Designing Hollywood

It's understandable that if you're going to be dealing in astronomical sums, you want someone like Garett Carlson on the job. Carlson, who grew up in Southern California, got good not merely by getting the appropriate degrees, but by doing an apprenticeship with a wise old landscape architect named Dudley Trudgett. Carlson speaks of his mentor, who died a few years ago, as if he owes everything to him. Perhaps not even Trudgett, though, can prepare you for Hollywood's most high-intensity players. Power manager Sandy Gallin, a man noted for his design taste and personal testiness, hired Carlson years ago to design his grounds with a budget of $100,000. He so liked the results that when he'd sold that house and gone for bigger game, he sought Carlson out again. But Carlson chose not to take the assignment, despite a whopping budget, because...well, peace of mind is worth something, too. In a gesture of what one would have to consider endearing self-awareness, Gallin had his lawyer call Carlson and make a deal wherein Carlson spoke only to the lawyer throughout the project.

Mostly, though, Carlson, like the other gifted people who work with Hollywood's elite, seems to enjoy the work, particularly when he can get a client to go with the crazier end of the spectrum of ideas he draws up at the planning stage. He still hasn't gotten anyone to take the bait on his concept of a swimming pool with actual fish in it to swim with you. Many people, though, accede to his distaste for diving boards, and have at one end of their pool "diving rocks" instead.

• 21ST CENTURY SUBLIME •

"Lots of people buy paintings with their ears," says Stephen Hannock, whose own paintings are in such demand that there's a two-year waiting list for his work at the Michael Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles and the James Graham & Sons gallery in New York. With that comment, Hannock isn't singling out the entertainment world, where his paintings are avidly collected, but no other place can probably rival Hollywood for the aural approach to acquiring art. After all, überplayer Michael Ovitz once responded to a talented young agent who'd asked why he should work for Ovitz as follows: "Because I have a Picasso and you don't." The irony is that Hannock's paintings are anything but trendy. As he puts it, his aesthetic "is not the white hot center of the universe. It's an understated area. It doesn't work with a brass band and fireworks." In Hollywood, where fortunes are spent on contemporary art that is clever at best and emperor's-new-clothes silly too often, Hannock's popularity is a bit of an anomaly. He paints large landscapes that deliberately recall the great 19th century Hudson River painters and the Romantic glory of Luminism. They are shamelessly beautiful, which in itself flies in the face of late 20th century painting, but beauty, while informed by the past, is thoroughly contemporary, even ahead of its time. While the great 19th century painters Hannock has been moved by painted visual meditations on the Beautiful and the Sublime, he is painting visual meditations on what the 20th century has wrought on those formal concepts. The process of his artistic thinking and daily living as he paints is evident right there on the canvas, both in lines of personal diary scripted plainly but inobtrusively into the texture of the landscape, and in the layers of polished oil he sands and refines to get a glowing surface that both represents and plays with light.

Hannock's best-known painting, The Oxbowa luminous view of a flooded river--hangs in The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Many of his other paintings hang in Hollywood, a number in the home of producer Steve Tisch, who has collected Hannock since the early '90s. Hannock is proud to be collected by Tisch"He really loves paintings. He looks at the paintings on his walls." Tisch, as well as others like producer Michael Peyser, Mimi Rogers and Jackson Browne, bought Hannock before he got the buzz on him that he has right now. So did Mike Nichols and Candice Bergen, among others in New York. Sting is an even longer-time collector of Hannock and a close family friend. But the reason Hannock is so ultrahot in Hollywood just now is unusual--he's an Oscar-winner, for paintings and visual effects he did for the 1998 film What Dreams May Come, in which Robin Williams goes to the Beyond in search of his artist-wife. Though the film was not praised for much else, Hannock shared the Academy Award with several others for the dazzling visual collaboration. Hollywood folk don't often have a chance to buy the respected artwork of an actual Oscar winner, and they jumped.

Unlike an interior designer or an architect, Hannock is an artist who can keep his distance from the Hollywood fray, and does. But he seems to have an irresistible appeal to Hollywood on every level. His paintings pop up in movies without any involvement from him. Harrison Ford picked out Hannocks to hang on the walls of the home where his sinister character lived in What Lies Beneath. And in Analyze That, the upcoming sequel to Analyze This, you'll see a painting owned by Robert De Niro's business partner, Jane Rosenthal, another Hannock collector. As it happens, Rosenthal asked Hannock to create one of six awards to be given at the New York-boosting Tribeca Film Festival. The winner of the Emerging Filmmaker Award will receive what Hannock describes as "an envelope nocturne," a small painting done on the envelope in which the request for his participation was sent to him.

The paintings of Stephen Hannock, the architecture of Richard Landry, the landscape design of Garett Carlson and the interior design of Elaine Culotti all make the argument that the Nathanael West-ian horrors of Tinseltown taste do not reign wholly supreme in Hollywood. We would be disappointed not to have the requisite number of giant marble bathtubs with solid gold fixtures and the Roman statues with bougainvillea in the background. But some of the people who have ridiculous amounts of money also have some measure of aesthetic judgment and the ability to have civilized interactions with those trying to work with them. Others at least have the good sense to stand back, shut up and have their money managers write the checks.

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Katherine Mitchell wrote about "The Big Young Hollywood Hangover" for the May issue of Movieline.

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