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Production Design and Art Direction (Screencraft)

In this wonderful book, the author introduces some known and not-so well known production designers and art directors. The book presents beautifully rendered photographs of many production drawings and final sets. Seeing the progress from set to screen is fascinating. This book is anecdotal rather the encyclopedic and is excellent in presentation. My favorite sections were the ones on Ken Adam and Richard Selbert.

Ken Adam designed most of the sets for the early Bond films (Goldfinger, Dr. No, Thunderball, etc.) as well as the amazing sets for Dr. Stangelove and Barry Lyndon. He has a great anecdote on how he and Kubrick came up with the war room (and a funny little aside about Ronald Reagan’s request upon taking office).

Richard Sylbert is a legend himself with Production Designer credits for such classics as The Manchurian Candidate, The Graduate, Catch-22, Chinatown, Rosemary’s Baby, Reds, Carlito’s Way, and on and on. For Chinatown, he explains how he layered the idea of water through the various sets and even the glasswork. He also talks about he had sets mirror other sets to provide subtle associations such as between the Department of Water and Power and the morgue.

I also really enjoyed the John Beard section on how he came up with some of the designs for Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. Many other production designers are featured including Henry Bumstead, Dante Ferretti, Dean Tavoularis, Stuart Craig, Patrizia von Brandenstein, Allen Starski, Dan Weil, and Nigel Phelps.

The very high quality paper and print quality gives the book a coffee-table book feel. It’s a pleasure just to page through it and view the different concepts of movie production design. If you’ve ever worked in the Art Department on a film or plan to work in a movie art department, be sure to add this to your collection. I would highly recommend it.

Dan Rahmel
Author: "Nuts and Bolts Filmmaking"