The Furniture: Celebrating the Tackiness of "The Oscar"

"The Furniture" is our weekly series on Production Design. Here's Daniel Walber...

Tomorrow is twice blessed. You’re probably already excited for the first reason, the Oscar nominations announcement. It’s also the centennial of Ernest Borgnine, an actor I have never particularly liked. But this coincidence makes today a perfect opportunity to talk about one of the worst movies ever produced by a Hollywood studio: 1966’s The Oscar.

The film begins and ends at the Academy Awards, where fictional Frankie Fane (Stephen Boyd) is as Best Actor nominee for Breakthrough, perhaps the most on-the-nose fictional title of all time. His newly estranged best friend Hymie Kelly (Tony Bennett, in his film debut), glares at him from the next row. Bennett would retire from acting immediately after The Oscar, for reasons that are obvious from the moment he starts talking...

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The Furniture: Appropriating Chinese Design in "The Shanghai Gesture"

"The Furniture" is our weekly series on Production Design. This week Daniel Walber looks back at one of the Art Direction Oscar nominees of 1942 for its 75th anniversary.

While Josef von Sternberg’s The Shanghai Gesture was still in production, the studio received a letter from T.K. Chang, the Chinese Consul to Los Angeles. Having read the script, he objected to its vicious and absurd portrayal of Shanghai’s underbelly and cautioned the producers to take “consideration of Chinese sentiment.”

Producer Arnold Pressburger defended the film as merely a fantasy. “This imaginary world has no connection with the realistic aspects of today,” he replied. This argument even wound up in the final cut, in the form of an opening title card: “Our story has nothing to do with the present.”

Chang saw right through Pressburger’s nonsense. “Such imaginations always prove to be constructed from the raw material of realities,” he wrote back. He was right. The Shanghai Gesture attempts a menacingly ahistorical flare by appropriating specifically Chinese decor. This is, of course, impossible. But the Oscar-nominated failure of art director Boris Leven (West Side Story) is fascinating...

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The Furniture: A Last-Minute FYC for the Home Décor of "Paterson" and "Jackie"

"The Furniture" is our weekly series on Production Design. Here's Daniel Walber...

Oscar balloting has begun! As Nathaniel explained last week, AMPAS branches have received their nomination ballots. They’re due on the 13th. The Academy’s production designers occasionally make offbeat choices, though they don’t do it as often as the costume designers or the makeup artists. So here’s a final nudge on behalf of the best work of the year.

I’ve already written about three of the five movies I’d nominate, were I in charge. The crazed fandom of the apartment in Florence Foster Jenkins is a work of precision and inspiration. So is the heavily curtained metaphor that is the mansion in The Childhood of a Leader. The hotel in The Lobster, meanwhile, is as perfectly sterile as the above settings are feverish. All three would be a thrilling surprise on nomination morning.

My other two have become less present in the awards conversation than I’d guessed...

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The Furniture: Fame Flattens Your Dreamgirls, Boys

"The Furniture" is our weekly series on Production Design. Here's Daniel Walber...

 This probably goes without saying, but movie musicals tend not to take place in the real world. Gene Kelly doesn’t just serenade French children in An American in Paris, he leads the cast through a dream ballet of wild abstraction. The oddness of public singing is often just the door to an even more fantastical world. Even those about actual musicians, who need no special excuse to croon, often break free from realism.

In this context, Dreamgirls is a bit of an odd duck. Director Bill Condon tries to split the difference. Some of the songs are entirely within the context of a real performance, while others incorporate non-musician characters and non-realistic settings. The back and forth can be a bit confounding...

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The Furniture: The Exuberant Fandom of Florence Foster Jenkins

"The Furniture" is our weekly series on Production Design. Here's Daniel Walber...

Florence's beloved Verdi sports her sensible chapeau.

Florence Foster Jenkins was a woman of grand exuberance. She’s mostly remembered for her terrible voice, which I suppose is fair. It’s worth noting, however, that she didn’t exactly intend to make comedy albums. It was her irrepressible love of music that drove her to the stage, the recording studio and, by way of generations of blithe dinner parties, into the 21st century.

With that in mind, a Meryl Streep movie seems like an inevitable conclusion. Florence Foster Jenkins’s director (Stephen Frears) and screenwriter (Nicholas Martin) clearly understand both pieces of the character, her fervent fandom and her wobbly voice. In fact, they so thoroughly embrace her passion for music that they suggest it’s what killed her.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Before Streep’s version of Florence takes her final bow, she lives her musical commitment. The design team of production designer Alan Macdonald (The Queen), supervising art director Patrick Rolfe (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) and art directors Gareth Cousins (BBC’s Jane Eyre) and Christopher Wyatt (Wuthering Heights) craft for her the most musical spaces possible without a total break from realism...

Of course, Florence herself seems determined to push that very boundary. The tableaux presented to the Verdi Club are fulfillments of fantasy. Suspended from the ceiling, the socialite silently impersonates a muse. Later, she becomes Wagner’s Brünnhilde. She stands in front of a bright and elemental backdrop, tastefully bloody corpses at her feet. The orchestra plays the Ride of the Valkyries with vigor, a musical endorsement of this charmingly absurd recreation.

After all, why should Florence obey the limits of reality? She’s an opera fan. What matters is the rush of the orchestra, the feelings that gush from the notes of the vocal line. Accordingly, Streep’s Florence is as larger-than-life as her Julia Child or her Anna Wintour. She is an icon of passion, not a citizen of the dull world that lurks outside the opera house, or the cinema.

The designers, therefore, elevate her period-appropriate decor with her fanatical devotion to music. Florence’s Hotel Seymour suite is only slightly less ridiculous than the ersatz Valhalla at the Verdi Club.

There are pieces of devotional memorabilia everywhere. One wall is a showcases for Florence’s collection of composer portraits. There’s Wagner, of course, and what appear to be multiple images of Liszt. The central position is reserved for Verdi.

Out in the hall, the same composers bless the apartment with their busts. They are joined by a crowd of matryoshka dolls, an elaborate lamp, and even more portraits hanging above.

Not every relic is clear to the naked eye. The hallway also features a row of chairs in which, as husband St Clair Bayfield (Hugh Grant) explains, various celebrities expired. They are, understandably, “not for practical use.”

 

Not an inch of wallspace is bare, no corner empty. One wall of the yellow music room features picturesque depictions of ruins, small paintings of what might be nymphs and a still life of flowers. The colors are doubled by the fruit display beneath and echoed by the roses of the wallpaper. It seems reasonable to assume that Florence is a great believer in the emotion evoked by sublime depictions of the natural world. The hills, if you will, are alive with the sound of music.

It’s easy to imagine Florence walking through her apartment, frequently stricken with sudden decorative inspirations. It’s certainly a plausible explanation for the flower and feather bouquet next to the window below, as well as the ornate doll seated in a miniature chair on the back table.

Florence’s is the exuberance of a fan who lives the art that she loves, the sumptuous musical excesses of opera. It’s no accident that the impetus for her return to singing is the Bell Song from Lakmé, an aria so extravagant that it dispenses with lyrics entirely in favor of high-flying vocal acrobatics. That same spirit runs through Florence’s apartment, her artistic career, and her joie de vivre. Every flight of fancy leads to a coloratura explosion of feathers or flowers. It’s as clear in her bathtub of potato salad as it is in her Carnegie Hall triumph.

previously on The Furniture