Production design is more than just conjuring up a specific time and place, at it's best it also reveals the story's emotional content. Academy Award-winner Gene Allen, talks about George Cukor, My Fair Lady, and his masterpiece, A Star is Born.
There's an image at the beginning of the 1954 A Star Is Born that perfectly sets the tone for all that is to follow. James Mason, as partyboy movie star Norman Maine, is drunkenly lurching around backstage at a charity benefit. His publicity rep corrals the actor into a dressing room where reporters interview him, until Maine suddenly gets wise to the fact that he's being kept from appearing on stage. In a rage, he hurls the PR guy into a makeup mirror, shattering it. Through the glittering shards, we glimpse chorus girls dressed in blood red, and, framed against that dark red chiffon, we see Maine making his getaway. There can be little doubt, from the violent punch of this moment, that the love story to come will be an unhappy one.
There are many who contribute to such an electrifying moment in the movies: the director, cinematographer, sound effects, editing, and costuming people all play an important part. But the man who gives them the elements to bring off the scene is the man who designed its visual components: the production designer.
The superb production design of A Star Is Born is the work of Gene Allen. It was his first such assignment, and the beginning of a long association with director George Cukor.
"Cukor's initial approach was always visual," Allen said during a recent visit to his Mandeville Canyon home. " 'Be as arty as you want,' Cukor told me, 'Just don't get caught at it.' "
Though Allen won his Academy Award for Cukor's film version of My Fair Lady ten years later, he deserved it far more for A Star Is Born, which continues to stand the test of time as a high point in the design of movies, proof that production design is, at its best, an art that uses the external world as a metaphor for the internal states of the story's characters.
Early in that film, Judy Garland wakes in the middle of the night, tormented by the need to decide whether she should continue her steady gig as a band singer, or throw it all away for the unlikely chance to break into movies. She talks in the dark with a friend; by scene's end, she's decided to do the risky thing. Allen's design for this sequence tips us off visually that Garland's made the right choice, because as she returns to bed, dawn is breaking. She's no longer in the dark.
In a parallel scene at the film's climax, Garland must again choose, this time between her successful movie career and her marriage to James Mason. She stands on the terrace of their Malibu beach house, designed by Allen so she is surrounded by giant plate glass windows which reflect the churning surf below. She is undecided--literally, visually, at sea--and as she makes up her mind, this time the sun goes down. She may not know it yet, but soon will: it's too late to save the marriage. Moments later, Mason appears on the other side of the glass windows, and the couple is separated by the reflections of the pounding waves--together, but no longer as one.
"On that one picture," 71-year-old Allen recalls, "I went from sketch artist to assistant art director to art director to production designer."
Cukor, Allen relates, had hired a New York stage designer for A Star Is Born but realized early on the man did not know how to design for the camera. At Cukor's suggestion, Allen--a sketch artist recruited from Warners' art department--was given increasing responsibilities and soon became one of Cukor's closest collaborators.
After A Star Is Born, Allen designed twelve films, six of them for Cukor: Bhowani Junction (starring Ava Gardner, 1956), Les Girls (with Gene Kelly, 1957], Heller in Pink Tights (a Wild West romp with Sophia Loren and Anthony Quinn, 1960), Let's Make Love (with Marilyn Monroe, 1960), The Chapman Report (sex-in-the-suburbs, 1962), and My Fair Lady (1964]. It was in this work with Cukor that Allen was given the widest latitude and greatest opportunity for creative muscle-flexing. Working with the director, the cinematographer, other designers, and, often, the well-known fashion photographer George Hoyningen-Huene (given the title "color consultant" because none of the guilds regulated such a mythic creature), Allen not only designed sets, he coordinated costume and lighting design, suggested camera angles for innovative transitions into and out of scenes, directed second-unit photography (including the Ascot scene in My Fair Lady), as well as conceiving the overall look and palette of each film. On his films with Cukor, Allen developed a signature look--together they strived to shoot color films in simple monochromatic tones that evoked the visual clarity of black and white movies, only using splashes of bright color to convey the story's emotional meanings--as with the shock of red behind the broken mirror in the opening of A Star Is Born. Allen even went so far as a creative collaborator that he offered reactions to script revisions when he thought they affected the "design" of the film. "A good production designer," Allen quips, drawing on his own experience, "should be able to shoot the picture, write the script, and play the music if necessary." Though not a musician, Allen is a member of both the Writers and Directors guilds.
Iris, Allen's wife of over four decades, offers us coffee, as Allen acknowledges that he's well aware his film output seems meager when compared to that of some colleagues. He jokes that a British biographer once noted that "Mr. Allen must be extremely selective." But, in fact, Allen says he just didn't want to be consumed by the motion picture business, despite offers to scamper up the ladder of clout. "Jack Warner wanted me to produce," Allen says modestly, "and I had offers to direct, which I could have done. After ten years with George Cukor, I could have directed anything. Audrey Hepburn [with whom Allen had worked in My Fair Lady] said to me, 'Gene, what's taking you so long? Be sure to remember me when you do your first picture.' But I had a family. I didn't want to become a seven-day-a-week man."
Oscar-nominated for A Star Is Born and Les Gills (which lost to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Sayonara, respectively), Allen finally won his Oscar for My Fair Lady, against stiff competition [Mary Poppins, Becket, The Unsinkable Molly Brown and What a Way to Go). He shared the honor with Cecil Beaton, who had designed the landmark musical on Broadway and finagled a production design credit for the film although, at least according to Allen, he designed only the costumes. Beaton, who has been described in biographies as shamelessly self-mythologiz-ing, took most of the credit for Allen's work, going so far as to make sketches from completed models and exhibit them as Beaton design drawings.
Twenty-five years after the fact, Allen is willing to state with delighted irony: "Cecil Beaton had nothing to do with the sets of My Fair Lady. He was never involved in the filming. He hated the Wimpole Street I built, he hated Higgins's house--he said it was too 'baronial.' "Even mild-mannered Cukor grew weary of Beaton, who had taken to dragging Audrey Hepburn off for still photo sessions when she was needed on the set. Allen, vindicated in part by longevity, is almost impish when he hefts the gilt Academy statuette and points out that his name comes first. "I don't know if it's alphabetical or in order of importance," he chuckles.
Allen's justly celebrated design for My Fair Lady is a particularly winning use of the sleight of hand employed by all good production designers. Though Allen conducted meticulous research into period historical photographs of Edwardian London, his response is a study in contrasts: for the early scenes in Covent Garden, the working-class background that flowergirl Eliza Doolittle longs to escape, Allen ordered up a realistic, brick-and-cobblestone recreation; but for the Ascot races, which serves as Eliza's introduction to the rarefied world of high society, Allen created trompe l'oeil sets to depict the way outsider Eliza might see it--all heightened fantasy. The trick is in finding a visual style so that these choices mesh in the mind of the viewer, a seeming seamlessness.
But making movies after the commercial and artistic success of My Fair Lady provided a significant number of disappointments for Allen. There were half a dozen Cukor projects that never saw film, even though research, designs and sometimes even the sets were fully complete. Over a year was spent on Nine Tiger Man, a drama set in Victorian India that would have starred Robert Shaw, and more than a year on what turned out to be Marilyn Monroe's last studio assignment, Something's Got to Give. "Cukor was very fond of Marilyn," Allen recalls, "and thought she had a terrific talent. He went out of his way to help her, even when things got really bad."
Though filming on 1960's Let's Make Love had gone tolerably well, Monroe's chronic demons so plagued Something's Got to Give that Fox pulled the plug on their problematic blonde before the production was finished. The film was eventually made after Monroe's death in 1962 as Move Over, Darling with Doris Day in the Monroe role--and without Cukor or Allen. Move Over, Darling was shot, however, on Allen's set (a meticulous recreation of Cukor's own home), for which Allen received no credit whatever.
His last movie assignment was in 1975, on Peter Bogdanovich's catastrophic Burt Reynolds/Cybill Shepherd musical, At Long Last Love, which Allen describes as "the worst picture ever made."
Mementos of Allen's career fill his home library: the leatherbound script of The Chapman Report, which Allen wound up writing as well as designing for Cukor in 1962; Ron Haver's book about the recent restoration of A Star Is Born; a carved wood and black leather armchair used by Jimmy Stewart and Henry Fonda in The Cheyenne Social Club (which Allen designed for director Gene Kelly in 1970); his collection of Impressionist art tomes, which he finds invaluable as inspiration in his research ("That little flicker of light the Impressionists capture is just like a single frame of film," he says with touching affection); and, of course, his Oscar, for the art direction of My Fair Lady.
In a corner behind a paint-ing-in-progress are a half-dozen simply framed photographs, including signed portraits of George Cukor, Audrey Hepburn, and Ava Gardner. An entire wall is covered with plaques commemorating services rendered and achievements duly rewarded.
Though these days Allen's executive director of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Art Directors (and was a recent president of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences), don't count him out: he's not ready to wash Hollywood out of his hair. What would it take to get him back into the fray? "Not much. Not money, not fame, just a good cast of characters to work with. It would have to be a special project for me to really get back into it, but I'd like to do a good story about people by a sensitive director. After all, I feel like I'm only thirty-five."
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Michael Lassell is a writer and photographer, and the managing editor of L.A. Style magazine.