction of a visual world that creates the appearance of being real in relation to itself and its narrative context or within its diegesis. For example, the much-lauded design of the original Star Wars (1977) was specifically constructed to give every set the sense of belonging to a shared, lived-in world. According to production designer John Barry, the intention was to “make it look like it’s shot on location on your average-everyday Death Star or Mos Eisly Spaceport or local cantina” (“Behind the Scenes” 1977, 700). Roger Christian, who worked as a set decorator under Barry, described his relationship with director George Lucas to Esquire magazine in 2014: “He didn’t want anything to stand out, he wanted it all real and used” (Singer 2014). Thus, despite the film’s narrative unfolding “a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away,” the verisimilitude that results from the design approach allows an audience to accept the world for what it is, the result being that the design remains mostly unobtrusive despite its otherworldliness. The achievement of a diegetic world that is detailed enough to be at once both believably consistent and unobtrusive is why the production designer becomes involved with production so early in the process. As Barnwell notes, “On receiving the script, the designer will then break it down into locations, interiors and exteriors, day and night, period, and so on.” This process allows the designer to “begin to see the design possibilities” in relation to settings and props. “After this the designer can start to get under the skin of the characters” (2004, 47). Each designer’s approach is likely to be different based on individual preference, but generally they will then also be involved in drafting the shooting script, producing a budget, and helping devise the shooting schedule. It is out of the designer’s intimate involvement in these pre-production processes that a concept for the film’s overall cinematic design begins to arise. In the case of The Last Picture Show, Platt read the novel several times and took many trips to Texas researching locations and interviewing locals (Platt n.d., 147–155). Through this process of research, she came to the realization that this part of Texas had such a harsh atmosphere that the people began to look gnarled like their environment. We really showed a lot of that in the movie. It’s just a bitter, bitter, hard life, and that’s why those young people are so precious, because they had beauty and youth. (LoBrutto 1992, 159)

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The contrast that Platt describes between the people “gnarled” by their environment and the “beauty” of the young people overrides the entire design of the film, and that design reinforces the narrative choices of the young people who are becoming aware of their own potential to grow gnarled if they remain in Anarene. Likewise, in researching locations for Paper Moon (Paramount 1973), the novel of which, Joe David Brown’s Addie Pray (1971 Simon & Schuster), was set in the deep south, Platt “pictured this ill-matched pair, Ryan (O’Neal) and the little girl, played by Tatum (O’Neal) to be tiny against a vast sky which would emphasize their extreme isolation from the comforts of the home and would, I thought, be more powerful, visually” (Platt n.d., 206). This vision informed not only her design strategy but her suggestion to relocate the film’s setting from Georgia to Kansas and Missouri. Platt’s desire and ability to lift themes out of a script, to conceptualize them in visual terms, and to grasp how those visual representations of theme can interact with character and narrative propel her films’ development in discernable, vital ways, even when the design itself remains ostensibly “invisible.” She elaborates on this process in a lengthy description of her work on A Star is Born: In addition to all the work of designing all the sets and choosing all the costumes, there is another art that goes with being a designer and it is very hard to describe. Every good script needs a theme, a special look, and part of designing a picture is figuring out that theme and “look.” For instance, even though “A Star is Born” is a pretty lightweight movie, there are themes of success and failure, alcoholism and drug abuse, the decadence of the life in the music world, where so much money is made by people who usually don’t know what to do with it. They often spend it all on drugs, and in the case of Kris Kristofferson’s character in the movie, it depresses a failing star and leads to suicidal behavior. The movie’s design needs to reflect some of these themes. In order to have a better “take” on how people in rock and roll live, I went to visit some of them, finding out about the way musicians live. After researching the lives of several big musicians, I decided that Kristofferson’s character should always be in the dark; he should live in a huge, darkened house with no furniture except a cherry Harley Davidson motorcycle in the living room. Frank (Pierson, the director) loved that. For Barbra’s (Streisand) character, I wanted light, a clear, beautiful, rosy light and I designed the set for her little apartment just that way. The meaning is simple, obvious; she brings clarity and purity into his dark Hades-like existence. This is really a pretty simple description of part of a designer’s work.

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That is why the Tucson desert was such a perfect location for the home that Kristofferson goes to with Barbra’s character … full of light. I even designed the house like a lean-to with one door, the front, facing toward the sunset and the back, where the kitchen is, facing the rising sun. (Platt n.d., 234–235)

Platt loosely conflates “concept” and “theme” here (see  the section on “Theme” below), but otherwise her description of the process closely accords with the one outlined by Barnwell, and also echoes her description of uncovering the overarching concept of The Last Picture Show. Through research of the script, of locations, of the characters, she arrives at an understanding of the deeper concept of the film and its interrelated themes. She then goes about constructing a visual palette for the film—its sets, costumes, locations—that both mirrors those themes and extends them. Furthermore, this conceptual approach to the films enables her to provide the film with a visual unity, or, as Barnwell writes, “Without the concept there is no overall design, just disparate sections of setting” (2004, 52). Once the designer begins to craft this conceptual space for the film, the details can flourish because every detail is rooted in the context of that concept and its related themes. To better analyze how the deployment of details by a designer like Platt can be read as part of the film’s authorship—part of its potential for meaning—it is worth categorizing them in ways that help determine their consistency and their relationship to the script and, thereby, character and narrative development. There are many approaches to categorizing design. For example, one could use the craft’s basic building blocks—color, props, location, or style—similar to the chapter structure of this text. However, for my purposes in this chapter, I have chosen five categories that allow for a reading of the nuanced ways that design interacts with other components of production, expanding and enriching those components. While I mainly emphasize design, this approach accommodates John Gibbs’s analysis of mise-en-scène as “the major elements of communication, and the combinations through which they operate expressively” (2002, 5). Platt’s imaginative approach to design drew from an understanding of Hollywood film production that was well-informed and deeply instinctive, and that grew rapidly holistic over time. In elucidating the efficacy of her design, then, it makes sense to analyze it in combination with the other aspects of production that she was fluent in from early in her career. In this section, I also elaborate on these five categories with brief reference to the work of Platt and other designers. Following that, I will examine work from

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throughout Platt’s career by combining different of the categories to show how such a joint approach can tease out layers of meaning, but also to show how even if Platt’s superficial style might change from film to film, there is a consistency in her understanding of the interrelationship between design, character, and narrative (as well as how important it is for the production designer to work closely with the cinematographer to achieve the desired ends). I will end the chapter using a similar approach to analyze how Platt’s design becomes part of the authorship of The Last Picture Show. Theme Themes are the detailed approaches to a film’s concept. For example, the concept of The Last Picture Show might be described as the slow death of small-town America in the 1950s and the existential mix of boredom and dread it inspires in the town’s youth. Platt describes the Texas setting as one that gnarls its residents over time, and the film’s focus on its youth displays a deeply ironic understanding that a similar future is likely in store for them, despite their current vivacity and beauty. A film’s themes, however, are more precise renderings of aspects of the concept. They extend the concept, complicate, even contradict it. Themes act as receptacles for a detailed approach to design because, in shading and adding nuance to the film’s concept, they allow for more malleability in design strategy. For example, in Picture Show, one of the themes concerns class disparity.4 Both rich and poor suffer as the town of Anarene slowly dies around them, but the rich, as is so often the case, have the means to pad their suffering with leisure-time exploits, material goods, and hopes and dreams more likely to be realized than those of their poorer neighbors and classmates. In such a situation, Jacy’s radio acts as a subtle status symbol, one that reinforces her own sense of blasé privilege and also communicates that privilege and Jacy’s attitude toward it to the viewer. She hardly notices the radio (the only time she might be said to “see” it in the sequence is when it is reflected back to her in her vanity mirror, but even then she never looks directly at it), and its short duration onscreen allows the viewer not to pay it any mind, just as, presumably, Jacy does not. On the other hand, the music devices displayed onscreen prior to Jacy’s radio are at once more obviously the focus of other characters’ attention and, as pointed out previously, are well used and sometimes poorly functioning. I have already mentioned the worn-down radios in Duane and Sonny’s truck and in Sam’s pool hall. There is also the jukebox in the town diner.

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When Duane and Sonny make a morning visit to the diner, Duane asks Sonny to pick a new song and flips a coin. Genevieve (Eileen Brennan), a waitress in the diner, grabs the coin mid-air and says, “down payment on breakfast. Let somebody prosperous play the juke box,” emphasizing the relationship between money and access to music and the devices that play it. Each of these music sources appears onscreen before the sequence in Jacy’s bedroom, and in each case the characters interact directly with them. As mentioned, the appearance of these devices conveys and continually enforces the diegetic nature of the film’s music. At the same time, though, the devices themselves establish an early visual motif. Jacy’s radio, in its onscreen brevity—almost passivity—disrupts the motif, or complicates it. In Sonny’s case, he is continually depicted as turning on music, or being thwarted from doing so, whereas prosperous Jacy need not concern herself with where her music will come from. Jacy’s many possessions, along with her naïve but burgeoning sexual enthusiasm, are ensconced within a protective shell of money and youth that protect her from the realities of adult life in Anarene. The same cannot be said for her mother, Lois, who has long grown bored with the money, alcohol, and sex she once thought would save her.5 Lois initiates the sequence in Jacy’s bedroom in which the radio appears because she is tired of watching television. She goes into Jacy’s bedroom because she is bored—with her situation in life and with her husband—and also, perhaps, sexually frustrated.6 It is in that state that she argues Jacy should sleep with Duane (after making sure to visit the doctor for birth control). Her advice to Jacy is couched in maternal concern that her daughter will end up with a boring boy who is not rich enough for her, but it is also grounded in the surety that no matter how much Jacy might love Duane, or how much money she might have, the only thing that will really save her is to get away from Anarene. In that light, the design of the bedroom, including the radio, deftly ties one of the film’s themes about wealth and poverty to the overarching concept of how life in this town beats down its residents, regardless of wealth, station, or power. Genre Genre is an immense topic in film studies, with a long, rich history. There are debates about what constitutes a specific genre, how those constituent traits should be determined and how they can be recognized, whether genres can blend, or even if genre can be said to exist in any clearly

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definable way at all. Or, as Rick Altman argued in 1984, “it is perfectly possible for a film to be simultaneously included in a particular generic corpus and excluded from the same corpus” (7). Altman’s approach to genre, which constructs a theoretically dialogic model for analyzing genre based on teasing out the seeming ideological differences in approaches to genre studies, thriving on their contradictions (Altman, 10), appeals to me in the way it recognizes the possibility for inherent contradictions to produce meaning that might not be discernable if those contradictions were not acknowledged. This overlaps with my approach to authorship, one that I articulate in this text and elsewhere, wherein the contradictory impulses and intentions of directors and crewmembers might sometimes author filmic texts in ways that were not predictable or intended by any singular author. Todd Berliner’s analysis of genre in 1970s Hollywood is likewise dialogic in its analysis of the changes classical genres underwent during that era due to unexpected outcomes from the confluence of artistic intention, audience expectation, and viewer response. For example, Berliner writes about how filmmakers attempt to respond to audience “weariness with film tradition” (2002, 31) by playing “against conventions” (25), but with quite different aims and results. On the one hand, they might make obvious the difference between their films and the genre they play against, thereby making “viewers feel movie literate” (26). On the other hand, they might “have unnerving effects on an audience because [they] make use of standard conventions and then disrupt them with inventive variations” (30). It is not, though, my intention to rehearse the various strains of genre study in order to analyze Platt’s work. In attempting to better understand the efficacy of Platt’s production design in relation to the success of her films, it is helpful to consider genre the way that practitioners do, on a less theoretical or historical level (although Platt’s knowledge of film history was extensive), and more on an industrial or even commercial level. To some degree, Platt thought of all her films in generic terms, albeit sometimes unconventionally so, and designed them accordingly. For example, Platt describes What’s Up, Doc? as a comedy, a “cartoon” movie (Platt 1977), and her location scouting and design of the film were based on that conception. Likewise, she was determined not think of Paper Moon as a Depression film, but as a father–daughter film, “two people against the world” (LoBrutto 1992, 159), which inspired her decision to locate the film in the wide-open spaces of Kansas rather than the South of the source novel. On The Man with Two Brains, which Platt described as “a wild,

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unlikely and unrealistic comedy” (Platt n.d., 277), she convinced the producers and director Carl Reiner not to shoot on location in Vienna: This dark and awesome city didn’t look to me to be a good place for comedy. It reminded me of spy movies, danger, dark intrigue […] I came back and told Carl Reiner that Vienna was no place for this comedy, and that I could create a comedic version of Vienna on the streets of the back lot at Universal, and that is where we shot “The Man With Two Brains.” I saved the studio a lot of money. (Platt n.d., 277)

In addition to these films, Platt worked on period dramas (The Last Picture Show), a sexy caper (The Thief Who Came to Dinner), sports movies (The Bad News Bears), spoofs (Young Doctors in Love), contemporary family dramas (Terms of Endearment), and a film that might best be called a Satanic rom-com (The Witches of Eastwick). For each of these films, Platt brought an overriding aesthetic derived from thinking of design conceptually, but an aesthetic that she was able and willing to modify based on genre. For example, each of the four films Platt designed in the 1980s includes at least one key hospital sequence, with almost the entirety of Young Doctors set in one. Even though all the films could be said to share certain characteristics with one or more of the others— for example, Young Doctors and Two Brains are both zany comedies, which could be said of Witches, too; and all of them feature adult themes of romance and sex— they are otherwise generically very different. The design strategy for the hospitals, even in Witches where it only appears briefly, is completely different for each film, dependent upon what the scenes or sequences required, the tone of the film, and the genre. For example, in Young Doctors, a spoof of TV hospital dramas (particularly American daytime soap operas), a major decision Platt made was to paint the hallways pink and the doors orange, “to compliment the comedic qualities of the movie” (Platt n.d., 272). Whereas during a pivotal moment in one of the hospital scenes in Terms of Endearment, Aurora (Shirley MacLaine) is pleading with the nurses to give her daughter, Emma (Debra Winger) some pain medication. Director James Brooks wanted to shoot as much of the film in practical locations as possible, and Platt had found a central nurses station that she thought would work well for MacLaine to circle while her pleading grows increasingly desperate. Brooks did not like the station though because he did not think it would help elicit a laugh on MacLaine’s “thank

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you” at the end of the sequence. According to Platt: “I couldn’t imagine how you could get a laugh on such a line, but I wanted to make him happy so I questioned him until I found out the problem, which was that the island was too high, so I lowered it” (Platt n.d., 295). In fact, she lowered one section of it, rather than the entire station, which first works to create tension in the scene as well as visual dynamism: as MacLaine circles the station, pleading with one nurse after another, the barrier between her and the nurses appears to lower and rise, which has the effect in much of the shot of obscuring MacLaine’s body from the waist down. Then, in the final moment, she stands in front of the lowered section again, which allows for a medium-long shot of MacLaine, most of her body in view onscreen, framed by higher portions of the station to either side of her. That shot selection creates space for her body language and line delivery to communicate her suddenly calm demeanor, which is where the humor arises. MacLaine’s modulated performance makes it work, but the design of the setting enhances the performance by creating the space for it. While Platt is tasked with constructing similar cinematic spaces in these films, her choice of how to do so—her choice of details of color, size, shape—is guided to some extent by each film’s generic concerns. Setting In design terms, setting comprises a wide array of possible subcategories, some having to do with narrative, some with production, some that can be categorized theoretically.7 These various classifications can overlap with or contradict each other. For example, screenplays generally differentiate between interior (INT.) and exterior (EXT.) locations, and while a film production will usually strive to reproduce those distinctions, there might be occasion to shoot an exterior shot in doors, on a studio sound stage for example. A theoretical reading of a desert-set sequence might not take into account that the onscreen space being read as vast and open is in fact a narrow stretch of sand surrounded by mountains or abutting a town or village. Alternatively, it might consider the viewer’s knowledge of those mountains or towns and how that off-screen presence alienates the viewer’s immersive experience. Some of these issues I discuss in further depth in the next chapter on location, but it is worth pointing out that, as with other aspects of reading design details, it is necessary to be familiar with both how a scene is designed and constructed, and how it appears onscreen for consumption. Platt’s intentions in designing a setting to convey certain

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information allow for that information’s presentation onscreen to be viewed and interpreted by an audience. Here, I focus mainly on how Platt’s understanding of a film’s concepts and themes, its narrative concerns, guided her conceptualization of the onscreen space she would design for her films. By which I mean, Platt’s ideas about the narrative-based onscreen setting guided her efforts to design that setting, regardless of either the setting as described in the source material or script, or the shooting location. For example, Platt worked on several novel adaptations and in some of those instances, Platt’s reading of a script led her to surmise that the film version would benefit from a change in narrative setting—so the Alabama of Addie Pray became the Kansas and Missouri of Paper Moon and the Chicago of The Thief Who Came to Dinner became the Houston of the film version, both on Platt’s suggestion. In each instance, the change was made for the narrative setting as well as the production shooting. In other instances, Platt’s eye for detail would prompt her to suggest maintaining the narrative setting, but changing the location. As mentioned, she suggested to Carl Reiner that a studio-­ based version of the streets of Vienna could be made funnier than the actual city where he had planned on filming The Man with Two Brains (Platt n.d., 277). The opposite occurred with the production of The Witches of Eastwick. The novel was set in New England, but while director George Miller intended to maintain the setting of the novel, he planned to shoot the film in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. Platt insisted it be shot in New England, not just to conform to the novel’s setting, but because “Massachusetts was the place in America for witches.” She scouted several towns and buildings in Massachusetts and Rhode Island to convince Miller, which she eventually did (Platt n.d., 305). In these and other cases, Platt was able to distinguish between an original setting and her preferred setting, as well as where to shoot, regardless of setting. These decisions were often driven by her process of discerning what she considered to be the film’s concept, but also its genre. For example, in the case mentioned earlier where Platt deemed Paper Moon more a father–daughter, two-against-the-world film than a Depression film, it was precisely that conceptualization that led her to move the film’s setting and production to the Midwest: I somehow pictured this ill-matched pair, Ryan and the little girl, played by Tatum, to be tiny against a vast sky which would emphasize their extreme

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isolation from the comforts of the home and would, I thought, be more powerful visually. I kind of knew it, really. It was Kansas. That flat land with its vast grassy plains and enormous sky. (Platt n.d., 206–207)8

The example demonstrates how the different categories of concept, genre, and setting were interwoven for Platt, each continually informing the others. Once the combination of narrative setting and production setting were determined, Platt went about researching the location, the era (especially for period pieces), and the people who lived there. She read magazines, interviewed people, visited homes and work places. Anything to hone her visual understanding of the setting she had to work with.9 For example, after meeting residents of Archer City, Texas (including Larry McMurtry’s father) she determined everybody in The Last Picture Show would wear blue jeans, including the women. She even bought McMurtry’s “father’s Levi jacket right off his back to use as a costume” in the film (Platt n.d., 151). On The Bad News Bears (Paramount 1976), the decision was made to cut all the scenes of the players’ domestic lives from the script, to set the entire film on the baseball diamond. Both Platt and director Michael Ritchie take credit for the decision to “make the baseball diamond the world” (LoBrutto 1992, 161; Ritchie 2000), but regardless of whose decision it was, once the decision was made, Platt designed the baseball field down to the tiniest detail, knowing that most of the film’s scenes would be set there (LoBrutto 1992, 160). It is in those little details that Platt’s design work shines—in the worn-backstop, the nicks on the bleacher benches, the gnarled fencing that protects the dugout. Platt constructed the field in a park in Encino, but it looks lived in, like it has hosted summer after summer of baseball games, with kids and bats and balls all banging against and mangling the equipment. That striving to depict those seemingly minor details lends Platt’s films a startling authenticity that marks them as different from films of an earlier era. Authenticity In the introduction, I quote at length a comment Platt made at an AFI seminar in 1977, where she discussed some of the flaws she found in the design of the preceding era of Hollywood. She is highly critical of the emphasis on fashion rather than character, when she comments, “Why is

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Sophia Loren, why is she wearing these weird clothes when she’s supposed to be somebody else,” or “Audrey Hepburn in these Paris fashions … It really didn’t work” (Platt 1977). Platt takes aim at fashion icons here, but her point is not that the fashion itself is necessarily bad or poorly designed, but that it lacks the kind of authenticity she believes works best for film. She was not alone among the designers of her era in thinking this way. As previously pointed out, Dean Tavoularis was also striving for a new authenticity opposed to what he saw as the overly bright, unrealistic design of the late Classical era. Authenticity is one of those mutable concepts that shifts from person to person and over time. Furthermore, authenticity in design when it comes to film is, at its heart, a misnomer. Film by its nature is constructed and inauthentic. To achieve its ends, film design uses illusion. For example, forced perspective, ersatz material, and city streets built on studio lots are some of the ways film renders the “fake” as real. If most of Hollywood film design aims for invisibility, then for that illusion to work—for the constructed to appear believably real— it becomes necessary that a designer trust her instinct, have a sense of audience expectation, understand what has worked in the past and what has not, and, to top it all off, have a deep practical knowledge of a huge variety of design and building strategies and approaches including color, materials, clothing and fashion, building dimensions and perspective, plants and flowers, and much more. A designer like Platt can look at Charade and both admire the fashion on display, but also find it inauthentic because of the unlikelihood that the character Reggie Lampert (Hepburn) would wear those clothes. Platt spoke regularly about wanting her design to remain invisible, but also wanting it to be an extension of character and narrative. There is a tension there, one that Tashiro writes at length about, for it seems that to contribute to character, design would have to be noticeable. If there is, as Platt claimed, humor in a character’s sleeves being too short, for example, then the audience must notice that the sleeves are too short. Tashiro describes the tension—or, perhaps, dynamism—this creates for the viewer: [W]hile narrative cinema may attempt a seamless stream of images, it is incapable of achieving that flow unless the spectator allows it. Cinematic viewing is better seen as a contest between identification, denial, interest, indifference, participation, derision, understanding, confusion, and surprise. And most importantly in this context, savoring, lingering imaginatively over preferred images, moments, phrases, and sensations. (Tashiro 1998, 17)

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I take this to mean that for a viewer to make meaning out of an image— specifically here, out if its design—the viewer must on some level notice and participate in an appreciation of the image’s design (or any of the other aspects of approach he describes). The same could be said for setting. Platt speaks regularly about what she did or did not want to “see” on screen in regards to location because of how she imagined it would affect reception of the film. For example, of What’s Up, Doc?, she writes: “I didn’t want to see the character Streisand was playing, an irresponsible and impossible creature, in Chicago with her Brooklyn accent” (Platt n.d., 190). There is a sense about authenticity here that is grounded less in a location’s believability as it appears on screen, and more about how it will be received by the audience as a believable space within which the film’s narrative takes place or its characters exist, the verisimilitude I mentioned earlier. Platt’s drive for authenticity meant that she often preferred to shoot on location, on practical sets, although she was highly adept at building sets on lots when necessary. As mentioned, she liked to dress characters in ill-­ fitting clothes, she preferred characters to have messed up hair, and she liked buildings that were dirty and old (again, elements that were likely to be noticed by viewers). In Terms of Endearment, as Emma’s cancer gets progressively worse and Aurora begins dedicating her days to taking care of her, Platt had the idea of designing a wig for MacLaine that would show Aurora’s dark roots, which can be seen on screen and which conveys how she had abandoned her previously pristine and well-kept façade out of her love and dedication to her daughter. As the film progresses and Emma’s health continues to deteriorate, the roots lengthen (I discuss this in greater detail in Chap. 5). Frank Marshall said Platt’s primary rule was that she hated things that looked new (Marshall 2020). Sometimes this meant crafting spaces that looked lived in, sometimes it meant leaving pre-existing spaces mostly untouched. For example, Sam’s pool hall in Picture Show was a domino parlor that already existed in Archer City. Platt described it as disgusting, with nicotine stains on the walls and ceiling from decades of cigarette smoke. She found it so apt for the space that she would not even let the crew wash the windows (she did have to add the pool tables) (Platt 1977). The rest of the interiors on Picture Show, and exteriors as well, had to be built, and most of what is seen onscreen in the film was constructed by Platt to accord with the visual concept and motifs that arose out of her study of the dungaree-wearing locals and the dirty rundown pool hall.

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Thus, while her striving for authenticity onscreen may have been born out of contradictory impulses in regards to what a viewer should or should not notice, it remained a driving force in her design throughout her career. Platt’s efforts in this regard are highly significant because they coincided with an overarching realignment of filmic representations of authenticity in the New Hollywood. Her design work played a significant part in reconfiguring depictions of “the real” on screen in ways that still pervade Hollywood design today. Consistency This leads to my final category, consistency of design. Like those above, consistency affords several avenues of interpretation—spatial, geometric, architectural, sartorial, color—and as with the others, one can examine consistency within a specific film or across a body of work, although the manner of consistency one looks for will differ when analyzing a single film or a group of them. For example, in the case of design, one might examine a single film for the consistency of building exteriors, especially those that have been rebuilt, to see what they imply about a town and its residents, its place in time, its economic status: are the façades consistently chipped and faded, or pristine and newly painted, or is there an inconsistent mix of both. Whereas across several films, one might look for how consistently the designer conveys such information about a town, regardless of its period or economic situation. The town of Eastwick and the town of Anarene are different in significant ways—the hand-carved, freshly painted, but vintage-looking signage hanging on the Eastwick shop fronts signify the quaint materiality of the comfortably middle class, whereas Anarene’s faded signs with their peeling paint and missing letters quickly establish that town’s economic precarity. These details enhance the narrative in several ways. In Eastwick, it is exactly the staid middle-class conformity conveyed by the shop signs that the devil threatens to disrupt when he comes to town. Anarene’s are consistent with the other features discussed above—the dirty Levi’s, the decrepit pool hall—that connote the town’s entropic collapse. One can examine the design of each town independently to see how consistently Platt constructs surface markers of material success (or lack thereof), town spirit, social class, and so on. But one can also compare the two films to examine how ably Platt conveys such information in two wildly different productions made nearly two decades apart.

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Such graded examination is a commonality of auteurist studies, where consistent traits of visual style or mise-en-scène are generally reduced to directorial choice and impulse. Much rarer is the examination of consistency across the body of work of practitioners like cinematographers, editors, or production designers. When it does occur, it often stops at a recognition of superficial details: Gordon Willis likes to shoot in the dark; Dede Allen makes use of jump cuts. Unlike with directors, these observations seldom extend to an examination of how those recognized traits contribute to the film’s development of character and narrative, or how those traits enhance a film’s potential for meaning, or how, in part, they author the film. In the case of Platt, she repeatedly discusses how she worked to enhance character and narrative—how they drove her design style, but also how her decisions about design affected them. Thus, there is a complex dialogue in her films between the script as written, her design vision and how it is deployed, how the actors perform in those spaces, and how they are lit and shot. If, then, one examines the consistency of Platt’s design—particularly in its varied details—with that dialogic relationship in mind, the authorial role that Platt played on her films becomes clearer. Throughout this chapter, I have returned to a few details of The Last Picture Show in relation to each other, but also to her work on other films. I have done so to call attention to the importance of those details, but also as examples to elucidate how the categories I have outlined above function in Platt’s work. For the rest of this chapter, I examine The Last Picture Show more closely, teasing out how the film’s details interact with each other to deepen and complicate the film’s narrative. There are many factors to the film’s success, from Bogdanovich’s direction, to Robert Surtees’s cinematography, to the many striking performances, with each component shading the others in numerous ways. Keeping those other factors in mind, and engaging with them, I argue that Platt’s design on the film is one of the primary components of its authorship, and is as vital to what makes the film work as any other element.

The Last Picture Show Released in 1971, The Last Picture Show is a major film of the early New Hollywood era. It was produced by BBS Productions, which had evolved out of Raybert Productions in 1969, the two companies being responsible for Easy Rider (1969), Five Easy Pieces (1970), and The King of Marvin Gardens (1972) among others. On a budget of $1.3 million, the film

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grossed over $29 million at the domestic box office, won major awards, and propelled many of its performers to stardom. It also cemented Bogdanovich’s reputation as one of the rising young film directors who would come to be known as the “movie brats,” a group of film literate directors who were happy to wear the mantle of auteur. This was aided in no small part by film critic Paul D. Zimmerman’s claim about Picture Show in Newsweek magazine that, “It is not merely the best American movie of a rather dreary year; it is the most impressive work by a young American director since Citizen Kane,” which then became part of the film’s marketing campaign. The story of how Platt and Bogdanovich came to be involved with the film has been told many times with several variations. All agree that actor Sal Mineo passed Larry McMurtry’s novel to Bogdanovich in the late 1960s. Bogdanovich respected Mineo’s opinion but was not sure whether it would make a good film or whether the subject matter even interested him, so he asked Platt to read it. Bogdanovich often relays the story that after she finished reading it, Platt told him, “I don’t know how you’d make it as a picture, but it’s a good book.”10 Platt recalls it slightly differently: “I loved the book. I thought it would be perfect for Peter to direct as I knew that he was the guy in high school who could never get the pretty girl. I thought he would relate to the novel” (Platt n.d., 44). The difference between these two versions of events may seem slight or even insignificant. They both agree that Platt read the book first and liked it, and both versions lead to the two of them developing a pitch to adapt the novel (they initially brought it to Robert Evans and Peter Bart at Paramount, who turned them down). In Bogdanovich’s version, however, it is significant that Platt does not really “get” the book, or at least does not get its potential as a film. When Bogdanovich tells the story to an interviewer, it seems lighthearted and often gets a chuckle. Then he resolves the anecdote by explaining how he read the book and also could not see it as a film at first, but then it came to him—just film the book! Again, this may seem like a typical Hollywood anecdote, but it has the subtle effect of diminishing Platt’s recognition of the novel’s filmic potential and her agency in pushing to get it made. The film was shot in Archer City, Texas, and surrounding locations from October to December of 1970. McMurtry grew up in Archer City and set the novel there, although he fictionalized it as Thalia. For the film, the name would be changed again, to Anarene. Bogdanovich has another oft-shared story about driving around west Texas with Platt and McMurtry,

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scouting locations. They come across town after town, none of which exactly meets his expectations for the film, until finally pulling into Archer City, at which point he tells McMurtry, “My God, this is perfect,” to which McMurtry replies, “well it ought to be, this is the town I wrote about.” McMurtry, on the other hand, describes it differently. At the very beginning of the trip, he picks them up at the airport in Dallas-Fort Worth and drives them to Archer City (stopping for dinner along the way), where they exit the car outside the Royal Theatre, which appears throughout the film: “Indeed, the first shot of the movie happens right where Peter and Polly stood when I first brought them to the town” (McMurtry 2010, 31). He goes on to write, “The scouting trip might as well have ended right there […] After all, it’s where I set the book”; however, “we proceeded to drive pointlessly around Texas for several days, looking at other towns that were a lot like Archer City” (McMurtry 2010, 31). I include these minor discrepancies not simply as amusing anecdotes or to illustrate the way individual memories about shared events can differ. Rather, both anecdotes demonstrate the way auteurist narratives, even those concerning the most minor of issues, serve to elevate the director’s role in crafting every creative element of a film. In these cases, it was Bogdanovich who “realized” how to adapt the novel, and Bogdanovich who “discovered” Archer City, McMurtry’s hometown.11 While these instances are minor, they exist on the same spectrum as Bogdanovich’s claims to having chosen every shot in the film, thereby marginalizing the labor of industry veteran Robert Surtees. Another story Bogdanovich often tells is how he edited the film in its entirety, only crediting Donn Cambern due to union requirements, a claim disputed by Cambern. However, it remains the Bogdanovich versions that are lodged in the popular mind. When it comes to Platt, while Bogdanovich has been inclined in the past to credit her design work (particularly on the various director’s commentaries he has provided for the films they worked on together), he has been reluctant to acknowledge any of the non-design creativity and labor she brought to those films. Most noticeably, in a 2019 interview with Vulture, he went as far as to label many of her claims about The Last Picture Show “bullshit” (Bogdanovich 2019). Auteurism, generally, marginalizes the talent and labor of non-directors (and non-stars), and directors who are framed as and frame themselves as auteurs regularly facilitate that marginalization through their reconstruction of creative contributions both large and small, as is the case with Bogdanovich on most aspects of The Last Picture Show.

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In reality, Platt’s crafting and shaping of the film’s narrative and character development by way of her design are visible from the first frame. After an opening title card, the film fades in on a desolate, windblown street in a barren town seemingly devoid of life. In the center of the frame, sitting on the corner of the street, is the Royal theater, the cinema that will play host to the eponymous last picture show, its marquee announcing its current film as Father of the Bride. There is a slow pan to the left, revealing more of the street and its businesses, shops with barely discernable signs, some boarded up. As the wind continues to blow, the sound of a pickup truck sputtering to life registers from off screen. At the far end of the block of buildings shared by the cinema, one can just make out the sign for the Texas Moon Café and, across the street from that, what appears to be a gas station—it is difficult to tell because the sign is missing. Above the intersection hangs a streetlight with two blinking lights. The pan continues, as does the wind and the sputtering of the pickup, interspersed with regular backfiring. In a few short seconds the film presents viewers with a vision of dilapidated barrenness—run down, lifeless, stark. The shot is well known not simply because it is visually stunning but because of the way it immediately establishes the overriding concept of the film: this town will grind its residents to dust. While Surtees’s simple, evocative camera work throughout the film endows it with much of its weathered drabness, the space the camera moves through from this opening shot onward was conceived of and designed by Platt. In this case, she redressed the entirety of the street’s shop fronts, including the cinema itself which had suffered a fire in 1965 and was in a “completely dilapidated state” (Royal Theater 2020). Throughout the town, Platt removed signs, fabricated new ones, remodeled the gas station pumps, and she entirely rebuilt some of the interiors as well. According to a contemporaneous report in local newspaper, The Archer County News, the crew worked daily for weeks “to back date the north side of the Square to the early 1950s period and have built a café, made gasoline pump covers, remade the bank front, etc.” (Stults 1970). Thus, before any characters appear on screen or any narrative proper begins to unfold, Platt has grounded the film’s conceptual mise-en-scène in the stark realism that will pervade its runtime. The narrative structure of The Last Picture Show comprises a series of vignettes that encapsulate one year in the life of Anarene, Texas. It meanders from sequence to sequence, subtly conveying the passage of time. However, the first four sequences occur in rapid succession and can be

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considered the film’s opening, announcing its concept and themes and four of its seven main characters. These sequences include: (1) the opening pan and cut to Sonny in his truck as he drives down the main drag and exits the truck, meets Billy, and heads to the pool hall; (2) Sonny and Billy entering the pool hall and talking with Sam and Abilene; (3) Sonny leaving the pool hall with money for Genevieve at the diner and meeting Duane on the way there; (4) Sonny and Duane interacting with Genevieve in the diner. Along the way Sonny and Duane talk with Sam and each other and interact with locals, but also with the town itself. The script is deft and efficient in the way it introduces the characters, where they are at this stage in their lives, what their roles in the town are, and their relationships with each other. However, it is the details of location and design that provide the opening with much of its richness. Examining a few of the details from those opening sequences displays just how thoroughly the world of the film is established by its design. Perhaps it is worth pointing out again here that, in addition to location and actual production design, Platt was also responsible for costume and hair and makeup on the film. After the pan down the street, there is a cut to Sonny inside his truck, the sputtering sound of which has already been established off screen. The first image is a close-up of Sonny’s hand ramming the truck’s choke, followed by a rapid series of recurring close-ups of his foot pumping the gas pedal, clad in a worn out old cowboy boot, and a profile shot of Sonny from the passenger side, as he blows onto his cupped hands in between trying to get the truck’s engine running. His jean jacket is too thin to keep him truly warm. This profile shot also includes a slightly closer shot of the opening scene’s gas station, now glimpsed out his driver’s side window. This series also includes shots of the truck’s tiny radio and its badly cracked windshield. Hank Williams “Why Don’t You Love Me” plays on the radio after Sonny turns it on. Within the film’s first minute, in addition to the opening shot of desolation, the viewer becomes firmly ensconced within the film’s time, place, and economic milieu. Once Sonny finally gets the truck started, he drives down the street and picks up his friend Billy. There is a small piece of oil drilling equipment, a pumpjack, visible in the background, further demarcating the geographical setting as oil country. Sonny and Billy drive through town, as dust blows in swirls around the streets, and they come to the pool hall, a dilapidated pile of wooden slats and greasy glass that looks like it is about to collapse in on itself. The sign above the door reads, simply, POOL.12

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When they enter the pool hall, they meet Sam the Lion (Ben Johnson), the owner of the pool hall, brushing down the felt on one of his pool tables and clad in a sheepskin jacket which he pulls tight against the biting wind that blows through the door as the boys come in. I have already described the pool hall in part, but a few other details are worth mentioning. The paint on the walls is badly chipped and peeling, the hanging bulbs that provide dim light are bare, the occasional flyer or framed photo dots the walls, but mostly they are unadorned and grim. The place is a dive. Most of this is recorded in the script, the one item present in the hall but not the script being the radio, which Sonny flicks on after grabbing a peanut patty and a bottle of Dr. Pepper. The radio hums for a moment before coming to life with another Hank Williams tune, “Cold Cold Heart” (Tony Bennet’s version of which will later be playing on the radio on Jacy’s room). The sequence in the pool hall includes some cutting put downs of Sonny’s performance in a high school football game the previous evening, a running joke that will continue throughout much of the film’s opening as Sonny and Duane encounter various locals. When Sonny exits the pool hall, he meets Duane and they walk to the Half Moon Café. Along the way, more of Platt’s re-fronting of town establishments is on display—the Texaco sign at the gas station is missing its “e” on one side of the sign and its “a” on the other; its exterior walls are stained and dirty. Finally, they enter the café, an establishment that is better kept and more thriving at that time of morning than the pool hall, but still shows ample wear and tear in its water-stained ceiling, chipped paint, and dusty blinds and lamp shades. Unlike the pool hall, which Platt found in near-ready condition, she built the entirety of the café, using the inside of an existing supermarket (Platt n.d., 159). Its design, then, could be read as much more intentionally constructed than the pool hall’s. The novel describes the café as “deliciously warm” (McMurtry 1966), while the script describes it as “small, clean and cozy” (McMurtry and Bogdanovich 1970, 6). Its onscreen iteration fits both those descriptions with additional embellishments by Platt to keep the diner’s décor consistent with her overall vision for the town’s thematic resonance with the narrative. In addition to its design, these first few minutes of the film include other visual and dialogue cues that indicate the state of the town and Sonny’s place within it. In particular, Sonny’s precarious economic status is made clear—after counting out his meager coins, he realizes he’s unable to afford buying breakfast at the café. And this is reinforced by Surtees’s

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stark black-and-white photography. Thus, while Platt is integral to establishing both a clearly defined diegesis for the film and a statement of its major theme, hers is not the only contribution, with script, performance, and cinematography all playing significant roles in signaling the world of the film and its inhabitants. Furthermore, Platt’s work in these opening scenes is rooted directly in the textual sources of film and script, with minor tweaks, such as fraying the edges of the cozy café. At the same time, however, her work and its significance for the filmic word unfolding is visible in every frame, and the richness of the design details are vital to drawing the viewer into the film—from the boots and clothes, the shop signs and greasy windows, to the way “FARROW OIL CO.” is hand lettered on the side of the pickup truck that drops Duane outside the pool hall, foreshadowing the presence of Jacy Farrow and her family before they appear on screen. As the film progresses beyond these initial scenes, other instances of Platt’s design strategy for the film display her ability to take the most minute description from the novel or screenplay and incorporate it into the film in ways that subtly develop even minor characters and extend thematic developments. For example, the novel features a few brief references to coach Popper’s (Bill Thurman) proclivity for hunting and his love of shotguns and rifles—at one point in the novel, while complaining about his wife Ruth (Cloris Leachman) to Sonny, he says, “A good gun beats a woman any day” (McMurtry 1966)—but these references to guns are mostly presented in dialogue or in Sonny’s thoughts about the coach’s reputation once Sonny begins his affair with Ruth. None of this is mentioned in the script, via either dialogue or description, but Platt finds ingenious ways to incorporate the detail in to the film. First, when Sonny arrives at the Poppers’ house on his initial visit to drive Ruth to the hospital, there are two brief glimpses of gun racks in the background—one holding a pair of shotguns, the other a pair of rifles. These appear on screen for only a matter of seconds each, not much longer than Jacy’s radio. But they are displayed prominently enough to convey that the owner of the house, coach Popper, is a gun owner. Not a surprise in early 1950s Texas, to be sure, but aside from a few revolvers dangling from police belts, Popper’s are the only guns that appear in the film. Their appearance onscreen in this instance represent the single representation of the coach as a possible threat of violence to Sonny (the film also downplays coach Popper’s closeted homosexuality).

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In a second instance, a different gun appears in the Popper home after Sonny returns with Ruth and she invites him in for a soda. They sit at the small kitchen table, cluttered with un-cleared breakfast dishes. Hanging above the table on the otherwise bare wall is an odd adornment—a decorative handgun integrated into what appears to be an arrangement of fake flowers (Fig. 3.2). Throughout the conversation, the gun points just above Sonny’s head—again, oddly threatening, in this case even more so because of the direction of its aim. This flourish on Platt’s part is subtle, but also striking for several reasons. First, it simply reinforces the coach’s gun collecting trait, thereby also emphasizing his potential as a threat. That threat manifests as more directly aimed at Sonny himself in the way the gun is pointed—he will sit underneath it more than once in the film. The gun also resonates thematically, although it can be difficult to put a finger on how. Sonny will spend much of the film engaged in an affair with Ruth that can be described as pleasurable and heartening for them both. For Ruth, it pulls her out of the doldrums and depression of her marriage to a seemingly deplorable man, and for Sonny, it leads him down the path of maturity in sex and romance, but also provides him with some adult stability in a life sorely lacking it. The age difference between the two was controversial on publication of the novel and might still appear

Fig. 3.2  The Popper’s wall decoration includes a gun pointing toward Sonny’s head. (The Last Picture Show, BBS/Columbia)

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striking to an audience today, but both characters seem to flourish within it. However, a relationship with Ruth will tie Sonny to the town, the town that, in Platt’s eyes, is certain to grind its youth into dust. This is reinforced later in the film when Sonny leaves Ruth for a brief fling with Jacy that leads to their elopement. Jacy and Sonny marry and head for the Oklahoma border and a chance at escape, before being dragged back to town by her parents. At that point, Sonny decides a relationship with Ruth would not be all that bad and he returns to her for the film’s final sequence, during which he sits under the handgun, still pointing at his head. This final sequence between Ruth and Sonny is bittersweet and powerfully acted by both Bottoms and, in particular, Leachman. In a scene captured in one take, with no rehearsals, Ruth rages at Sonny for having abandoned her and for his temerity in returning and attempting to rekindle the relationship. However, it ends with her stroking Sonny’s cheek and telling him not to worry. Ruth’s behavior indicates that she is open to the idea of taking Sonny back, but the gun remains pointing at Sonny’s head, an enduring reminder of what a life lived in Anarene has in store for him. The gun, thus, becomes a detail that represents the film’s Texas setting (both as a firearm and as a piece of regional kitsch), develops one of its major themes, and shades Sonny’s development while also providing consistency to the lesser character of coach Popper. Platt takes those few references to coach’s hunting from the novel and turns them into a minor but potent detail that functions on several levels within the film. With this analysis in mind, we can return to Jacy Farrow in her bedroom, listing to the radio, being lectured by her mother. Even more so than the Poppers’ handgun wall-hanging, Jacy’s radio exemplifies the tenet that design not call attention to itself. While its music is present throughout the sequence, the radio itself is barely on screen for more than a few moments and then always just at the edge of the frame or obscured by a performer’s body. As a complement of character and narrative, it represents, rather than a threat, a soothing balm, a promise of middle-class comfort. Unlike Sonny or the Poppers, the Farrows live a life of ease and comfort, at least on the surface, and throughout the film Jacy radiates the unshakeable confidence of somebody who has always gotten what she wanted. The precarity of Sonny’s existence might push him to desire something more than a life lived forever in Anarene (as it seems to do for Duane, who ends the film by joining the military to fight in Korea); the wealth and ease of Jacy’s life, on the other hand, has led her to believe the town will remain a safe haven. Every piece of furniture and graspable item

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in her room supports that belief—the radio, but also the full-sized bed, the skirted dressing table, and the expensive perfumes (described in the novel as a “fifty-dollar bottle of Chanel No. 5”). Even the song on the radio conveys a gentle ease, with Tony Bennet’s mellow crooning of “Cold Cold Heart” much more pacifying than the insistent twang of Hank Williams’s original version, which plays earlier on the radio in the shabby pool hall. Jacy’s mother, Lois, is acutely aware of the dangers embedded beneath the surface of Anarene’s wealth; having been ensnared by them herself, she knows how Anarene will grind one down regardless of money, and she does not want that for her daughter. She has come into Jacy’s room to disabuse her of the notion that her wealth will somehow protect her from the town’s deleterious effects. Lois fears that Jacy will want to settle down with local roughneck Duane and never take advantage of the one opportunity of wealth that Lois believes her daughter might actually benefit from—escape. So she pushes Jacy to end her relationship with Duane and prepare to find a rich boy in college next year. Some of this is projection on Lois’s part. As we eventually discover (and as is spelled out more clearly in the novel), she had something of a wild youth, including an intense love affair with an older man. But she has settled for the stability of marriage and wealth, and now, even as she continues to have love affairs, she is bored and lonely. Immediately before coming into Jacy’s room, she sits on the sofa, drink in hand, watching the TV game show Strike It Rich, while her husband Gene dozes on the sofa next to her, a copy of Collier’s magazine spread open on his lap. The Farrow’s is the only television in the film,13 and represents, together with the Collier’s, an adult version of the middle-class trappings that populate Jacy’s room. Lois is bored out of her mind and it is out of this milieu that she rises to confront her daughter. In a sense, Lois here embodies a complementary metaphor to the handgun on the wall for Sonny, a different kind of warning or even threat. During the conversation with her daughter, she insults her, encourages her to have sex with Duane to get it out of her system, and disparages the town and everything about it. She wants Jacy to take any course but the one that she had chosen for herself, the one that is wearing her down. The dialogue between the two replicates their conversation in the novel almost word for word, with one striking omission: in the novel, Lois tells Jacy, “life’s too damn hard here … The land’s got too much power over you.

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Being rich here is a good way to go insane” (McMurtry 1966). Perhaps this line was too on the nose for the film. Instead, the set design conveys the insanity that Lois feels and that she imagines lurking in Jacy’s future— sometimes replicating Lois’s warning (the all-white décor in Jacy’s room being just as flat as Anarene) and sometimes in ironic opposition to it (what could be wrong with all this luxury?). While Jacy is resistant to her mother’s admonitions at first (she “loves” Duane), eventually she is persuaded: by the end of the film she has escaped to Dallas. Sonny, though, has not. The Last Picture Show flirts with conventions from a variety of genres. A historical drama that features elements of a coming-of-age film, it also reconfigures tropes of the Western and veers toward melodrama in scenes like the fight between Duane and Sonny, or Ruth’s final tirade. For the novelist, McMurtry, it was a scathing tell-all of the seedy underbelly of his hometown. To a certain extent, director Bogdanovich attempted to refashion it as a nostalgia piece, a picturesque but stark farewell to the films of Classical Hollywood that he loved so well and to the era that brought them forth. The film works because of how it weaves these various generic threads into a rich tapestry that encompasses them all, mostly seamlessly. Robert Surtees’s cinematography provides a nostalgic black-and-white sheen, while also pushing toward a less comfortable visual palette with its awkward close-ups and abrupt intrusions of unstable camera movements. The performances, too, work particularly well across these different genres, especially considering the clashing styles of the old Hollywood hands like Johnson, the theatrical and live television training of Burstyn, Leachman, and Brennan, and the youthful fervor (and in the case of Shepherd, inexperience) of the young performers. However, grounding these aspects, creating a space for the cinematography, direction, and performance, is Platt’s design, with every detail, from the smallest graspable object to the reconstruction of an entire main street, meticulously planned and deployed. Furthermore, the design does not simply create the space, it amplifies and extends thematic and metaphorical developments, ironic commentary, and representational authenticity in ways that add nuance and meaning to the film from its opening frame. Once we recognize how much meaning, or at the least potential for meaning, the production design creates for this film, the significance of Platt’s contribution to the film’s authorship becomes much clearer.

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Notes 1. For example, see Richard Dyer on Home from the Hill (MGM 1960): “the house is the woman’s domain – it is decorated in off-white, with chintzy patterns and in upper-class good taste” (1981, 1154). 2. In the original novel, Larry McMurtry specifies a 1941 Chevrolet, but the film version seems to be a 1939 model (McMurtry 1966/1994, 1). 3. The radio is on screen for such a short period that it is difficult to discern what model and year it is, but it bears striking resemblance to several Bakelite table radio models that were manufactured between 1946 and 1950. 4. The rich-versus-poor theme could be refined much further, of course. Much of the film’s subtext concerns the capricious nature of capitalism and business ownership, particularly in a region where wealth often depends upon whether a hole dug in the ground strikes oil. 5. There is much to be said about the role cinematography plays in conveying mother and daughter’s differing conceptions of life in Anarene. In the Farrow house, for example, the living room where Lois spends much of her time is often shot in low light and heavy shadows, whereas Jacy’s room is mostly bright and evenly lit, with relatively few shadows. 6. It is worth noting that the scene in Jacy’s room also foreshadows Lois’s telephone plea to meet up with her lover Abilene (Clu Gulager), which directly follows the bedroom sequence and will prove fruitless, thereby increasing her boredom and frustration with men. 7. For example, see C.  S. Tashiro’s discussion of street scenes in Doctor Zhivago (MGM 1965), and the tension between the “heterogeneity of the script and characters,” and the lack of authenticity of the set-built streets (Tashiro 1998, 32–34). 8. There is a biographical component to the decision as well. When Platt and Bogdanovich first left New York for Los Angeles in the summer of 1964, they drove a 1952 Ford convertible with a cracked block that had to be constantly attended to, including coasting down hills whenever they came to one. Platt describes how this worked until they came to Kansas, where there were no hills, and they constantly had to stop and let the engine cool down. It took days to cross the state, which helped cement the couple’s “us against the world” mentality. As Platt writes, “This geography stayed in my memory and I was to return to Kansas to make “Paper Moon” there because of its qualities of loneliness and endless vistas” (Platt n.d., 107–109). 9. In an AFI seminar in 1977, Platt describes reading literature of the place and era, watching TV shows (I Love Lucy) when relevant, and has high praise for LIFE Magazine in its ability to convey “the way people really dressed, real interiors” (Platt 1977).

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10. See: “The Last Picture Show: A Look Back” (1999); “‘The Last Picture Show’ 40th Anniversary Panel” (2014); Mankiewicz (2020). 11. As an example of how these kinds of narratives inform audience understanding of a film and its production, see a YouTube video from 2019 about visiting the locations of The Last Picture Show and its sequel Texasville (Columbia Pictures 1990) in which the narrator repeats almost verbatim Boganovich’s recounting of “discovering” Archer City. “Filming Locations of The Last Picture Show and Texasville,” YouTube video, 15:56, “A View from the Middle,” July 14, 2019. 12. If one looks closely enough at the pool hall marquee, the faded original sign WELCOME DOMINOES can be read. This is an artefact of the building’s actual use, and perhaps a nod to the book in which a domino parlor run by Sonny’s father plays a minor role. There is also a faded and dented sign advertising Camel cigarettes. 13. In the novel, the Poppers also have a TV and Sonny spends a good deal of his time at Ruth’s watching it while she does housework.

References Altman, Rick. 1984. A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre. Cinema Journal 23 (3): 6–18. https://www.jstor.com/stable/1225093. Barnwell, Jane. 2004. Production Design: Architects of the Screen. New  York: Wallflower. Barsacq, Léon. (1970) 1976. Caligari’s Cabinet and Other Grand Illusions: A History of Film Design. Translated by Michael Bullock. New York: Plume. “Behind the Scenes of Star Wars.” 1977. American Cinematographer 58 (7): 698–762 (Non-consecutive). https://f001.backblazeb2.com/file/ac-­ pdfs/1977_07.pdf Berliner, Todd. 2002. The Genre Film as Booby Trap: 1970s Genre Bending and ‘The French Connection.’. Cinema Journal 40 (3): 25–46. https://www.jstor. com/stable/1350193. Bogdanovich, Peter. 2019. In Conversation: Peter Bogdanovich. Interview by Andrew Goldman. Vulture. March 4. https://www.vulture.com/2019/03/ peter-­bogdanovich-­in-­conversation.html Bogdanovich, Peter, dir. 1971. The Last Picture Show. Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 1999. DVD, 118 min. ———. 1972. What’s Up, Doc?. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2003. DVD, 94 min.

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———. 1973.  Paper Moon. London: Eureka Entertainment Ltd, 2015. BluRay, 102 min. Brooks, James L., dir. 1983. Terms of Endearment. Hollywood, CA: Paramount, 2013. Blu-Ray, 132 min. Dyer, Richard. 1981. Minneli’s Web of Dreams. Movie 58: 1153–1154. Fischer, Lucy. 2015. “Introduction.” In Art Direction and Production Design, edited by Lucy Fischer, 1–22. London: I.B. Tauris. Gibbs, John. 2002. Mise-en-Scène: Film Style and Interpretation. London: Wallflower. LoBrutto, Vincent. 1992. By Design: Interviews with Film Production Designers. Westport: Praeger. Mankiewicz, Ben, Host. 2020. Cybill.” I’m Still Peter Bogdanovich (Podcast). May 5. https://theplotthickens.tcm.com/season-­one/episode-­guide/. Accessed 31 July 2020. Marshall, Frank. 2020. Telephone Interview with the Author. April 3. McMurtry, Larry. (1966) 1994. The Last Picture Show. New  York: Simon & Schuster. ———. 2010. Hollywood: A Third Memoir. New York: Simon & Schuster. McMurtry, Larry, and Peter Bogdanovich. 1970. The Last Picture Show (Script). https://www.scriptslug.com/assets/uploads/scripts/the-­l ast-­p icture-­ show-­1971.pdf Miller, George, dir. 1987. The Witches of Eastwick. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2017. Blu-Ray, 118 min. Platt, Polly. 1977. American Film Institute: Harold Lloyd Seminar, December 7. ———. n.d. “It Was Worth It.” Collection of Antonia and Sashy Bogdanovich. Unpublished Memoir. Reiner, Carl, dir. 1983. The Man with Two Brains. Burbank, Ca: Warner Home Entertainment, 2017. Blu-Ray, 90 min. Ritchie, Michael. 2000. Visual History with Michael Ritchie, Interviewed by Jeremy Kagan, Director’s Guild of America, November 22. https://www.dga. org/Craft/VisualHistory/Interviews/Michael-­Ritchie.aspx Ritchie, Michael, dir. 1976. The Bad News Bears. Hollywood, CA.  Paramount. DVD, 101 min. Royal Theater. 2020. About the Royal Theater. http://www.royaltheater.org/ about2.html. Accessed 5 Aug 2020. Singer, Jeremy. 2014. The Man Who Literally Build “Star Wars.” Esquire, May 4. https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a28570/star-­wars-­roger­christian/

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Stults, Shirly. 1970. “Last Picture Show” Filming Underway Here. The Archer County News, October 22. https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/ metapth708496/m1/1/?q=last%20picture%20show Tashiro, C.S. 1998. Pretty Pictures: Production Design and the History of Film. Austin: University of Texas Press. “The Last Picture Show: A Look Back.” 1999. Directed by Laurent Bouzereau. The Last Picture Show. DVD.  Directed by Peter Bogdanovich. 1971. Culver City: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment. “‘The Last Picture Show’ 40th Anniversary Panel.” 2014. YouTube Video. 33:22. “Oscars,” March 20. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAPoBmLC8uo

CHAPTER 4

Location and Design

Let’s consider a few of the films Polly Platt designed: The Last Picture Show (1971) What’s Up, Doc? (1972) Paper Moon (1973) The Bad News Bears (1976) Terms of Endearment (1983) The Witches of Eastwick (1987) While each of these films features indelible performances, expressive cinematography, and thoughtful direction, each is so thoroughly grounded in its location that it is difficult to distinguish the films’ characters or narrative from the landscapes that contain them. If performance or photography first come to mind when envisioning these films, the imagery of location and setting likely encompass those more immediately noticeable aspects. It is hard to imagine The Last Picture Show without recollecting the windswept main street of its opening and closing shots. Likewise, the hilly San Francisco streets of What’s Up, Doc?, the wide-open plains of Paper Moon, the Little League baseball diamond of The Bad News Bears, Sections of this chapter previously appeared in “Design as Authorship: Polly Platt’s New Hollywood Aesthetic,” published in New Wave, New Hollywood, 2021, New York: Bloomsbury. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Hunter, Polly Platt, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82120-3_4

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or the quaint New England streets and homes of The Witches of Eastwick. Even her lesser known or celebrated films are imbued with such a strong sense of place that it becomes impossible to divorce character and narrative from locale: the streets of ‘60s Los Angeles in Targets (1968) or the contrast between Houston’s dodgy criminal netherworld and its nouveau riche mansions in The Thief Who Came to Dinner (1973). Lawrence Webb describes location shooting as “crucial to the films of the New Hollywood” and the practices associated with shooting on location as “bound up with the ideology of auteurism in multiple, overlapping ways” (2019, 151). Auteurism, entwined as it is with notions of authenticity and—at least in its New Hollywood iteration—realism, benefited from the ways that location shooting endowed productions with aspects of the authentically real. The maverick nature of the ‘70s auteur reputation was also enhanced by shooting on location, as it showed a willingness and an ability to buck the system by resisting the stage-bound traditions of Classical Hollywood and the oversight that came with them (Webb 2019, 132). Realistically, technological advances and budgetary concerns had as much to do with the growing preference for location shooting in the 1970s as auteurist independence (Cook 2000, 395). Advances in camera and sound recording equipment made it easier to shoot on location, and it became increasingly cheaper to do so, which satisfied a studio system still recovering from its late-1960s recession. But as with so many artifacts of the era’s mytho-historical reception, the preference for location shooting remains tightly entwined with its auteurism. As such, the choice to film on location, the selection of specific locations, and the approach to shooting those locations are regularly credited to the films’ directors. To be clear, location shooting as a practice, whether due to aesthetic choices, budget concerns, or a desire for studio freedom, long pre-dates the 1970s. However, its rapid growth during the era expanded the role of the production designer, under whose purview, for a time at least, location scouting and management fell (Fischer 2015, 7). In fact, many of the most significant designers of New Hollywood also acted as location managers or scouts (or both) on their films, including Richard Sylbert, Michael Haller, Dean Tavoularis, and Polly Platt. For these designers and others, location decisions were not simply a matter of finding a landscape, a street, or a building that matched the script, or even one that fit the director’s vision, although those concerns certainly played a role. Rather just as with the details of design, location choices were made based on the designer’s reading of the script and her perception of its characters, narrative, and conceptual themes. These could be major decisions, such as Platt’s to relocate Paper Moon, or more seemingly minor decisions that still affected a film’s

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visual and narrative presentation. For example, in scouting locations for Chinatown Richard Sylbert describes how “every building that Gittes visits will be above his eye level, because it’s harder to go uphill than down” (LoBrutto 1992, 51), an approach to location that subtly enhances the many imperceptible obstacles that Gittes faces in his investigation. This chapter explores the ways that Polly Platt integrated location into her overall design strategy, how her attention to detail when it came to interior and exterior structures, to clothes, and to objects, also applied to her scouting of specific locations. This includes what might be called macro-locations—geographical settings, cities and states, neighborhoods—and micro-settings like specific streets or buildings. The chapter begins with a brief examination of the New Hollywood historical context—how the practice of location shooting expanded, how that expansion affected the palette of New Hollywood cinema, and how Platt’s contemporary production designers also oversaw an approach to location that integrated it into their design strategies. The chapter moves on to highlight the specific location choices Platt made on her films, particularly in the 1970s, but also on some of her ‘80s films. Building on the previous chapter, this one will then analyze the importance of location to such aspects of the films as narrative, character, concept and themes, and overall visual aesthetic with examples from a variety of Platt’s films. Finally, it will end with a case study of The Bad News Bears, a film which might seem overly simple in terms of location—almost the entirety of the film happens in one place—but which provides sharpened insight into Platt’s grasp of how effective, thoughtful location decisions can create visual and thematic resonances that deepen a film’s impact on viewers. Thus, the chapter is not simply a consideration of location, but rather how in Platt’s films location and production design inform each other and how both develop out of her consideration of the resonances of the script.



Location and New Hollywood

New Hollywood films often walk a fine line between realism and expressionism, deftly blending elements of both in their mix of conventional and non-conventional styles of filming, editing, design, and sound. Geoff King describes this as “seemingly contradictory” (2002, 41), and argues that this playfulness came about as directors in the early 1970s were given greater creative freedom due to studio upheaval. This continuum between the expressive and the realistic might better be understood as a dialogue rather than a contradiction. Filmmakers of the era, equally influenced by

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the Classical Hollywood studio films of their youth and the more experimental films of various European New Waves, felt comfortable blending expressive and realistic narrative and stylistic modes in ways that most previous Hollywood filmmakers had not (or had not been allowed to). The result in these instances is often a film that seems grounded in the real world, in which the implications and ramifications of events and character actions take on a more expressive, personal quality. Although not always the case, much of that real-world grounding finds its expression via the verisimilitude of location shooting. Take, for example, Bonnie and Clyde (1967), often noted as the film that set New Hollywood in motion. The opening scene announces the film’s subtle departure from classical conventions in an effort to convey Bonnie’s dissatisfaction with life. Bonnie (Faye Dunaway) paces her cramped bedroom alone, frustrated and naked. In addition to the risqué nudity (mild by European and later Hollywood standards), the sequence employs discomforting close-ups, zooms, and jump cuts with awkward, shaky camera movements to convey a sense of uneasy boredom. These stylistic flourishes call attention to themselves in ways that circumvent traditional Hollywood practices of “invisible” style. The production design, on the other hand, grounds the sequence in a drab realism that indicates the film’s Depression-era setting and the simple, plain life that Bonnie desperately wishes to flee. The visible ceiling, the degraded quality of the mirror, the dusty photographs hanging askew on the wall, and the shaky brass bedstead through which Bonnie peers like prison bars all create an intensely realistic space. This realism remains “invisible,” but the appearance of reality allows the more expressionistic camera work and editing to convey Bonnie’s interiority so efficiently. Robert Kolker describes how the scene’s elements “give the viewer a sense of immediate, if confused, attachment to the character” (2000, 33). Yet, in describing the color, the close-ups, the editing, Kolker never mentions production designer Tavoularis, cinematographer Burnett Guffey, or editor Dede Allen; everything about the sequence that works (or does not work) is credited to director Arthur Penn. Clearly, though, the talents of all three and more are vital to the sequence. (Additionally, Francis E. Stahl’s sound design blends realism and expressionism throughout the film, including the birdsong in this scene). Guffey has discussed the attempt to create an unglamorous realism on the film (emphasis in original): “Nothing was to be beautiful. Everything was to be, you might say, harsh—and that’s the way it was through the whole picture” (Lightman 2017). This

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harshness was facilitated by the film’s location shooting and resultant production design. Tavoularis wanted to do something new in the film, “to rebel against the Pillow Talk, Hollywood movie look … I had looked at rooms in places like Waxahachie, and I knew what a modest house looked like—I wanted those old ceilings with wallpaper on them to be visible” (Harris 2008, 253). Once Tavoularis found the rooms and other spaces he desired, Guffey was forced to rethink forty years of experience and resort to using fewer and smaller lights, with smaller cameras and rigs (Lightman 2017). Thus the production designer’s location work led to a design strategy that directly affected the way the film was lit and shot. The resultant film exhibits the combined efforts of Tavoularis, Guffey, and Penn to capture the stark reality of Bonne and Clyde’s Depression-era existence.1 While the design on Bonnie and Clyde was not completely new— Tavoularis admitted to finding inspiration in films directed by Sidney Lumet (Harris 2008, 253)—it made a noticeable contribution to what would rapidly become the standard approach to film design in New Hollywood. A major factor was that the drive for realism, in both contemporary films and period pieces, was coupled with a growing desire to shoot on location. Webb explains how, “The move away from studio production, under way since World War II, was now accelerating at a new pace,” and describes the increased desire to shoot on location as an effort to replicate “authenticity, realism, immediacy, contemporaneity, social awareness, imperfection” (2019, 124). The tie between narrative “realism” and formal “imperfection” grew increasingly desirable to New Hollywood filmmakers, particularly as cinematographers incorporated stylistic approaches derived from verité and direct cinema documentary practices—lens flares, shaky cameras, awkward framing. Such “artificiality” would have seemed unrealistic in classical Hollywood. Joshua Gleich and Lawrence Webb describe “a certain irony to this style of realism that draws attention to the presence of the camera, unlike the seamless dramatic realism of classical Hollywood that can now appear staged by comparison” (Gleich and Webb 2019, 9). In other words, while New Hollywood filmmakers were often driven to depict realism on film, and while I discuss Platt’s efforts to imbue her sets with a believable realism, it is worth noting that definitions of “realism” have changed throughout Hollywood history.2 Production designers working on location had three broad options when designing both interior and exterior spaces: repurposing and accentuating existing structures and interiors; completely renovating existing

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structures (e.g., tearing out walls and building new ones or redesigning building facades); and building new sets from scratch. The latter approach sometimes meant building freestanding structures or, on other occasions, hiring local soundstages or warehouses in which to house purpose-built sets. Because of this intimate relationship between locations and sets, in the early years of New Hollywood production, designers regularly oversaw location scouting. Tavoularis says, “You used to always location scout yourself, and it was fun. Although it’s a time consuming thing—hundreds of hours really.”3 Like Tavoularis and Platt, Richard Sylbert (Chinatown, Shampoo), Michael D. Haller (Harold and Maude, Bound for Glory), and other production designers of the early ‘70s, played significant roles in determining the shooting locations of their films. In not only constructing and dressing sets, but also deciding where those sets are located and how they look inside and out, and working closely with cinematographers to light them, New Hollywood production designers significantly crafted the mise-en-scène of their films. Furthermore, in selecting locations, their decisions were driven by considerations of how they might affect narrative and character. Tavoularis choosing small rooms so that ceilings might be visible was as much about refining Bonnie’s character as it was striving for period authenticity. On his relationship with production designer Mike Haller, director Hal Ashby said, “When I start pre-production, the person I work most closely with is my production designer, Michael Haller. He will have more ideas than anyone” (Young and Bruns [1980] 2010, 101).4 On Bound for Glory, period authenticity was important to Ashby so Haller drove thousands of miles around Texas, Oklahoma, and other states trying to find the dustbowl conditions of Guthrie’s era. However, since the 1930s, the flat, dusty areas that Guthrie had traversed had become too green. So Haller scouted the towns of Stockton and Isleton, California, which had the dustbowl feel Ashby desired (Dawson 2009, 171). More noticeably, it was Haller’s idea to relocate Being There from the novel’s New York City to Washington, DC, a decision that allowed the filmmakers to imbue the movie with the visual symbols of American political power so important to its concept (Young and Bruns [1980] 2010, 101). Thus, in integrating their location and design strategies in an effort to deepen their films’ character, narrative, and thematic development, these production designers oversaw their films’ visual milieu. In doing so, they were intentionally contributing to their films’ authorship as well.

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Platt and Macro-location

Although rarely credited as location manager on any of her films, Platt generally played a significant role in the location scouting process—in fact, she not only scouted locations within a production’s chosen city or region, but regularly guided the productions’ choice of where to shoot in the first place, what we might call the macro-location. This should not be confused with the film’s setting. Although the drive for authenticity in 1970s filmmaking generally led to films being shot in the location where they were set—The French Connection (1971) in New  York City, for example, or, more explicitly, Nashville (1975) in Nashville—this was not always the case. As mentioned above, for example, the Texas settings in Bound for Glory were shot on location, but in California. For Platt, setting was generally secondary to location. She tended to care less about where a film was meant to be set—or where its source novel or script were set—than she cared about how location would appear visually onscreen, and how that appearance would interact with and, thus, enhance a film’s thematic, character, and narrative development. For instance, it was Platt’s decision to set What’s Up, Doc? (1972) in San Francisco. Early script outlines indicate that Bogdanovich’s original idea was to set the film in New  York City (Bogdanovich 1971), later changing his mind and shifting the film’s setting to Chicago. While Bogdanovich’s original concept pitched Ryan O’Neal’s Howard Bannister as the Midwestern fish-out-of-water that he remains in the finished film, Barbara Streisand’s Judy was more of a tough New York chick with a penchant for petty crime—in early versions, when they meet in the hotel gift shop, she is shoplifting books. Platt believed Judy would be more sympathetic, and more intriguing, if she, too, were an outsider, and that Chicago would not be an appropriate substitute: It seemed to me to be a city that differed very little from New York, except for the big lake. I didn’t want to see the character Streisand was playing: an irresponsible and impossible creature, in Chicago with her Brooklyn accent. I wanted to get her out of the East Coast where the character could be an outsider … Chicago didn’t “feel” like a funny place to me. It was earnest and buttoned-up. (Platt n.d., 191)

She traveled to several US cities trying to find one that “felt” right— Seattle, Dallas, Houston—and eventually landed in San Francisco, a search

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driven by her conceptualization of the narrative and characters even when the script was in its earliest, outline versions. By the time she settled on San Francisco, the first draft of the script by Robert Benton and David Newman had been written, with a Chicago setting. When Buck Henry was hired to do comedic punch-ups for the script, he also had to be cognizant of the film’s new San Francisco setting. According Platt: I told Buck Henry about the hills and valleys in San Francisco, the escalator inside the Hilton, the ferries where the chase could end up; everything. I didn’t really expect he would listen to my excited babble about the location, but a great many of the things I told him about showed up in his next draft. I just told him about the city and he used it! (Platt n.d., 191)

Furthermore, Platt and location manager Frank Marshall drove around the city for two and a half weeks meticulously plotting out the route for the film’s famous car chase sequence, a route that Bogdanovich largely adhered to (Platt 1977). What’s Up, Doc? is a San Francisco film. The city’s hills,5 its docklands, its Pacific Heights homes not only imbue the film with a vastly different cityscape than the flatter, skyscraper-riddled Manhattan and Chicago, but also enhance the film’s themes and reinforce its tone. Howard and Judy are both strangers in this town—they don’t know anybody, they get easily lost, they’re up, they’re down—the result being that they meet on equal footing and the bubble that forms around them as their attraction for each other grows is fashioned by their shared outsider status. The film is a screwball comedy, to be sure, and may not have the gravitas of The Last Picture Show, which preceded it, but it remains a film that was thoughtfully developed and written to achieve a thematic unity and consistency. Thus, as with the barren opening of The Last Picture Show, which forecasts the film’s concept of life as a wearing grind, or the wide-open vistas of Paper Moon, which portrays its father and daughter on the run as two lonely figures against a vast, indifferent world, the San Francisco setting of What’s Up, Doc? is an essential aspect of the film’s thematic development, its narrative arc, and its generic humor. Platt made similar choices about location on other films she worked on. For The Thief Who Came to Dinner (1973), it was her idea to relocate the film from the Chicago of the novel’s setting, to Houston, believing that city’s nouveau riche milieu would make it easier for viewer’s to sympathize with the film’s cat burglar protagonist (Ryan O’Neal)—she again found

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Chicago, in this case its old-money preciousness, to be the wrong fit (LoBrutto 1992, 161–162). Likewise, she suggested moving the action of Paper Moon (1973) from the deep south of its source novel (Addie Pray) to the plains of Kansas and Missouri, and Laszló Kovács’s striking black-­ and-­white cinematography alone makes a compelling argument for Platt’s decision. She chose the desert outside of Tucson (where she had once lived) for the Kristofferson and Streisand getaway home in A Star is Born (1976), and she insisted that The Witches of Eastwick (1988) be shot in New England, not the Pacific Northwest that director George Miller had originally intended—in fact she spent days driving up and down the Rhode Island and Massachusetts coasts to find Cohasset, Massachusetts, the town just right for the film (Platt n.d., 305). To a certain extent, in coming to these conclusions about location and convincing directors and producers to accept her decisions, Platt was operating under standard best practices for production designers acting as location managers in early ‘70s Hollywood: enhance the film’s realism by finding locations that evoke not only the place, but thematic aspects of the film tied to place (and if they work within or reduce the budget, even better). In that regard, Platt was a consummate location manager and scout, especially when teamed with her friend and location assistant Frank Marshall, who worked with her in some capacity on all four Bogdanovich films, but also The Thief Who Came to Dinner and The Other Side of the Wind (2018). Marshall has described their relationship as highly collaborative, always driven by what would work best for the film visually and stylistically: She would explain to me what she was looking for—and why it was important to the story. All the locations that we ever picked were because of the story and what the team was trying to say. We just wouldn’t pick a street, it would have to look a certain way, or be able to contribute to the visual story telling. And I would go out and know what I was looking for, I had a purpose. (Marshall 2020)

As mentioned in Chap. 2, for Platt “visual storytelling” derived from concept and theme. “Every good film needs a theme, a special look, and part of designing a picture is figuring out that theme and ‘look’” (Platt n.d., 235). Theme and look are not the same thing, but they can engage in dialogue with one another and when they do so, the theme deepens. Because themes also engage in dialogue with character and narrative, as

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themes deepen, so then do character and narrative. In Platt’s career, the macro-locations of so many of her films play the roles of both announcing the themes and then developing them.



Platt and Micro-location

When a film’s macro-location (in some cases more than one) is determined, the more intensive work of the location manager begins—finding and choosing specific sites, both exterior and interior, where the film’s scenes will be shot. This is the process often described as “location scouting,” as it takes place within a specified locale. With the script in hand and with directions from the production, the location manager roams the city or town in search of locations that are not only right—not “just a street” as Marshall says—but right in addition to being visually compelling and conducive to developing various story aspects. Depending on the individual film—its genre, its era, its tone—similar location decisions can have different effects. Thus, making Jake Gittes constantly walk uphill in Chinatown conveys his struggle to learn the truth that continues to elude him, whereas having the government agent forced to tote his golf bag uphill in What’s Up, Doc? provides one of the films humorous visual motifs. To be sure, in addition to aesthetic concerns, many factors go into choosing locations: budgetary, technical, availability, and numerous union codes and rules. While New Hollywood location shooting is often framed as having been possible due to its cost effectiveness compared to studio filming, and desirable due to the possibilities it generated for experimentation, Webb explains that “Location was frequently more expensive, harder to control, and logistically complex, and it carried risks and contingencies that were hard for studios to rationalize” (2019, 127). In interviews, Platt acknowledges the same—explaining how the unexpected could often add to budget considerations. However, she had developed extensive budgeting skills, including using ingenious methods for saving money on production—skills she had begun developing during her time working with Roger Corman. Like many great production designers, as soon as she looked at a script, she would start calculating the budget in her head— accounting for set construction, props, and location costs—and this generally led her to preferring shooting on location. Describing the process in 1977, she said:

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You just cannot build four walls—we call it “four walls”—you cannot make four walls here, at a studio, for less than seventy-five to a hundred thousand dollars. It doesn’t matter what size the set is. I’m talking about Barbra Streisand’s set, you know, her apartment in A Star is Born, that little tiny thing? That was ninety-five thousand dollars, undressed. Four walls … That’s working in a studio. That’s why you like to go on location. I mean, you get it for free. I mean, you pay a hundred dollars a day. (Platt 1977)

In interview after interview and throughout her memoir, Platt displays her budget savvy—in fact, before she would agree to work with James Brooks on Terms of Endearment (1983), she insisted he devise “an honest budget” for production (Platt n.d., 284). When Platt was scouting locations, whether directly herself or via an assistant such as Marshall, she brought the same meticulous attention to detail that she did when creating building facades, designing interiors, and selecting props. In fact, the two are so intimately linked for her that, in describing her work on The Last Picture Show, she said, “As a designer, it was just a question of going and finding the right locations” (Platt 1977). Thus, just as she saw sets and costumes as being dictated by character, so she also saw sets and their design as being dictated by location. And because she oversaw all these elements of her films, the visual pallet of those movies, almost the totality of the mise-en-scène, derives from Platt’s eye, her understanding of the script, and her ability to “see” the script as a film. When it came to choosing locations on the micro level, Platt was as adept at finding interiors that needed little work (like the pool hall in Picture Show, as discussed in Chap. 3) as she was at locating empty spaces that could be redressed to suit her requirements; exteriors that were nearly ready as is, or those that needed full makeovers; desperate and scuzzy locales and buildings, and refined domiciles of the upper classes. Some of her films required that she do all of these at once. The Thief Who Came to Dinner (1973), the first film she designed that was not directed by Bogdanovich, moves between Houston’s Johnson Space Center, corporate office buildings, the homes of the city’s rich elite, and the decrepit, out-of-the-way haunts of Houston’s low-rent criminal denizens. Platt scouted Houston extensively for the film’s varied settings. She invests each location with the same care she had on her earlier films, and all of them work to contextualize and complicate the narrative and key character motivations.

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For example, Laura (Jacqueline Bisset) is a formerly wealthy socialite who has fallen on financial hard times. When she first meets Webster (Ryan O’Neal) at a high society soiree, she takes him to be one of the privileged but debonair men she typically meets at such functions, albeit younger and more attractive. She is surprised to discover that behind the façade, he is the cat burglar who has been making a name for himself robbing the homes of Houston’s elite. Almost immediately she decides not only to remain in a relationship with him, but to become his accomplice. At first such a decision seems quite striking, almost ridiculous, but when Webster arrives at Laura’s house for the first time—which is also the viewer’s first sight of the home—her behavior begins to make more sense. Laura lives in a designer house with a swimming pool in the back, befitting her social class and aspirations. However, aside from the bedroom and one solitary lamp that sits on the floor of the main living room, the house is bereft of furniture. The swimming pool, which we first see the following morning, is empty of water, full of leaves and debris, and surrounded by lush overgrowth. Thus, a beautiful designer home that would be suitable to the station Laura imagines for herself—the station to which she once belonged and desires to achieve again—has fallen into disrepair and she has, presumably, had to sell off her furniture to maintain some semblance of an income (when Webster asks her where her furniture is, she replies, simply: “Who needs furniture?”). Marshall, who scouted locations on Thief, describes Platt giving him specific directions of what to look for on the film. In the case of Laura’s house, the production had developed a relationship with Ellie Fondren, an actual Houston socialite. Fondren introduced the crew to homeowners in the city’s tony River Oaks neighborhood, which would serve as the locale for most of the homes that Webster burgles in the film.6 She also owned several houses, including the one that would serve as Laura’s (Bergeron 2020). It was for sale at the time, which is why the pool was empty, the garden unkempt. Marshall believed with some fixing up, it would work for Laura. He describes Platt’s reaction when she saw it: She said don’t touch anything, it’s perfect. This is who the character is. So where I couldn’t see how it would be useful, she saw a story point and made it part of the character. And it also saved us money because we didn’t have to clean it up or get any furniture. (Marshall 2020)

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This home and its barren state take on added narrative and thematic significance as the film progresses. At first its use appears to be limited to its furnished bedroom, as Laura and Webster’s sexual relationship intensifies. But Webster moves in and as Dave, an insurance investigator (Warren Oates), begins to close in on Webster, the house becomes one of their meeting places in the game of cat and mouse that slowly unfolds. Thematically the house plays a significant role in the way it ties the film’s various locations together. As Webster infiltrates the lives of Houston’s elite, we see more and more of their houses and places of work—luxurious interiors with chandeliers, private bars, gilded furnishings. This is the life Laura once lived, and while she is still accepted in society and still has her house, she no longer has the financial wherewithal to maintain that luxurious lifestyle. When Webster is not burgling, fleecing, or blackmailing the elite, he is fencing his stolen goods with the Houston crime underground (Ned Beatty, Gregory Sierra). These meetings regularly take place in scuzzy locations—a once famous drive-in movie lot (The Trail), now featuring broken windows, fading paint, and rubbish and debris strewn about the lot; another time they meet amid a pile of rubble underneath a bridge along the city’s Ship Channel (Bergeron 2020). These locations have an edge of danger, visually incongruous with the gauche luxury of Webster’s marks. Laura’s house, then, acts as a nexus between the two worlds through which Webster moves. Architecturally, its designer structure and pool represent the affluence of one who could afford to acquire such a house in one Houston’s most exclusive neighborhoods. On the other hand, it is a run-down dump, much like the locales of Webster’s meetings with his fences. It occupies both worlds at once: not only a “perfect” representation of Laura and her current precarity, but also a visual depiction of the film’s themes of wealth and the social and financial mobility that Webster hopes to achieve through his life of crime, and that Laura hopes to achieve by attaching her hopes to his success. Platt deployed this kind of visual incongruity to her designs throughout her career. Sometimes it works to comedic ends, such as when Eunice is led to a waterfront criminal hideout in What’s Up, Doc? while Howard and Judy arrive at Mr. Larrabee’s posh Pacific Heights home. At other times, it becomes a signifier of more substantial aspects of character or narrative. In Terms of Endearment (much of which was also shot in Houston), the contrast between Aurora’s house and Emma and Flap’s first dingy apartment above a garage7 could not be more striking. But even when Emma and Flap’s fortunes rise as his career progresses, the homes they move into

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continue to lack the perfectly manicured gardens and lawns of Aurora’s house or the meticulous décor of its interiors—a contrast that visually reinforces Aurora’s contention throughout the film that Flap is not good enough for her daughter. To a different end, and slightly less incongruous, are the homes of John Norman and Esther in A Star is Born (1976). John Norman lives in a huge mansion, befitting his rock star status, but every room has a different design and all are cluttered with a mix of recording equipment, games, and discarded liquor bottles. All feature drawn shades and curtains, shrouding the rooms in darkness. Esther, when we first meet her, lives in the small, cutely decorated apartment mentioned above. It has none of the grandeur of John Norman’s mansion, but is much more homey—as if somebody who cares lives there. Then, as the couple’s relationship deepens, they build an adobe house in the Arizona desert outside Tucson—a house that Platt designed and built specifically for the film. This house, where the couple share some of their most intimate scenes, blends their sensibilities—spacious and airy like John Norman’s mansion, but thoughtfully decorated and cozy like Esther’s apartment. Additionally, it is populated with typical desert accoutrements—Navaho blankets, Hopi dolls, Edward Curtis prints—for which Platt had developed a taste during her own time living in Arizona in the early 1960s.

Designing on Location Scouting locations, both macro and micro, and finding the “perfect” storefront, seedy dive, or posh living room was only part of the work. Platt speaks on occasion about locations that required little or no construction or dressing, like the pool hall in Picture Show or Laura’s house in Thief— although one must wonder how much of that is just Platt downplaying her accomplishments in a manner typical of Hollywood crewmembers, particularly women. In any case, as frequent or more were the cases when Platt and her location crew discovered a functional location that needed redressing or more extensive construction. Examples of such have already been mentioned, like the gas station signs in Picture Show. Reasons for alterations might include addressing the film’s period, as in Picture Show or Paper Moon, because a location is ideal but its structures are not so, or, as in Star, the necessary structure is non-existent. The reasons might be subtler, such as to show the passage of time, or to convey a change in fortunes of a character or locale.

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Almost the entirety of Paper Moon was shot on location in rural and small-town Kansas and Missouri. By straying as far from the highway as possible, Platt and Marshall were able to find locations that were less touched by modernity than their more populous counterparts nearer the interstate. According to Marshall: “We rented a car in Denver and drove across Kansas and we never took an interstate. That was our rule. We just drove across the backroads of Kansas. And that led to us discovering those great little towns” (2020). Nevertheless, even those great little towns had moved on from the 1930s, and Platt had quite a bit of work to do to create the film’s onscreen evocation of the Depression-era Midwest. In an important early scene as Moze (Ryan O’Neal) and Addie (Tatum O’Neal) sit in a diner and discuss her future over Coney Island hotdogs, the street outside is visible through a giant plate glass window. Across the street is a cinema whose front was designed and built by Platt (Bogdanovich 2015)— typical of a Bogdanovich film, the main feature is John Ford picture, in this case Steamboat Round the Bend (1935). More extensively, for a scene in which Addie executes one of her first successful swindles, Platt built a 1930s-era shop interior inside an old, burnt-out warehouse. Platt’s set included vintage cash registers, display cases, and lamps, as well as clothes that she had designed and sewn herself (in the Paramount costume shop). She also oversaw the construction and design of an entire fairground amusement park, which not only had to convey period authenticity, but had to accommodate one of the film’s many long takes as Addie wanders around the fairgrounds looking for Moze (see Chap. 6 for more on these location sets). The design in these sequences exemplifies Platt’s acumen for integrating location and on-location design in ways that accentuate narrative beats as they unfold. For example, in the script of Paper Moon, the movie theater whose exterior Platt designed is not mentioned at all (Sargent 1972, 14–19), the shop where Addie’s swindle takes place is described simply as “SMALL DEPARMENT STORE” (55), and the tracking shot of Addie wandering the fairgrounds reads: “She turns and moves away. CAMERA WITH HER as she walks through the fairgrounds” (59). Out of these sparse descriptions—typical of Hollywood screenplays, to be sure—Platt constructs a world through which this young girl moves as she grows and develops from a tough but sad orphan into a sophisticated swindler. Despite that sophistication, however, she remains a nine-year-old girl in need of adult guidance. Moze finagles with her over 200 dollars in the diner scene and teachers her to con in the department store scene, but

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abandons her in the fairgrounds so he can attend the burlesque show of Trixie Delight (Madeline Kahn) repeatedly. As she wanders the park at night in search of him, the lights, the crowds, the sights which should be exciting for a girl her age seem, instead, to swallow her up in a mirage of confusion. The location sets develop into a narratively satisfying, but highly fraught, metaphor for the way Addie is being robbed of her childhood.



The Bad News Bears

The Bad News Bears (1976) is often overlooked as a major New Hollywood film, perhaps because even with all its foul-mouthed cynicism, it retains the veneer of a children’s movie—a children’s sports movie, at that. Young kids running around a Little League baseball diamond and getting up to various hijinks would not appear to threaten the same bite as films like The Godfather (1972), Chinatown (1974), or Taxi Driver (1976), or even the gentler, more reflective despair of films like Five Easy Pieces (1970), Shampoo (1975), or Nashville (1975). However, even the most cursory of pokes beneath its surface reveals a film that engages in a trenchant, darkly satirical skewering of not just something as amorphous as the “American Dream,” but strikes at the heart of American conceptions about childhood, the national pastime of baseball, and that most sacred of American ideals, competition—and all during the summer of the American bicentennial celebrations. The Bad News Bears is a film about losers who lose, no matter how hard they try. There is no redemption, no final victory lap around the bases, no gentle lesson to be learned about teamwork, or perseverance, or all that matters is how you play the game. On losing the championship game, the Bears only celebrate after they throw their second-­place trophy at the winning team. Then they cheer as they dump beer over each other’s heads. The film shares a similarity with Jaws, its predecessor from the previous summer, in that both films appear to focus on their generic conventions (horror/thriller and sports) in the guise of light summer fun, but both also mine the era’s skepticism in ways that deepen both their genres and their dismantling of shibboleths of American culture. The crew as well includes a cadre of New Hollywood talent. Director Michael Ritchie was at the height of his reputation as a dark satirist whose films peeled back the pretty surface layers of American life in films like Downhill Racer (1969), The Candidate (1972), and Smile (1975). While

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today Ritchie is rarely considered one of the pre-eminent directors of the era, at the time his darkly knowing depictions of American sports and other public events, like beauty pageants (Smile), tended to see him evaluated much more highly. For example, he joins the likes of Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Altman, John Cassavetes, and Hal Ashby as the subject of one of the director-centered chapters in Diane Jacobs’s Hollywood Renaissance: The New Generation of Filmmakers and their Works (1977), in which she describes him as “one of the most important directors working in Hollywood today” (1977, 213). Richie hired as his cinematographer John A. Alonzo, who had already shot several primary texts of New Hollywood, including low-budget indies like Vanishing Point (1971), quirky personal films like Harold and Maude (1971), and one of the era’s pinnacle achievements with Chinatown. Bears stars Walter Matthau and Vic Morrow, and includes Tatum O’Neal and Jackie Earle Haley among its talented cast of children. And, of course, Polly Platt made the film’s location decisions and did its production design. In a sense, Bad News Bears might appear an odd choice for a case study of Platt’s location work. It doesn’t incorporate the extensive exterior redesigns of films like The Last Picture Show or Paper Moon, nor the array of visual incongruities in a film like The Thief Who Came to Dinner. Almost the entirety of the film takes place in one location—a Little League baseball diamond and its various dugouts, snack shacks, and parking lots. However, it is precisely because most of the action is limited to one location and its environs that the film becomes a microcosmic example of the extent to which Platt’s location design work is so integral to her films’ mise-en-scène and to their visual expression of narrative, character, and theme. Because so much action takes place at the baseball diamond, its verisimilitude of design is crucial to the film’s sense of realism. Furthermore, however, because many other locations were cut from the original draft of the script, the film becomes notable, in part, for what we do not see. Bears concerns a little league baseball team made up of a ragtag gang of foul-mouthed children with bad attitudes, who also happen to be frightful baseball players. They are coached by Matthau’s equally foul-mouthed Buttermaker, a washed-up drunk who is not so much looking for redemption as he is grabbing an easy paycheck to supplement his regular job as a pool cleaner. One notable scene that takes place away from the diamond involves Buttermaker enlisting the kids to help him clean a pool—or to clean it for him while he drinks beer and watches. Limiting the locations to just a few was not the original plan for the film. Early drafts of the script

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by Bill Lancaster set much of the early action in the homes of the players and include numerous scenes between adults with no children around— depicting drunken parties and illicit affairs (Lancaster n.d.). These sequences deliver much of the film’s exposition and also provide psychological profiles of the players. The sequences set in the kids’ homes include more intimate portraits of their family relationships than appear in the final film—including glimpses into the players’ socioeconomic status—while the more adult-oriented scenes provide insight into how some of Bears’ opposing players might have ended up so spoiled. Where the script depicts the Bears coming from loving, but poorer families, most of the players on opposing teams come from greater privilege, their parents the kind that might have felt comfortable at John Updike scripted cocktail parties. Once director Michael Ritchie was hired, the script underwent several changes, some quite substantial. For example, in screenwriter Bill Lancaster’s earliest drafts, Kelly, the juvenile delinquent who happens to be a baseball phenomenon (eventually played by Jackie Earl Haley), receives the most focus of the child players. During script conferences and re-writes, this focus was shifted to Amanda (Tatum O’Neal). Kelly remains a central figure and a delinquent, but his criminality was toned down for the film. He still smokes, rides a motorbike, and has no desire to conceal his contempt for adults, but early drafts depicted him selling drugs and being wanted by the police. This led to a zany ending in which, following a high-speed chase, Kelly makes it to the championship game, hits what should be the game-winner, but cannot cross home plate because the police are waiting for him, so the Bears lose (Lancaster n.d.; Ritchie 2000). These are standard changes, typical of the Hollywood pre-production process, and Ritchie spoke on numerous occasions about how receptive Lancaster was to reworking his drafts based on the director’s notes (Ritchie 1977, 2000). A more significant decision made in pre-production was to cut all the scenes set at the players’ homes and most of the adults-only scenes. Both Platt and Ritchie have taken credit for this decision. According to Ritchie: [Y]ou saw the difficult homes that all these kids came from. You learned more about the kids from their home situations than perhaps what was true on the playing field. And what I said, right off the bat to [producer] Stanley Jaffe was, “No I think that everything should happen on the field. I think we should only see the lives of these kids at the baseball field.” (Ritchie 2000)

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Platt’s remarks about her motivation for cutting the home scenes are similar to Ritchie’s, although perhaps more firmly grounded in the specifics of her job as a designer. She says of the kids’ homes: I didn’t want to design those sets: I didn’t get any ideas, which usually means there’s something wrong with the scenes. So I kept saying to the director and the writer, “We should make the diamond the world. We will find out about the parents when they come to watch the games.” I felt we should get to know the kids completely on their own. In the end, that was a very big cut. When I don’t get any ideas about a set, I know there’s something wrong with the scene. Then I start trying to decide what’s wrong. (161)

Both Ritchie and Platt were open throughout their careers about their respect for the collaborative process, so there is a good chance that the decision to cut the home scenes came “out of the room,” a by-product of close collaboration. Interestingly, though, in the same interview, Platt likens her feelings about the home scenes in Bears to her feelings about Chicago as a setting in Doc—“I knew Chicago was wrong for that movie” (161). Similar feelings about certain locations and their uninspiring potential led her to suggest the change of locations in Thief and Paper Moon, as well. In fact, up to that point Platt’s decisions about location were so thoroughly integrated into nearly every film she had worked on that it would be difficult to conceive of her not having played a role in the decision to locate most of the action in Bears on the field. The decision, like so many other of her location and design choices, was grounded in her reading of the script. Platt read the domestic scenes as superfluous to the narrative and its potential for character moments. Regardless, however, of whose decision it was, in the end, just under seventeen minutes of the film’s 102-minute runtime takes place away from the diamond. The ballpark itself—the diamond and its necessary structures, plus associated buildings like a snack shack and clubhouse—were designed and built by Platt (Fig.  4.1). She explored the possibility of using existing ballparks in the Los Angeles area, but found them insufficient for a variety of reasons—mostly having to do with traffic noise—so she found a park in the Chatsworth area of Los Angeles that had large enough grounds and located the ballpark there.8 In constructing the field, Platt researched official baseball specifications, specifically for Little League, and she designed the film’s ballpark (LoBrutto 1992, 161). Importantly, she laid out the diamond so that the sun would cross from third base to first, to avoid

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Fig. 4.1  The baseball diamond Platt designed. (The Bad News Bears, Paramount)

shading problems (about sixty-five degrees different from Major League Baseball recommendations). This had the benefit of providing cinematographer John Alonzo with an increased number of shooting opportunities throughout each day.9 Thus, as with Platt’s location decisions on films like Doc and Paper Moon, her construction of the field not only met the needs of the script, but contributed to the film’s overall visual pallet by creating opportunities for the director and cinematographer to achieve certain shots that would not have been available had she strictly followed the Little League handbook. As she was in the process of constructing the field, her approach led to derision on the part of some of the film’s male crewmembers. Platt often recounted the story of being second-guessed by a “macho guy who was working on the movie [who] kept saying, ‘Why are you letting Polly Platt design this set? What does a girl know about baseball?’” (LoBrutto 1992, 161). Platt had faced this type of sexist derision at least since her days at Carnegie Tech when she was forced into studying costume design rather than production design because she “couldn’t physically handle the work involved in scenic design” (Platt n.d., 59). She managed to turn the tables on her critics with humor by explaining how she knew exactly where the five bases went (a baseball field has four bases, including home plate). Even still, such treatment is more than a little ironic considering one of the

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film’s major plotlines concerns how the Bears only begin to win once Tatum O’Neal’s Amanda joins the team as pitcher—the boys on the team are also reluctant about a girl playing a boys’ game until Amanda easily strikes out their best hitter. Platt’s work on the field itself was just the start of her visual contribution to the film. Much of what makes the field work lies in the details of its accompanying structures—the dugouts and backstop, the manual scoreboard, the snack shack with its cheap plastic picnic tables, and the clubhouse (as usual, she also designed costumes as well, including the distinctive white-and-yellow baseball uniforms with their “Chico’s Bail Bonds” logo on the back; see Chap. 5). The structures have a worn feel, lending them an authenticity as the locus of summer after summer of kids gamboling over them and balls slamming into them. This is enhanced by the way that as the film begins—at the start of the Little League season—the structures all have a coat of fresh green paint, cleaned up and shining in the sun, full of promise for the new season. As the film and the season progress, the bleachers, the dugout walls, the backstop become progressively more dinged up and dirty. Whether the dings and dirt were added intentionally by Ritchie and Platt and her design team, or were a result of the natural wear and tear of the production is unclear, but in both cases the decision was made to refrain from repairs or fresh paint jobs. These details are subtle. The film is so full of activity, not just the baseball, but the kids’ rebellious nature in general, their infamous swearing, insults, and fights, and coach Buttermaker’s drunken antics, that aside from the field’s outward verisimilitude, the rest of its design easily fades into the background. Paid attention to, though, this slow weathering of the field and its structures can be read as an understated reinforcement of the way the movie’s adults fear that the scruffy Bears are bringing a certain disrepute to their precious league. Throughout the film, pressure is put on the Bears to quit the league, no more so than when the team starts to play well and there are fears that these urchins might deprive some of the “better” teams of their “rightful” championship. Thus the scuffing up of the diamond goes hand in hand with the scuffing up of the league. Regardless, though, of how much one wants to read into the deployment of these minor details thematically, visually the structures feel lived in, which does develop Platt’s metaphorical and conceptual vision of the baseball diamond representing home. This is especially true and important of the dugout. On field, during practice and play, the Bears share their very public defeats, their later

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triumphs, and their final, crushing loss. But it is in the dugout that the kids and Buttermaker enact their more emotional dramas. Players tease each other, confess their fears about the inadequacy of their play, and team up to revolt against Buttermaker when they believe some of his coaching decisions are undercutting their chances for victory. It’s the location where the kids first reject Buttermaker and where they slowly come, if not to admire, at least to accept him and his approach to baseball. It becomes the place where the ragtag bunch of ne’er-do-wells becomes a team. For example, in the first game of the season, the Bears suffer a humiliating loss when they cannot score a run and Buttermaker forfeits the game. The team is dejected and they walk out, refusing all his phony cheer about getting ‘em next time. In the dugout scene following this loss, the team decides to quit en masse—humiliated by the loss and having been relentlessly mocked and bullied at school. Buttermaker gives the first of his few rousing speeches here—mixing tough love with a crass lack of sympathy for their personal plights—and convinces them to keep playing. Throughout the film, scenes in the dugout include the humorous distribution of athletic cups to the players, uncomfortable scenes of Buttermaker severely scolding children, and inspirational moments when he convinces them all how important they are as individuals and as a team. If the on-­ field scenes convey the film’s humor and its excitement, those in the dugout provide the film with much of its emotional depth. There is no doubt that much of the emotional resonance in these scenes derives from the script and the performances. Matthau’s Buttermaker is curmudgeonly with only a touch of discernable sentiment. At first he cares very little about the success of the team or kids—he’s in it for the money. However, as he grows to admire their vivacious pluck and their desire to win, he begins to take both his job as coach and the kids’ feelings more seriously. Likewise, the players invest great energy in appearing tough and uncaring, with little regard for authority figures, but they do care—they want their uniforms, they want to get better, they want to win. These desires pull them together as a team, and eventually lead them to trust their coach. The space in which most of these developments take place is the dugout. In one sense, if the field can be considered home, the dugout is like the hearth, or the kitchen table. Like all dugouts, it is a confined space, walled on three sides with a fourth wall of protective fencing typical of Little League. When the entire team is present, they are practically on top of each other, and, as the dugout is a sunken space, it is often filmed from the top step looking down, adding to the sense of confinement. This

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is contrasted with the wide-open spaces of the baseball diamond and surrounding practice fields. This is typical of a dugout and, beyond the fact that Platt designed and built it along with the rest of the field, perhaps not incredibly important or impressive. However, as with much of her work, there are subtler details and a deeper purpose to the structure and its potential for meaning. In its earliest appearances, the dugout looks to have the same freshly painted sheen as the rest of the diamond’s structures, adding a promising gloss to the kick off of the season. On closer inspection, however, one can see that the dings and dents that will take their toll on the rest of the buildings are already present in the dugout. It’s worn: there are carvings in the wood that have been painted over; random nails protrude in spots; the fresh paint barely masks how the dugout’s supporting beams have chunks of wood hewn from them; the protective chain-link fencing that fronts the dugout is twisted and gnarled around the edges, and there are holes in the fencing indicating years of use and abuse (Fig. 4.2). These are clear design decisions, and whether Platt ordered previously used timber and fencing, or added the damage on construction, the result is the same. This dugout has experienced many summers; it has witnessed the thrill of victory and

Fig. 4.2  The dinged-up fencing of the dugout. (The Bad News Bears, Paramount)

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the agony of defeat; it has born witness to the sometimes joyful, sometimes pained growing up of generations of boys and girls. This confined, banged up, lived in space is vital to film’s most significant scene of conflict. While the film’s major plotline concerns the Bears’ efforts to become a cohesive group of good players and to make a run for the championship, it also includes a substantial subplot about the relationship between Buttermaker and Amanda, who is twelve years old. As the film unfolds, the viewer discovers that two years previous to the start of the film, Buttermaker had been in a relationship with Amanda’s mother that ended badly. During the relationship, Buttermaker taught Amanda how to pitch, and after the Bears are humiliated in their first game, he becomes convinced that the team needs Amanda to have any chance of winning. After some cajoling and promises of financial assistance, Buttermaker (Amanda teasingly calls him “Boilermaker”) recruits her to the team. At first she is quite stand-offish with him—she resents him during moments in the film when he tries to act fatherly toward her. But as the season progresses, and as the kids begin to come together as a team and win games, Amanda begins to drop hints that it would be nice to have him back in her life again. Then, the night before the championship game after the rest of the players have departed, they have a one-to-one conversation in the dugout. While Amanda sits icing her pitching arm, she informs Buttermaker that she has invited her mother to tomorrow’s game—she’s hoping that afterward the three of them can go out for dinner or to a movie. At first, Buttermaker is coy, acting like he thinks she is talking about the whole team, and then he becomes gently resistant, explaining that, after a season, ballplayers go their own way until next season. However, Amanda continues to push him about being involved her life, and finally he erupts in anger. He throws the contents of his beer in her face, and unleashes a tirade of anger and abuse at her: “God damn it, can’t you get it through your thick head that I don’t want your company? If I did, I would’ve looked you up two years ago. I wouldn’t’ve waited two goddamn years … you ever think of that?” In response, Amanda first resorts to her earlier, snarkier self. “If that’s the way you feel, fine,” she says, grabbing her gear, shrugging her shoulders, and walking away. But as she leaves the dugout, a close-up on Amanda’s face reveals that tears now mix with the beer that still drips down her face. A cut back to the dugout shows that Buttermaker, too, has teared up.

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There is much to the power of this scene. Matthau’s sudden burst of anger is shocking. He has become riled up at earlier points in the film, aggressive even, but those few moments have come in a fashion typical of a sports films, when a coach goads his team to do better by letting his exasperation show. In this instance, his anger is much more personal, and much more pointed. He is not extolling a team to do better, but dashing a little girl’s hopes. O’Neal’s performance is key to the scene as well, as she shifts dramatically from the jovial hopes that her coach and mother will reunite to a palpable fear at Buttermaker’s rage, then to a protective cynicism that helps her escape the dugout unscathed, and finally to the teary-­ eyed little girl who has been hurt much more than she wants to let on. It is an outstanding performance, and one that deepens the entire film. Up to this point, Buttermaker’s crass cynicism and his good-natured jostling with the kids has been played for laughs. In this scene he crosses the line, and it prepares the viewer for the following scenes during the championship when he spends half the game trying to manipulate his players into winning at all costs. In addition to the performances, the scene’s effectiveness also benefits from the script, cinematography, and editing. However, it is difficult to overstate how important the design is here. This may be difficult to discern at first—what’s so special about a baseball dugout that follows standard Little League design guides—gnarled and scuffed as it may be. We must, however, keep in mind that it was Platt who likely excised the film’s domestic scenes, Platt who conceived of the diamond as the film’s world, and Platt who designed and built the confined space of the dugout wherein many of the film’s emotional revelations occur. She designed that space to appear homely, a space of closeness and safety, where the kids throughout the film can express their anger and fear to Buttermaker, but also where their comradery and trust in their coach and each other has flourished. When Buttermaker dashes Amanda’s hopes so cruelly, he violates that space. There is a personal connection as well, although one that Platt rarely trumpeted. It was her idea to cast O’Neal in the role of Amanda, just as it had been her idea to cast O’Neal in Paper Moon (see Chap. 6). During this time Platt was a single mother, struggling to connect with her two daughters and struggling to find work that would keep her based in Los Angeles so she could remain close to them. She describes a major problem at the time of working on Bears as “the continuing sense that I was failing my

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children, leaving them to go and work for months at a time making movies” (Platt n.d., 246). Platt expresses this sense that she is failing her children repeatedly throughout her memoir. Both Paper Moon and The Bad News Bears feature O’Neal as a young girl who is virtually motherless—in the former her mother has recently passed away, in the latter she never appears onscreen10—and who is attempting to reconcile with a rascal of a father figure. Paper Moon ends with O’Neal’s Addie forming a promising bond with Ryan O’Neal’s father figure, Moze. In Bears, the “father” rejects the daughter, and even though they reconcile by the end of the film, Buttermaker’s final words to Amanda—agreeing to teach her how to hit “next spring”—imply that their future is strictly baseball, not familial. Platt knew Tatum O’Neal well enough to consider her a daughter figure— she had worked with Ryan O’Neal on three films previously and had spent time at the O’Neals’ beach house (Platt n.d., 204), although she and the elder O’Neal would eventually have a falling out (226). Tatum was only a few years older that Platt’s own daughters, those she constantly feared she was failing and about whom she worried that their relationship with their father, Bogdanovich, was suffering. That Platt would be drawn to work with Tatum on these two films during the tumultuous years of her separation and divorce from Bogdanovich does not seem surprising. Nor that she would invest so much care in designing the emotional spaces so intrinsic to the films’ success. The Bad News Bears is a complicated film that manages to be both cynical and hopeful while offering little in the way of redemption—the Bears lose the championship game and the kids on the team remain as irascible, irreverent, and foul-mouthed as ever. In many ways, the dugout scene between Amanda and Buttermaker, their failure to connect and reestablish their bond, represents the film’s unsatisfying emotional climax more even than the Bears losing the championship game. On the field, we have seen the Bears lose games, seen them get in their own way. In the dugout though, while we have seen anger and frustration along with the gentler silliness, it has always been anger about their shared goals. Buttermaker’s rebuke and denial of Amanda in the dugout recasts that space as one of pain and loss—a space that is no longer about the joys of summer, but rather the pain of growing up. Platt’s ability to design sets that amplify character and narrative, sets that are constructed on location and out of whole cloth, constantly imbues her films with deep resonances that may

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derive from the films’ scripts but that also continually manifest as onscreen visual spaces that tease out of the scripts meanings, themes, and visual motifs that enrich the films in unexpected and deeply satisfying ways.

Notes 1. By most accounts, Tavoularis’s approach made Guffey miserable on-­ set and at one point he quit the film for a few days. He was convinced to return, however, and his work on the film earned him his second Academy Award (Harris 2008, 253–254; Biskind 1998, 48). 2. See D’Arcy (2019) for an in-depth discussion of the influence of literary and theatrical realism on early cinema and how the concept of realism in design has changed over time. 3. Fionnuala Hannigan, Filmcraft: Production Design (Lewes: Ilex, 2016), 184. 4. Haller served as production designer on six Ashby-directed films: Harold and Maude (1971); The Last Detail (1973); Bound for Glory (1976); Coming Home (1978); Being There (1979); and 8 Million Ways to Die (1986). 5. Bogdanovich has variously claimed that he enjoyed shooting the city’s hills because it was funny to make characters walk up them or because they would increase the intensity and humor of the film’s extended chase sequence. For example, see: Bogdanovich (2000); Mankiewicz (2020). 6. Incidentally, one of the homes that was used belonged to Candace Mossler who had been the subject of a highly public murder investigation in the mid-1960s, for which Mossler and her nephew Melvin Powers were acquitted (Bergeron 2020). 7. This apartment-above-a-garage building bears a striking resemblance to the criminal haunt that Eunice mistakenly visits in Doc. 8. The ballpark built for the film still exists at the Mason Recreation Center at 10500 Mason Avenue, Chatsworth, CA. 9. Platt and Alonzo had almost worked together the previous year on the Mike Nichols-directed film The Fortune (1975), but Platt had been fired by Nichols during pre-production. According to Nichols biographer Mark Harris, this was because Platt took the side of screenwriter Carol Eastman in her disputes with Nichols over the script (2021).

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10. Interestingly, in most of the early drafts of Bears, Buttermaker is described as having been in a relationship with Amanda’s older sister. It is only in the last draft of February 1976 that this is changed to Amanda’s mother. It remains unclear why this change was made, but it is not impossible to imagine that Platt had something to do with the decision.

References Bergeron, Michael. 2020. Remembering When ‘The Thief Who Came to Dinner’ Filmed in Houston. Preview (Houston Chronicle), July 20. https://preview. hous tonchr onicl e.com/movi es-­tv/r em embering-­w hen-­t he-­t hief ­who-­came-­to-­15418043 Biskind, Peter. 1998. Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. New York: Touchstone. Bogdanovich, Peter. 1971. What’s Up, Doc? Script Outline. Box 141. Bogdanovich Mss., Lily Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. ———. 2000. Commentary. What’s Up, Doc? Directed by Peter Bogdanovich. Burbank: Warner Home Video, 2010. ———. 2015. Director’s Commentary. Paper Moon. Blu-ray. Directed by Peter Bogdanovich. London: Eureka Entertainment. Bogdanovich, Peter, dir. 1971. The Last Picture Show. Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 1999. DVD, 118 min. ———. 1972. What’s Up, Doc?. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2003. DVD, 94 min. ———. 1973. Paper Moon. London: Eureka Entertainment Ltd, 2015. BluRay, 102 min. Brooks, James L., dir. 1983. Terms of Endearment. Hollywood, CA: Paramount, 2013. Blu-Ray, 132 min. Cook, David A. 2000. Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam 1970–1979. Berkeley: University of California Press. D’Arcy, Geraint. 2019. Critical Approaches to TV and Film Set Design. New York: Routledge. Dawson, Nick. 2009. Being Hal Ashby: Life of a Hollywood Rebel. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky. Fischer, Lucy. 2015. Introduction. In Art Direction and Production Design, ed. Lucy Fischer, 1–22. London: I.B. Tauris. Gleich, Joshua, and Lawrence Webb. 2019. Hollywood on Location: An Industry History. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Harris, Mark. 2008. Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood. New York: Penguin.

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———. 2021. Mike Nichols: A Life. New York: Penguin. Jacobs, Diane. (1977) 1980. Hollywood Renaissance: The New Generation of Filmmakers and Their Works. New York: Delta. King, Geoff. 2002. New Hollywood Cinema: An Introduction. London: I.B. Tauris. Kolker, Robert. 2000. A Cinema of Loneliness. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lancaster, Bill. n.d. The Bad News Bears. Screenplay—First Draft. Box 55, Folder 37. Paramount Pictures Scripts. Margaret Herrick Library, Beverly Hills, California. Lightman, Herb A. 2017. Raw Cinematic Realism in the Photography of Bonnie and Clyde. American Cinematographer, August 7. https://ascmag.com/articles/flashback-­bonnie-­and-­clyde LoBrutto, Vincent. 1992. By Design: Interviews with Film Production Designers. Westport: Praeger. Mankiewicz, Ben. 2020. The Plot Thickens, Episode 4. Podcast. Produced by Yacov Freedman. Marshall, Frank. 2020. Telephone Interview with the Author. April 3. Miller, George, dir. 1987. The Witches of Eastwick. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2017. Blu-Ray, 118 min. Platt, Polly. 1977. American Film Institute: Harold Lloyd Seminar. December 7. ———. n.d. “It Was Worth It.” Collection of Antonia and Sashy Bogdanovich. Unpublished Memoir. Pierson, Frank, dir. 1976. A Star is Born. Burbank, CA: Warner Bros. 2008. DVD, 140 min. Ritchie, Michael. 1977. American Film Institute: Harold Lloyd Seminar, July 7. ———. 2000. Interviewed by Jeremy Kagan. Visually History with Michael Ritchie. Directors Guild of America. https://www.dga.org/Craft/VisualHistory/ Interviews/Michael-­Ritchie.aspx Ritchie, Michael, dir. 1976. The Bad News Bears. Hollywood, CA.  Paramount. DVD, 101 min. Sargent, Alvin. 1972. Paper Moon. Screenplay—Final Revised Draft. Box 98. Bogdanovich Mss., Lily Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. Webb, Lawrence. 2019. The Auteur Renaissance, 1968–1979. In Hollywood on Location: An Industry History, ed. Joshua Gleich and Lawrence Webb, 124–154. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Young, Jordan R., and Mike Bruns. (1980) 2010. Hal Ashby: Satisfaction in Being There. In Hal Ashby: Interviews, ed. Nick Dawson, 99–105. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

CHAPTER 5

Color in the Films of Polly Platt

Young Doctors in Love is a 1982 spoof of television hospital drama, particularly of the soap opera variety that was so popular during the early ‘80s on series like General Hospital and Days of Our Lives. The film is episodic in nature, following a year in the life of young hospital interns training at the fictional City Hospital. It is light on story and heavy on gags, including a variety of raunchy sex jokes. Although it features an excellent cast, a mix of up-and-coming Hollywood talent, like Michael McKeon, Sean Young, and Ted McGinley, and a host of established performers such as Dabney Coleman, Harry Dean Stanton, and Hector Elizondo, and despite its modest box office success, the film is not much more than a trifle (often described as Airplane! in a hospital).1 While the film indulges in an enjoyable zaniness in spots—a zaniness its cast is completely game for—it is no stretch to describe it as the least consequential film in Polly Platt’s body of work. Platt had spent much of the 1970s hoping to work close to home to avoid extended separation from her daughters, so the opportunity to shoot the film entirely in Los Angeles was key to her willingness to commit to the project, her first film as a production designer since 1976’s A Star is Born.2 Despite the film’s slight, silly nature, and despite her personal life being somewhat of a shamble at the time,3 Platt designed the film with as much attention to detail as she had The Last Picture Show, Paper Moon, or The Bad News Bears. Most of the film takes place within the hospital— filmed in an actual defunct hospital south of Los Angeles4 (Platt n.d., © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Hunter, Polly Platt, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82120-3_5

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272)—and Platt has designed each space within the building according to a combination of practical, narrative, and character needs. Thus, the pathology lab of Dr. Ludwig (Stanton) teams with the substances and specimens of his study, cluttered and disheveled much like his dress and hair; the materials of the main nurses’ station are arrayed in orderly fashion, while the station itself sits in a central position around which the film’s chaotic events unfold, so that the station becomes a place of calm in the whirlwind film, much like practical head nurse Sprockett (Pamela Reed); and the operating theater is cold and serene, with a viewing gallery that functions as a locale for some of the film’s most absurd gags but also moments of heartfelt sentiment. These are typical hospital settings5 that might seem standard to any film set within such an environment. While the verisimilitude of the design might stand out, less noticeable, particularly on a first viewing, is the use of color—the walls and doors are painted pink and orange throughout the hospital. Platt believed this would complement the film’s comedic qualities, perhaps most notable in a scene where a nurse on roller skates distributes meds to patients in a ward, or when Dr. Burns (Taylor Negron) teaches Nurse Sprockett the tango in an attempt to seduce her (both scenes wonderfully shot, as is the rest of the film, by cinematographer Donald Peterman). Not content to stick with pink walls, Platt later dresses Sean Young’s Dr. Brody in a pink athletic outfit for one of the films key scenes in MacArthur Park, a mix of physical comedy and character backstory in which the viewer first learns of Dr. Brody’s serious illness. Her pink outfit pops against the greenery of the park, while also recalling the hospital’s pink interiors. Platt’s use of color in both production and costume design was ingenious throughout her career—even in the black-and-white films she designed. In this chapter, I briefly discuss how color, as a rather significant subject in film studies, has rarely been aligned with the production designers whose work determines so many color decisions. I then go on to an examination of the many uses Platt makes of color in her films. At times, she called on color to explode off the screen in obvious fashion, while other times her deployment was much subtler. She used color metaphorically and symbolically to complement or undermine aspects of her films’ concepts and themes, and to add complexity to their characters. And she was equally comfortable deploying color in these ways in her early realist dramas or in her later comedic or more highly stylized films in the 1980s. I end the chapter with a case study of The Witches of Eastwick, Platt’s final film as a production designer, in which I argue that her use of color is a

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major aspect of the film’s metaphorical structure and a significant component of the film’s storytelling successes. By examining how she accentuates her overall design strategy with color, we can detect another tool Platt uses to create a sense of visual unity and consistency in her films.



Film Color and Design

Color has been a component of film since almost the origin of the medium. If one considers that color was immediately notable for its absence at early film screenings—Richard Misek notes how early viewers regularly commented upon the lack of color in the Lumière actualités (Misek 2010, 14)—then we might say color, the knowledge of its presence in the pro-­ filmic event and its absence onscreen, has been a component of film since the very beginning. Certainly, the earliest filmmakers sought to include color in their films and developed a variety of methods to do so, including hand painting, stenciling, and dye immersion (Misek 2010). Some of the best-known movies from the first decades of filmmaking have survived in versions that were colorized in such manner, including Edison Studios’ Anabelle Serpentine Dance (1895) and The Great Train Robbery (1903), and Georges Méliès’s The Impossible Voyage (1904). Misek and Tom Gunning have each argued that early film color tended to be reserved for spectacle films—films, according to Gunning, “associated with fantasy,” “trick films,” “films with exotic or spectacular themes” (Gunning 1995). Both scholars also tend to agree that colors in early films “do not perform any obvious narrative or thematic function” (Misek 2010, 17) and even that color in early films is bereft of meaning. I am not convinced that the red gun shots and explosions in The Great Train Robbery lack meaning, at least in a rhetorical or semantic sense—the spectacular effect of onscreen fire would certainly have been enhanced by the stab at realism brought about by the color red. Regardless, however, of color’s potential for meaning in early cinema, its addition to the films in an early version of post-production renders it an entirely different approach to color in film than the later, design-centric approach that would arise with the coming of technicolor and other film color processes later in the century. Color designed for the camera needs to take into consideration how a prop or costume or set is lit, the type of lighting, the type of lens, and film stock, among other concerns. Furthermore, any meaning that color in a film might have depends on its relation to other colors onscreen and how those colors are lit and deployed

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as well. Modern production designers must work closely with costume designers, cinematographers, and directors to devise a strategy for deploying color in a film, particularly because, as film editor and scholar Norman Hollyn has argued, “it is important to have the color palette evolve over the course of the film” (Hollyn 2009, 90). However, even if we agree that color in early cinema has no narrative or thematic “meaning,” it still conveys a type of information as meaning, in an extra-diegetic sense—this is a film worth adding color to, this is a film that will benefit from color, or even, this is a film that the producers have the time and resources to colorize. It is also worth noting, that if, in the films of George Méliès or Edwin S. Porter, color meant merely “spectacle” or “fantasy,” the endowment of that meaning came in part from the practice of colorizing such films more regularly than other film types or genres.6 In the earliest cinema, decisions about color’s deployment were certainly not the purview of somebody called a production designer. As Lucy Fischer has written about early cinema: To call the creation of scenery for the first films made by U.S. companies “art direction” (or perhaps even to use the term mise-en-scène) would be to invest the enterprise with delusions of grandeur. For the most part, few records exist documenting how such sets were fashioned or by whom; and, clearly, in the early years, the film sets were minimal, functional, and unremarkable—to the extent that they existed at all. Furthermore, the films themselves did not yet include credits for art direction or many other production tasks. (Fischer 2015, 24)

Scenic designers did begin to proliferate as production companies began to experiment with “studio” shooting, such as in the East 21st-street studio that Edison Productions moved into after its tenure in the famed Black Maria. In the later studio, designers such as George S. Fleming, William Martinetti, and Richard Murphy contributed to the increasingly elaborate set design. Significantly, they were generally paid as much as—or in the case of Fleming, more than—in-house director Edwin S.  Porter (Fischer, 26–27). As Hollywood took over as the center for production of U.S filmmaking, and as the studio system began to coalesce around a hierarchical, departmental system, dedicated  production design became more necessary and much more prominent. By the 1920s, the studios were employing designers such as Ben Carré, who designed films for Universal (The

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Phantom of the Opera 1925), MGM (La Bohème 1926), and Warner Bros. (The Jazz Singer 1927), or William Cameron Menzies, who designed elaborate sets for Paramount during the silent era on films like Robin Hood (1922) and The Thief of Bagdad (1924). Menzies would work for a variety of studios, and well into the color era, including on films such as Gone with the Wind (Selznick/MGM), on which he was the first art director to use the term “production designer.” Most silent-era films were shot in black and white and little production information is available as to how particular colors were chosen on specific films for costumes, sets, and makeup in order to affect their quality as black-and-white images. Some films of the era, however, made extensive efforts to include color—if not in the entirety of the film, for key stretches of it—one of the most notable examples being The Phantom of the Opera, which made use of two-strip Technicolor for some scenes and also incorporated the elaborate Handschiegl tinting process for other sections of the film7 (Fischer 2015, 44; Misek 2010, 21). One could argue that, once again, color is used here mainly for spectacle, but it would be difficult to assert that it has no meaning. The color spectrum of the Technicolor sequence, the Bal Masque de l’Opera, is limited due to the two-strip process that accentuated reds and greens; however, that limited spectrum is used to great effect, first to differentiate the numerous dancers weaving in and out of each other’s paths across the vast sets. The bright red highlights of some of the costumes simply pop next to the blacks, whites, and faded greens of the rest of the scene. Second, famously, is to isolate the Phantom on his entry down the grand staircase of the opera. The appearance of the Phantom, draped almost entirely in red and wearing a skull mask, immediately recasts the color as something dreadful rather than festive, especially considering his speech about the dead buried beneath the opera’s foundations. His red will pop again in another of the film’s well-known scenes atop the roof of the opera house. These uses of color in design represent a clear early example of how color can be used thematically, narratively, and metaphorically, endowing a film with textured layers of additional meaning. Color’s arrival as the mainstay of Hollywood filmmaking was a transition that took decades, and scholars have written about the difficulties of that transition in terms of the technological processes behind the camera and the impact that shooting in color had on such factors as actors’ performances and attitudes (Shiel 2015, 69), directors’ understanding (or lack of understanding) of how to use color (Misek 2010, 37), the depiction of human skin tones and the makeup required to make them appear

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“natural” (Dootson 2016, 108), and color’s tremendous impact on Hollywood budgets (Shiel 2015, 69). Hollywood studios responded to these developments in a variety of ways, often developing house styles under the leadership of powerful art directors like Menzies and Cedric Gibbons (Barnwell 2004, 89–92). Many of these changes and developments occurred during a period when the Hollywood studio system was in flux, particularly after the 1948 Paramount Decrees, which advanced the upending of the studio model that had been under way since earlier in the decade and would culminate in the massive industrial changes of the 1960s, and the concomitant rise of independent producers (Schleier 2015, 74–75). There were different approaches to the use of color during this era. In the early days, there was an emphasis on muted colors and naturalist expression (Misek 2010, 36)—the explosive possibilities of colors seem to have been viewed as unnatural and distracting and held in a similar disregard as the black and white of the earliest films. However, as the technological processes improved, as production designers grew more adept not only at incorporating and lighting color, but also at experimenting with it, and as productions grew increasingly independent of the dictates of the studios, the use of color for purposes of expressive power expanded dramatically. By the 1950s, color was used across a variety of genres to enhance elements of a film including its sense of realism, its metaphorical qualities, its thematic development, or just its sense of aesthetic pleasure. A film like Rebel Without a Cause (Warner Bros. 1955) could make red seem sexy, dangerous, or sad depending on the ways its properties were deployed throughout the course of the narrative. The Searchers (Warner Bros. 1956) could astound with the colors of its natural beauty while also developing the metaphor of that nature’s dehumanizing qualities. Imitation of Life (Universal 1959) could use color to enhance the lushness of its melodrama while also developing a rich metaphorical critique of America’s long history of racial hatred. By the time Polly Platt began designing films in the late 1960s, Hollywood had been exploring color in all its intricacies for over three decades. Platt was intimately familiar with this history having viewed thousands of Hollywood films in her life—just during her years with Bogdanovich they would often watch several films a day, every day. Furthermore, as a student of design she had studied color, both in university and independently. As noted in Chap. 2, she describes a period in college when she was inspired by reading plays to paint with water colors, to help her visualize the drama:

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I realized that if I interpreted the plays I was studying I could have vision within the confines of the play itself. The play gave me ideas as to what the set should look like and what to do for the actors who walked the boards. I could also study, as I did later, the periods of the plays and dutifully design sets “in the period.” This seemed to me the right way and I devoted that year to reading plays and imagining the sets, drawing them and indicating lighting in my watercolors. This was very satisfying for me. (Platt n.d., 57)

In fact, Platt’s description of her memories and interactions with her surroundings are laden with color; her memoir is teaming with perceptive descriptions of colorful moments she recalls from throughout her life. She describes the “khaki Chevrolet” her family were driven in when they first arrived in Germany (13); swimming in the “iron-colored water” in Lake Tegernsee in the Bavarian Alps (26); Bogdanovich’s “dark mink” hair when they first meet (84). Her sense of color in these instances is not only descriptive, but also tactile and emotive. She has an intimate understanding of how color relates to things—to animals, nature, to minerals and other materials, to bodies and bodily functions. When Platt makes color decisions for her films, she combines her vast knowledge of cinema history with her years of study and her intimate knowledge of color’s potential to create a dialogue between the object in question—whether set, prop, or costume—and other objects or experiences that the color might bring to the mind of the viewer.



Platt’s Approach to Color in Film

James L. Brooks likes to tell a story about Platt, not as a production designer, but as a producer on the film Broadcast News (Gracie Films/20th Century Fox 1987): In one of the opening scenes where we see Aaron (played as a youth by Dwayne Markee) as a high school kid, he comes out and he’s beaten up in the school yard after commencement. As we were doing the picture, I saw Polly break from behind the camera—it’s my favorite image of her, and I think it’s quintessential—and she grabs a bucket of paint, and painted the bannister in the background red, pretty damned quickly all by herself, and I always think of that; that was a metaphor. (Brooks 2020)

The story has been told often enough that sometimes the details change— in some versions, it is a door that Platt paints red, as in the version of the

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story that Cameron Crowe tells (Crowe 2018). Platt’s second film as a producer was Crowe’s directorial debut, Say Anything (Gracie Films/20th Century Fox 1989), which was in development during the production of Broadcast News. The red bannister/door story seems to have quickly become legend in the Gracie Films offices. Crowe also uses metaphorical terminology to describe the moment—in a tribute article published in The Hollywood Reporter soon after Platt’s death, he says: “It pops in the scene and matters in a beautiful way. That red door is Polly” (The Hollywood Reporter 2011). The scene in question does involve a red door, and while there is no red bannister, there is an outdoor metal staircase with a bright red stringer. Both pop, to be sure, but both also appear onscreen for a matter of only seconds. So, whether it was the door, the stringer, or both that Platt rushed to paint that day, what makes it “matter in a beautiful way,” what makes it quintessentially Polly? The scene takes place in a blacktop schoolyard. As it is graduation day, all the students wear black gowns and caps. The school building itself is light brown brick, and the windows are encased in white. Against this drab background, the fire engine red of the door and staircase certainly stand out, but they are not the only reds in the scene. There is also the blood on Aaron’s face, a result of his beating by the jocks who the film implies have tormented him throughout high school. The brief glimpses of the door and staircase accentuate, or call attention to, the red of Aaron’s face. Furthermore, the red of the staircase, which appears onscreen slightly longer than the door, is shot over Aaron’s shoulder as the jocks walk toward it, thus associating the red of the staircase visually with the jocks, subtly reinforcing their brutal nature. The red, then, becomes not only an aesthetic choice, but a key insight into Aaron’s character and his later motivations in the film (when he is played by Albert Brooks). His viscerally negative response to Tom (William Hurt) and Tom’s ability to get by on good looks and charm is rooted in this opening scene of violence and bloodshed (in a key late scene, Aaron will refer to Tom as “the devil”). To Aaron, Tom is no different from the schoolyard toughs who bloody his nose, even if Tom’s grown-up methods of abuse are subtler and less overtly violent. Returning to the opening of the film, even before we meet young Aaron, we meet young Tom (Kimber Shoop), wearing a bright red baseball cap. The red, though, is also part of more extensive aesthetic choice made during pre-production. Brooks describes what he calls a “template” for the film: “there’s a photographer named Joel Meyerowitz, who found

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beauty in urban settings, and he loved reds, so we had red all over the place” (Brooks 2020). This resonates with statements Platt has made about turning to magazines, photographs, and painting when she is in the planning stages of a film. She describes doing “a tremendous amount of research” before beginning a film (LoBrutto 1992, 162) and how she “reads a lot of literature … looks at magazines … and always looks at paintings” in order to develop visual motifs for her films (Platt 1977). The result of this research and of Platt’s propensity for deep familiarization with the script, is that she understands why a door or staircase stringer needs to be painted red—not just so it will pop in a particular scene, but so that it will broaden the color’s potential for meaning throughout the entirety of the film. And red abounds in Broadcast News. Sometimes its appearance seems meant to “pop” as Crowe describes, but the color also has subtler resonances as well. When Jane (Holly Hunter) first sees Tom (and when we first meet adult Tom) he appears at the back of a lecture hall in long shot, surrounded by empty red chairs. Later, Tom wears a bright red necktie on his first visit to the office, copying the fashion sense of star anchor Bill (Jack Nicholson), which hints at the inauthenticity that will become a major plot point later when he fakes tears for a news piece. But red is not used only as an association with Tom, though, and it does not always carry metaphorical weight—in the famous scene when Blair (Joan Cusack) sprints through the news offices to get a tape to air on time, she runs down a white and blue corridor, past a large red trash can. Red neon lights appear in the background of numerous scenes, a call is placed from a red phone booth, and the blues, whites, and grays of the news offices are accentuated throughout with flashes of bright red. While these appearances of the color can seem heavy-handed in a brief discussion, as a whole, the use of red throughout the film is understated, and there are long stretches when the color does not appear onscreen. Each moment when it does, however, both calls back to the color’s earlier appearances and foreshadows its later ones. Much like the radios in The Last Picture Show or the different areas of the baseball field in The Bad News Bears, with each iteration of red in the film comes an accretion of thematic, narrative, and character meaning. This is, I think, what Crowe meant when he describes how Platt’s paintjob “matters”—it exemplifies not only her deep understanding of the power of design to flesh out character, but her ability to deploy color with a precision that changes and strengthens the meaning of a scene. It is, perhaps, worth pointing out that

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while Platt produced Broadcast News, she was not actually production designer on the film, yet her attention to details of design remain pervasive throughout.



Color and Character Psychology

Platt’s facility for employing color to embed a variety of potential meanings into her films extends back to her first movie as production designer, Targets (Saticoy/Paramount 1968), a film that weaves together two distinct stories: that of Byron Orlok (Boris Karloff), an aged, washed-up horror movie star who’s considering retirement; and Bobby Thompson (Tim O’Kelly), a youthful, attractive all-American young man who goes on a killing spree. The narrative strands come together at a drive-in cinema in the Valley, where Bobby continues his killing during the premiere of Orlok’s newest film. A well-known part of both Bogdanovich’s and Platt’s Hollywood origin stories, Targets began life as a Roger Corman project, when he had some Karloff footage he wanted to incorporate into a new film, and Karloff owed him a day of shooting from a previous contract. The budget was incredibly low, even for the late 1960s, at about $120,000 (comparatively, the ultra-low-budget of Easy Rider was about three times that amount). Particularly considering the film’s budget, Targets is highly instructive of how Platt’s attention to details of color add nuance to the emotional tone of a given scene and consistency to a film’s visual strategy. Unlike most of the films Platt worked on, Targets was filmed almost entirely on a studio lot, and the production had use of only one stage to construct most the film’s interiors, including a studio screening room, the Polo Lounge, Orlok’s Beverly Hills Hotel suite, and the bungalow home of Bobby’s family. While it is impressive that the four sets are so different, much of the film takes place in the latter two, especially during the film’s first half before the killing begins. Each set was designed by Platt to convey elements of the main characters’ emotions, as well as the feel of the space itself. As Targets is really two different narratives that only intersect in the film’s climactic scene, the psychological profiles of the two men that render their confrontation believable is developed in subtle ways by color and mise-en-scène throughout the film’s first half. Byron Orlok’s hotel suite consists of two open and airy rooms. The rooms are painted a light brown, accented with golds, yellows, and oranges. The decorations are ornate, as befits a suite at the Beverly Hills

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Hotel, and the overall effect is warm and inviting when the set is lit both for day and for night. The openness and warmth here are important: the Orlok sequences show him surrounded by colleagues and friends who love him, who praise his talents, and who encourage him to keep working during an emotional low point in his life. As on most of her films, Platt also designed costumes for Targets, and she explained her thoughts on the film’s color scheme in a letter she wrote to Karloff before production started: Dear Mr. Karloff, Mr. Kennard suggested I write to you about the clothes you will need for “Before I Die.”8 Orlok’s world in the picture has been designed in the warm colors—the Hotel room is basically warm tan and gold. With Mr. Bogdanovich’s approval, and subject to yours, I have “designed” Mr. Orlok’s clothes also in warm colors. When we first see Mr. Orlok, he should be wearing a warm brown tweed jacket, perhaps a tattersall shirt and a beige cardigan. And of course, grey or brown trousers. Tie is optional. I like the idea of seeing you for the first time in very casual dress as the public has rarely if ever seen Boris Karloff this way. Orlok wears this the whole day, and is still wearing it when he gets into bed, and wakes up with everything terribly wrinkled. Where we come back for the rehearsal he has changed and shaved, and is wearing another sports jacket and trousers, again in warm colors. Then of course, he changes into a tuxedo for his personal appearance. The boy, Bobby Thompson, wears whites and greens. And we are avoiding red in the picture, saving it for a few pertinent moments (the typewriter ribbon on which the boy types his note is red, and so on). Any of these things which you don’t have, please let me get them for you after you have arrived. Thank you so much, Polly Platt (Platt 1967)

A fascinating element of this letter is Platt’s awareness that she’s dressing not only Orlok but also Karloff; for his heroism to ring true at the end of the film, the viewer needs to regard Boris Karloff—famed screen monster—as just as warm and inviting a character as they see in the fictional Orlok. In contrast, the house where Bobby lives with his wife and parents comprises many small, cramped rooms, connected by narrow hallways. There is a sense of confinement that adds to the slow-burning tension

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before Bobby embarks on his rampage. Furthermore, every room in the house is painted blue. This was done specifically to create a cold feeling, heightening Bobby’s sense of isolation within his own home. Platt has described blue as an “ugly” color for interiors in film (Platt 1977), and said in using it she “was trying to design a home that might create a murderer” (LoBrutto 1992, 157). Its use as the color of the walls in Bobby’s home also exhibits Platt’s understanding of the relationship between color and lighting. The cinematographer on the film was Laszló Kovács, with whom Platt would make two additional films (What’s Up, Doc? and Paper Moon),9 and the two of them deploy expressive lighting that develops and changes the color and feel of the blue walls over the course of the day before Bobby embarks on his spree, as he mentally commits to the killings. We first see the home’s interiors in the light of day where the pasty blue of the walls comes across as sickening as Platt intended. In the evening, as Bobby and his family sit around the TV, its warm glow works to neuter some of the blues’ more depressing impressions. Then late at night when Bobby is in bed and his wife returns home from work, he asks her to keep the lights off. The lighting is incredibly low and the blue of the walls has taken on an inky menace as only Bobby’s eyes are visible. The next time we see the house is in the bright light of the following morning, when Bobby starts his rampage by killing his wife and mother. Of vital importance is that until the moment Bobby starts killing, the viewer is never explicitly told or shown what his plans are. We see that he has a trunk-load of guns in his car and that he has been stocking up on ammunition. And we do see him “playfully” aim his rifle at his father while the two are out target shooting. But there is no conversation or voice over—no exposition—detailing what Bobby is actually thinking about. Thus, the set design of his house, where most of his scenes in the film’s first half take place, is a key psychological indicator of the darkening of his already fragile, isolated, menacing state of mind. The colors these two men move through work on several levels. Most immediately, they create a strong visual contrast between the two men. They are also specifically intended as visual markers of the two men’s states of mind. Additionally, though, for the viewer they create a sense of allegiance, in the case of Orlok, and revulsion, in the case of Bobby. The filmmakers, Platt included, were acutely aware of the horrors of random gun violence, and Targets was in part designed as a political statement about gun control—early prints of the film included an opening title that read “Why Gun Control” and print ads for the film included the same slogan,

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along with lists of gun casualty statistics. Platt had this in mind and used color to convey the film’s allegiances to the audience. Finally, though, it is how the color works on all these levels, interweaving meanings, that builds up the character of Orlok, an otherwise frail old man, as somebody dramatically (if not physically) able to slap the killer down when the two men meet in the climax.



Color and Narrative Metaphor

Webster McGee (Ryan O’Neal), an elusive cat burglar, arrives at the home of Gene Henderling (Charles Cioffi), a wealthy mark whose home Webster has already burgled and whom Webster is now blackmailing. Gene is throwing a party for Houston’s moneyed elite, and Webster aims to glean information about the party guests that will aid him in continuing his burglary spree. This is The Thief Who Came to Dinner (1973), and one needn’t be an overly attentive viewer to notice the abundance of green that adorns the walls, gowns, and jewelry throughout the party scene— most of it very light in shade. As soon as Webster walks through the front door, he’s greeted by a vast entrance hall with mint green wall paper, and as he mingles he meets more than one guest completely or mostly attired in the color, sporting emeralds in their bracelets and necklaces. He looks across the room and notices a woman in profile, ordering a drink from a bar. This is Laura (Jacqueline Bisset), a socialite who, we will soon learn, is down on her luck, having lost all her money, and she will become Webster’s love interest and partner in crime. Laura is also dressed in green, a gown much sleeker and more modern than the ostentatious and somewhat frumpy designs of most of the party guests. The green of her gown is also much darker—it could easily be mistaken for black in low light. The bartender stands inside a Dutch door, which is surrounded by dark brown paneling. The room behind him also features green wallpaper, this time accented with an ogee pattern. The blocking of the scene is such that Laura appears ensconced in green—her gown—but also separate from it, literally barred by the Dutch door from the green room beyond. She’s awash in a sea of green at the party, but the darker green of her dress marks her as separate, different from the other party goers. Indeed, one of her first lines in the film comes as Webster enquires what they might have in common, and she replies: “I haven’t the faintest idea. Nothing about me is at all common.”

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As discussed in Chap. 3, it was Platt who suggested moving the setting of Thief from the Chicago of its novel to Houston. She believed it would be easier for viewers to empathize with Webster if his victims were tacky, new-moneyed folk with the kind of gaudy clothes, jewels, and other status objects that are on display in the party. She decided to amplify this aspect of the film by bathing the wealthy in green (Platt n.d., 221). The use of the color in the film begins subtly: in the first mansion Webster burgles, he enters by way of a back kitchen where there are only smatterings of green—in the wall paper, on an electrical outlet. Quickly, however, green’s presence builds to something almost overwhelming as Webster, disguised as a handyman, makes his way through a succession of rooms, most of which display a green motif with increasing intensity. For example, a foyer includes a brown and white spiral staircase with a green runner carpet; the room also has green walls, but the color scheme is broken up by a fair amount of white trim and heavy brown furniture. He enters another more fully green room, where the furniture is green as well (as is the dress of a young women in a painting that adorns the wall). Finally, there is a sun room that is monstrous in the relentless green of its interior and exterior— through the glass walls of the room, visible lawns intensify the effect. As Webster penetrates the house of his first rich victim, he becomes ever more fully ensconced in trappings of money that grow increasingly audacious in their insistence on being green. This color scheme persists throughout the film. As an approach to interior design, the color is almost solely reserved for the homes of the rich, and every house Webster burgles includes at least some swaths of green. Perhaps its most ostentatious use comes late in the film at Henderling’s office—a green shag carpet, green furniture, green walls. Even as he has been burgled and blackmailed by Webster, he surrounds himself with the constant reminder of his wealth. There are, to be sure, subtler uses of the color as well. Warren Oates plays Dave Reilly, an insurance investigator on the trail of Webster. Reilly is a clever investigator who slowly pieces together the jewel thief’s identity, but he is also not of the world he is working so hard to protect; clearly not rich himself, he serves as a useful tool, both as an insurance man and as an investigator, to protect the wealthy and their money. Throughout the film, Reilly often wears a tie with stripes of green and dark blue, as if to indicate his tangential relationship with the money he labors so hard to safeguard. Platt ingeniously blends costume, design, and location to reinforce this extended metaphor. As with the lush green grass of the lawn mentioned

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above, the film uses natural greens to complement or undermine the idea of green as money. When Webster meets the lowlife fences who sell his stolen property for him (Ned Beatty and Gregory Sierra), the meeting sites are in rundown parts of town—on a rubble heap under a bridge or at the former Trail Drive-In, boarded up and overgrown (Bergeron 2020). These locations are dingy and strewn with rubbish. What greenery exists appears sickly, as if abandoned by life. These locations are clearly marked as unsavory, in part because of the activity that takes place in them, in part because of their dilapidated conditions, and in part because, aside from the few weeds that poke through the rubbish-strewn asphalt, they are almost entirely devoid of green. Laura is something of an intermediary between these two worlds, and so is her house. She is English, formerly of old money, but down on her luck, and the film implies that she has unhappy affairs with married rich men to maintain her standard of living. Webster meets her at a swank cocktail party, and, as described above, when she first appears onscreen, she too is tied to this green world of money, albeit also separated from it by the Dutch door barrier. Later, Webster and Laura return to her house, which (as described in Chap. 3) is empty of furniture and devoid of green on the inside. Laura’s financial straits are also indicated by her dilapidated swimming pool, empty of water and strewn with piles of windblown leaves. However, the house and pool are surrounded by greenery—lush trees, bushes, and overgrown gardens. The lot is not as devoid of life as the criminal meeting points. Laura is surrounded by green—at home, at the cocktail party—but not ensconced in it like the wealthy victims of Webster’s crimes, even as she would like to be. The complex visual metaphor works here to imply why she would be so willing to join Webster in his life of crime, to help him with his burglaries and robberies.



The Witches of Eastwick

The Witches of Eastwick is Polly Platt’s final film as a production designer. Working with James Brooks at Gracie Films, she was already transitioning into producing,10 which, aside from occasional screenwriting, would be her primary role in Hollywood for the rest of her career. Witches is a fitting end to Platt’s design career—lushly intricate and detailed, the film features homes, wardrobes, mansions, swimming pools, city streets, and more all designed by Platt, with sophisticated reoccurrences of patterns, colors, structural shapes, even text styles. In Chap. 3, I discuss Platt’s role in

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determining the location of the filming, but her eye for detail permeates every scene of the film, aided immensely by the direction of George Miller and by Vilmos Zsigmond’s cinematography, particularly when it captures natural colors that resemble Platt’s design choices. Beneath its satanic rom-com trappings, Witches is a beautifully made film in which every frame carries information that pushes and transforms the narrative through-line in thoughtful, subtle ways. Witches concerns three single women living privileged, but boring lives in a small New England town: Alex (Cher) is a sculptor and the widowed mother of a teenage daughter; Sukie (Michelle Pfeiffer), a writer for the local newspaper, is the mother of six whose husband has left her; and Jane (Susan Sarandon) is a cellist and school music teacher—recently divorced, she was never able to have children. The three meet for weekly drinks to gossip about townsfolk and humorously fantasize about men. Unknowingly, they form a witches’ coven that summons Daryl Van Horn (Jack Nicholson) to town. Over the course of the film, Van Horn, who may be the devil, seduces all three women while also wreaking various havocs upon the town before the women realize the intensity of their own magical power, which they use to banish him. It is an amusing sometimes awkward mix of feminism and regressive sexual politics, and part of its devious pleasure comes from the way the film’s mischievous depiction of adult sexual relationships refuses categorizing. Perhaps not surprisingly, design and color play a role in crafting this mischief. Before discussing the film’s use of color it is worth pointing out a few of the design elements that ground its visual style. The first is fire. Most of the characters in the film have fireplaces in their homes, the first appearing onscreen early in the film when the three “witches” visit Alex’s house for their regular Thursday drinks night. It’s a stormy evening and the fire provides Alex’s rustic waterfront cottage a warm chiaroscuro glow that accentuates not only the boozy frolicking of the women, but also the devilry at work as, unbeknownst to them, they call forth the demonic Van Horne. The film is full of hints—subtle and overt—about Van Horne’s diabolical nature from before he even appears onscreen: odd cloud formations; characters forgetting his name after having met him; and most ominously, the dark premonitions of Felicia (Veronica Cartwright), which eventually drive her mad and lead her husband, Clyde (Richard Jenkins), to murder her. Against these more overt markers, the fires often seem downright homey, but fire, of course, has its own connotations of devilry, and the ever-present fire throughout the film adds to its sinister

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atmosphere. Some of the fireplaces are mentioned in the script in a few scenes, but Platt decided to “put fire everywhere” in her sets: We still had no ending to the picture, where the witches destroy the Devil. I knew we were going to do a wax effigy of the Devil and that somehow the wax effigy would melt and that would be the end of the Devil but we didn’t know how that was going to happen. (Platt n.d., 307)

Ironically, the fire that burns Van Horne’s effigy in the finished film comes not from a fire place but from a bottle of spirits accidentally catching fire in his kitchen. However, the fireplaces maintain a consistent presence in the film. In addition to their infernal foreboding, they also add ambiance to key scenes in particular ways. The fire in Alex’s house, mentioned above, sets the scene of the women’s inadvertent summoning of Van Horne. At the Alden’s home, the fireplace flickers menacingly as Felicia is overcome by her darkest possession, vomiting a seemingly endless stream of cherries all over the room (inadvertently caused by the three women under Van Horne’s sly direction). This leads Clyde to grab the fireplace poker and beat her to death. In Jane’s home the firelight in the background is mirrored by her cello catching on fire when Van Horne arrives to seduce her. And the elaborate, beautifully designed fireplace in the center of Van Horne’s swimming pool provides sultry backlighting to his seduction of Sukie. The pool is one of Platt’s finest design creations. While much of the film was shot on location in Massachusetts, the pool was designed on the Warner Bros. lot in Los Angeles. Platt painted the pool deck black and surrounded it with an enormous tent, which she draped with gray silk and lit with several candelabras and two chandeliers hanging from above. She also designed the marble fireplace that appears to float in the center of the pool (Fig. 5.1). The entire set is magical and mystical, befitting both its scenes of seduction and its role as the locale where the witches first learn they can fly. The tented pool aligns with one of the film’s other visual motifs—large, open tents and awnings that dot Van Horne’s property and where he lays on impressive spreads to entice the women with his largess, while also provoking them with his studied vulgarity. The first of these appears when Van Horne makes the acquaintance of Alex, who has cycled out to his manor to investigate the strange, charismatic man the town has been talking about. He invites her to lunch under a large, airy, pink tent.

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Fig. 5.1  Van Horne’s swimming pool and fireplace. (The Witches of Eastwick, Warner Bros.)

Later, a different pink tent appears closer to the mansion when Alex arrives with Sukie to introduce her to Van Horne and they find Jane reclining in a lawn chair, having already been a target of his seduction. Every tented space in the film is one of luxury as well as sex, and, particularly when Van Horne is present, a certain amount of vulgarity. At lunch with Alex, he speaks in crass sexual terms about male genitalia to provoke her latent desire to be free from societal constraints. In another tent, when Alex and Sukie meet Jane, she lounges in a blissful post-coital manner. The tented pool is the location not only of Sukie’s seduction, but also where the women first agree to join in a group sexual relationship with Van Horne. The tents are huge structures, but they are also airy and open—aside from the one covering the pool, they have no walls. Visually the represent Van Horne’s character explicitly—impressive on first view, sophisticated even, but lacking substance and empty of promise. It’s important that the main outdoor tens are pink, which represents another effort by Platt to endow a particular color with meaning in a film. In the case of Witches’ pinks, the effort is much subtler and the color is deployed more sparingly—with a few major exceptions—than in Targets or The Thief Who Came to Dinner. Furthermore, the color’s potential for meaning is much more ambiguous and, thus, potentially more effective than in those earlier films. Platt had rarely chosen pink as a major color in any of her films from the 1970s, but it explodes into her ‘80s films, as Platt seems to have become enamored with the color—I have already mentioned the pink hospital walls of Young Doctors in Love, but The Man with

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Two Brains (1983), Platt’s most cartoonish film, abounds with the color. She returns to subtlety with Terms of Endearment, where the color is used for key touches, such as for the curtains in Emma’s bedroom.11 In Young Doctors and Two Brains, pink and its abundance accord with the Day-Glo aesthetic of the early ‘80s. By the time of Witches, Platt is still infatuated with the color but she embeds its slight irreality into the film’s fabric much the way she does the fireplaces. One of the things that makes its use in the film effective is that pink’s culturally agreed upon meanings or metaphorical potential are more elusive than other, more primary colors. It has an association with femininity and the effeminate, to be sure, but its blending of purples, reds, and whites (even grays) endows it with other possible meanings as well. Color consultant Patti Bellantoni’s book If it’s Purple, Someone’s Gonna Die examines the different psychological uses of color in film. The book’s chapters focus on the colors red, yellow, blue, orange, green, and purple—and she attributes specific, if somewhat predictable, metaphorical meaning to those colors. Red is romantic and lustful, but also defiant and angry; blue is cold and cerebral, but also melancholy and passive; purple is asexual and fantastic, mystical and ethereal. The book has little to say about the color pink, and what Bellantoni does offer can be contradictory, but these contradictions, I think, help explain the effective use of the color in Witches. For example, she describes how the “bubble gum pink” (which she also describes as “pale red”) of The Royal Tennenbaums renders the family patriarch Royal Tennenbaum (Gene Hackman) silly despite his despicable behavior, and that it leads the audience to “know instinctively not to take him seriously” (Bellantoni 2005, xxviii). Later, doubling down on the color’s primary stereotype, she calls pink “the color of little girls” (25). She writes of May (Winona Ryder) wearing the color in The Age of Innocence, “Pink sends a very innocent signal and captures a critical element in May’s disingenuous character. She may appear innocent, but she is more than clever” (35). Thus, pink’s silliness can also imply a certain deviousness when appropriated by a character with scheming on her mind. She describes the pink credits of Rosemary’s Baby as “sinister” (65), and she describes the pinks of The Virgin Suicides as deceptive, masking the sisters’ (particularly Lux’s) melancholy in a surface innocence (181). Bellantoni does not spend a great deal of time discussing the color pink, and when she does, it is mostly in contrast to other colors (e.g., she makes the claim about pink as “the color of little girls” as a contrast to the red coat that the little girl wears in Schindler’s List). However, when the color

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does come up its potential for meaning is constantly shifting, often mediating between a type of childhood or naïve innocence, and a more sinister deception. In Witches pink is Van Horne’s color. It appears throughout the film in all manner of design—as clothes, flowers, lampshades, the tents, and even in the way Zsigmond’s photography captures pink sunsets reflecting off the water. Most of these appearances could be described as slight, almost unnoticeable—nothing like the way Thief is awash in greens. However, those subtle appearances are clearly tied to the color’s blatant manifestation in two of the film’s most significant set pieces: the balloon scene, and the climax. In the balloon scene, Van Horne opens his mansion not only to the three witches, but to their children as well. In the mansion’s front hall (filmed in the foyer of the Wang Center in Boston), Van Horne welcomes the families, and while Puccini’s “Nessun Dorma” plays on the soundtrack, thousands of pink balloons flood the hall. The children and their mothers run and frolic among the balloons; they bat them in the air (Fig. 5.2). After a time jump, the children are no longer present as Van Horne and the three witches take turns gliding around the same foyer on a small cart, as though swimming or flying through the balloons. The entire hall is awash in pink and, at points in the sequence, the balloons crowd out everything else onscreen so that the camera’s frame is entirely filled with the color. This scene is not in the script. According to Platt, Miller wanted to include a “honeymoon sequence” in the film, in which Van Horne entertains not only the

Fig. 5.2  Van Horne courts the witches and their children with thousands of pink balloons. (The Witches of Eastwick, Warner Bros.)

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women, but their children. Miller had in mind a Restoration style play, but was having difficulty making it work. Platt suggested: “if you want to have him entertain the mothers and the children, why don’t you have the Devil bring them a lot of balloons. Everybody likes balloons” (Platt n.d., 308). The idea of the balloons led to the cart, and the scene was born.12 Over 12,000 balloons were used. The film’s climax occurs after Van Horne has viciously manipulated the witches into returning to his bed after they attempt to break off the relationship. They spend the night with him and he thinks all is copacetic, so he leaves the mansion that morning, driving into town to retrieve food for brunch. Van Horne wears a hot pink blazer and a long pink coat that resembles a luxurious bathrobe. He appears anything but threatening, and while he is in town, the witches cast a spell upon a wax effigy of him. The spell causes him immense pain, he spouts chicken feathers from his mouth, he is blown and then dragged about the town by a ferocious wind, and then, in a disgusting act reminiscent of Felicia’s death, he lets forth with endless streams of cherry vomit over a crowded church. His hair is a mess, he is coated with feathers, his face is plastered with vomit, and his pink coat is stained with dirt. He has been made a fool. These two sequences blatantly foreground pink and associate it directly with Van Horne, but they are not the only associations. There are the aforementioned tents, but there is also Van Horne’s gigantic bed. Platt describes how Miller wanted everything in Van Horne’s house to be massive, the bigger the better, so for his bed she attached four king-sized beds together and covered them with an enormous pink sateen quilt. The bed is big enough so that Van Horne and all four witches can lounge upon it comfortably. There are subtler pinks as well. When Van Horne first appears, he wears a maroon bow tie, but later, as it comes untied around his neck, its pattern gives off a pink sheen. These uses of pink reinforce Bellantoni’s analyses of the color. Its meaning modulates throughout the film from childish to deceptive, to insidious, to silly. And these meanings wax and wane along with the witches’, and the film’s, perception of Van Horne’s power. Pink appears elsewhere in the film in surprising ways. The color can first be seen the day after the storm, after Van Horne’s arrival, as Felicia and Clyde enter the town’s newspaper office. Felicia wears a pink blouse and Clyde carries pink flowers. A subtle connection is made here before the color’s association with Van Horne has even been established. Later, on hearing that somebody has bought the Lennox mansion, Felicia drops a

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bouquet of pink flowers as her first premonition comes upon her. When Van Horne finally appears, at a concert given by Jane and her quartet, he gives Jane a bouquet of pink flowers (pink flowers of numerous varieties abound in the film), the first establishment of his association with the color in what seems like an underplayed invitation. As the film spends more time at Van Horne’s mansion, the color continues to make appearances—there is a large pink vase outside his bedroom door, and in a scene when the witches recount their deepest fears to him, they lie on the floor, in front of the fireplace, and lounge on large pink cushions. Felicia, too, will continue to be associated with the color—in a hospital scene she has a pink pillow, in a church scene where she’s overcome with the urge to viciously denounce the witches as whores, she wears pink gloves, and then in her final scene, she wears another pink blouse underneath a needlepoint sweater. Felicia is the only character in the film to recognize Van Horne for who he is—immediately so, before she even meets him or learns his name—and she pays a dreadful price for it. At the same time, though, her recognition of his evil seems to infect her in a way that the film never explains. She becomes obsessed with his evil, and with punishing him and the three women, and is driven to madness by it. Their connection is also mirrored in the fact that both take part in deranged anti-women rants during church service, and both eventually spit up cherries. The three witches, on the other hand, never wear pink in the film. At times, they all take on the suave, black-and-white patterned wardrobe scheme that Van Horne wears early on, with each of the women bringing their own individual flair to it. And they do carry pink flowers at times. They romp on his pink bedspread, lunch under his pink tents, and recline on his pink pillows. But they do not take on the color of the devil. They are lured by Van Horne’s style, by his debonair, even by his grandiosity. But in the end, they do not fall victim to his deceit, nor do they allow him to render them silly or outlandish. As with her attention to detail and her eye for location, Platt’s understanding of the possibility of color was formidable and was driven by her constant desire to expand upon the meaning of the script and to develop character and narrative through color’s precise and thoughtful deployment. Often times, as in several of the examples in this chapter, that meant embedding a particular color or color scheme into a film’s overall color palette. Such examples can be easy to articulate because they represent a highly discernable, almost total approach to scenic design. But other times, as with the red paint in Broadcast News, they are subtle touches

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meant as less detectable flourishes of meaning. For example, in Bad News Bears, she chose yellow as a predominant color for various costumes because she liked its association with cowardice (Platt n.d., 245). In Terms of Endearment, she has purple wisteria slowly ascend the front of Aurora’s house to convey the passage of time. Platt even had a detailed knowledge of how to design color for black-and-white films (an under-researched area of study). Two of her best-known films, The Last Picture Show and Paper Moon, were filmed in black and white, and Platt worked to get the color right for both of them. For example, on Picture Show she describes painting the bricks of buildings various dark shades of red so that their contrast would show better on film (LoBrutto 158). On Paper Moon, she designed all of Tatum O’Neal’s costumes in shades of reds and blues to heighten their contrast in black and white. These uses of color are only some of the many ingenious ways Platt took advantage of one of a designer’s greatest tools. Doing so marks another means, in addition to her attention to detail and her location work, by which she developed the mise-en-scène of all her films.

Notes 1. See, for example, reviews by Roger Ebert (https://www.rogerebert.com/ reviews/young-­doctors-­in-­love-­1982) and Janet Maslin (https://www. nytimes.com/1982/07/17/movies/young-­doctors-­in-­love.html) 2. In the intervening years, Platt had turned her hand to writing, penning scripts for feature films Pretty Baby (1978) and Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff (1979). She would go on to write the script for the Academy Award winning short film Lieberman in Love (1995). 3. The film was shot in 1981. During this time, Platt’s ex-husband Peter Bogdanovich was reeling from the murder of Dorothy Stratten, which had a profound impact on Platt and Bogdanovich’s two young daughters. Additionally, Platt was in the midst of a temporary but long separation from her third husband, Tony Wade (Platt n.d., 271–272). 4. The exteriors of the hospital were shot outside the façade of The MacArthur Hotel, formerly the Park Plaza Hotel, designed and built in the Art Deco style in 1925. Perhaps coincidentally, the MacArthur façade bears a striking resemblance to the Art Deco facade of Los Angeles County Hospital (1933), where Platt was a patient during her miscarriage in 1960. 5. As mentioned in Chap. 2, Platt designed hospital spaces for a variety of her later films—in addition to Young Doctors in Love, hospitals figure prominently in The Man with Two Brains; Terms of Endearment; and The Witches of Eastwick.

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6. While fantastical films may have been most frequently colorized, other early film types and genres sometimes received added color as well. For example, travelogue films made by Segundo de Chomón, such as Voyage to Burgos (1911), were often colorized by himself and his wife, Julienne Mathieu (Chomón did specialize in trick films as well). 7. Rumors have long persisted that some sequences of the film were shot using Prizmacolor, one of Technicolor’s competitors; however, no such footage appears to survive. 8. In addition to Before I Die, other potential titles for Targets included Blood and Candy and Day of Horror. 9. Cameron Crowe credits Platt with convincing Kovács to serve as cinematographer on Say Anything (Crowe 2018). 10. Platt’s first project at Gracie was the development of The War of the Roses (1989). She had suggested the novel to Brooks, who loved it, and she was slated to direct—her first film in that role. She had a difficult relationship with screenwriter Michael Leeson, who, in Platt’s telling, was not receptive to the kind of collaborative working relationship that she was used to. While he was finishing the script, she left Los Angeles to design Witches. While on location, she got the call that Danny DeVito had been hired to direct in her stead. She received an “executive producer” credit on the film (Platt n.d., 300–308; Abramowitz 1993). 11. Platt’s use of curtains in Terms of Endearment is fascinating: they indicate the passage of time, the economic status of Emma and Flap’s family, and metaphorically the status of Emma and Aurora’s relationship. 12. According to Platt, the three women performers did not take to the cart idea at first, so she got on it and Miller pushed her around, and when they saw the way she glided, they changed their minds. There are set photos of Miller pushing Platt around on the cart.

References Abramowitz, Rachel. 1993. She’s Done Everything (Except Direct). Premier, November. https://www.maryellenmark.com/text/magazines/premiere/ 919V-­000-­004.html Barnwell, Jane. 2004. Production Design: Architects of the Screen. London: Wallflower. Bellantoni, Patti. 2005. If It’s Purple, Someone’s Gonna Die: The Power of Color in Visual Storytelling. Burlington: Focal Press. Bergeron, Michael. 2020. Remembering When ‘The Thief Who Came to Dinner’ Filmed in Houston. Preview (Houston Chronicle), July 20. https://preview. houstonchronicle.com/movies-­tv/remembering-­when-­the-­thief-­who-­came-­ to-­15418043

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Bogdanovich, Peter, dir. 1968. Targets. Hollywood, CA: Paramount, 2004. DVD, 86 min. Brooks, James L. 2020. Personal Interview. March. Brooks, James L., dir. 1983. Terms of Endearment. Hollywood, CA: Paramount, 2013. Blu-Ray, 132 min. Crowe, Cameron. 2018. Personal Interview. August. Fischer, Lucy. 2015. The Silent Screen, 1825–1927. In Art Direction & Production Design, ed. Lucy Fischer, 23–47. London: I.B. Tauris. Gunning, Tom. 1995. Colorful Metaphors: The Attraction of Color in Early Silent Cinema. Fotogenia 1. https://archivi.dar.unibo.it/files/muspe/wwcat/ period/fotogen/num01/numero1d.html Hollyn, Norman. 2009. The Lean Forward Moment: Create Compelling Stories for Film, TV, and the Web. Berkeley: New Riders. Julian, Ruper, dir. 1925. The Phantom of the Opera. Public Domain. YouTube, 79 min. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dPClZCaiXc LoBrutto, Vincent. 1992. By Design: Interviews with Film Production Designers. Westport: Praeger. Marshall, Garry, dir. Young Doctors in Love. Beverly Hills, CA: 20th Century Fox. 96 min. Miller, George, dir. 1987. The Witches of Eastwick. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2017. Blu-Ray, 118 min. Misek, Richard. 2010. Chromatic Cinema: A History of Screen Color. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Platt, Polly. 1967. Letter to Boris Karloff. Box 114. Bogdanovich Mss., Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. ———. 1977. American Film Institute: Harold Lloyd Seminar, December 7. ———. n.d. “It Was Worth It.” Collection of Antonia and Sashy Bogdanovich. Unpublished Memoir. Schleier, Merrill. 2015. Postwar Hollywood, 1947–1967. In Art Direction & Production Design, ed. Lucy Fischer, 23–47. London: I.B. Tauris. Shiel, Mark. 2015. Classical Hollywood: 1928–1946. In Art Direction & Production Design, ed. Lucy Fischer, 23–47. London: I.B. Tauris. The Hollywood Reporter. 2011. Remembering Polly Platt. August 2. https://www. hollywoodreporter.com/news/remembering-­polly-­platt-­218266 Yorkin, Bud, dir. 1973. The Thief Who Came to Dinner. Burbank, CA: Warner Bros.

CHAPTER 6

Platt’s Costume Design

Much as with production design, little scholarly focus has been paid to costume design, and most of what has been written is relatively recent. In the introduction to her 2001 monograph, Costume and Cinema: Dress Code in Popular Film, Sarah Street rehearses some of the arguments that had been developing in the late 1990s about why costume design had not been recognized as “a legitimate and fruitful subject area” (Street 2001, 1). One of the overriding arguments is the elision of costume with fashion, and semiotic framings of fashion as “frivolous” and “feminine,” but also as “an expression of capitalist commodity fetishism,” or, finally, as “one of the primary ways in which women are trapped into gratifying the male gaze.” These presentations of costume as fashion, and fashion as either too frivolous to warrant close attention or overly laden with capitalist and patriarchal trappings, result in conflicting barriers around the study of costume—too “feminine” for serious scholars, too misogynist for feminist scholars. Street’s and other important work1 from around the turn of the century challenges these negative framings of costume as an area of study, and over the past two decades, a small but growing body of scholarship has developed around analyzing costume’s role as a component of mise-en-scène, as a means of distinguishing, enhancing, or countering character, or as locus of symbolism and metaphor. While work on costume design often continues to focus on costume as fashion—costume’s role in developing the look of a film—there are examples as well of how costume “helps © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Hunter, Polly Platt, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82120-3_6

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viewers understand … character, but also offers possibilities for personal expression” (Munich 2011, 4). More recently, Melanie Williams has explicitly detailed the immense labor undertaken by one costume designer in particular, Julie Harris, and how the marginalization of costume design as an area of serious study is another way that both Hollywood and film scholarship obscure the labor of the (often) women whose creativity is such a fundamental component of the relationship between character, viewer, and meaning. Williams argues, “It is important that feminist film scholarship works to overturn the marginalisation, devaluation and invisibility of women’s work, including in the realm of costume” (Williams 2016, 1). When considering this invisible labor in the case of Polly Platt, it is important to keep in mind that on most of her films she acted as both production designer and costume designer, as well as overseeing location management. While she rarely received credit for the latter two jobs, it becomes clear that the amount of labor she put into fashioning the look of her films was enormous. If costume helps viewers understand character, then, like other components of mise-en-scène, it becomes part of the film’s potential for meaning. Street argues that “film costumes not only relate to the characters who wear them but the audiences who watch them” (Street 2001, 7). In other words, costumes aid audiences in the construction of meaning. Munich echoes this when she writes, “Viewers quickly grasp the contemporary meanings and values conveyed by costume, even in films about earlier historical moments. Thus fashion is an essential tool in the craft of conveying meaning through film” (2011, 5). Costume designers know this. For example, Drake Stutesman outlines how costume designer Juliet Polsca approached dressing Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) on the television series The Sopranos. Polsca had to contend with Tony’s supposed sex appeal, but also Gandolfini’s appearance, his atypical seductive allure (by Hollywood standards), and his “unsophisticated New Jersey twenty-first-­ century mafia look.” In choosing darker solid tones—grays, blacks, tans— with specific patterns, Polsca was able to “lend him urbanity” while also “sexualizing his bulk” (Stutesman 2011, 23). Williams details how Harris designed four versions of Ursula Andress’s chiffon gown in Casino Royale in slightly different shades from pale to deep pink, “to suggest the accelerating romanticism of the scene”—a plan that was, unfortunately, mangled in the editing (Williams 2016, 12). These are just two of countless examples of the intimate awareness costume designers possess of how their

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designs, their fabrics, their colors, and their fashions create meaning by conveying information to viewers not only about character, but also about time, place, emotion, theme, or genre. Polly Platt was no different. Her attention to details of costume derived from a host of concerns, sometimes complementary, sometimes overlapping: character, narrative, theme, aesthetics, cost, genre, setting and era, and of course her own practice of production design. Most of the time her decisions were meticulously planned well in advance of production, but she was also adept at improvising or changing plans when necessary. In this chapter, I examine Platt’s costume design. I have alluded to this in earlier chapters, raising the issue of ill-fitting clothes in Chap. 2 or how some of her costumes exemplify her understanding of color in Chap. 4. Here, though, I will take up costume specifically as an extension of or co-­ equal with her production design. I first briefly discuss Platt’s approach to costume design as stated in several public forums. Her public statements about costume and its potential for meaning were sometimes contradictory—both with other public statements and with her privately stated thoughts that she included in her memoirs—and it is worth teasing out some of those contradictions and their implications for her practice. I then focus on how Platt designed costume in relation to both character and production design: to complement, or foreground, or contrast with the production design; to comment upon or complement the script; and in so doing, to extend understanding of character and narrative. In this way, I articulate how costume becomes another part of Platt’s contribution to the mise-en-scène of her films. Aspects of costume that were important to Platt overlap, so rather than focus on particular elements such as fit, or color, or character, I begin by considering some examples of how Platt’s design weaves these components of costume together for an overall approach. As with previous chapters, I then move on to a case study—in this instance, of What’s Up, Doc?, a film for which Platt oversaw all aspects of location, production design, and costume, all of which are so intimately and intricately interrelated that it is difficult to imagine the film without her input and presence.



Platt on Costume Design

When discussing her work and career in public, Platt could come across as contradictory, especially if the changing nature of her statements over time are considered. For example, throughout her career she regularly spoke

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about her metaphorical and psychological intentions for the “cold” greens and blues versus the “warm” browns and golds she used for Bobby’s and Orlok’s homes and attire in Targets (as discussed in Chap. 4). Elsewhere, however, she claimed that she did not give much thought to her design’s potential for meaning. At an AFI seminar in 1983, she was asked about the similarities between writing and designing. She first startles by saying, “I think they are one in the same” (Platt 1983). She then gives a long, thoughtful answer about how both require intimate knowledge of character. As the seminar progresses, with each answer, she continually circles back to this statement, which she slowly refines and reframes as a question over how well a writer or even director can really know a character. This, she seems to argue, is where design can come in: “It should be in the picture. It’s not in our mouths,” she says, by which she seems to mean the only thing one can know about a character, or narrative, is what we see onscreen. Anything else, even if it comes from the director’s mouth is, as she puts it, “all bullshit.” As she continues, however, she makes an intriguing statement about her own approach to design, which extends her notion that nobody can really know character, not even the designer: But I don’t think I really have been able to verbally tell you why I put anything on anybody, except for the early days when I said it would all be cold colors and this and that. But when I write, I can’t really tell you that I understand the characters I write about. Not really. That may be a big copout. But I really believe that seeing things is different from talking about them.

Here Platt again conflates the writer and the designer, but she also conflates color, one of the key components of her production design, and costume, another vital component. It is fascinating to hear her thinking aloud here, in front of an audience of film students. As she progresses through the session, her statements do not only refine previous ones, but contradict them. They also contradict statements she had made earlier or would make later in her career. For example, in a previous seminar at AFI, she spoke very precisely about how her costumes for The Last Picture Show were designed to be ill-fitting to convey awkwardness, were designed to appear used and in some cases, dirty, to convey her conception of the film’s concept about life’s hardship in Anarene, Texas (Platt 1977). In her interview with Vincent LoBrutto, she discusses not only the specifics of the colors in Targets, but also the colors of the interiors and the flowers in Terms of Endearment (LoBrutto 1992), in both cases implying that her decisions could tell us something

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about character, a concept she seems less comfortable with in the ’83 seminar. Such contradictory statements are not infrequent among artists—as careers and prospects develops, as individuals age, as the experience that comes with working in the same field for decades accrues, it is natural that one’s opinion will evolve. Platt was clearly a thoughtful filmmaker whose approach combined a pragmatism about the possibilities of film production and budgets with a consistent sense of ingenuity about the process of filmmaking itself. There is also something refreshingly counter-auteurist in her growing insistence throughout the talk that pinpointing a specific meaning, or an intended meaning, is fruitless. This is reminiscent of the way some of her heroes of the Classical era responded to claims over their auteurism—for example, John Ford’s repeated insistence that he was not an artist or that he could not explain what his films meant (McBride 2011, 519). However, the contradictions in Platt’s public statements may also have deeper, more complex motivations behind them. In 1983, Platt had just re-entered her career in production design after a nearly six-year break, taken in an effort to transition solely to screenwriting. While that endeavor had seen the production of her controversial arthouse hit Pretty Baby (1978), it had not resulted in the shift in careers that Platt had hoped for.2 She had returned to production design with Young Doctors in Love (1982) and The Man with Two Brains (1983), two broad comedic farces that are fine as films, and have their admirers, but are far from the high-profile, critically successful movies she had designed in the previous decade. She had also just embarked on the second great creative relationship in her career, with director-producer James L.  Brooks. In downplaying the potential for “meaning” of her design, and even her writing, Platt may be engaging in the reputational management that was typical of New Hollywood crew members who often chose to defer to their films’ directors on questions not only of meaning, but also of intention. Claiming ownership or authorship of a significant component of a film’s production, meaning, or its success could be precarious for the career of a crew person who wanted to maintain their reputation. This has been especially true for women throughout Hollywood history, including during the 1970s, when their re-entry into Hollywood was still contingent as much on a sense of the system’s benevolence toward them as it was on their talent and skill. While Platt had developed a reputation throughout her career as somebody unafraid to speak her mind, even she was not immune to the vagaries of Hollywood’s ability to cast aside women who seemed “difficult.”

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While these various contradictions and strategies for reputational management are common in Hollywood and a part of Platt’s public-facing persona, her memoirs tell a different tale. She writes repeatedly about her intentions for specific designs—structural, color, costume, even, on occasion light. For A Star is Born (1976), she designed the Los Angeles mansion of John Norman (Kris Kristofferson) to be dark and cluttered, even though it is enormous, while Esther’s (Barbra Streisand’s) small apartment is light and airy because she felt such designs complemented their characters. For their adobe house in Arizona she filled it with enough props to give it an appearance of controlled clutter, but kept it very light because it was a blending of their two characters (Platt n.d., 235). These decisions were not accidents or happenstance. As previously outlined, Platt was studied in the arts: two years as an art major at Skidmore, then nearly two more studying costume design at Carnegie Tech, during which time she also studied architecture (in one AFI seminar, she would claim that designers needn’t study architecture because it was likely to be a hindrance—another contradiction). While in college, she supplemented her formal education through self-directed study—reading as many plays as she could; sketching and then painting her own designs for those plays; studying architectural and art history beyond what was required for her degree. Finally, she worked in summer stock and university theater almost constantly from the age of eighteen. Philosophically speaking, her statements about not being able to “find” character through writing and design might be very accurate, but practically speaking she was highly informed and highly articulate about the potential of set design, of color, and most definitely of costume to affect a film’s potential for meaning. Platt oversaw costume design—generally without credit—on nearly every film she designed. On most of those films, there is no credited costume designer, and when there is, Platt usually played a guiding hand in costuming, just as she did in location decisions even when somebody like Frank Marshall was credited as location manager. For example, director James L. Brooks has described how Platt mentored Kristi Zea, the costume designer on Terms of Endearment (Brooks 2020).3 For Platt, costume was an integral part of design and an integral part of her approach to filmmaking. Just as she equated design with writing in the ’83 AFI seminar, in a previous seminar, she equates all three: “the sets for me are totally dictated by the characters. So therefore, the clothes that the character wears have to be related to what I designed. I mean, in other words, they’re all … everything goes together” (Platt 1977).

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In Chap. 4, I mention Platt’s decision to use yellow as one of the major colors of the baseball uniforms in The Bad News Bears (1976) because she thought it was “cowardly” (Platt n.d., 245), an intriguing choice considering the film’s subject matter. Bears is about a Little League baseball team in Los Angeles that should not exist. The league in which they play comprises teams of elite young players—athletic, serious about the game, dedicated to winning. The players on the Bears were not good enough to make it onto any of the other teams, so one of their fathers (Ben Piazza)—a prominent city politician and member of the club that oversees the league—forces them to accept another team made up of these cast offs. He then recruits Morris Buttermaker (Walter Matthau) as their coach and agrees to pay him on the sly. Buttermaker is a washed-up, alcoholic former minor league player, now cleaning area swimming pools, and the film’s early stages depict him as a borderline reprobate, only in it for the extra paycheck. He drinks on the job, swears around the kids, insults their appearance and abilities, and barely has the energy to coach them properly. He determines right away that, aside from two or three of the players, the team is hopeless. They are unlikely to win a game, let alone make a run for the league championship. Such a setup is ripe for the Hollywood underdog treatment: ragtag bunch of kids rise above their abilities to meet the challenge; miserable bastard old coach is inspired by their grit and determination; the team pulls together and, through sheer force of will, achieves the unthinkable and proves everybody wrong by winning it all for the losers and outcasts. How could Platt conceive of such an inspirational gang as cowards? The film, however, is not standard underdog fare. Rather, it is a deeply cynical look at parents, the pressures of team sports, and failure. The film hints at moments of redemption, but in each instance its cynicism undermines any opportunity for hope. For example, during the pre-season the kids are anxiously waiting for Buttermaker to get them uniforms—all the other teams already have theirs. Buttermaker finally comes through with fresh new outfits for everybody, but then during their first practice in uniform, Buttermaker passes out drunk on the field. And while it would be a stretch to describe them as cowards, the kids do give up regularly, on themselves and on the team. They quit en masse after they lose their first game, refuse to play at key moments, and they lose faith in Buttermaker as a coach each time he makes a poor decision. When they do make it to the championship

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game, they lose in part because Buttermaker’s poor coaching decisions lead them to undermine their own playing. The uniforms that Buttermaker acquires for them do not scream cowardice. They are mostly white, with yellow caps, details, and undershirts. In many ways, they resemble the outfits of the rest of the league, but the yellow does pop onscreen in a way that the more staid blacks, dark blues, and greens of the other teams do not. Furthermore, though, Buttermaker also wears yellow throughout the film, including yellow shirts and a yellow quilted jacket that he wears at night and during the climactic scene in the dugout with Amanda (see Chap. 3), lending some consistency to the color’s appearance. Finally, Platt also dresses numerous of the parents in various yellow clothes as they sit in the stands—shirts, blouses, hats, and shorts, thus implicating them as well. Also, where the other teams’ uniforms are subdued and serious, the brightness of the Bears’ outfits have an element of the comical about them. Platt accents this with the team’s logo. While the other teams in the league are sponsored by the likes of Pizza Hut and Denny’s, Buttermaker finds a sponsor in Chico’s Bail Bonds. Platt found the business in the phone book and designed the logo to go with it: a cracked Liberty Bell with the slogan “Let Freedom Ring” beneath it. On first glance, this seems aimed at getting a laugh from the viewer on the uniforms’ reveal, and it is comical. It also, however, embodies the film’s cynical spirit. The film was released in 1976, during the nation’s bicentennial celebrations, and  including the Liberty Bell along with the final lyric of “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” makes for an awkward combination with a Los Angeles bail bondsman, to say the least (it may also be worth remembering Platt’s reflection in her memoirs on seeing the Liberty Bell as a teen, when she deemed its crack to be representative of the dark stain of America’s slavery past). There are also subtle differences in how the uniforms fit the players. On Amanda (Tatum O’Neal) and Kelly (Jackie Earle Haley), the two bona fide quality players on the team, the uniforms are snug and sleek and fit them almost like professional players. The uniforms of two very good players, Tanner (Chris Barnes) and Ahmed (Erin Blunt), also fit well, although they are slightly looser than on Amanda and Kelly. Players with worse skills or who do not play at all, sport more awkwardly fitting, baggy uniforms. Kelly’s and Amanda’s street clothes also mark them as different from the rest of the team. While most of the kids wear white t-shirts and jeans when not in uniform, the two standouts have very distinct styles. Amanda often dresses in floral patterns, perhaps befitting her status as the

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team’s only girl, but also in clothes like halter tops and hippie blouses that are marked as more grown up than the t-shirts most of the boys wear. Kelly wears tight t-shirts of a variety of colors, aviator sun glasses that are a bit too big for his face, and jewelry. Although the film implies they are all in the same age range, Kelly and Amanda are marked as older by their wardrobes, which reinforces not only their stronger playing abilities, but their more central roles in the film. This aging up of Kelly and Amanda also adds to the film’s feel of being something more than a children’s movie, as Amanda, who is eleven, already has her own job, while Kelly rides around on a motorbike and flirts like an adult (or at least in a crass manner representing what he thinks is adult). When Amanda makes a bet with Kelly on a game of air hockey, hoping to convince him to join the team, she loses and must go on a date with him to a Rolling Stones concert. The depiction of Amanda and Kelly as more adult-like than they are, including via their costume, is undermined later in the film: in Amanda’s case in the dugout scene discussed in Chap. 3; in Kelly’s, when he acquiesces to Buttermaker’s request that he take over all the defense in an important game. The team turns on him, causing him to run off in a fit of childish frustration. In these instances, the notion that the two of them might have been more adult-like than the rest of the kids appears suddenly ludicrous. Platt’s propensity for designing ill-fitting clothes to convey understated aspects of character is evident in The Thief Who Came to Dinner (1973). I wrote about the film’s use of the color green—in both costume and production design—in Chap. 4. While green is used throughout the film to convey the characters’ relationship to, or desire for, money, the fit of their clothes suggests something about their level of comfort in their roles within the milieu of the film. Webster (Ryan O’Neal) and Laura (Jacqueline Bisset) spend much of the film as outsiders, criminals who are both social climbers but also scornful of the very society they are moving through. Yet they are always comfortably dressed, whether in formal or casual attire, or even in the workman’s overalls that Webster wears during his first burglary. Webster often wears his shirts unbuttoned down to the chest, or completely unbuttoned, conveying his comfort in any scenario. Laura’s clothes fit her perfectly and exhibit impeccable taste. At the party where Webster first meets her, she’s wearing a simple dark-green gown, with thin shoulder straps and a plunging neckline. She wears no jewelry. Contrast this with the many wealthy wives who populate the rest of the soirée in their garish bright greens, with shoulder pads, sparkles, blinding gems or

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extravagant strings of pearls—they are far richer than Laura, but far less comfortable, although they look like they are trying very hard to be. Some of this is down to Bisset and O’Neal’s reputations and glamor, two of Hollywood’s most attractive stars of the early ‘70s, flirting their way through a breezy, sexy caper film. This is related to what Adrienne Munich describes as “Look” in a film, “an ensemble of visual signs in attire that orients the viewer by its simultaneous strangeness and familiarity and, at a glance, conveys meanings” (Munich 2011, 3). The film positions Laura and Webster as societal outsiders within the diegesis—people who should perhaps be a bit more down at the heel—so their constant comfort and sense of ease seems out of place. At the same time, though, they are both the central figures of the narrative and, extra-diegetically, the fabulous movie stars Jacqueline Bisset and Ryan O’Neal. Of course they should be dressed both fashionably and comfortably. In contrast, Dave Reilly, the insurance investigator played by Warren Oates, looks like his clothes don’t quite fit him. It is not so much that they are uncomfortable, but they are boxy and ill-suited to his shape, off-the-rack suits that hang awkwardly on his frame. Reilly’s job is to pursue Webster (or the cat burglar in question, whom Reilly is pretty sure throughout the film is Webster), and he does so in service to Texas Mutual, the large company that protects Houston’s ultra-rich, of which Reilly is most certainly not a member. As the film progresses, Reilly develops an admiration for Webster even as he gets closer to solving the case, and Oates plays him as a whip-smart investigator who is sure he’s got his man, but who also sympathizes with Webster and slowly develops scorn for Webster’s wealthy victims.4 Thus his slightly ill-fitting outfits help convey how tricky he finds his position. This can be contrasted further with the clothes worn by the fences who buy Webster’s stolen goods off him, particularly Ned Beatty’s Deams, whose clothes always seem to be a bit too tight. Deams is comfortable enough in his role as a petty criminal hoping to get rich off the back of Webster’s crimes, but he is also crass, a bit low-brow. His unfashionable, tight-fitting clothes complement the seedy, dilapidated locations where he and Dynamite (Gregory Sierra) meet with Webster (see Chap. 3). Platt deploys a different approach to costume in Terms of Endearment (1983). She was reluctant to work on the film at first. With its two-­ protagonist structure and a narrative spanning thirty years, she found the novel’s potential for adaptation complicated (Platt n.d., 275). The film was directed by first-time movie director James L.  Brooks, a veteran

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television producer and director (The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Rhoda, Taxi), and Platt was convinced that he was in over his head, particularly in relation to the film’s budget: “I asked if he had finished the script. He handed it to me and I took it home. It was brilliantly done. I met with him again. He was incredibly naïve about movies, and thought he could make Terms of Endearment for very little money. I told him no, but he didn’t get it” (Platt n.d., 284–285). But Brooks knew of Platt’s reputation as a consummate designer who could also act as a de facto producer. He also knew of her friendship with and familiarity with the work of Larry McMurtry, on whose novel the film would be based, and her experience shooting in Texas: “he took out his checkbook and asked me how much I wanted to do the picture. He would write a check right then” (285). So she signed on. In addition to beginning her fruitful, long professional relationship with Brooks, Terms would become the only film for which Platt garnered an Academy Award nomination (the award went to Anna Asp for Fanny and Alexander). Platt’s design for the film had to convey the slow passage of time over several decades, with each scene taking place a few years after the previous, but with no clear expositional marker of time’s passing. In an interview from 1984, Shirley MacLaine, who plays Aurora, discusses the challenge of performing that kind of aging for the film: “To have gone from 23 to 55 would have been a snap. What was difficult was to make 23 different from 35, 35 different from 45” (Harmetz 1984). Platt faced the same struggle in depicting the passage of time for homes and clothing. Her production design for the film solved this problem in a variety of ways, most of them very subtle. Aurora’s house in Houston features a large back garden, full of flowers. The house, like all the settings in the film, was a practical location in Houston. Platt designed the back garden, and with each new scene, the flowers and their arrangement changes. In the front of the house, wisteria grows up the trellises on either side of the entrance, climbing slowly higher and higher over the course of the film. Inside the house, more subtle touches, such as the curtains changing as time passes (curtains and window shades play a fascinating role throughout the film, denoting not only the passage of time, but also the rising-and-falling financial situation of Aurora’s daughter Emma (Debra Winger) and her family). The film’s costume designer was Kristi Zea, but as discussed earlier, Platt served as a mentor to her on set. According to Zea:

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I was very affected by everything she was doing. She was a great supporter and mentor, not just to me. And she really could hold the reins of everything that was going on visually in a film and deliver that look. She allowed people to do their own thing, but she also wanted to be involved. (The Hollywood Reporter 2011)

The film takes a similar approach to costuming as it does to production design. Aurora’s style changes only slightly throughout the first half of the film. She is a meticulous dresser, and she wears clothes solidly colored with little or no pattern. This is true when she dresses formally—as she does for the dinner parties she hosts for the many male suitors trying to win her affection—or casually, when she often wears a white cardigan sweater over a light pink or yellow blouse. It is also true of the pajamas she wears early in the film when she tries to convince Emma not to marry Flap the night before their wedding, which are a plain light pink over which she wears a light-yellow housecoat. In keeping with her fashion sense, throughout most of the film, she wears makeup in every scene and her hair, even when not styled for an occasion, is well arrayed. Like her clothes, her hair style and color change slightly, wavering between a platinum blonde, light blonde, and strawberry blonde. She is shown on occasion to wear a wig. Two events change her approach to style. First, she succumbs to the entreaties of her neighbor, the retired astronaut Garrett Breedlove (Jack Nicholson), and agrees to go on a lunch date with him. She wears a dress with a very light floral pattern. As their relationship develops she dresses frequently in brightly colored floral patterns whenever she is with him, whereas when she speaks to Emma on the phone she tends to return to solid colors. She also wears a sheer floral nightgown when she invites Garrett to sleep over for the first time. Garrett and Aurora’s romantic and sexual relationship are coupled with a slowly developing sense of freedom that she gains after Emma and her family move away, and the floral dresses she wears—light, airy, almost girlish—complement her new, less serious and more pleasurable lease on life. When Emma returns home later in the film, and then Garrett breaks off the relationship, Aurora returns to wearing plainer, non-patterned clothes, for most of the rest of the film. In one scene, when she and Garrett reconcile at an airport, she wears a gold outfit with understated gold polka dots, blending the playfulness of the flower dresses with the more reserved solid colors. The second major event, which also helps explain why she might eschew the colorful floral patterns, is Emma’s illness. Much of the film’s final act

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takes place in hospitals, airports, and hotels as the family seeks medical aid or relief for Emma’s cancer. For this portion of the film, Platt made an ingenious decision: One day during pre-production, I was talking to Brooks about Shirley’s character and what I thought she would do during the time that her daughter was dying in the hospital. One of the things I suggested, as far as production design was concerned, was that Shirley’s character would let her dyed blonde hair grow out; in other words, she wouldn’t bother with her usual regime of going to the hairdresser and getting her hair dyed. Jim loved this idea, and I pointed out that we would have to have a wig made to show the outgrowth of hair. Jim, great collaborator that he was, immediately approved such a wig and we had one made to show the dark hair growing out. (Platt n.d., 287)

Apparently, MacLaine was less than happy about the wig—Brooks, Platt, and other members of the crew have spoken about how glamorous she appeared in any makeup, in any light, and how important it was to her to maintain her look. But, as Brooks has said, “In the end, she served the art. That’s very rare” (Harmetz 1984). Watching the final stretch of the film closely, it appears there might be more than one wig, or that the wig’s dark roots were lengthened. This has the effect of displaying how “she wouldn’t bother with her usual routine,” but it also conveys that time is passing and that Emma’s illness is a painful, lingering slog for the whole family. Aurora also stops wearing makeup in these scenes. She ever remains Shirley MacLaine, but she also appears older, tired, run down. This is in contrast with a new energy she displays as she attends to her sick daughter, takes care of her grandchildren and plans for their future, and rekindles her relationship with Garrett. It appears as if in letting go of her old routines, she is able to redirect her energy and her emotional intensity toward caring for her family in ways she hadn’t earlier in the film, or earlier in Emma’s life. This creates a similarity with the flowered dresses she wears early in her relationship with Garrett—while those gave her a more youthful appearance and the wig adds an agedness, both display an Aurora slowly recalibrating her sense of what is important in life, letting go of some of the social conventions that made her such a rigid character in the film’s first half. These changes are especially apparent in two scenes. First is in the hospital, when Emma is due her pain medication and the nurses are preoccupied with other work. Aurora circles a central nurses’ station, exhorting

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them with increasing intensity to give her daughter a shot. Much of the scene’s power comes from MacLaine’s performance, but the dark roots in her hair visually signify how little energy she currently has for propriety or social conventions. The second comes in the airport scene mentioned above, when she wears the golden polka-dotted dress. Garrett has come to visit her while Emma is in the hospital; he wants to support her and to renew their relationship. When it is time for him to return home, she takes him to the airport and, in this scene, tells him for the first time that she loves him. This is the only scene in the film where she wears her hair both with dark roots and let down as opposed to up in a bun. She is tired, and she displays no interest in playing the kinds of games that she and Garrett had played in the early stages of their relationship—either for fun or out of defensiveness. Again, MacLaine’s and Nicholson’s performances—understated, but full of a tired, hard-won emotion—center the scene, but her appearance is also a key part of its success. Her hair looks natural, like it fits her, and her costume blends the plain colors of “serious” Aurora with the bright patterns of “girlish” Aurora. It is as if, despite all the pain and trauma she has gone through, she has found a way to be comfortable in her own skin. The costume design, including the wig, supplement the performances by conveying this vital information about Aurora visually.



What’s Up, Doc?

When production wrapped on The Last Picture Show, Platt was emotionally and physically drained. During the shoot, she had given birth to her second child and then immediately returned to work, her father-in-law Borislav had passed away, and her husband Peter had begun the affair with Cybill Shepherd that would soon lead to the dissolution of their marriage. Throughout all this, Platt had overseen location, production design, costume design, and hair and makeup for Picture Show—even continuing to do Shepherd’s hair (Platt n.d., 163). She describes the months of early 1971, while the film was in post-production: “I was alone. No friends who weren’t famous. No friends my age. No one. I couldn’t stop crying” (172). However, she soon received a phone call from Orson Welles who invited her to come to Arizona and work with him. Platt jumped at the chance—“I was more than grateful. It was perfect” (Platt n.d., 177). She went to Arizona and did production design for the “film within the film” portion of The Other Side of the Wind, which was finally released in 2018 (Netflix). The experience was rejuvenating for Platt, she writes that

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it made her “start living again” (189),5 so that when Bogdanovich approached her for advice on What’s Up, Doc?, she was ready to go to work on her biggest film yet, and her first studio film. Doc was a Warner Bros. production that would feature two of the era’s biggest stars, Barbra Streisand and Ryan O’Neal. As Platt’s first film produced by a major studio, it was also a union film. At the time, Platt was not a member of the Art Directors Guild—no women were—and so could not work on a union film without the fear of fines or even a strike (185). Like many of Hollywood’s guilds at the time, it was difficult to become a member without experience on a union film, but also nearly impossible to get work on a union film without being a member of the guild. Even though she had trepidations about working with Bogdanovich again, Platt agreed to work on Doc in large part because she believed that designing a Streisand film would give her the bone fides required for Guild admittance. The Guild was resistant—according to Platt, then Guild head, Gene Allan, told her she would never get real work in Hollywood because she was “only the wife.”6 She received Guild permission to design Doc only by hiring a union art director who was paid the art director’s wage for “standing by,” while Platt was “paid next to nothing” (186). This was fine with Platt, who believed correctly that working to design a union, studio film would make it impossible for the Guild to deny her admittance. In 1972, several months after shooting on Doc had wrapped, she became the first woman member of the Art Directors Guild. Even more than that, though, feeling revitalized by her time with Welles and getting along with Bogdanovich, she felt excited to be back working on a big film: “I was going to design all the costumes and the sets and find all the locations for a Barbra Streisand film!” (186). In previous chapters I have discussed elements of Platt’s location scouting and production design on Doc, and when these are considered in conjunction with her costume design, one can see how tremendous her visual contributions to the film were. There is not a shot of the film that she did not have a hand in designing. After the storybook opening credits, the first thing that appears onscreen is one of the four overnight bags whose confusion will lead to so much of the film’s comedy (this one containing top secret documents). The bag’s plaid (tartan) design features red as its predominant color and before any plot gets underway, the bag’s color design establishes the potential for a series of costume and color relationships that persist throughout the film, the most obvious of which are the four bags themselves, including Howard’s (O’Neal), which contains his musical

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rocks. More significantly, but subtler, is the way that a pattern develops between colors and clothes associated with Howard and Judy (Streisand), establishing a visual relationship between them, whereas the clothes worn by Howard’s fiancé Eunice (Madeline Kahn) mark her as separate. For example, when Howard first appears onscreen, he is wearing a blue-and-­ white seersucker suit that has little in common with the plaid of the bags, but he does hold one of the bags. Eunice, on the other hand, wears a brightly patterned yellow-and-white dress, with a string of pearls and white gloves (Platt describes going for a Jackie Kennedy look for Eunice). When Judy first appears onscreen, she is much more casually dressed in jeans and a trench coat that covers her top. She wears a brown tartan newsboy cap, whose pattern, if not color, establishes a connection with the bags, one of which she is also carrying, enhancing the connection further (her bag contains her wardrobe). Furthermore, as the opening minutes of the film progress and Judy’s trench coat opens on occasion, her blouse becomes more visible—it is red with a combination of floral and geometric patterns. The design is much different from the tartan of the overnight bags, but the color scheme is remarkably similar. Thus, before the film has run ten minutes, understated visual connections between Judy and Howard have been made. The narrative compounds these connections and contrasts further. When Judy and Howard first meet in the hotel shop, she calls him “Steve,” a nickname that establishes their private connection and confounds Eunice. In another example, Howard and Eunice have separate bedrooms in the hotel, which Platt uses to provide further visual information about these relationships. In Howard’s room, the bedspread, drapes, and some of the art on the walls feature dark oranges and reds, like the overnight bags and Judy’s blouse (Fig. 6.1). Later, in preparation for the cocktail party on the first evening, Howard will don a tuxedo with a red tartan bowtie and cummerbund. In Eunice’s room, the bedspread and drapes are a green-and-­ blue floral pattern, matching the brightly colored clothes she wears throughout—including her puffy blue house coat with flowers, the outfit she wears during the first scene in her room (Fig. 6.2). The sequences that occur in these spaces become practical examples of what Platt meant when she said, “the sets for me are totally dictated by the characters. So therefore, the clothes that the character wears have to be related to what I designed” (Platt 1977). In What’s Up, Doc? all these elements are intricately designed to comment upon character and narrative, to complement what occurs onscreen, but also counter what is onscreen. Eunice and

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Fig. 6.1  In Howard’s hotel room, Judy’s shirt, the bedspread, and the overnight bag are color coordinated. (What’s Up, Doc?, Warner Bros.)

Fig. 6.2  In Eunice’s hotel room, her house coat and the bedspread share a different color coordination. (What’s Up, Doc?, Warner Bros.)

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Webster are, ostensibly, a couple—they are engaged, they arrive at the hotel and convention together, they clearly know each other and their pasts. Everything the film’s narrative and dialogue tell the viewer about them makes their relationship very clear. But the film’s visual diegesis repeatedly separates the two of them. At the cocktail party in the hotel’s banquet room, all the men wear suits—mainly tuxedos—in black tie, with two exceptions. Howard, as mentioned, wears a tartan tie, whereas Hugh Simon (Kenneth Mars) wears a corduroy sports coat with elbow patches, a blue shirt, and a red-­ and-­silver-striped tie. He looks distinct—either eccentric or out of place— which befits his role as Howard’s competition for the musical grant, but also, as the film later reveals, a plagiarist and a phony. Judy arrives, pretending to be Eunice, and she has changed into a silk white pantsuit over a black top. She also wears a black-and-white choker necklace. Her outfit becomes, then, an inverse of Howard’s—both sport black and white, both with neckwear. When Eunice arrives later, in a comical scene of frustration and mistaken identity, the brightness of her bejeweled turquoise dress once again stands out and marks her as separate from her fiancé and his burgeoning paramour. These distinctions continue throughout the film, culminating in one of the most intriguingly designed sequences in Platt’s career. The day after the cocktail party in the hotel, another such party is held at the home of Frederick Larrabee (Austin Pendleton), the wealthy young benefactor who is supplying the grant money that Howard and Hugh Simon are vying for. Platt imagined Larrabee having “no taste whatsoever” and being utterly transparent. So she filled his apartment with what she considered to be gauche artwork (a large black-and-white painting of bare feet, several abstract sculptures). She also had Lucite pillars and a Lucite staircase built for the set, as something she imagined someone like Larrabee would “would do to one of those gorgeous old Victorian homes along the streets in San Francisco—tear the insides out and put in all these Lucite pillars holding up a balcony” (Platt n.d., 195). Much of this décor had to be collapsible because during this sequence a comedic fight breaks out when all four bags finally come together and all the owners (and a host of unsavory characters) vie to get their hands on them—the wall art and sculptures fall apart, land on peoples’ heads, and the room is left in a state of total disarray. Because of hijinks in the hotel the evening before (a fire in Howard’s room), Judy and Howard are wearing the same black-and-white outfits

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they wore to the previous cocktail party. Larrabee is dressed all in white— suit, tie, waistcoat—while his help wear white dinner jackets. Everybody else at the party is dressed very colorfully. So while Judy’s and Howard’s outfits have not changed, the function here is slightly different than at the previous cocktail party in the hotel. Here the clothes not only tie the two of them together, but also mark them as distinct from all the other party guests, as well as all those pursuing the four bags and their contents. Of course, when Eunice finally arrives—after having been sent by Judy to the wrong address—she wears a sky-blue dress with a silver broach in the shape of a rose, again distinguishing her from Howard and Judy and aligning her closely with the rest of the party guests. Following this sequence is the massive ten-minute car chase during which Judy and Howard are a couple against the world, with all the film’s many characters in pursuit of them. The film’s penultimate scene takes place in the San Francisco airport and it’s a variation on the typical “order is restored” comedy ending. As the principle characters come together, Hugh Simon is finally exposed as a fraud, and Larrabee agrees to fund Howard’s research. He and Eunice have become a couple, and Howard learns that Judy is returning to university (it is only in the final scene, on the plane, that he learns she will be attending his university, and the two profess their love). Almost all the characters are dressed in outfits they have worn previously in the film. Simon is wearing the same ensemble he wore to the first evening’s cocktail party—patched-elbow corduroy jacket, blue shirt, red and silver striped tie—which relates his unmasking as a phony in the airport to his awkward appearance at the party. Larrabee wears the same all-white suit he wore to the cocktail party hosted in his home. That was when he intended to bestow his largess upon the one of the two candidates, but it was also the moment that he first expressed feelings for Eunice, defending her against the actions of the criminals who were after the bags. It makes sense that he would wear the suit again now that he is finally giving Howard a check, but also when he and Eunice are informing Howard of their newfound love for each other. Eunice, interestingly, wears the same outfit she wore on arrival, the white-and-yellow dress—maybe she has a special dress for when she flies—but also, that scene made clear she was part of a couple with Howard, and now she is part of a couple with Larrabee. Thus, as it did in the opening sequences, the dress once again distances her from Howard.

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Howard and Judy retain elements of previous costumes, but now appear different as well. Howard wears his tattered tuxedo. The tartan tie is gone, as is the cummerbund, and his top buttons are undone. He is also missing the glasses that he had been wearing throughout the film. He is disheveled. The film has portrayed Howard as the absent-minded professor, a man so consumed with his studies that he cannot keep track of where he is, what he is wearing, or whom he is meeting—when he prepares to go to the first cocktail party, Eunice ties his bowtie for him. That steadying presence in his life appears to be lost. At the same time, though, he appears more relaxed than he does throughout the film’s first half when his behavior is frantic and anxious. He may have lost Eunice’s steadying presence, but also her firm control over everything he does. Judy wears the tartan newsboy cap from the opening scene and has her trench coat draped over her arm, but she also wears a new top that has not appeared before, a greenish-blue one that seems to match her eyes. Unlike everybody else in the scene, Judy appears most prepared for a fresh start. Platt’s work on What’s Up, Doc? is a highly representative example of her all-encompassing approach to her films’ visual presentation. Patterns, colors, and styles of clothes, furniture, art, and architecture, overlap and comment upon each other throughout the film. They create a consistent aesthetic symmetry, but also enhance narrative developments and character relationships. Much of this is grounded in the costumes, which Platt chose and designed with specific ends in mind. She saw the film as a cartoon and designed it as such, but always with the same eye for script details and the possibility for developing meanings that she brought to all her projects. For example, the chaotic collapse of Larrabee’s apartment when all the artwork is destroyed was not in the script, but only came about because of Platt’s design for the space. However, her comprehensive approach to production and costume design and their relevance to character and narrative are on display throughout her work. It can be seen in the pink balloons and flowers in The Witches of Eastwick and the way pink clothing establishes connections between certain characters and props. It is there in the relationship between Aurora’s growing flowers and the floral patterns she wears when she falls in love with Garrett. The films Platt worked on were different in many ways—genre, setting, directorial style— so it can be difficult to discern or argue that there is a signature to her own style. She would probably declare that as a positive quality of her films. In one of her AFI seminars, when a questioner refers to a particular design style he admires in a current film, she says, “the very fact that you noticed

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that is negative to me” (Platt 1977). Yet there are clear similarities in her approach to design that are signature to her: her deep emersion in the script and her tremendous ability to parlay the knowledge she gained from that emersion into visual elements that add new shades of meaning and visual pleasure to the films.

Notes 1. Street cites such foundational texts of the ‘90s as: Stella Bruzzi, Undressing Cinema: Clothing and Identity in the Movies (1997); Pam Cook, Fashioning the Nation: Costume and Identity in British Cinema; and Pamela Church Gibson, “Film Costume” in The Oxford Guide to Film Studies (1998), among others. 2. Platt wrote two scripts for producer Nessa Hyams: an adaptation of the Roald Dahl short story, “The Great Switcheroo,” which Hyams directed as part of the AFI Directing Workshop for Women; and an unproduced adaptation of Bernard Malamud’s The Assistant (Platt n.d., 247). She also wrote an adaptation of the William Inge novel, Good Luck, Mrs. Wyckoff, which was directed by Marvin J.  Chomsky. About the latter experience, Platt wrote: “I had nothing to do with the shooting. I got a taste of why screen writers are so unhappy when they didn’t invite me to the opening” (Platt n.d., 264)—the film was poorly received. 3. After working in costume design through the early and middle 1980s, Kristi Zea would go on to become a renowned production designer in her own right, designing such films as Goodfellas (1990), The Silence of the Lambs (1991), and Beloved (1998), among many others. 4. That the audience might feel that same simple scorn for Webster’s ultra-rich victims was one of the reason’s Platt insisted the film’s setting be moved to Houston from the novel’s Chicago (Platt n.d., 221). 5. For more on Platt’s time with Orson Welles in Arizona, I recommend “Orson Welles, What’s Up Doc, Paper Moon,” from the You Must Remember This podcast series: Polly Platt, the Invisible Woman: http://www.youmustremember thispodcast.com/episodes/2020/6/10/orson-­w elles-­ whats-­up-­doc-­paper-­moon-­polly-­platt-­the-­invisible-­woman-­episode-­4 6. In her 1977 AFI seminar, on the other hand, she refers to Gene Allan as her friend.

References Bogdanovich, Peter, dir. 1972. What’s Up, Doc?. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2003. DVD, 94 min. Brooks, James L. 2020. Telephone Interview with the Author. March.

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Brooks, James L., dir. 1983. Terms of Endearment. Hollywood, CA: Paramount, 2013. Blu-Ray, 132 min. Harmetz, Aljean. 1984. Call It Mad, But It’s Pure MacLaine. New York Times, April 1. https://www.nytimes.com/1984/04/01/theater/call-­it-­mad-­but-­it-­ s-­pure-­maclaine.html LoBrutto, Vincent. 1992. By Design: Interviews with Film Production Designers. Westport: Praeger. McBride, Joseph. (2001) 2011. Searching for John Ford. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Reprint, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Munich, Adrienne. 2011. Introduction. In Fashion in Film, ed. Adrienne Munich, 1–13. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Platt, Polly. 1977. American Film Institute: Harold Lloyd Seminar, December 7. ———. 1983. American Film Institute: Harold Lloyd Seminar, October 11. ———. n.d. “It Was Worth It.” Collection of Antonia and Sashy Bogdanovich. Unpublished Memoir. Ritchie, Michael, dir. 1976. The Bad News Bears. Hollywood, CA.  Paramount. DVD, 101 min. Street, Sarah. 2001. Costume and Cinema: Dress Code and Popular Film. London: Wallflower. Stutesman, Drake. 2011. Costume Design, or, What Is Fashion in Film? In Fashion in Film, ed. Adrienne Munich, 17–39. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. The Hollywood Reporter. 2011. Remembering Polly Platt. August 2. https://www. hollywoodreporter.com/news/remembering-­polly-­platt-­218266 Williams, Melanie. 2016. The Girl You Don’t See: Julie Harris and the Costume Designer in British Cinema. Feminist Media Histories 2 (2): 1.

CHAPTER 7

Design and Authorship in Paper Moon

Platt had been excited to get to work with Bogdanovich again on What’s Up, Doc?, rejuvenated by her experience working with Orson Welles, and cautiously hopeful about rekindling a relationship with her ex-husband. She was much more ambivalent, more conflicted, about the project that was to become their last film together, Paper Moon (1973). The film was based on the novel Addie Pray (Joe David Brown 1971) about a young girl during the Great Depression who, after the death of her mother, goes on a road trip with a man who might be her father. The two make their way financially by swindling people through a series of petty, and then increasingly elaborate, cons. Peter Bart had been developing it at Paramount for John Huston to direct. When Huston pulled out, Bart and Robert Evans brought the project to Bogdanovich, who was not sure he wanted to make another period piece so soon after The Last Picture Show (Biskind 1998, 208–210). He sent the script to Platt for her opinion. Bogdanovich often tells the story of Platt’s response: “she said, ‘you have two daughters and it might be interesting for you to do a father-daughter story.’ I thought that was a good reason” (“The Next Picture Show” 2015). By Platt’s account, while she thought the script by Alvin Sargent was brilliant and thought the film was a good fit for Bogdanovich, she was less enamored by the idea of working on the film. She was still reeling from the separation and felt that Bogdanovich’s relationship with Cybill Shepherd would undermine her position on the film. According to Platt, Ryan O’Neal begged her to work on the project: “With you, I figure Peter © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Hunter, Polly Platt, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82120-3_7

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is a ten. Without you, he’s a four” (Platt n.d., 206). In the end, she agreed to do the film if Shepherd was not allowed on set. As on What’s Up, Doc?, Platt’s creativity and labor infuse every scene of Paper Moon. As had become her practice, she oversaw production design, costume design, and location on the film. She also played a role in the film’s casting and in elements of its scripting. To be clear, I do not mean to imply that Platt directed the film, or was a secret second director. By the time of Paper Moon, Bogdanovich had begun to develop distinct stylistic approaches to filmmaking that are on display in many of his films from What’s Up, Doc? onward—including the films he made after his creative partnership with Platt had come to an end. He favored intricately choreographed long takes, deep focus shots, rapid-fire dialogue, and tonal shifts between comedy and pathos. Likewise, cinematographer Laszló Kovács had developed a photographic style that Bogdanovich would come to prize—the two would make six features and a documentary together. Furthermore, Verna Fields, who did sound design on Targets, edited What’s Up, Doc?, Paper Moon, and Daisy Miller (1974). Throughout his career, Bogdanovich has had a propensity for discovering, sometimes developing, talented crew and maintaining working relationships with them across numerous pictures, and in Platt, Kovács, and Fields, the first films he directed featured a visual team composed of some of the most talented crew in early 1970s Hollywood. Paper Moon is a result of all that talent working at the height of their abilities, and one could build a case study around the film to examine the directing, the editing, the photography, and certainly the performance. However, Platt had a hand in making so many decisions about what would appear onscreen, that, as with Doc, it is difficult to imagine the film as it is without her guidance or creative labor. Furthermore, though, Platt also brought elements of her personal life and situation to the making of the film. Auteurist studies often center on locating the “personality” of the director in the film. There have been many approaches to this over the decades from Truffaut’s “suppleness of spirit” to Sarris’s “interior meaning,” both of which derived from the director’s ability to reveal more than was in the script. Even in this day and age, when the notion of auteur theory has become passé (at least in mainstream academic film studies), directors are often the touchstone for understanding what director Martin Scorsese has described as “aesthetic, emotional and spiritual revelation” (Scorsese 2019). However, without too much difficulty, it is possible on occasion to discern the

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personality—certainly the personal style—of non-directing crew. I and others have written extensively elsewhere about approaching filmmaking from a perspective of multiple-authorship.1 According to this approach, when any member of the film collective makes a decision about or contribution to a film that affects the film’s making and affects its potential for meaning, that member can be considered one of the film’s authors. This could be a performer, a cinematographer, a sound designer, a writer, an editor, a production designer, or many others. When directors were, and in many cases still are, considered the sole author of a film, the search for their spirit or personality is often a search for intention, for reasons behind the decisions that guide their filmmaking. That same quest or thirst for knowledge, however, has virtually ignored the experiences, personalities, and decisions of non-directing crew. It is well known, for example, that Gordon Willis excelled at shooting in low light, that he often chose to contrast tableau still shots with intricate dolly shots, and that he did so in film after film in continually though-provoking ways. But why? Likewise, film scholars are aware that Dede Allen liked to cut from establishing shots to close-ups, skipping intermediary medium shots or two shots—sometimes even skipping the establishing shot—and that she was adept at jump cuts and mid-­action cuts. But why? These questions are rarely asked about practitioners. When they are asked, or analyzed, they are generally done so via attribution to the director. In the case of Paper Moon, however, Platt’s ingenuity, her intimate understanding of the relationship between character, narrative, and the visual, her artistic vision, all are simply too enmeshed in the film to ignore, even as they coincide or overlap with the visions of Bogdanovich, Kovács, and others. Furthermore, her personality and elements of her personal life can also be detected in the film. In Bogdanovich’s anecdote about Platt convincing him to direct the film, he describes Paper Moon as a “father-­ daughter” story, but the film is also a “mother-daughter” story—a narrative about the loss of a mother, and how that loss haunts Addie (Tatum O’Neal) throughout the film. In one of her 1983 AFI seminar’s, Platt discusses the connection between The Last Picture Show, Paper Moon, and Pretty Baby and describes how she is interested in making films about young people, claiming, “that’s all I’m interested in.” She goes on to say: “clearly I’m interested in young girls, and children, and America. I don’t know, I mean I’ve now found what I’m interested in after I made a bunch of movies” (Platt 1983). Many of the films about children, specifically daughters, that she worked on also include elements of fraught

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mother-­daughter relationships, like Terms of Endearment, or even missing mothers, as in Bad News Bears—in which Amanda (Tatum O’Neal) has a mother, but she never appears onscreen—and, of course, Paper Moon, a film that opens with a mother’s funeral. In this chapter I make detailed examination of Platt’s creativity and labor on Paper Moon. As in previous chapters, particularly the case study sections, this will consist of a mix of film analysis, production study guided by archival research and interviews, and a reliance on and desire to allow Platt’s voice to describe her process as derived from interviews, seminar appearances, and her unpublished memoir, It Was Worth It. I will consider as well how Platt’s own personality can be detected in the film. Elements of the film, including casting, costume, script development, in some cases even performance, derive directly from Platt’s input. Much of that input— Platt’s thinking about the film’s narrative and themes, her creative contributions, her relationship on set with Tatum O’Neal and how that affected O’Neal’s performance—derived from the state of Platt’s life before and during the film’s production, including her relationship with Bogdanovich and her relationship with her two young daughters, Antonia and Sashy. Examining Platt’s life and personality, then, is not simply an exercise of transferring auteurist examination from the film’s director to its production designer. Rather, teasing out the dialogue and tension between Platt’s creativity one the film and her own personality can help expand our understanding not only of her role in making the film, but of the film itself, its success, and its potential for meaning.

Polly Platt, 1972 When What’s Up, Doc? wrapped in the late autumn of 1971, Platt returned to her home and two young daughters in Los Angeles. They still lived in the same house, on Saticoy Street in Van Nuys, that she and Bogdanovich had moved into soon after their first arrival in California. It was the house where they had written the script for Targets together, where they had edited Targets as well as their sequence from The Wild Angels, the house after which they had named their short-lived company, Saticoy Productions, co-producer of Targets, What’s Up, Doc?, and Paper Moon. While the house was modest, during the heady years of the late 1960s, they had hosted some of their favorite film luminaries there: Howard Hawks, Don Siegel, Jean Renoir. Now, however, it was less festive. According to Platt: “I had visitors very rarely. Larry McMurtry came and stayed a few days;

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Frank Marshall came once in a while, which was very kind of him. Basically, the phone never rang. All our famous friends were Peter’s friends now. It is an old story” (Platt n.d., 203). In the 2011 documentary, Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel, Platt says of the period: “My husband left me and the phone stopped ringing. But, the only person who called me was Roger [Corman]” (Stapleton 2011).2 Around this time, she did use her experience on Doc to formerly apply for membership in the Art Director’s Guild—her application is dated December 4, 1971 (Platt 1971).3 In addition to her loneliness, Platt describes the difficulty she had with her two daughters. Throughout the memoir, she details feelings of regret and remorse about not being able to spend enough time with the girls because of work; at the same time, however, she describes the difficulties of motherhood and her fear that it was pulling her away from work. In the latter half of the 1970s, she chose projects based in and around Los Angeles so she could work closer to home, including giving up production design completely in favor of writing for nearly six years, but eventually, in the 1980s, she would return to taking regular assignments far away from home—still filled with regret, but not willing to forgo the work. By early 1972, though, she had already spent a good deal of time away from her daughters. Platt and Bogdanovich hired a nannie, Maria Currea, to mind their eldest, Antonia, while they scouted locations in Texas for The Last Picture Show, and Bogdanovich’s parents had moved to Tucson, Arizona, and could sometimes be relied upon to mind the young girl. In the late summer and autumn of 1970, they left Antonia in Los Angeles with Maria while they prepared to shoot Picture Show. Platt was heavily pregnant at this time with their second child, Sashy. Platt writes: I flew back and forth from LA to Texas to design the sets and find all the locations and I was still pregnant. My due date in August came and went and my baby just wasn’t coming. I was big and round, my skinny legs could barely hold me up … this baby was going to be a big baby! I lied and told the stewardesses on the planes that I was expecting twins, because they were worried about how pregnant I was and that I might go into labor during the flight! (Platt n.d., 155)

Sashy was born in September, in Los Angeles, and Platt hired a nurse to help Maria and went back to work on Picture Show almost immediately: “The hardest part was winding myself up in sheets to stop my mother’s milk from flowing, as I clearly was not going to be able to breast feed

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Sashy. I lay in my bed crying from the pain of my engorged breasts and this draconian method of stopping the milk” (156). Eventually, Maria was able to take the girls to Bogdanovich’s parents in Arizona. It was during this time that Platt discovered Bogdanovich’s affair with Cybill Shepherd. Later, when Platt went to work with Orson Welles in Arizona during the spring of 1971, she was able to bring the girls to stay with Bogdanovich’s mother in Arizona (as previously mentioned, his father had passed away during the production of Picture Show). While she was incredibly busy, and often flew back and forth to Los Angeles at Welles’s request (188), she managed to spend some of this time with the girls. However, eventually, they returned to Los Angeles with Maria so that Antonia could start daycare (188). Soon after she finished work on The Other Side of the Wind, she began scouting locations and then pre-production on What’s Up, Doc?, as a result spending much of 1971 apart from her daughters. The sacrifice she was willing to make on Picture Show was becoming the norm—“I loved my baby and my Antonia, but I loved my work too. It was a terrible choice to have to make. I wanted so much to have a career in movies. So I had the hard decision to make as to what to do with my children during the months I was to be working on the picture” (157). It was also during this period that Platt began to accept that she and Bogdanovich were not going to get back together. “My fantasies that Peter would come to me and tell me that he had made a terrible mistake and that he wanted me back were that. Just fantasies” (206). Her only respite from the loneliness she felt came when Bogdanovich would call to ask for her to come give her opinion about the latest cut of Doc, which Verna Fields was editing. Occasionally, Ryan O’Neal, whom she had befriended on Doc, would invite her and the girls to Malibu for Saturday parties. It was on these occasions that she first became familiar with O’Neal’s daughter Tatum. Otherwise, though, Platt felt miserable during this period. It was in such a mood that she received the call from Bogdanovich asking for her opinion on the Paper Moon script, and his subsequent request that she come work on the film. Given her state of mind and her personal circumstances, her ambivalence about working on the project is understandable. On the one hand, she desperately wanted to return to work. On the other hand, however, she feared that working with Bogdanovich again would be humiliating given that the circumstances of their personal lives were now well known.

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Location The novel Addie Pray, upon which Paper Moon is based, is set in Alabama and other parts of the deep south during the 1930s, as its protagonists, Addie, a young orphaned girl, and Moses Pray, a small-time confidence man, travel by car in search of their next big swindle. Early drafts of Sargent’s script maintain this southern setting. Platt, again in charge of the film’s location, went to Georgia with Frank Marshall to scout appropriate southern locations. According to Platt: “I somehow pictured this ill-­ matched pair, Ryan and the little girl, played by Tatum, to be tiny against a vast sky which would emphasize their extreme isolation from the comforts of the home and would, I thought, be more powerful, visually. I kind of knew it, really. It was Kansas” (Platt n.d., 206–207). Frank Marshall explains that while the trip to Georgia proved unsuitable, it actually took some time to settle on Kansas. He and Platt flew to Denver, rented a car and started driving east, with a pledge only to take back roads, not highways. Platt’s instincts about Kansas derived from having traversed the state in her cross-country move to Los Angeles with Bogdanovich in 1964 (and possibly her previous cross-country drive with first husband Philip Klein, although she does not mention such). In describing the drive with Bogdanovich in her memoir, the most difficult part of the journey comes in Kansas. Their car was in horrible condition and would often overheat under strain. In eastern states, they alleviated this by coasting down hills, but once they encountered the flatness of Kansas, that approach no longer worked. The car regularly overheated and they had to stop constantly to let the engine cool. As it was summer, they had put their car’s convertible top down, and it became stuck in that position, so they also received painful sun burns as they drove across the state, which took several days. But Platt fell in love with the landscape, the “smooth farmland with its occasional windmills and its huge blue skies” (Platt n.d., 109). She also recalled its loneliness: “This geography stayed in my memory and I was to return to Kansas to make Paper Moon there because of its qualities of loneliness and endless vistas” (109). As Platt and Marshall drove around Kansas scouting locations, memories of these mixed feelings about the landscape came back to her: That flat land with its vast grassy plains and enormous sky. It was the state where Peter and I had such a hard time driving across with our old Ford

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convertible with the cracked block. I traveled through many states until I got to Kansas and I fell in love with the flat plains of America again. There would be an occasional windmill or lonely house on the top of an infinitesimal rise. It was perfect. I had a movie camera and when I found, by driving blindly around on the off roads, the long and endless white chalk road that seemed to go on forever, I knew that I had found the road for the end of the film and that Hayes, Kansas was where we should shoot the film. (Platt n.d., 207)

The many scenes set in small towns, at farmhouses, or amidst the empty openness of Kansas were indeed filmed in and around Hayes. The production then moved to St. Joseph, Missouri, where all the city sequences were shot. Thus, as she had with What’s Up Doc? previously, and as she would on her next film, The Thief Who Came to Dinner, Platt made the decision to change the film’s location based on her reading of the script, her understanding of its concept and themes, and her instinct for how the narrative should look onscreen. With Paper Moon, that decision announces itself immediately. The film opens with a close-up of Addie, looking downcast as her mop-top hair the blows in the wind. She is at her mother’s funeral, and her face is framed by the huge sky and receding flat plains that Platt describes. The film is barely underway and the visual tie between its geography and its protagonist’s loneliness is established. Much of the film’s visual beauty comes from the black-and-white photography of Kovács, particularly his decision to shoot with red filters, which makes the bright blue sky look gray (Zone 2002, 95–96). Indeed, in contemporary reviews of the film, which generally praised Bogdanovich’s direction and Tatum O’Neal’s performance, Kovács was generally the only other member of the crew mentioned, and then only on occasion. More frequently, however, even Kovács’s cinematography goes unmentioned. For example, in a positive review of the film in the Chicago Tribune, Gene Siskel writes: “Few visual effects in film are as chilling and strangely stirring as a broad expanse of gray-colored flatland that meets a whiter shade of cloud-streaked sky” (Siskel 1973), with no mention of the cinematographer in his review. Judith Crist, on the other hand, does mention Kovács’s work in one section of her review: “Laszlo Kovacs’ camera has captured so completely a sense of time and place, of a poverty-stricken Midwest and a Depression-era whose hopes are fed by Addie’s idolized ‘Franklin Roosevelt,’ and of an age of relative innocence, that one is transported in the watching” (Crist 1973).

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Such omissions or marginalizations of non-directing crew are typical of the auteurist bent in U.S. film criticism that had been emerging for several years (and which Bogdanovich had helped develop during his own pre-­ directing career as a film critic). But more modern reviews of the film often replicate the omissions. Reviewing the film’s Blu-ray release by Masters of Cinema, Scott Nye recasts the film as a subtle masterpiece of postmodernism: “The actors operate in a performative style, the frames are arranged to remind us of old photographs and films, and the absence of a score—rather than enforce a sense of realism—heightens its artificiality. Even the choice to shoot black-and-white is a postmodern touch” (Nye 2015). In the review, Nye attributes all the elements of the film, including to a certain extent performance, to Bogdanovich (who, one imagines, would be highly amused to be described as “postmodernist”), as neither Platt nor Kovács nor their influence on the film’s visuals are mentioned. Such omissions occur for a variety of reasons, including tradition, ease of use, or the subtle insistence of auteurism. I say “subtle” because modern criticism and scholarship rarely frame themselves as “auteurist”; nevertheless, through the practice of marginalizing and omitting creative practitioners from consideration of film authorship, such criticism and scholarship replicates and strengthens auteurist tropes to such an extent that auteurism has become paradigmatic in thinking and writing about film. Thus we get a film like Paper Moon where Platt’s influence on the film is often known, but rarely mentioned. However, the decision to shoot in black and white, and to use the landscape as visual, narrative, and thematic frame throughout the film was a direct result of Platt’s decision to change the film’s setting and her and Marshall’s choice of locations.

Casting and the Script When Paper Moon, in its earlier iterations, was still intended as a John Huston project, Paramount’s plan was for Paul Newman to play the role of Moses and his daughter, Nell Potts, to play Addie. When Huston left the project, so did Newman and Potts. Whether their participation sowed the seeds of having a real-life father-daughter team play Moses and Addie is difficult to say, but what is clear is that as Platt eased her way into the production, she suggested Tatum O’Neal as Addie. Of first getting to know Tatum on her trips to the O’Neals’ home in Malibu, she recalls: “I thought to myself, as I watched Tatum with her low gravelly voice, trying to charm her father, ‘If I were casting a picture, say, like Twain’s Huckleberry

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Finn, I would cast Tatum in the movie’” (Platt n.d., 204). When Bogdanovich showed her the script, her first suggestion was to cast the O’Neals. The decision to cast Tatum, and then Ryan, O’Neal would affect the film in several ways. In the book and in the early drafts of the script, the character of Addie is twelve years old, whereas Tatum was only eight when she was cast. That meant that actions like her smoking and swearing onscreen would have even more dramatic impact. During test screenings, for example, while much of the audience feedback was positive, negative feedback generally focused on Addie’s adult behavior. A representative example from one feedback card reads: “The language and smoking by a child is going too far along the unnecessary road of ignoring decency” (Paper Moon survey 1973). The casting of the O’Neals was also important to Platt because she felt it meant the film could focus more closely on their relationship and that the elements of the Great Depression that were made explicit in the novel and in early drafts of the script could be expressed more subtly by focusing on the loneliness of the two leads rather than including explicit, Depression-era imagery: I wanted to imply the depression by Ryan and Tatum’s loneliness on the road, selling bibles to gullible women who had lost their husbands. I also talked him out of the plot in the script in which Ryan and Tatum get so rich and successful that they buy a Cadillac Car and end up at the Plaza Hotel in New  York City. I felt no one would have any sympathy for them if they became that successful stealing from sad widowed women. So Peter and Alvin changed the script so that the wretched duo only achieved a minimum of success. They buy a nice Ford convertible, finally, when they are flush. And the biggest city they do a scam in is St. Jo, Missouri. (Platt n.d., 207)

In making these changes to the script, the production cut the latter third of the novel. Platt’s instincts in suggesting such changes replicate others from her career—for example, cutting the domestic scenes from The Bad News Bears. Platt also suggested another small, but significant change to the script: “I had an old photograph of my father sitting in a big quarter moon with a woman who was not my mother … I showed the photo to Peter and suggested a scene in the Carnival where Tatum wants her ‘father’ to sit with her in the Paper Moon booth to have her picture taken but he never shows up” (Platt n.d., 208). From that suggestion came the idea to include

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the song “It’s Only a Paper Moon” (Arlen, Harburg, Rose 1933) in a scene in the film (just as with The Last Picture Show, Paper Moon would feature no score, only diegetic source music from the period). This decision eventually led to changing the title of the film to Paper Moon from the novel’s Addie Pray. It should be noted that Bogdanovich, who has told the story many times, recounts it differently. He recalls hating the novel’s title (he has said, “it sounded like a snake”), but says that when he came across the song title in a list of period songs, he knew he had found his title. He likes to tell the story of phoning Orson Welles in Rome to ask his thoughts on the title, with Welles responding, “that title is so good, you shouldn’t even make the picture. Just release the title!” It was only after that word of encouragement that he asked screenwriter Sargent to include the scene from the carnival where Addie has her picture taken (“The Next Picture Show” 2015). Thus, in Platt’s version, her suggestion of the scene leads to the title change; whereas in Bogdanovich’s, his idea about the title leads to the scene. (The photograph of her father that Platt describes can be found in Box 100 of the Peter Bogdanovich papers at Indiana University.) However, the scene’s inclusion is significant for more than its effect on the change in title. The photograph that results—Addie, sitting forlorn and alone on the paper moon, both father and mother absent—is one of two photographs that play a major role in the film. The other photograph shows Addie standing with her mother sometime shortly before her death, and it is one of the keepsakes that Addie carries with her throughout the film in her cigar box of treasures. In one key scene, Addie glances at the photo of her mother, which constitute her mother’s only onscreen appearance in the film. (I return to this photo and its relation to the film’s costume design and themes below.) The paper moon photograph from the carnival scene is significant for two reasons. First it has thematic resonances with the mother-daughter photo: one is a reminder that Addie’s mother is dead, the other a reminder, or possible warning, that Addie is alone and cannot rely on Moze. This is resolved somewhat by the photograph’s appearance in the film’s denouement, when Moze looks at it and begins to realize that leaving Addie with her aunt in Missouri might have been a mistake. These two stories about the derivation of the paper moon scene provide interesting insight into Bogdanovich’s and Platt’s thinking about the film and its construction. For Bogdanovich, the scene’s inclusion was almost an afterthought—he needed to justify his desire to change the film’s title,

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a change that Frank Yablans at Paramount was resistant to. He has also said that an added benefit of the photograph was helping him re-­ conceptualize the film’s ending, with which he was unhappy. For Platt, on the other hand, the idea for the scene came out of a personal place. The photograph of her father had always intrigued her—who was the woman in the photo that was not her mother? There is a sense of absence, of loneliness to Platt’s anecdote that corresponds with her conception of how she wanted to represent the film’s themes visually. In any case, the scene at the carnival was added late in pre-production, adding an unexpected depth of narrative and character to the film, which I return to below.

Production Design For Paper Moon, Platt build upon but also modified her experiences designing The Last Picture Show. Both were period pieces shot in black and white, and both featured down-and-out characters clashing with and, particularly in Paper Moon, aspiring to the lifestyle of the more economically prosperous. Both were shot entirely on location and required the redressing and reconstruction of practical exterior spaces as well as the redressing and, in some cases, complete construction of interiors, many of which were built inside abandoned and empty shops. Platt was again driven by her preference for props and costumes that were old and used, but with modifications. Coupled with her concern about overemphasizing obvious artifacts of the Depression was her realization that even in the 1930s people sometimes had new possessions. As a result, while her design strategy mainly relies on the dusty, old, and used, she supplements this occasionally with the shiny and new. In doing so, Platt remained driven by a desire for authenticity and realism, but a secondary result is to emphasize the loneliness and precarity that she recognized as the heart of Addie and Moze’s relationship. Exteriors Frank Marshall describes how “untouched” much of Kansas and Missouri was, at least in the locations chosen for shooting. However, as some signs of obvious progress were visible, streets had to be completely redressed. For example, in St. Joseph, Missouri, they received permission from the city to cut down all the parking meters on one road (they reinstalled them after the shoot) (“The Next Picture Show” 2015). Platt also re-fronted

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shops and other businesses. Sometimes these are quite simple, as with the “General Merchandise” sign that hangs on the shop where Moze buys Addie her first dress, or the slightly fancier, hand-painted sign at Vivians Dress Shop, where Moze buys Trixie Delight (Madeline Kahn) several new outfits. Others are more intricate. Early in the film, Moze takes Addie to a diner where he attempts to explain his plan to ship her off by train to her aunt in Missouri even thought he had promised her relations that he would drive her there. Moze has scammed a local business owner out of 200 dollars’ bereavement pay for Addie, with which he buys her a train ticket, intending to keep the rest for himself. In the diner scene, Addie indicates she knows about the money and claims it as her own, insisting Moze give it to her if he is not going to drive her to Missouri. The scene is filmed via a complex series of shots that begins outside the window of the diner—Moze and Addie can be seen inside, but the reflections of the buildings facing the diner from across the street are also clearly visible, if somewhat distorted by reflection (Fig. 7.1). There is then a cut to inside the diner, but over the 180-degree line, so that the camera now faces through the window to the street outside, with Moze and Addie still in the shot (Fig. 7.2). The buildings across the street can now be clearly seen. One is a movie theater with a basic, but well-kept Art Deco façade. The

Fig. 7.1  Reflections in the diner window of the opposite shop fronts. (Paper Moon, Paramount)

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Fig. 7.2  The shop fronts opposite, now seen through the diner window. (Paper Moon, Paramount)

marquee advertises the 1935 film Steamboat Round the Bend. There is a likely homage here to The Last Picture Show, which begins and ends on a shot of the movie theater, only one much more aged and finally defunct than the one in Paper Moon. The movie theater is often mentioned by Bogdanovich and Platt as an example of her attention to detail in the film—its Art Deco styling, large marquee above the door, box office, and smaller signs to either side of the door advertising prices and matinees. Perhaps more interesting, though, next door to the cinema is a John Deere store. The sign above the door includes large, stylized letters spelling out “John Deere,” under which it reads, McCracken Implement Company, indicating both the location of the shop (McCracken is a very small town about forty miles from Hays) and an older term for “tools” or “equipment” that was in common usage in the 1930s. Furthermore, that these buildings are seen first as reflections from outside the diner—including with reversed text—and then more clearly from inside visually complement the way Addie clearly “sees through” Moze and his song and dance act during the scene. In addition to giving the building fronts a 1930s makeover, Platt also paid special attention to the streets. She has noted that when she was scouting locations in Kansas, “everybody had cars that were at least ten

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years old” (“The Next Picture Show” 2015), which drove her to populate the streets of the small towns with cars from the late 1920s and early ‘30s. Perusing old photographs of the thirties, she also noticed that cars were rarely if ever parallel parked; rather they were parked at an angle, nose in, and so she made sure to do the same for the film. As pointed out in previous chapters, the attention to detail and striving for a believable onscreen realism that Platt brings to these exteriors and street scenes was typical of her design strategy. But it also conveys more than just period detail. For example, returning to the shop signs. When Moze decides to buy Addie a dress, he takes her to the General Merchandise shop, whose shopfront, though large, is incredibly basic. It has a dusty awning, the façade is dirty, and the sign is simple block text (Fig. 7.3). Vivians Dress Shop, on the other hand, has a lovingly hand-painted sign, with scripted lettering—the shading is such that one can almost detect the presence of color (Fig. 7.4). The windows are dressed with various designs and mannequins, and the front of the small tidy shop is pristine white. The contrast between the shops could not be starker, which conveys to viewers Moze’s feelings—of affection, of generosity—toward Addie, a girl who may or may not be his daughter, and toward Trixie, a carnival burlesque dancer with whom he hopes to have an affair. The screenplay describes these simply as

Fig. 7.3  The General Merchandise shop, where Moze buys Addie’s dress. (Paper Moon, Paramount)

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Fig. 7.4  Vivians Dress Shop, where Moze buys dresses for Trixie, and which bears the name of Platt’s mother. (Paper Moon, Paramount)

“department store” and “White Cloud dress store” (Sargent 1972b), so it is Platt’s design of them that endows them with any metaphorical meaning they might have (she also seems to have changed the name of the dress shop, heightening its feminine aspect and, perhaps, naming it after her mother). Thus, as with the missing letters on the Texaco sign in Picture Show or the gilded hand-carved shop signs in The Witches of Eastwick, Platt again here uses shop fronts to convey details about the setting, but also about character relationships. One of the more difficult exteriors to design was the carnival, not simply because of its vastness or authenticity, but because Bogdanovich and Kovács had planned a lengthy dolly shot through the carnival from the cotton candy vendor (whom Addie, now well versed in the ways of the con, swindles out of ten dollars) to the “Harem Slave” tent where Moze has been standing in line repeatedly to watch “luscious Miss Trixie Delight,” who will soon join their road trip along with her “assistant,” Imogene (P.J. Johnson). The carnival is a delight of design and the biggest set Platt had worked on to that point in her career. It features a variety of amusement park rides that move in and out of frame as the shot proceeds. There are hand-lettered signs, a hay-strewn floor, and, because the scene is set at night, strings of light bulbs everywhere. On the floor of the cotton

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candy vendor’s booth, there are empty Nehi crates, subtly tying this scene back to the diner scene mentioned above, where Moze attempts to buy Addie off with a “Cony island and a Nehi.” And there are carnival goers everywhere, adding to the scene’s festive mood. The entire carnival sequence consists of two shots. In the first, Addie walks from the cotton candy stand to find Moze getting in line once again for Trixie’s show. Addie is elated—she has got a giant cotton candy, has just pulled a successful con, and, as we soon discover, has arranged for Moze to take a photo with her at the paper moon photo booth. Moze on the other hand, has only one thing on his mind. As Addie invites him to spend some time with her, he resists, they argue, and she storms off. There is then a cut to the second shot, Addie approaching the photo booth, where her previously taken picture is ready for collection. Her mood is considerably darker, and her former loquaciousness has vanished in favor of sharp, angry bursts of speech. As she turns to leave, the photographer says, “hey, I thought you were gonna sit in the moon with your pa,” to which Addie replies, “He ain’t my pa.” This, then, is where the paper moon of the film’s title comes in, and its presence seems to suggest something more than a last-minute addition to accommodate a title change. The two shots show Addie elated walking toward Moze, then downtrodden walking away from him. In between is the discussion of Trixie, whom Addie does not yet know will be joining them. After this sequence, the film’s middle third consists of Addie growing increasingly frustrated with Trixie’s presence and then developing an elaborate scheme to get Moze to leave her behind,4 which he does, and the final third of the film is just the two of them again. In this sense, Addie’s two walks across the carnival grounds with a discussion about Trixie in the middle mirror the film’s structure. More significantly, though, the photographer’s question to Addie about sitting with her “pa” implies that she has already described the relationship as such. Her adamant rebuttal that “he ain’t my pa” comes out of anger and disappointment. But it is also an expression of Addie’s confused, ambivalent feelings about parenthood that constitute the emotional heart of the film. She is nine years old, has lost her mother, and has no sense of who her father is. It is telling that Platt, who was still experiencing the emotional fallout of her difficult separation from Bogdanovich—including dealing with custody issues—would recommend he take on Paper Moon because it would be good for him to do a “father-daughter picture,” when in fact Moze’s parentage of Addie is never explicitly determined by the film. At the same time, though, Platt

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was processing feelings of critical self-doubt about her own perceived failure in relation to her parenting, and she might just as well have conceived of the film as a “mother-daughter picture,” only one from which the mother is absent. In any case, the carnival scene as intricately designed, choreographed, and filmed as it is, also simply captures a nine-year-old’s sense of loss, betrayal, and loneliness. Interiors The film’s interiors range from diners and restaurants, to hotel rooms of various size, along with shops, private homes, and late in the film, in one of its key sequences, a police station. All were designed and built by Platt and her team. While the film’s exteriors are vital to establishing its era and its themes of loneliness and the sense that Addie and Moze are a team (if shaky) of two against the world, its interiors display Platt’s developing thinking about blending old and new. It does so in sometimes subtle ways, and also in ways that reinforce the mercurial nature of Addie and Moze’s financial status. For example, in the early diner scene discussed above where Addie insists the 200 dollars is hers, tabletops shine, the walls are freshly painted, and silverware and glasses sparkle. It is clean and well-kept and, as such, differs significantly from the pool hall in Picture Show where Platt insisted on keeping the windows greasy and the paint on the walls peeling. Even the diner in Picture Show, which is in much better condition than the pool hall, features plywood walls as if in a state of disrepair. This was all part of Platt’s approach to designing a town in collapse. On first glance, though, the diner in Paper Moon appears a much newer, shinier, cleaner affair. However, on closer inspection, one notices that the paint around the edges of Addie and Moze’s table is chipped, and there are mismatched tables in the background. There is a veneer of newness to the furniture and fixings that belies their agedness. This blend of fresh paint with chips and scratches around the edges abounds in the film (similar to how she would add paint to the aged dugout in Bears a few years later). It can be seen on the home of the first widow Moze and Addie scam, and in the furniture of the hotel room where they spend their first night. This approach endows the film’s interiors with a lived-in atmosphere that reflects the poverty of the Depression, but also a sense that, unlike with Picture Show, people haven’t given up entirely.

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Their first hotel room also features cracked walls, only one bed, and a hole-riddled blanket that Moze uses while he sleeps on the floor. However, as the film progresses and Addie and Moze develop their confidence talents, the hotel rooms slowly improve. First there are two beds, then a second room. While these rooms gradually grow bigger and more comfortable, through the early goings they continue to retain the same lived­in, rough-hewn quality as the first one. Their second room has two beds, painted walls, and lamp shades, and there are no holes in the bedding, but both the chest of drawers and the radio are scratched up and dingy. The third room is similar, but the forth has wall paper, lace curtains, and Moze and Addie have adjoining rooms. Around the time they are joined by Trixie Delight and Imogene, they are flush enough that they can afford fancier accommodation—the Exchange Hotel—including its own restaurant with table linens, an elevator, and separate bedrooms with fireplaces. This hotel exemplifies Platt’s incorporation of newness into her style. However, it does more than simply convey the existence of newness for its own sake. It is part of a broader strategy of showing Addie and Moze’s increasing success while still underscoring their economic precarity. In addition to the fancy hotel, Moze also buys more and more new clothes, gets an expensive new haircut, and once Trixie and Imogen arrive, purchases a new car to drive the four of them around in. It is Addie’s realization that Moze is spending their savings—which she deems as much hers as his—that energizes her exploits to break Moze and Trixie up. Moze is depicted throughout the film as irresponsible, a man who blows in the wind, especially where women are concerned. Because he believes he can get by on his wits, he does not fear running out of money: there’s always another mark around the corner. Addie, on the other hand, is acutely aware of her position as an orphan—and she knows times are hard because she keeps referencing “Frankie” Roosevelt and how “we gotta look out for one another.” To her, new cars and fancy hotels, while nice, are also frivolous. This aspect of her character, as is so often the case in Platt’s films, is enhanced by the design. Another set of interiors that showcases a mix of old and new comes in the various shops they visit, which are linked to what they purchase, and the kind of cons they pull. Once Moze realizes that Addie can be an asset to his cons, he decides she would be even more effective if she appeared a bit cuter, so he takes her to a store to buy some ribbons for her hair. The shop is run by a nice older lady, with whom Moze flirts while he scams her. The shop has nice furnishings, but is also a bit dusty, and items are cramped

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together on the shelves—next to the till is piece of board with a hand-­ written sign reading “No CrediT.” It is empty of other customers, giving it a lonesome feel (Fig. 7.5). In this shop, Moze runs a variation of a short-­ change scam on the saleslady and makes off with four dollars. Later, when Moze decides Addie should have a dress, they go into a larger shop with more items, and more additional shoppers, giving it a bustling feel. There can also be seen a few pedestrians passing by outside. Platt said: “I had to build the whole set. It was a burnt out building, and I picked the building because of the reverse, because out the window was a real street, and I liked being able to see people going up and down the street” (Platt 1977). The shop’s front windows feature lace curtains, as opposed to the drawn shades of the earlier store, and there is a shiny, pressed-tin cash register (Fig. 7.6). In this shop, Addie pulls off her first swindle—a variation on the “change in the drawer,” by which she makes off with over twenty dollars. Both shops were designed by Platt in vacant store lots with furniture and fixtures she found in various locations throughout Kansas. And both shops work in similar fashion to the hotel rooms in the film—they provide period grounding, accentuate Moze and Addie’s growing, if temporary, prosperity, and use visual information to convey information about the development of Addie and Moze’s relationship.

Fig. 7.5  Interior of the shop where they buy Addie’s ribbon. (Paper Moon, Paramount)

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Fig. 7.6  Interior of the shop where they buy Addie’s dress. (Paper Moon, Paramount)

If we consider the film’s visual representation—its cast, its setting, its interior and exterior locations—and the impact that aspects of those visual components had on the script, it is difficult to argue that Platt’s contributions to the film were anything other than authorial. The other onscreen element Platt oversaw was the costumes, sometimes designing and hand-­ sewing them herself. But before moving on to a discussion of clothing and its role in the film, it is worth briefly considering developments in Platt’s personal life, and her reaction to them, that occurred during the film’s production.

Platt on Set Four significant events occurred during production—some of which likely impacted Platt’s thinking about the film, others of which most certainly affected the way she approached her career after Paper Moon wrapped. First, she received the news that she had been accepted into the Art Directors Guild, becoming its first female member: I heard about it from someone who had been there for that vote. An experienced and respected Production Designer named Tambi Larsen5 stood up

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during the discussion about my becoming a member of the guild, he said, “Polly Platt is doing, in Production Design, exactly what they all should be doing: the ‘look’ of the film.” He made a motion that I be unanimously inducted into the Guild especially because it made the Guild look foolish to keep a person of my talents out of the Guild. Quite an honor. And now I could design pictures legally. (Platt n.d., 215)

Platt’s admission into the guild was more than just an honor. It was a recognition by her profession that her work stood on its own. Several of the creative women of the 1970s—including Platt, but also Marcia Lucas and Toby Rafelson, to name two others—were deemed lucky, or even otherwise unworthy if their positions, because of creative partnerships with their husbands. While Hollywood had begun opening to creative women in the mid-to-late 1960s, sexism and misogyny were still rampant. When asked about sexism in the industry at an AFI Seminar in 1983, Platt said: “the only thing I did was try to push away from being Peter’s wife—which I succeeded in doing very well (laughter)—because I felt that my opinion should be taken completely independently of the fact that I was married to Peter” (Platt 1983). Because her creative relationship with Bogdanovich was with not only a husband, but a director during an era heavily defined by auteurism, her creativity was often subsumed into Bogdanovich’s reputation—he would eventually take credit for getting her into the Art Director’s Guild (Abramowitz 1993). It must be remembered that, while his reputation has waned somewhat in succeeding decades, in the early-to-­ mid-1970s, Bogdanovich was one of the most popular, most successful, most celebrated film directors in Hollywood. He was asked by Charles Bluhdorn to join the Directors Company with Francis Ford Coppola and William Friedkin.6 Thus, for Platt, the peer and industry recognition that came with joining the Guild sent her a message that she no longer needed Bogdanovich’s partnership—or approval—to have a successful career in the industry. Her growing awareness that she could have a life—both personal and professional—free of Bogdanovich (or mostly free; there were still the children), was reinforced by a second development that occurred during filming: on the set she met and fell in love with Tony Wade. Wade was an experienced property master, and Platt fell for his “tough but clearly sweet character” and his “dark sense of humor” (Platt n.d., 210). She became “transfixed” with Wade (215) and began having an affair with him, which she describes as “revelatory”:

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I had felt like an unattractive, nonsexual woman ever since losing Peter to Cybill. “Hell hath no fury like that of a woman scorned” is true, or it was for me. I was furious, even though I was still working with Peter. Tony made love to me. It was fantastic, exotic, romantic, sexy and beautiful all at the same time. I emerged from my motel room every morning at 6 a.m. charged with new energy and confidence. I was attractive; I was not an exhausted mother, a possibly sexually inept woman who had lost her husband to a cover girl. (213)

Platt and Wade would have a tumultuous relationship that would lead to a marriage that lasted until his death in 1985. But an immediate side effect of the relationship on the set of Paper Moon was that Bogdanovich was furious. He has claimed it was not jealousy; rather, he was angry that Platt felt she could banish Shepherd from the set while carrying on an affair of her own. Platt saw a different double standard: “Apparently he was allowed to have his affair but I was not!” (213). The intensity of working on a film production under such circumstances while personal affairs intruded seems likely to have brought out anger and jealousy on both sides. Regardless, though, of who held the double standard, Bogdanovich’s reaction to the affair led Platt to a resolution: “I decided then and there that I would not work with Peter again” (213). While Platt’s professional and romantic situations were improving and she was enjoying a re-emergent sense of independence and self-confidence, she was also still plagued with feelings of guilt and failure about her family and her motherhood. This led to a third significant development, related to her treatment of her daughters. As previously discussed, she had spent several stretches away from her daughters before, leaving them in the care of family or childminders. She was dedicated to her career and cognizant of its demands on a location manager and production designer during an era when location shooting was expected. But she also knew the toll it was taking on her daughters. In the past, she had phoned frequently from the road, but on the production of Paper Moon, she recalls convincing herself that regular phone calls would only remind her daughters of her absence: “I made a terrible mistake. I felt that if I called them up every day, it would just remind them that I wasn’t there. I elected not to call them at all. Incredibly wrong, and so painful for Antonia, my oldest, almost four years old, who really missed me” (213–214). Both Platt and Bogdanovich have frequently told the story of her convincing him to direct the film because as a “father-daughter” picture, it

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would be good for him. But as I have mentioned, Paper Moon is also in many ways a mother-daughter film. It is about a young girl’s loss of her mother and the girl’s efforts to make a new life for herself in the wake of that loss. Platt clearly felt very close to the material. She would later claim: “of course Paper Moon was my idea to make in the first place—it was absolutely my conception to make that film” (Platt 1983). Not only does this run counter to the story of the film’s conception that has generally been presented publicly, including by Platt herself, it presents a different attitude to filmmaking than is the norm for Platt. She was generally quick to take credit for every specific contribution she made to a film, and showed little reticence or shyness about claiming credit for script alterations, casting decisions, or other aspects outside her remit as a production designer. She also took credit for convincing Bogdanovich and other directors to make particular films. But she does not generally take credit for a film itself or its “conception.” Paper Moon came at the nadir of her relationship with Bogdanovich, at a time when she was just discovering a new creative and romantic lease on life, but also at a time when she was experiencing deep shame over her relationship with her daughters, and her absence from their lives. It is highly unlikely that her feelings about her daughters and motherhood would not manifest in work that Platt was so personally committed to. A fourth development was her growing closeness with Tatum O’Neal. She describes feeling a maternal bond with her and wanting to protect her. While shooting the carnival scene, she writes: I can’t believe how cold it was, as we shot into the winter in mid America. Those winds just came screaming along those flat plains and froze us all. In between takes I would zip Tatum inside my jacket to keep her warm, as she was wearing only a small summer dress that I had designed for her. (216)

O’Neal recalls the relationship similarly, describing Platt as “loving and motherly” during the production (O’Neal 2004, 50). O’Neal and others have detailed the difficult relationship she had with her own mother, actress Joanna Moore who struggled with drug addiction and financial difficulties throughout Tatum’s youth (O’Neal 2004, 32). Platt felt protective of her, as though the film production was shielding her from her difficult home life. At the same time, though, Platt’s affection for Tatum compounded her feelings of guilt about her treatment of her own daughters: “I felt guilty that I was giving all this attention to Tatum when my

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own two children were home and not getting any loving from me” (Platt n.d., 216). The relationship persisted, however, and Platt would again suggest Tatum for a major role in The Bad News Bears, another film about a young girl’s difficult relationship with a father figure in which the mother does not appear.7 If Platt were the director of Paper Moon, these developments in her personal life would be mined for insight into her filmmaking. The fact that the film’s genesis is often presented as Bogdanovich taking on a father-­ daughter film because it would be “good for him” shows how easy it has become to elide a film director’s life and work. Yet Platt’s work on Paper Moon was so extensive, it makes sense to ask how much of her own life went into the making the film. Or it would make sense if auteurism did not relegate such personal excavations solely to the life of directors. To better understand the extent to which Platt’s own spirit and personality can be detected in the film, it will be helpful to turn to her costume design, especially how her design of one particular piece of clothing created an emotional through-line for the film that deepened one of its major themes.

A Hat, a Photo, a Mirror As usual on her films, Platt oversaw costume design on Paper Moon. “I designed and we made most of the period clothes in the sewing shop at Paramount Pictures” (Platt n.d., 209). As the film was black and white, she again had to be aware of how different colors would appear onscreen. “I just made sure to make everything contrasting—light and dark as I could—especially the little girl’s clothes. I designed all of her clothes. I used pink, red, and blue. Red comes out sort of black on the screen” (LoBrutto 1992, 160). These various colors can be seen in production stills from the film that have been released, for example, the turtleneck sweater Addie wears under her overalls at the end of the film appears dark-­ gray, while the overalls are nearly black. In color, the sweater is red and the overalls are blue. Addie’s dress that she wears throughout the middle of the film is light gray and white onscreen, but pink and white in color. During pre-production, Platt was approached by Bogdanovich and Sargent to design a place where Moze or Addie could hide money in plain sight. In the film’s third act, the duo swindle a bootlegger and are later brought in for questioning by the bootlegger’s sheriff twin brother (both played by John Hillerman). To this point in the film, Addie has been keeping all their cash in an old cigar box with a false bottom, where she also

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keeps her prized possessions, particularly the photograph of her with her mother, and some of her mother’s jewelry and perfume. The scene in the jailhouse is filmed as suspense—it is shot in a small room, and with every cut, the camera angle changes slightly. Bogdanovich claims they used nearly fifty different set-ups (Bogdanovich 2015), which gives the whole sequence an unsettling feel. Throughout the film the viewer has become accustomed to seeing Addie keep track of the money in the box, so when the sheriff begins to rifle through her keepsakes, his discovery of the money appears imminent. But he does not find it. He finds the box’s false bottom, but still no money. This adds to the scene’s tension which is increased by reaction shots of Moze every time the sheriff seems about to find the money. Finally, there is a shot from Moze’s point of view—a slow push into Addie’s hat—where it becomes clear that the money is hidden underneath the white hat’s dark lace band. Addie’s quick thinking allows them to get away with the money. Platt explains the genesis of the hat: I thought and thought about where the money might be. Then I remembered this beautiful, wide piece of ancient brown lace that I had seen in the many Paramount rooms filled with old buttons, fabric and laces. It was at least four inches wide. I realized that if I could make a hat that Tatum wore a lot in the movie … a hat that had lace around the crown of the hat … a hat that maybe had belonged to her dead mother, and well, the money could be hidden right underneath the fabulous lace and no one could really see it unless they knew it was there! So there they would be in the jailhouse and Tatum could have the money hidden right in her hat, behind this ornate lace band! Alvin and Peter were delighted when I showed them this lace and described the twenties hat Tatum should wear often in the film so that when the time for that gag came, it would be funny as hell. It is that. I only had enough lace to build two hats so we guarded these hats carefully while we were shooting.8 (Platt n.d., 209)

Addie does wear the hat throughout the film, almost every time she appears onscreen, so much so that it becomes a part of her character. As the filmmakers expected, by the time the jailhouse scene occurs, a first-­ time viewer of the film is unlikely to expect that the money is underneath the hat’s band—it has become such a part of Addie, that one almost ceases to notice it. In that sense, it becomes another example of Platt’s understanding of the relationship between character and costume. However, the hat also becomes more than just an extended set-up for the jailhouse payoff. As Platt’s statement above indicated, the filmmakers

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work it into the film as Addie’s mother’s hat. This is never mentioned in the film, and it only becomes apparent in one scene. On Addie and Moze’s third night together, when they are still staying in cheap hotels, Moze has left Addie alone in the room so that he can go out drinking with some women. He returns late at night, drunkenly removes his trousers, then promptly passes out in bed still wearing the rest of his suit. When she is sure he is asleep, Addie sneaks into the bathroom with her cigar box and there is a long scene where the contents of her box and its false bottom are revealed for the first time. These include the photo of Addie and her mother (Fig. 7.7). In the photo, Addie stands stiffly, hands in the pockets of her overalls, squinting in the sunlight. Her mother stands at a slight angle, one hand on her head, the other on her hip, and a big smile on her face. She wears a bead necklace that Addie also has in the box, and the cloche hat in question. This is the only time in the film that we see Addie’s mother, and it is one of two photographs important to the film, the other being of Addie alone in the paper moon, discussed above. Addie studies the photo intently for several seconds, then, staring at herself in the mirror, she poses like her mother in the photo—one hand on head, one on her hip (Fig.  7.8). She then puts it down and picks up the beads her mother is wearing in the photo, holds them in place around her neck, and

Fig. 7.7  Addie’s greatest treasure—a photo of her with her mother. (Paper Moon, Paramount)

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Fig. 7.8  Addie poses in the mirror like her mother in the photograph. (Paper Moon, Paramount)

smiles while she wiggles her hips. Finally, she takes her mother’s perfume, splashes more than enough of it into her hands and rubs it all over her face. There is something ritualistic about the scene. Addie stands alone and in her underwear. She has waited for Moze to come home and pass out before going through the treasures, not wanting to share the moment with him. She does not speak throughout the scene, but goes through these motions with some familiarity, as if she has done this before. Paper Moon is a comedy, and it is not about grief per se, but grief pervades the film. Much like Platt wanted to avoid making the Depression itself a subject of the film, and only allude to it via design, the film only alludes to Addie’s sadness over the loss of her mother, but this scene is key to understanding that. Addie has short hair and throughout the early part of the film, she is dressed in trousers or overalls (like she wears in the photo), and she is mistaken for a boy on more than one occasion. In this sequence, she tries to connect with her mother via her femininity. By wearing her mother’s hat throughout most of the film, she attempts to keep that connection alive. Bogdanovich has praised O’Neal’s performance in the scene. It was filmed without sound so that he could direct her performance from behind

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the camera (Bogdanovich 2015), and he is complementary of the way she moves, her facial expressions and gestures, and he is especially effusive about her satisfied smile at the end of the scene after she has doused herself in perfume. This sets up a joke the he is also very satisfied with (in interviews about the film Bogdanovich often talks about how many jokes he sets up and then pays off in the film)—the scene cuts directly from her smile to Addie and Moze riding in the front seat of their car, Moze’s facial expressions indicating that something smells. The mirror scene does set that joke up well, but there is more to it than that in terms of character and narrative. Bogdanovich has praised Platt’s production design for the scene and how she built the cramped bathroom in the corner of a larger space. He has mentioned that the mirror was her idea. However, this seems unlikely because the mirror is in every iteration of the script. In fact, in earlier versions of the script, before Moze passes out, he goes into the bathroom and looks at himself in the mirror and notices lipstick on his collar. Furthermore, the scene simply does not work without the mirror—it is Addie’s self-­ examination and self-awareness that make the scene so touching. There is another scene late in the film, just before the climax, when Addie and Moze are preparing to pull their last big con. As they get ready, they have a long conversation in front of a mirror, which is filmed in one continuous take. For this scene, the mirror is not mentioned in the script, so perhaps when Bogdanovich credits Platt with devising the mirror for Addie’s bathroom scene, he is conflating the two scenes. However, it is interesting that he would mention Platt’s importance to Addie’s mirror scene because there was one small but significant change to the final draft of the script just before production started. Throughout the spring and summer of 1972, various drafts of the script describe the scene like this: [A] photograph of Addie standing next to her mother on the front lawn of their house. Her mother is loose, hand on hip, cigarette, and smiles broadly. Addie stands stiff and straight and ready for battle. SHOT – ADDIE picking up the picture. Then she puts it back in the box and picks out a long strand of red beads. (Sargent 1972a)

The scene is virtually the same in the final draft of the script (dated September 1, 1972), except that a line has been added:

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[A] photograph of Addie standing next to her mother on the front lawn of their house. Her mother is loose, hand on hip, cigarette, and smiles broadly. Addie stands stiff and straight and ready for battle. SHOT – ADDIE picking up the picture. She studies it, then she takes the stance her mother has taken in the photo. Then she puts it back in the box and picks out a long strand of red beads. (Sargent 1972b, my emphasis)

The addition of the pose to the script is a small change, but a significant one because it changes the scene from Addie looking at the picture to Addie responding to the picture, interacting with it. She wants to be like her mother, or at least closer to her somehow. While she cannot be shown to pose like her mother throughout the film, she can wear her hat. That response, then, endows the wearing of the hat throughout the film with greater resonance, so that while Addie’s mother is never again pictured and rarely mentioned, she is ever present. It would be difficult to argue with certainty that Platt was responsible for the additional line, or even for the idea to have Addie pose like her mother. There are always gaps in archives, and archival research must contend with them, even when the temptation to fill those gaps is compelling. But one can speculate. Platt was a writer, and throughout her career she demonstrated her fondness for making script changes and her ability to recognize how seemingly minor changes could add focus to character, narrative, or theme. That does not mean, however, that she added this line. However, approximately a year after Paper Moon wrapped, Bogdanovich received an intriguing letter from Platt. The film had been released and was garnering mostly positive reviews and strong box office. In the meantime, Bogdanovich had traveled to Europe, where he was on location in Switzerland shooting Daisy Miller (1974) with Cybill Shepherd. Platt was back in Los Angeles with their daughters, but she and Bogdanovich kept up a regular correspondence throughout the 1970s. The short letter, dated November 29, 1973, opens with a brief description of a dream she had and a visit with the girls to Bogdanovich’s sister and mother. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, she writes: “Need I encourage you about the movie further? You make it sound so good. Especially the mirror scene that made you understand the whole movie” (Platt 1973). Again, she could be referring here to the latter mirror scene—it is an exceptional scene technically, the way it is shot in one take and entirely as a mirror reflection, and it features fine performances from the two O’Neals.

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But it seems unlikely as a key to understanding “the whole movie.” Whereas Addie’s solo scene in front of the mirror in which she engages in a kind of dialogue of performance with her dead mother makes the viewer aware of the provenance and importance of Addie’s hat. It is also the scene in the film that makes Paper Moon, at its heart, as much a mother-daughter film as it is a father-daughter film. Bogdanovich and Sargent required the hat as a prop, and perhaps Platt would not have designed it had that need not arisen. However, it was Platt who understood how the hat could be integrated into the film as something more than a prop; rather, in associating the hat with Addie’s grief over her mother, and in tying them all together in the mirror scene, Platt again exemplifies her deep understanding of the complicated and compelling interplay between design, costume, and character. Regardless of whether Platt suggested the pose in front of the mirror, her craft, creativity, and labor are visible in every frame of Paper Moon. There is no question that Bogdanovich directed the film: it is full of intricate, but very natural long takes; it makes use of finely constructed and framed deep focus shots; and the performances he gets from his actors are impressive and effective. It is a funny, touching film whose themes run much deeper than its surface charms imply on a first viewing. Laszló Kovács’s exquisite cinematography and Verna Fields’s editing (particularly in the multi-set-up jailhouse scene) are keys to its success. The film is an excellent example of how collaborative 1970s Hollywood actually was—it is difficult to imagine the film resembling anything like itself without the presence of those talents, some of the most creative professionals of New Hollywood. However, there is no denying that Platt’s work imbues the film with much of what makes it work, and that this clearly stems from her finely honed ability to discern thematic depth in the scripts she read and to design her films to enhance that depth. Furthermore, though, one must recognize the depth of Platt’s artistry in the film—in the sense of art as personal expression. Her connection to the subject matter is affected by her own feelings—both of joy and of impending freedom, but also her feelings of doubt and fear about her relationship with her young daughters (also, perhaps, her troubled relationship with her own mother). In making Paper Moon, Platt brings a part of herself and her biography to her locations, production designs, and costumes. In doing so, she creates a realm of stark loneliness that tinges its surface comedy with a depth of grief and sadness.

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Notes 1. See, for example: Aaron Hunter, Authoring Hal Ashby: the Myth of the New Hollywood Auteur, 2016, New York: Bloomsbury; Aaron Hunter, “Performance as Authorship: Sarah Michelle Gellar and Buffy Season 6,” 2016, Journal of Film and Video, 68, no. 3–4, 51–68; Virginia S.  Murray, “Collaborative Authorship in Film Production: Walter Murch and Film Editing,” 2014, International Journal of New Media, Technology and the Arts, 8, no. 2, 9–19; C.  Paul Sellors, Film Authorship: Auteurs and Other Myths, 2010, New  York: Columbia University Press. 2. Platt served as an executive producer on the film, her final credit before she passed away in 2011. 3. In addition to Platt’s formal application to the guild, the Bogdanovich archives at Indiana University includes several documents in support of her application, including detailed accounts of the films she worked on, hours, locations, duties, and so on. Most of these documents are also dated early December 1971. 4. Maria Pramaggiore argues convincingly that Addie’s schemes to end Moze and Trixie’s relationship includes an unacknowledged sexual tension, one that launches a decades-long incestuous component of both O’Neals’ star texts (Pramaggiore, 89). 5. Larsen was an Oscar and BAFTA-winning production designer who successfully transitioned from the late Classical Hollywood to the New Hollywood era. Films he designed include: The Rose Tattoo (1955), for which he won his Oscar; The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965), BAFTA; The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976); and his final credited film, Heaven’s Gate (1980). 6. Paper Moon was one of two Directors Company films Bogdanovich would make, the other being his next film Daisy Miller (1975). Coppola directed The Conversation (1974) under the auspices of the group. Friedkin never contributed a film. 7. Interestingly enough, according to Platt, it was Tatum who first detected that Platt was in a relationship with Tony Wade (Platt n.d., 212). 8. Frank Marshall remembers this somewhat differently. While he and Platt were scouting locations in Kansas, “In one of them was an antique

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store, and it had a lot of clothes, and that’s where she found Tatum O’Neal’s hat” (Marshall 2020). Later, she added the lace from the Paramount shop. According to Marshall, one of his jobs on set was to guard the hat.

References Abramowitz, Rachel. 1993. She’s Done Everything (Except Direct). Premier, November. https://www.maryellenmark.com/text/magazines/ premiere/919V-­000-­004.html Biskind, Peter. 1998. Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ‘N’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood. New York: Touchstone. Bogdanovich, Peter. 2015. Director’s Commentary. Paper Moon. Blu-ray. Directed by Peter Bogdanovich. London: Eureka Entertainment. Bogdanovich, Peter, dir. 1973. Paper Moon. London: Eureka Entertainment Ltd, 2015. Blu-Ray, 102 min. Brown, Joe David. 1971. Addie Pray. New York: Simon and Schuster. Crist, Judith. 1973. Variations on the Confidence Game, Review of Paper Moon, Directed by Peter Bogdanovich. Texas Monthly, July. https://www.texasmonthly.com/articles/variations-­on-­the-­confidence-­game/ LoBrutto, Vincent. 1992. By Design: Interviews with Film Production Designers. Westport: Praeger. Marshall, Frank. 2020. Telephone Interview with the Author. April 3. Nye, Scott. 2015. Review of Paper Moon, Blu-ray, Directed by Peter Bogdanovich. Criterioncast, May 28. https://criterioncast.com/reviews/blu-­ray-­reviews/ scott-­r eviews-­p eter-­b ogdanovichs-­p aper-­m oon-­m asters-­o f-­c inema-­ blu-­ray-­review O’Neal, Tatum. 2004. A Paper Life. New York: Harper. Paper Moon Audience Survey Card. 1973. Box 98. Bogdanovich Mss., Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. Platt, Polly. 1971. Application to the International Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Employees, December 4. Box 2. Bogdanovich Mss., Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. ———. 1973. Letter to Peter Bogdanovich. November 29. Box 9. Bogdanovich Mss., Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. ———. 1977. American Film Institute: Harold Lloyd Seminar. December 7, 1977. ———. 1983. American Film Institute: Harold Lloyd Seminar, October 18. ———. n.d. “It Was Worth It.” Collection of Antonia and Sashy Bogdanovich. Unpublished Memoir.

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Pramaggiore, Maria. 2015. Filial Coupling, the Incest Narrative and the O’Neals. In First Comes Love: Power Couples, Celebrity Kinship and Cultural Politics, ed. Shelley Cobb and Neil Ewen. New York: Bloomsbury. Sargent, Alvin. 1972a. Paper Moon. Draft Script. August 18. Box 98. Bogdanovich Mss., Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. ———. 1972b. Paper Moon. Final Draft Script. September 1. Box 98. Bogdanovich Mss., Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. Scorsese, Martin. 2019. “I Said Marvel Movies Aren’t Cinema. Let me Explain.” New York Times, November 4, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/04/ opinion/martin-scorsese-marvel.html Siskel, Gene. 1973. He’s Just Mad About Addie, Review of Paper Moon (Film), Directed by Peter Bogdanovich. Chicago Tribune, June 15, 39. https://www. newspapers.com/clip/37501983/gene-­siskel-­movie-­reviewpaper-­moon/ Stapleton, Alex, Director. 2011. Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel. A&E Indie Films. “The Next Picture Show.” 2015. Paper Moon, Blu-ray. Directed by Peter Bogdanovich. London: Eureka Entertainment. Zone, Ray. 2002. Kovacs’ Violin: An Interview with Laszlo Kovacs, ASC. In New Wave King: The Cinematography of Laszlo Kovacs, ASC, ed. Ray Zone, 85–100. Hollywood: ASC Press.

CHAPTER 8

Epilogue: Production Designer to Producer … And Everything in Between

In the mytho-historical iconography that has been constructed around New Hollywood, film director and producer Roger Corman is a giant figure who stands on its periphery. Beginning in the 1950s, Corman developed an impressive talent for directing and distributing a variety of films variously described as low-budget, b-movie, or exploitation. He made horror films, teen films, crime films, fantasy films, and, in the early 1960s, a series of eight films loosely based on the works of writer Edgar Allen Poe and often staring Vincent Price. Corman’s specialty, regardless of genre, was to shoot films quickly and cheaply. For example, House of Usher (1960) was shot in fifteen days for $300,000. The hope was that the films would then go on to garner high earnings in comparison to their budgets (House of Usher made $1.5 million in North America). In the 1960s, he moved increasingly into production, mainly at American International Pictures (AIP). As a producer, he developed a knack for nurturing emerging talent with similar skills to his own—shoot fast, shoot cheap, and get the movie out quickly. While at AIP, “Corman scoured the L. A. film schools for cheap local talent, like director Francis Ford Coppola, writers Willard Huyck and John Milius, and producer Gary Kurtz” (Cook 2000, 133). As an increasing number of young filmmakers underwent tutelage with Corman, he “became celebrated for allowing many of the movie brats to pass through his shoot-today-edit-tomorrow lowbudget motion picture academy” (Biskind 1999, 31). Furthermore, it was not just future directors or producers who were mentored by © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Hunter, Polly Platt, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82120-3_8

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Corman—writers, performers, cinematographers, production designers, and more received practical training under his guidance. Some of the figures who made at least one film as part of the “Corman school” include directors Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Monte Hellman, Peter Bogdanovich, performers Peter Fonda, Bruce Dern, Jack Nicholson, writers like Robert Towne, cinematographer Laszló Kovács, and production designer Polly Platt. Platt is rarely mentioned in discussions of the Corman school. Nor for that matter are director Stephanie Rothman, producer Gale Anne Hurd, or editor Tina Hirsch. Even Corman’s long-time partner and wife, Julie Corman, an important independent producer in her own right, is often ignored (Julie Corman was a key researcher and associate producer on Boxcar Bertha one of the earliest features directed by Martin Scorsese). Much like New Hollywood as a whole, the “Corman school” is almost always framed as a masculine endeavor. This is partly due to its having flourished during an era of exclusion for women—in the late 1950s and early 1960s, women were just beginning to re-enter the United States film industry, and there were still fewer and much limited opportunities for them to take part in filmmaking—studio or independent. Corman was happy to hire anybody who could adapt to his system, women included, and he was often very supportive of the women who worked for him. However, he was not immune to the era’s sexism. Alicia Kozma describes how in 1972, director Stephanie Rothman, who had proven herself producing and directing several films for Corman, was passed over for Boxcar Bertha in favor of “neophyte director Martin Scorsese” (Kozma 2022). While Corman may occasionally have practiced a sexism typical of the era, more troubling is the way the stories of the women he did hire have been, in the main, erased by New Hollywood scholarship and history. Polly Platt did pass through the Corman school, however, and she learned a great deal in doing so. As I have mentioned, she and Bogdanovich filmed and edited additional footage for The Wild Angels (1966). They also helped Corman in one of his favorite projects: buying foreign films, re-cutting them or adding additional footage, and releasing them in English. In this case, they shot additional footage for a Russian film, Planeta Bur (1962), which Corman had already re-released once earlier. The Bogdanovich and Platt version was re-named Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women (1968) and featured additional scenes staring Mamie Van Doren. Finally, Platt did story development and production and costume design on their first feature, Targets (1968), another Corman

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production. Working on these three projects, Platt developed filmmaking skills that she would deploy in a variety of capacities throughout her career. She wrote, edited, designed costumes, managed budgets, hired actors, acquired film stock, and did costume and production design. Having worked in theater for years before meeting Corman, she brought many of her own skills to the films she made with him. Furthermore, as I have highlighted earlier, she took advantage of other, earlier experiences in her life to develop talents that would serve her as a filmmaker—working as an industrial seamstress in 1960 or typing out scripts for Larry Edmund’s bookshop. But with Corman, she received an on-the-job, crash course in practical filmmaking. She describes his instructions for shooting the b-roll scenes for The Wild Angels: Roger looked at me, ready with my yellow pad and pencil, and gave me a long list of tasks that I had absolutely no idea how to do, but I learned fast. He told me to go and buy 5000 feet of Kodak movie film, 5254 emulsion. I wrote it down not understanding what the hell emulsion was. He said to get the costumes used in the chase sequence from Western Costume Company in Hollywood, get the primo motorcycles and their owners (who were really terrifying actual Hell’s Angel bikers we had used in principal photography). Roger had hired a low budget cameraman who would bring the Panavision camera we needed … and almost as an afterthought, Roger looked at us and said, “You understand the one-hundred-and-eightydegree-­line rule, don’t you?” Neither of us did. He pulled out the placemat under his lox and bagels and drew out an explanation of the very holy, essential and most confusing principle of shooting a movie. Hardly waiting to see if we understood, he stood up and wished us luck, paid the bill and left us to our own devices. (Platt n.d., 122)

Platt went out and accomplished all those tasks. It can be easy with hindsight to read the totality of what Platt learned and accomplished in the three years she worked for Corman as preparation for a career as a producer (when I spoke to James Brooks for this project, he insisted that Platt produced Targets—Bogdanovich is the film’s credited producer) (Brooks 2020). However, her career as a production designer took precedence, and she spent the next twenty years mainly engaged in that role. One of the arguments I have tried to make in this book is that Platt’s production design in the 1970s and into the ‘80s was not only exemplary, but transformative. Along with the work of a small cadre of peers, her design on films of the New Hollywood era reimagined

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what Hollywood films could look like. It reformulated the concept of visual realism in cinema by de-glamorizing American life and by accentuating the deep visual bonds between people, places, and objects and how the stories that are told about them can be expanded by a thorough understanding of those bonds. In doing so, I argue, she was an active participant in the authorship of her films. As I have shown, however, while credited as a production designer, Platt’s remit was much more expansive. Like many of her early ‘70s design colleagues, she supervised location decisions, but she also oversaw costume design and often hair and makeup. She worked on script development, she participated in casting, and in taking on all those roles, she developed a comprehensive familiarity with Hollywood financing and budgets. As the 1970s rolled into the ‘80s, Platt began to write more frequently and to move into production—she wrote 1978s Pretty Baby and served as an associate producer on the film, and then would become a full-time producer and executive producer with Gracie Films beginning on 1987s Broadcast News. The thrust of this book has been to examine the influential nature of Platt’s design work and how it contributed to the authorship of her films. In this concluding chapter, I will look briefly at Platt’s “other” careers—as a writer and producer. It must be emphasized that Platt’s career outside of production design was extensive, and a survey in one chapter cannot hope to account for the work she did as a writer and producer—that might require another book. However, as this is the first scholarly account of her career, I do think it important to clarify that she worked steadily in Hollywood for many years after she stopped production designing, and did so in a capacity that remains highly influential. I will also consider Platt’s legacy and the way it has been framed—or perhaps has been exempt from framing—due to the powerful grip that director-driven auteurism has on the scholarly and critical film imagination at large. As influential as Platt’s work and career were, and as expansive her skills and imagination, there is a lingering sense that because she never directed a film, her talent was wasted. She was pestered with this sentiment during her life, and it persists after her passing. I then discuss the sexism that underlies this notion and Platt’s complicated relationship with it. Hollywood was barely open to female directors in the 1970s and only slightly more so in the 1980s, and it was often brutal to those women who were able to wrestle a directing credit from its clutches. How Platt is held accountable for the system that was designed to oppose her success as a director is, at best, an

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oxymoron. Platt’s own relationship with feminism, her willingness to confront or even name the sexism in the system, was fraught with an ambivalence similar to that of other women of the era who knew that speaking out too forcefully might lose them their next job. Finally, I will consider how this conflux of historical and cultural trends—auteurism, sexism, and women’s precarity—have served as excuses to continue women’s marginalization in film history.

Platt’s Later Career As difficult as Platt’s personal life had been during the later stages of her creative relationship with Bogdanovich, the collaborative nature of their practice had remained strong. About working on What’s Up, Doc? (1972), she wrote, “The wonderful thing about the relationship I had with Peter is that he trusted me” (Platt n.d., 191) and “we had the perfect collaboration” (193). Describing her working relationship with Bogdanovich on Paper Moon (1973), she writes, “Collaboration was dreamy. I loved it” (209). Because she had such a strong creative relationship with Bogdanovich, even during times of great personal difficulty, and because she had such an extensive amount of creative input and control on those films, one of her difficulties in moving on from the relationship was that not all directors took her or her input as seriously as Bogdanovich had. Some of her experiences, as discussed in this book, were fruitful, professionally speaking at least. With Bud Yorkin on The Thief Who Came to Dinner (1973) and Michael Ritchie on The Bad News Bears (1976), she was given a good deal of leeway to design the films as she envisioned, as well as to make creative suggestions about the scripts. On A Star is Born (1976), one of her unexpected tasks was to keep the peace between director Frank Pierson, first-time producer and infamous hot-head Jon Peters, and star (and Peters’s partner), Barbra Streisand, who was also a co-producer. Streisand wanted to direct the film, but hadn’t yet developed the confidence to do so on her own. According to Platt, Streisand came to her and suggested they co-direct; Platt declined (238–239).1 At the same time, Pierson was relatively inexperienced, and Peters, the film’s producer, was firmly in Streisand’s corner. Platt describes how Streisand would wait in her trailer until long after a scene was set up, so that she could be the one to decide when to appear on set. Platt decided to appeal to Streisand the co-producer rather than Streisand the star: “I did tell Barbra that she should not wait in her trailer and come out at the

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last minute, when the cameraman, Bob Surtees, and his gaffer had finished the lighting for the shot. It cost money, changing the lighting again, at the last minute, to please her. As a producer of the movie she should see how expensive that was to her film” (240). While Platt had to negotiate such difficulties throughout the production, she was again allowed great leeway in designing the film, including hiring her old friend Jules Fisher to create the lighting for the film’s concert scenes (it was Fisher’s first film). A Star is Born received a tepid critical response, but was wildly successful at the box office. Platt would work with Peters again on The Witches of Eastwick2 and with Pierson again on an unproduced project later in the decade (Platt n.d., 271). On other films of the decade, however, Platt’s professional interactions with directors were less successful. She was contacted by Robert Altman twice to work on films—first for Thieves Like Us (1974) and then for Nashville (1975). On the former, Platt was reluctant to work on the film mainly because she had just finished Paper Moon, and, both films having been set in the 1930s, “felt that I wouldn’t do justice to a second film of that era” (Platt n.d., 218). Altman also came onto her after the interview, “telling me confidently that he slept with all the women he worked with” (218; also Zuckoff 2010).3 She passed on the film.4 On Nashville, she accompanied Altman and screenwriter Joan Tewkesbury to Nashville to scout locations. Altman was absorbed by the Watergate news at the time so Platt and Tewkesbury did most of the location scouting themselves, and Platt was on board to do the film’s production design. However, Altman changed the ending of the script and decided to include the assassination of Barbara Jean, an idea Platt found misguided: “it was a beautiful, delicate story of many lives intertwining. Everybody arriving at Nashville, and then this assassination—which obviously comes from his political fascination. It’s like a sledgehammer on this delicate, filigreed story” (Zuckoff 2010). No amount of pleading with Altman could convince him to change his mind and in the end, Platt quit the film. In 1975, she was also hired by Mike Nichols to do production design on The Fortune (1975). Her creative relationship with Nichols was even more disagreeable than with Altman. They disagreed “vehemently” about sets for the film, which she had never experienced before. Platt also found that the cuts Nichols was making to Carol Eastman’s script (which Platt describes as “wonderful”) (Platt n.d., 232) were weakening the film. She takes some of the blame for these disagreements: “I was doing my usual stuff arguing with Nichols about the cuts he was making … interfering

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with casting.” In her 1977 appearance at the AFI, when she is describing her inclination for ill-fitting clothes, almost as an aside, she says: “I think that the production designer should have the total say so. But boy you have to be … That’s how I got fired by Mike Nichols, off of The Fortune. By trying to push my weight, and there were too many other heavyweights around there, and I got schweet (here she makes a  sound like getting yanked). I got fired” (Platt 1977). Later, she would describe her feelings about this period: “And then when I went working on other films, it was hard for me not to be listened to with a complete and absolute respect, because Peter always respected my opinion and I had an enormous influence on the pictures he did” (Platt 1983). Also during this period, Platt’s feelings about leaving her daughters for work became increasingly hard to ignore and she tried to find films that would keep her in Los Angeles, which was part of the appeal of A Star is Born (1976) and The Bad News Bears (1976). But even in Los Angeles, and even able to take Antonia to the set of Bears, she felt like the children were suffering from her being away. Bears was the last film she designed for six years. In the meantime, however, she decided to focus on writing. As mentioned previously, Platt devised the story for Targets and worked on the script with Bogdanovich (in the end, she shared a “story by” credit with Bogdanovich, while he received the sole “screenplay by” credit). As also mentioned, even when not credited for her influence on her films’ scripts, she continued to cut scenes, add scenes, change characters and location, in ways that influenced the films’ outcome. In many ways, it was a natural development that she would turn to writing. While making What’s Up, Doc? (1972), Platt had befriended Nessa Hyams, the film’s casting director whose other credits include Summer of ‘42 (1971) and The Exorcist (1973). According to Platt, it was Hyams who discovered Madeline Kahn for the film. In 1973, Hyams was promoted to the position of vice president of creative affairs at Columbia Pictures (Gregory 2002, 42), making her one of the highest-ranking women in a Hollywood studio. In 1974, she became one of the inaugural class of the American Film Institute’s Directing Workshop for Women, a group that included, among others, Julia Philips, Ellen Burstyn, Lee Grant, Margot Kidder, Lilly Tomlin, and Maya Angelou. The program was not designed to be a film school; rather, the women were expected to know their way around production already. The workshop was an opportunity for them to make quick demo films that would, ostensibly, help them get work

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directing features (Smukler 2019, 208). According to Platt, Hyams “came to me out of the blue and asked me if I wanted to adapt a short story by Roald Dahl called ‘The Great Switcheroo’ which she was going to direct for the women’s program at the American Film Institute” (Platt n.d., 247). Platt wrote the script, which led to Hyams requesting her to write an adaptation of Bernard Malamud’s The Assistant: “we tried to get the studios interested, but the subject matter was too dark” (247). Although The Assistant went unproduced, Platt’s work with Hyams came to the attention of David Picker, then head of Paramount, who was putting together French director Louis Malle’s first American production. Picker recommended Platt to Malle, and the two began to discuss possible projects together. This led to Platt writing the script for Pretty Baby (1978). Pretty Baby is loosely based on the life and photographs of historical figure Ernest Bellocq (Keith Carradine), who is best known for the photographs he took of sex workers living in the Storyville red-light district of New Orleans in the years leading up to the First World War. Yet, while the narrative derives from Bellocq’s life and photographs, it centers on a young girl, Violet (Brooke Shields), who was born in a brothel to a prostitute mother, Hattie (Susan Sarandon). The brothel is a quasi-­ communal living environment, and Violet is raised collectively by all the women there. This becomes particularly apparent when Hattie falls in love with one of her clients and leaves the brothel for a life in St. Louis, leaving Violet behind. Thus, while Pretty Baby is drastically different from Paper Moon or The Bad News Bears, it again features a young girl abandoned by her mother. In this case, Hattie does return in the final minutes to take Violet away with her. According to Platt, it was she who suggested the idea of a script about Bellocq and Storyville after Malle informed her that he loved American jazz (Platt n.d., 248). Malle says the idea was his, that a friend sent him a book of Bellocq’s plates (Yakir 1978, 62)—in fact, in interviews promoting Pretty Baby, Malle rarely mentions Platt’s work on the film. In any case, once they had agreed upon the setting, Platt decided: “the story should be about the daughter of a prostitute, a young girl like my daughter Antonia, a spirited and know-it-all child who would basically have nothing but boredom where her mother’s occupation was concerned” (Platt n.d., 249). Thus Violet, and Shields’s portrayal of her, become the driving force of the film—and the cause of much of the resultant controversy surrounding it.

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Although Platt mostly enjoyed working with Malle, and has immense praise for cinematographer Sven Nykvist, the production was not without its struggles. Platt was an associate producer on the film and with her experience working in Hollywood, again hoped that her ideas and input would be readily accepted. When it came to casting the role of Bellocq, however, Malle was not receptive to her idea that Jack Nicholson play the role. According to Platt, she and Picker had secured a commitment from Nicholson, but “Louie was furious. He told me he did not want to work with a movie star on his first movie in Hollywood. Stars were difficult.” Furthermore, “He felt betrayed that I had not consulted him about Jack” (253). Malle, as both producer and director, had final say, and Carradine was cast, a decision Platt believed “had blown the movie” (254).5 Whether Malle’s casting decision was right, once again Platt found herself butting heads with a male director who took her advice less than seriously. Platt continued to write scripts for feature films after Pretty Baby, although to lesser degrees of success.6 She also wrote the script for the Oscar-winning short film Lieberman in Love (1995). For a time, she thought that she had quit production designing for good. In 1977, when she asked whether she had worked on production design for Pretty Baby, she replied: “I didn’t design the picture. I didn’t want to design it. I don’t want to design anymore. It isn’t that I don’t like it. It’s just that I’ve always wanted to be a writer, and I have two children, and they’re very small and in desperate need of me. And I can’t keep going away, have to change my life” (Platt 1977). However, she did return to design in 1981 on Young Doctors in Love (1982), the first film directed by Garry Marshall. According to Marshall, “During the movie, I would turn to her whenever I was confused and needed advice from a person wiser than myself” (Marshall 2012, 119). Marshall also learned a great deal from Platt about budgets and about the importance of staying on schedule (120). Platt would design four films in the 1980s, the third being the most propitious. It was on Terms of Endearment (1983), that she first worked with James Brooks. Like Gary Marshall, Brooks had an extensive background in television directing but was making his first feature film. Terms of Endearment was based on a novel by Larry McMurtry, and Brooks knew that Platt had worked with him before (The Last Picture Show), and was friendly with him, which is why he approached her to work on the film. However, as with Marshall, Brooks began to rely on Platt for more than just her production design: “She was the person I spoke to and asked

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about everything” (Brooks 2020). In this case, what Brooks learned from Platt was not limited to scheduling or budgets, but ran deeper to the heart of filmmaking art: She made you feel the path to integrity, she was very much against the bosses, and she made you feel a summons to a higher calling. She really had that, she’d worked with great people, she’d done great films … In a very specific, raw way, not the way you think of it. You think of “inspirational” as … there’s a grandness to it, a loftiness to it. In a very gritty way, in a very gritty us-against-them way, she was inspirational. The film was king and you had to do everything to protect the film. (Brooks 2020)

Terms of Endearment was a massively successful film. It received widespread critical acclaim, was a tremendous box office hit, and won five Academy Awards, among many others. It is also the only film for which Platt was nominated for an Academy Award for her design, although she did not win. The film’s success made Brooks a highly sought talent in Hollywood and in 1986, he founded Gracie Films, a production company that had an exclusive and highly lucrative distribution deal with 20th Century Fox. For Brooks, Platt’s extensive filmmaking knowledge, her artistic vision, and her “gritty” inspirational qualities were too valuable not to harness, so he hired her as an executive vice president at Gracie. It would be impossible to detail the extensive work Platt did at Gracie in a short space. On paper, she served as producer or executive producer on a slew of major films from the 1980s and ‘90s, including Broadcast News (1987), Say Anything … (1989), The War of the Roses (1989), I’ll Do Anything (1994), and Bottle Rocket (1996). Two of those films again featured first-time film directors whom Platt mentored, Cameron Crowe (Say Anything …) and Wes Anderson (Bottle Rocket). According to Crowe, Platt taught him everything about the stages of production and about the importance of building a good crew—based on talent, not on pedigree. He describes her as a “maverick” in the way she fostered an “us against the world spirit,” but also traditional in the way “she believed in the importance of execution—if someone couldn’t execute, there would be a guillotine headed their way” (Crowe 2018). As producers do, Platt also made extensive behind-the-scenes contributions to Gracie films that are harder to discern. In researching this book, I visited the 20th Century Fox legal archives in 2018, where there is a wealth of information about Platt’s less publicized activities. Unfortunately,

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since Disney’s takeover of the studio, I have been informed that “the recitation or reference to any legal documents or material by third parties is prohibited.” So I cannot quote directly from material that shows that when Platt was first hired by Gracie, one of the films she was contracted to produce was Big (1988), directed by Garry Marshall’s sister, Penny. The film ended up being produced by Brooks and Robert Greenhut, but Platt may have done uncredited script work on the film. Nobody I asked about the film remembers Platt’s work on Big, but documents in the Fox archives may refer to payment made to Platt for services to the film. And while Brooks does not recall specific work Platt did on Big, he does recall that she often “did script doctoring, where it was anonymous” (Brooks 2020). Along with Garry Marshall and a few others, Platt receives a “special thanks” in the film’s end credits.

But She Didn’t Direct While Platt knew her way around a film set and film budgeting as well as anybody in Hollywood, she never directed a film. This is a subject of much discussion in the discourse around her legacy, and it began early in her career. Platt’s thinking about the topic could be ambivalent, and she changed her mind frequently. When asked in 1977 if she ever intended to direct, she says no, but that if she ever were ever to write a film she thought only she could direct, she might try (Platt 1977). Later in her career, she leans more firmly toward wanting to direct: Do I want to direct? Yes, finally. I used to say “no.” I used to say I never want to direct until I find somebody like me to help me, and I really think that would be nice, if one of you guys would come out of here and be good. I would like to direct now, but … I don’t want to direct just anything. I don’t know whether I’ll get the chance. (Platt 1983)

She almost got the chance with The War of the Roses, a film that she developed. However, a difficult pre-production led Platt to take the job designing The Witches of Eastwick, and while she was working on that film, Danny DeVito was hired in her stead (Platt n.d., 308—more on this below). Despite all her accomplishments and influence, Platt’s lack of a directing credit persists as part the framing by which her career is understood. In earlier interviews and other media like DVD director’s commentaries, Bogdanovich is quite praiseworthy of Platt’s work. But in a 2019

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interview with Vulture, his attitude toward her takes on a very different tone—he repeatedly accuses her of lying about her contributions and labels several of her claims “bullshit.” He sums up his current impression of her by claiming, “Yeah, she lied. She did earn a lot of credit, but she didn’t direct anything” (Goldman 2019). Bogdanovich’s relationship with Platt is complicated by the way their marriage ended, by years of co-parenting, but also by lingering rumors that she may have codirected their four films together. However, even when those more sympathetic to Platt’s career discuss her work, they lean into the framing of her career as mildly disappointing because she was unable to direct. Brooks says, “that was her goal, she wanted to. There were development things that started, that didn’t finish, and it never quite happened … It was enormously hard for a woman to get a shot” (Brooks 2020). Even Karina Longworth, whose podcast Polly Platt, the Invisible Woman (2020) is incredibly sensitive to Platt’s battles and laudatory of her career, succumbs to the framing at points. Describing Platt’s decision to design The Witches of Eastwick while The War of the Roses was still in preproduction, she states: “she showed that she didn’t have the drive and the self-confidence she needed to steamroll herself through all of the obstacles” (Longworth 2020). Brooks and Longworth are not necessarily wrong—women finding opportunities to direct was “enormously hard” and it did require “drive and self-confidence,” especially in the 1970s and into the 1980s. Maya Montañez Smukler describes how the ‘80s were a much better decade for female directors than the ‘70s had been. At the same time, though, she is clear about how many women of the ‘80s, like Platt, “never got to do their movie. These women were prepared to direct, having designed development deals with studios or were attached to projects scheduled to go into production. Yet none of these ventures were ultimately realized” (Smukler 2019, 285, emphasis in original). Platt’s difficulties on The War of the Roses were about much more than her drive and self-confidence. She had actually begun development on War before joining Gracie and brought the film with her as part of her hiring package (again, there may be documents detailing this package in the Fox legal archives that I cannot refer to; see also Longworth 2020). Platt and Brooks hired Michael Leeson to write the script. Leeson had worked with Brooks extensively in television, with writing credits on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Rhoda, and Taxi. He and Platt did not get along. Platt writes: “I felt that the wife [in Roses] was getting to be too much of a bitch, and I didn’t think the movie would

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work if only one of the two were awful. We struggled and it wasn’t pleasant” (Platt n.d., 301). Their relationship deteriorated and Leeson reportedly told Platt he “didn’t give a fuck” what she thought (303). Platt was contracted as the film’s director and art director. She was an executive vice president of the company producing the film. Brooks reportedly asked Platt to try to patch things up with Leeson, but does not seem to have considered firing the writer. If we compare Platt’s treatment as pre-production director on War with her treatment by directors on earlier films where there had been disagreements, there is a stark difference. When she disagreed with Robert Altman about the ending of Nashville (1975), she left the picture. When she disagreed with Mike Nichols about the production design and script for The Fortune (1975), she was fired. When she disagreed with Louis Malle about the casting of Pretty Baby—a film which she had written and was associate producing—Malle had the final decision. In all these cases, the director’s decision was final. On The War of the Roses, when Platt, the film’s presumptive director, disagreed with Leeson, she was removed as director. Gracie did reappoint her as executive producer of War (Longworth 2020). Any further deals she made with Gracie to direct a film never came to fruition. With these experiences in mind, it is easy to see why Platt might be ambivalent about directing. Longworth frames her choice to design The Witches of Eastwick rather than remain in Los Angeles and fight with Leeson so she could direct The War of the Roses as an example of choosing what she already knew over something more challenging. There may be some truth to this, but it also replicates the auteurist framing about creativity in Hollywood that has plagued conceptions of women’s labor throughout film history. No matter how vital, how creative, or how intensive a woman’s work on a film is, if she is not the director, she does not get credit. Platt went to Massachusetts and did a phenomenal job designing Witches. She then stepped into a producer’s role at Gracie that was highly suited to the skill set she had developed in her career. She could at once see the big picture and all the fine details. She had become an excellent mentor to young directors and other crew. She had a deep understanding of budgets and finance. She was fantastic with casting and talent. These are the skills of a producer, and both the accounts of the people she worked with and the critical and financial success of the films she produced demonstrate that she excelled in the position. So often in her career, she was not respected because she was not a director, but she

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was not allowed to direct because she was a woman. When she finally was hired to direct, she still did not garner the necessary respect. And, at least in part because she never directed, history has mainly ignored her contributions.

But Was It Sexist? Platt was asked several times throughout her career what it was like to be a woman working in male-dominated Hollywood. When she answers, she is always aware of the precarity of her position, but she is also careful not to align herself with feminism or women’s liberation. When asked in 1977, she replied: “I consider myself an artist first. Sex second. I’m not anti-­ feminist or pro-feminist or anti-male” (Platt 1977). This stance was not unique in the 1970s. Women had only just begun to re-enter the Hollywood work force in anything approaching significant numbers, and they were acutely aware of the institutional suspicion about their intentions and doubts about their abilities. Smukler writes: [W]omen—in particular white middle-class women—were in a position to gain access, for the first time in generations, to creative and economic power in the motion picture business. Pushing against this possibility of progress was the legacy of institutionalized discrimination in Hollywood, which was not going to succumb easily without strong resistance and some casualties. (2019, 41–42)

This created a paradox for these women—to gain the access they so desired, they had to work extremely hard and be extremely bright, they had to suffer pay inequality and sexist remarks and harassment, and they were aware that they would be judged much more harshly for every misstep than they would be praised for any successes. However, they could not speak about this precarity because that would raise the “strong resistance” and potential for “casualties”—the specter of being difficult. Repeatedly women of the 1970s downplay their feminism or alignment with Women’s Lib. For example, a New York Times profile of editor Dede Allen from 1972, describes her thinking as such: “Being a woman in an industry dominated by men has not been easy, Miss Allen feels, but the problem has not only been the obvious one of being overlooked. There is also the problem of the woman who has had to fight so hard to get where she is that she is likely to come on too strong, to be competitive with the

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director” (Canby 1972). Oliver Gruner describes how screenwriter Jay Presson Allen presented herself in public as non-feminist, or even anti-­ feminist, making remarks in public that “were, at best, evasive and, at worst, outright hostile” toward feminist politics (Gruner 2022). Auteurism compounded, and continues to compound, this paradox in the way it frames much of non-directing labor as “invisible.” This is particularly true of the work that women gravitated toward in the 1970s— editing and design. It is common to hear the best Hollywood editing and production described as invisible, and Platt did so herself: They should not be aware of it, ever, ever, ever. They should just never see it. Unless, you know, we’re talking about a cartoon like What’s Up, Doc? where you’re having a lot of fun, and you’re fooling around. But like on Paper Moon, or the The Last Picture Show, or A Star is Born, or any film that you feel seriously about at all, your work should be invisible, but good. I think. (Platt 1977)

I have discussed this paradox in earlier chapters but it is worth mentioning briefly again. Film analysis and criticism often rely on a close textual analysis of the visible, as do the simple pleasures of film viewing. Furthermore, the very notion of auteurism derives from an analysis of the visual—miseen-scène, cinematography, editing. It is nearly impossible for these elements of a film, particularly its design, to be “invisible” because they are directly in front of the viewer’s face through the entirety of the film. Describing the notion of invisibility in editing, Karen Pearlman writes: We may not see edits but what we see is the flow of movement (moving pictures, a movie). This flow of movement has been designed, shaped, and ultimately determined by the editor, and unfortunately, calling editing “invisible,” even if meant as praise, occludes the creative input of the editor. The editor who, in New Hollywood, was significantly more likely to be a woman than was the director or cinematographer. (Pearlman 2022)

I have argued throughout this book that Platt’s work has also been intentionally “designed, shaped, and ultimately determined” by her. The effect of rendering her and other women’s work “invisible” is to more easily bequeath that work to the director of the films, as auteurism by its very nature does. Thus, for women in the industry in the 1970s, sexism was rampant not only in the institutional barriers to their ability to work, but

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in the scholarly and cultural demarcations of their labor, their creativity, and perceptions of their value. Platt was aware of this, even if she was inclined to play it safe. Asked again in 1983 if, as a woman, she had faced any disadvantage in the industry, she gave a long and rambling answer that seems to indicate that she wants to say one thing, but must veer toward safety. I quote it in full here (with minor edits for clarity) because it is fascinating to see her mind work aloud as she tries to give an honest answer: I don’t think there’s any denying that the fact that you’re a woman works to your disadvantage a lot in this industry. And I don’t blame it on the men, I blame it on all of us. I call it “the nature of things.” It’s hard, but when you are as lucky as I was, and people have treated me very well, it’s been an advantage because I’ve been treated well. And I don’t think that it’s appropriate to … I used to make jokes about it. I used to say, I used to do some talking and teaching a little bit, and I used to say, “well, I screwed my way to the top.” I used to make all kinds of jokes because I was married to the director and I, uh. But now, I’ve made so many films without Peter, and I discovered that I was quite spoiled because I got everything I wanted, I had a tremendous influence on … and by getting what I wanted, I mean I had the ear of the director. I had a tremendous amount of power, and I didn’t know it. And then when I went working on other films, it was hard for me not to be listened to with a complete and absolute respect, because Peter always respected my opinion and I had an enormous influence on the pictures he did, who he cast, I mean he really was influenced in terms of the instigation of the making of the films. But I think I’ve been very lucky, and in later years, I’ve seen it when I’ve been on my own a lot more. It’s “the nature of things.” It’s hard. I don’t think … I’m writing a script about it now. I mean, women again. I think I’ll be asking myself that question all my life. Do I want to be a man? Would it be better for me? You know, because sometimes I wish I were because when I deal with all these construction crews and stuff, it’s … it’s hard. I make, you know, three times more than the highest paid man who usually works for me. And it can either create animosity, it can create antagonism. You find yourself being very engaging and very charming, becoming, if anything, more feminine in a way. But I have a reputation for being very tough and ballsy … I just don’t know. Answer … poor answer. (Platt 1983)

Choosing not to “blame” men, but rather the “nature of things” is a fascinating sleight of hand. The nature of things, the system, was constructed

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by men and for men. It is the “institutionalized discrimination in Hollywood, which was not going to succumb easily without strong resistance and some casualties” that Smukler describes. And that resistance comes from the top—from other directors she has worked with—but also from below, not only the crew she mentions here who feel an antagonism toward her, but similar crew on the set of a film like The Bad News Bears who believed a woman had no place designing a film about baseball. It also pervades the rhetorical argument that because she never directed a film, her career was somehow less than a success. One of the difficulties in writing a book like this about a figure like Polly Platt is that one can fall into an auteurist trap similar to the one that has marginalized women like Platt for so long. In some of the popular writing about Platt that does exist, there is already the whiff of an argument that “she really directed the films,” especially when her work with Bogdanovich is considered. That likely accounts, at least in part, for his change in demeanor toward her legacy over the years. Auteurism posits a single artist, and if not the director, then it must be somebody else. My intention has not been to replicate that paradigm, but to interrogate and, perhaps, upend it. There can be no doubt that the many directors Platt worked with were creative and thoughtful practitioners with visions that they worked diligently to impart on their films. Likewise, she worked on films photographed by some of the finest cinematographers of the era. The films that she designed look as good as they do because of the combined efforts of those practitioners, and more. However, there can be no doubt that Platt played a tremendous role in determining the final look of her films. Furthermore, her approach to design was groundbreaking in its attention to details of realism and in the ways that its intricate interplay between character, narrative, and theme developed and enhanced the meaning of her films—not only her films, but the potential for films in the New Hollywood era, one of the most creatively fertile periods of mainstream American cinema. To analyze her work, to understand it, even to celebrate it is not to take away from the creativity of those with whom she worked. It is, however, a call for further inquiry into how other women of the era, women whose work has been marginalized and trivialized, might have made equally astounding contributions to Hollywood film that have changed the way we think about it, even as it has gone unrecognized.

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Notes 1. Listening to Streisand’s commentary on the DVD of A Star is Born, one could be forgiven for mistaking her as the director; she takes credit for a number of shots, costumes, production design, and script decisions. 2. Platt’s daughter Antonia, discussing The Witches of Eastwick, describes her mother as one of the few people able to calm the famously temperamental Peters (Antonia Bogdanovich 2018). 3. Like many women of the decade, Platt was subject to frequent and repeated sexual aggression, including by many of the directors she worked for. The podcast Polly Platt, the Invisible Woman (Longworth 2020) describes some of these instances in detail. 4. According to all parties, Platt did not work on Thieves Like Us; confusingly, however, Wikipedia, IMDB, and other online sites list her as having done (uncredited) costume design. 5. For the record, I think Carradine is great in the role. His soft-spoken demeanor, which Platt found so unappealing, allows Shields’s more intensely dramatic performance to shine. It also lends his character a delicate pathos. 6. Other writing credits include: Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff (1979) and A Map of the World (1999), the latter of which was produced by her old friend Frank Marshall and his partner Kathleen Kennedy.

References Biskind, Peter. 1999. Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-And-Rock ‘N’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood. New York: Touchstone. Bogdanovich, Antonia. 2018. Telephone Interview with the Author. September. Brooks, James L. 2020. Telephone Interview with the Author. March. Canby, Vincent. 1972. “Dede is a Lady Editor.” New York Times, May 14, 1972. https://www.nytimes.com/1972/05/14/archives/dede-is-a-lady-editor-­­dedeis-a-lady-editor.html Cook, David A. 2000. Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the Shadow of Vietnam and Watergate 1970–1979. Berkeley: University of California Press. Crowe, Cameron. 2018. Telephone Interview with the Author. August. DeVito, Danny, dir. 1989. The War of the Roses. Beverly Hills, CA: 20th Century Fox Home Video, 2013. Blu-Ray, 116 min. Goldman, Andrew. 2019. In Conversation: Peter Bogdanovich. Vulture, March 4. https://www.vulture.com/2019/03/peter-­bogdanovich-­in-­conversation. html Gregory, Mollie. 2002. Women Who Run the Show: How a Brilliant and Creative New Generation of Women Stormed Hollywood. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin.

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Gruner, Oliver. 2022. ‘It Was a Little Late in the Day for All That Prissy Business’: The New Hollywood Career of Jay Presson Allen. In Women and New Hollywood, ed. Aaron Hunter and Martha Shearer. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Kozma, Alicia. 2022. The Rothman Renaissance, or, The Politics of Archival (Re) Discovery. In Women and New Hollywood, ed. Aaron Hunter and Martha Shearer. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Longworth, Karina. 2020. Women of the 80s. In Polly Platt, the Invisible Woman (Podcast), Episode 8. http://www.youmustrememberthispodcast.com/episodes/2020/7/7/women-­o f-­t he-­8 0s-­p olly-­p latt-­t he-­i nvisible-­w oman-­ episode-­8 Malle, Louis, dir. 1978.  Pretty Baby. Hollywood, CA: Paramount Home Entertainment. DVD, 106 min. Marshall, Garry. 2012. My Happy Days in Hollywood: A Memoir. In collaboration with Lori Marshall. New York: Crown Archetype. Marshall, Penny, dir. 1988.  Big.  Beverly Hills, CA: 20th Century Fox Home Video, 2019. Blu-Ray, 100 min. Pearlman, Karen. 2022. Women Editors in New Hollywood: Cutting Down on the Raging Bullshit. In Women and New Hollywood, ed. Aaron Hunter and Martha Shearer. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Platt, Polly. 1977. American Film Institute: Harold Lloyd Seminar. December 1. ———. 1983. American Film Institute: Harold Lloyd Seminar. October 18. ———. n.d. “It Was Worth It.” Collection of Antonia and Sashy Bogdanovich. Unpublished Memoir. Smukler, Maya Montañez. 2019. Liberating Hollywood: Women Directors & the Feminist Reform of 1970s American Cinema. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Yakir, Dan. 1978. Louis Malle’s Pretty Baby. Film Comment 14 (3): 61–66. Zuckoff, Mitchell. 2010. Robert Altman: The Oral Biography. New  York: Vintage Books.

Index1

A Addie Pray (Joe David Brown 1971), 61, 68, 97, 167, 173, 177 Affron, Charles, 9, 10, 15 Affron, Mirella Jona, 9–10, 15 Allan, Gene, 159, 165n6 Allen, Dede, 27, 73, 92, 169, 214 Allen, Jay Presson, 215 Alonzo, John A., 105, 108, 115 Altman, Robert, 41, 105, 206, 213 American Film Institute, 1–2, 13, 19, 26, 69–70, 84n9, 150, 164, 165n2, 165n6, 188, 207–208 Anderson, Wes, 14, 52n14, 210 Anouilh, Jean, 39 Architecture, 11, 14, 19n1, 36, 43, 150, 164 Art Directors Guild, 18, 24, 49, 159, 187 Arzner, Dorothy, 51n3 Ashby, Hal, 94, 105, 115

Asp, Anna, 155 Auteur, 6–8, 10, 20n7, 27–29, 49, 50, 73–75, 90, 149, 168, 175, 188, 191, 204, 205, 213, 215, 217 paradigm, 7, 12, 27, 28, 50, 175, 217 Authorship, 3, 6, 7, 9, 12, 29, 30, 50, 57, 59, 62–63, 94, 149, 175, 204 See also Multiple authorship B The Bad News Bears (Paramount 1976), 16, 41, 46, 48, 59, 66, 69, 89, 119, 127, 141, 170, 176, 191, 205, 207, 208, 217 case study for Platt and location, 104–115 color and costume, 151–154 Barnes, Chris, 152 Barry, John, 60

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Hunter, Polly Platt, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82120-3

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Barsacq, Léon, 9, 58 Bauchens, Anne, 51n3 Beatty, Ned, 101, 133, 154 Bennet, Tony, 55, 78, 82 Big (Gracie Films/20th Century Fox 1988), 211 Biskind, Peter, 11, 24, 41–44 Bisset, Jacqueline, 100, 131, 133, 153–154 Blunt, Erin, 152 Bogdanovich, Alexandra (Sashy), 13, 41, 46–48, 170–172 Bogdanovich, Antonia, 13, 41, 47, 170–172, 207 Bogdanovich, Peter, 11, 24, 40–43, 46, 48, 50, 58, 74, 75, 83, 84n8, 96, 103, 114, 115, 124, 141n3, 159, 167–168, 170–175, 180, 182, 187–192, 194–196, 198, 202, 203, 205, 207, 211, 212, 217 relationship with Cybill Shepherd, 12, 41 and Roger Corman, 43–45 and Tony Wade, 188, 189 Bonnie and Clyde (Warner Bros. 1967), 11, 20n5, 92–93 Bottle Rocket (Gracie Films/Columbia 1996), 49, 210 Bottoms, Timothy, 56, 81 Brennan, Eileen, 64, 83 Bridges, Jeff, 55 Broadcast News (Gracie Films/20th Century Fox 1987), 49, 125–128, 140, 204, 210 Brooks, Albert, 126, 127 Brooks, James L., 13, 18, 24, 41, 49, 50, 58, 66, 99, 125–127, 133, 142n10, 149–150, 154, 155, 157, 203, 209–213 Brown, Joe David, 61, 167 Burstyn, Ellen, 55, 83, 207

C Cahiers du Cinema, 7, 8 Cambern, Donn, 75 Carnegie Tech, 2, 35, 36, 38–40, 52n11, 108, 150 Carradine, Keith, 208, 209, 218n5 Cartwright, Veronica, 134 Cher, 134 Chinatown (Paramount 1974), 11, 91, 94, 98, 104, 105 Cinematography, 7–9, 11, 12, 17, 20n8, 27, 29, 36, 44, 63, 73, 79, 83, 84n5, 89, 92–94, 97, 105, 108, 113, 120, 122, 130, 134, 142n9, 168, 169, 174, 197, 202, 209, 215, 217 Coates, Anne V., 51n3 Coleman, Dabney, 119 Color, 124–128 See also Production design Coombs, Ernie, 35, 37, 51–52n10 Coppola, Francis Ford, 7, 29, 44, 105, 188, 198, 202 Corliss, Richard, 6 Corman, Roger, 5, 24, 41–45, 98, 128, 171, 201–203 Costume design, see Production design Crowe, Cameron, 13, 14, 52n14, 126, 127, 142n9, 210 Cusack, Joan, 127 D Darling, Joan, 28 The Deadly Companions (Carousel 1961), 40 DeVito, Danny, 211 Dunaway, Faye, 92 E Elizondo, Hector, 119

 INDEX 

F Fields, Verna, 168, 172, 197 Fisher, Jules, 40, 52n12, 206 Fondren, Ellie, 100 Ford, John, 14, 27, 103, 149 The Fortune (Columbia 1975), 3, 115, 206–207, 213 Freed, Arthur, 25, 28 G Gibbons, Cedric, 10, 124 The Godfather (Paramount 1972), 7, 11, 104 Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff (Bel Air-­ Gradison 1979), 165n2, 218n6 Gracie Films, 13, 14, 26, 49, 125, 126, 133, 142n10, 204, 210–213 The Great Train Robbery (Edison 1903), 121 Groening, Matt, 24 Guffey, Burnett, 92–93, 115 H Haley, Jackie Earle, 105, 106, 152 Haller, Michael D., 5, 11, 15, 90, 94, 115 Harris, Julie, 145–147 Head, Edith, 3, 5, 51n3 Henry, Buck, 96 Hepburn, Audrey, 3, 20n4, 70 Hillerman, John, 191 Hitchcock, Alfred, 3, 18, 27 Hunter, Holly, 127 Hurd, Gale Anne, 202 Hurt, William, 126 Hyams, Nessa, 165n2, 207–208

223

J Jenkins, Richard, 134 Johnson, Ben, 56, 78, 83 Johnson, P.J., 182 Johnson Space Center (Houston), 99 K Kael, Pauline, 6 Kahn, Madeline, 104, 160, 179, 207 Karloff, Boris, 45, 128–130 Klein, Philip, 24, 37–40, 45, 51n1, 173 Klute (Warner Bros. 1971), 7 Kovács, Laszló, 44, 97, 130, 142n9, 168–170, 174–175, 182, 197, 202 Kristofferson, Kris, 61–62, 97, 150 L Lancaster, Bill, 105–106 The Landlord (Mirisch Company/ United 1970), 7 Larry Edmund’s Bookshop, 2, 43, 203 Larsen, Tambi, 187, 198 The Last Picture Show (BBS/Columbia 1970), 5, 15, 16, 19n2, 24, 41, 46, 48, 55–57, 60, 62–64, 69, 85n11, 89, 96, 99, 105, 119, 127, 141, 148, 158, 167, 169, 171, 177, 178, 180, 209, 215 case study for Platt’s attention to detail, 73–83 Leachman, Cloris, 79, 81, 83 Leeson, Michael J., 212, 213 The Liberty Bell, 33, 152 Lieberman in Love (Chanticleer 1995), 209 Location scouting, see Production design

224 

INDEX

Longworth, Karina, 29, 30, 50, 52n15, 212, 213, 218n3 Lucas, George, 59–60 Lucas, Marcia, 12, 41, 188 Lupino, Ida, 51n3 M MacLaine, Shirley, 66, 67, 71, 155–158 Malle, Louis, 208, 209, 213 The Man with Two Brains (Warner Bros. 1983), 48, 65, 68, 137, 141n5, 149 Mars, Kenneth, 162 Marshall, Frank, 13, 71, 96–100, 103, 150, 171, 173–175, 178, 198, 218n6 Marshall, Garry, 52n14, 209, 211 Matthau, Walter, 104–106, 110, 113, 151 May, Elaine, 28, 51n3 McGinley, Ted, 119 McKeon, Michael, 119 McMurtry, Larry, 69, 74, 75, 78, 79, 83, 84n2, 155, 170, 209 Méliès, George, 121–122 Menzies, William Cameron, 10, 122–124 Meyerowitz, Joel, 126 Miller, George, 68, 97, 134, 138–140, 142n12 Mise-en-scène, 7, 8, 29, 62, 73, 76, 105, 128, 141, 147 Moore, Joanna, 190 Morrow, Vic, 105 Mossler, Candace, 115 Multiple authorship, 6, 18, 19, 20n8, 24, 65, 73, 83, 169 Murphy, Brianne, 36

N Negron, Taylor, 120 Nichols, Mike, 3, 115, 206–207, 213 Nicholson, Jack, 44, 127, 134, 156, 158, 202, 209 Nykvist, Sven, 209 O Oates, Warren, 101, 132, 154 O’Kelly, Tim, 128 O’Neal, Ryan, 61, 95, 96, 100, 103, 114, 131, 141, 153–154, 159–160, 167, 172, 175–176, 196, 198 O’Neal, Tatum, 48, 61, 103–106, 109, 113–114, 152, 169, 170, 172, 174–176, 190, 194, 196, 198, 199 One-Eyed Jacks (Paramount 1961), 40 The Other Side of the Wind (Netflix 2018), 48, 97, 158, 172 P Pakula, Alan J., 7 Paper Moon (Directors Company/ Paramount 1973), 12, 16, 17, 19n2, 41, 46, 48, 61, 65, 68, 84n8, 89, 90, 96, 97, 107, 113, 114, 141, 167–170, 198, 205 case study, Platt’s creative authorship, 173–197 location, 102–104 Pardeathan, Mana, 40 Peckinpah, Sam, 14, 40 Pendleton, Austin, 162 Penn, Arthur, 92–93 Peters, John, 205–206, 218n2 Petrie, Graham, 6 Pfeiffer, Michelle, 134

 INDEX 

The Phantom of the Opera (Jewel/ Universal 1925), 122–123 Pierson, Frank, 61, 205–206 Platt, Jack (brother), 31, 34 in the CIA, 51n9 Platt, John (father), 1, 30, 34, 37, 45, 46, 176–178 presiding judge, German war crime trials, 14, 31 Platt, Polly childhood, 1, 30–33 early career, 38–40, 42–45 education, 33–38 first marriage, 37–39; Klein, Philip Platt, Vivian (mother), 14, 30, 32, 34, 45–47, 52n13, 176–178, 197 Polsca, Juliet, 146 Porter, Edwin S., 121–122 Pretty Baby (Paramount 1978), 14, 18, 24, 41, 46, 48, 149, 169, 204, 208, 209, 213 Production design, 2, 3, 5, 6, 9–12, 17, 19n2, 29, 32, 33, 42, 49, 57–60, 63, 92, 93, 108, 115, 145, 158, 165n3, 171, 198, 203–207, 209 and authorship, 7, 8, 83 color, 119–122, 124 costume, 147, 156, 191–197 exteriors, 93, 103–104, 178–184 interiors, 92, 93, 99, 184–187 location, 90–91, 98 R Rafelson, Toby, 18, 41, 188 Redmond, Dorothy Hold, 18 Reed, Pamela, 120 Reiner, Carl, 66, 68 Ritchie, Michael, 58, 69, 104–107, 109 Rothman, Stephanie, 202

225

S Sarandon, Susan, 134, 208 Sargent, Alvin, 103, 167, 173, 177, 182, 191, 195–197 Sarris, Andrew, 6–8, 29, 168 Saticoy Productions, 128, 170 Say Anything . . . (Gracie Films/20th Century Fox 1989), 49, 52n14, 126, 142n9, 210 Schrader, Paul, 29 Scorsese, Martin, 8, 28, 29, 44, 51n6, 105, 168, 201–202 Selznick, David O., 10, 123 Sexism, 12, 13, 19n1, 25, 26, 28, 36, 108, 188, 202, 204, 205, 214–217 Sharaff, Irene, 18 Shaw, George Bernard, 32–33 Shepherd, Cybill, 12, 24, 29, 41, 55, 83, 158, 167, 168, 172, 189, 196 Shields, Brooke, 208, 218n5 Sierra, Gregory, 101, 133, 154 Silver, Joan Micklin, 36 Simone, Lela, 25, 28, 29 Skidmore College, 2, 35, 37, 150 Stanton, Harry Dean, 119, 120 A Star is Born (Warner Bros. 1976), 41, 48, 52n12, 61–62, 97, 99, 102, 119, 150, 205–206, 215, 218n1 1954 version, 18 Streisand, Barbra, 61, 71, 95–97, 99, 150, 159–160, 205, 218n1 Surtees, Robert, 73, 75, 76, 78, 83, 206 Sylbert, Paul, 11 Sylbert, Richard, 5, 11, 15, 27, 90–91, 94

226 

INDEX

T Targets (Saticoy Productions/ Paramount 1968), 2, 5, 16, 19n2, 24, 42, 43, 45, 52n14, 90, 128–131, 136, 142n8, 148, 168, 170, 202, 203, 207 Tashiro, C.S., 10, 15, 70, 84n7 Tavoularis, Dean, 4, 5, 11, 15, 70, 90, 92–94, 115 Terms of Endearment (Paramount 1983), 46, 48, 49, 52n14, 59, 66, 71, 99, 101, 137, 141, 141n5, 148, 150, 170, 209–210 costumes, 154–158 The Thief Who Came to Dinner (Warner Bros. 1973), 15, 19n2, 30, 41, 48, 59, 66, 68, 90, 96, 97, 99, 138, 174, 205 color, 131–133 costume, 153–154 location, 100–101, 132, 133 Thurman, Bill, 79 Truffaut, François, 7, 168 V von Brandenstein, Patrizia, 5 Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women (The Filmgroup 1968), 45, 202 W Wade, Tony, 49, 188, 189, 198 The War of the Roses (Gracie Films/20th Century Fox 1989), 49, 210–213 Welles, Orson, 158, 159, 165n5, 167, 172, 177

What’s Up, Doc? (Saticoy Productions/ Warner Bros. 1972), 15, 17, 19n2, 30, 41, 48, 58, 65, 71, 89, 98, 101, 115, 167–168, 170, 172, 174, 205, 207, 215 case study for Platt and costume, 158–165 location, 95–96, 107 The Wild Angels (American International Pictures 1966), 43–45, 170, 202–203 Williams, Hank, 55, 77, 78, 82 Willis, Gordon, 27, 73, 169 Winger, Debra, 66, 155 The Witches of Eastwick (Guber-Peters Company/Warner Bros. 1987), 16, 19n2, 48, 66, 120, 141n5, 164, 170, 206, 211–213, 218n2 case study for Platt and color, 133–140 location, 68, 89, 90, 97 Y Yorkin, Bud, 205 You Must Remember This, see Longworth, Karina Young Doctors in Love (ABC Motion Pictures/20th Century Fox 1982), 48, 52n14, 65–67, 119–121, 136–138, 141n5, 149, 209 Young, Sean, 119, 120 Z Zea, Kristi, 150, 155, 165n3 Zsigmond, Vilmos, 134, 138