The Furniture: SciFi on a Budget in Planet of the Vampires

"The Furniture," by Daniel Walber. (Click on the images for magnified detail)

Last week’s column was about Dr. Zhivago, the obvious first choice for any 1965 celebration of production design. But where do we go for Part 2? None of the other 9 nominees really leap forward as worth a column, though I do like King Rat. Outside Oscar’s purview, meanwhile, there’s a lot. There are sweeping historical dramas, like The Saragossa Manuscript and Forest of the Hanged. There are wildly bizarre fantasies, like Juliet of the Spirits and Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors. But I think it would be fun to follow Dr. Zhivago with something entirely different, a movie with only a handful of sets and a budget of $200,000.

Mario Bava’s Planet of the Vampires was perhaps never destined to be a hit. Bava was disappointed with the casting of Barry Sullivan as Captain Mark Markary, who he considered far too old. Sullivan, for his part, took one look at the script and assumed the worst. It wasn’t until he showed up for ADR recording that he saw just how much magic Bava could get out of $200,000. The images took his breath away...

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The Furniture: The frozen escape of "Doctor Zhivago"

"The Furniture," by Daniel Walber. (Click on the images for magnified detail)

Ten movies were nominated for Best Production Design at the 1965 Oscars, one of the last years before the Academy retired separate categories for color and black & white. There are some striking examples on the list, from the bloated (The Agony & the Ecstasy, Ship of Fools) to the bizarre (Inside Daisy Clover). But when you come down to it, there’s really no looking past Doctor Zhivago.

This was David Lean’s second consecutive film to win the category, after Lawrence of Arabia three years earlier. While their visual scope is similar, the two films actually have very different preoccupations. Lawrence of Arabia is about a man determined to shape history. Doctor Zhivago is about a man trying to escape it. Understanding the difference helps us understand the design.

We begin on the eve of the Russian Revolution, a moment of great social contrasts...

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The Furniture: Framing Perpetual Childhood in The Truth

"The Furniture," by Daniel Walber, is our weekly series on Production Design. You can click on the images to see them in magnified detail.

Towards the end of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s The Truth, legendary actress Fabienne Dangeville (Catherine Deneuve) admits something quite harsh. “I prefer to have been a bad mother, a bad friend and a good actress,” she announces at dinner. Her talent and her single-mindedness have given her a lengthy career, multiple Césars, and the freedom to take liberties with her own story. Her soon-to-be-published memoir is the occasion for which her daughter, Lumir (Juliette Binoche), has come for a visit, bringing her American husband (Ethan Hawke) and their daughter, Charlotte (Clémentine Grenier). And this short trip quickly becomes a long one, once Lumir agrees to step in as her mother’s assistant on the set of a science-fiction film.

Lumir’s presence becomes an opportunity to relive and relitigate family history. It’s not just that Fabienne’s memoir strays from the truth, but that their entire relationship is based on contested memories. Kore-eda suggests that it might be Fabienne’s work that has so deeply wounded her personal relationships. Has the vocation of make-believe crept into the rest of her life, encouraging her to freely reshape her own memories and ignore the truths of those closest to her? Has acting made Fabienne a forever-child?

And how on earth do you express that with production design?

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The Furniture: Of Tesla and TED Talks

"The Furniture," by Daniel Walber, is our weekly series on Production Design. You can click on the images to see them in magnified detail.

Does genius have an aesthetic? And what would it look like? Tesla poses this question in a big way, tossing out the visual parameters of a typical period piece in the process. Director Michael Almereyda has said that he was inspired by “Derek Jarman, Henry James and certain episodes of Drunk History,” which absolutely comes through - and is a good thing. But, to be honest, Tesla also reminded me of a major component of the 21st century tech aesthetic: the TED Talk.

It’s in the script, too. The first thing we hear is a tale of the title inventor’s childhood, told by our narrator Anne Morgan (Eve Hewson). The young Tesla once noticed static electricity on a cat, a little memory that will be woven into an origin story for genius. This is immediately followed by a scene in which Thomas Edison (Kyle MacLachlan) waxes poetic about his own memories, which include an early boat ride on Lake Ontario and witnessing a friend drown shortly thereafter.

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The Furniture: Wallpaper and Wet Wood in 'The Grey Fox'

"The Furniture," by Daniel Walber, is our weekly series on Production Design. You can click on the images to see them in magnified detail.

Yesterday would have been the 100th birthday of Richard Farnsworth. You might have seen some tributes on Twitter, most of them recalling Farnsworth’s Oscar-nominated performance in David Lynch’s The Straight Story - the actor’s last film. Today I’d like to turn to something earlier, a gorgeous Canadian Western called The Grey Fox. 

It’s the kind of movie that feels undiscovered even as you’re watching it - even now that it’s been beautifully restored and rereleased by Kino Lorber. It’s not that it was ignored upon release, really; Farnsworth got a Best Actor - Drama nomination at the Golden Globes and it swept the Genie Awards. But its quiet, slow, rainy charm lends it an air of the forgotten, as if it had been left on a shelf for a century. 

The subject helps: the last years of the last notorious stagecoach robber in the West, released into the 20th century like a ghost...

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