Richard Sylbert was on the line. Used to expressing himself in bold lines and stark imagery, he was recalling the first time he met William Cameron Menzies. “It was at the Hotel Westbury on Madison Avenue, near the Carlyle. In his hotel room. I remember what he was wearing, how he looked. He was the same height as my father, and he dressed the way his pictures looked. In other words, he was silver-haired. No, not silver—steel-haired. You know? And he wore his uniform; I had mine, even in those days, and he always had his, which was gray tweed, gray flannel, black shoes, black tie, white button-down shirt, black pullover sweater. He looked like a black-and-white image.”
The year was 1952, and Menzies had come to New York to make the pilot for a TV series based on the Fu Manchu stories of Sax Rohmer. Sylbert, at age twenty-three, was already the veteran of more than a hundred telecasts. “Bill was my first mentor,” he said. “He was the director; I was the designer … which is not a bad way to start. We got along beautifully. Unfortunately, he died five years later. He died at sixty—he was very young—and he was a terrific guy. He’s very important in the field of motion picture design; maybe the most important. Did you ever read that letter Orson Welles wrote? He’s not just the father of production design, he’s the only one who ever did it in his own time. Anton Grot got reasonably close, but nobody has ever repeated what Menzies did. You couldn’t do it, meaning you couldn’t have control over Sam Wood—who, as Menzies said, didn’t know where to put the camera anyway—and draw all the shots for him. There’s no director alive today who would do that.”
Along with Ken Adam, who also worked with Menzies at the beginning of his career, Dick Sylbert was probably the most influential of all modern production designers. I had asked the Society of Motion Picture and Television Art Directors how to reach him, and Karen Jacobsen, a tremendous help, gave me the Palm Desert number of Sylbert’s agent, Phyllis Rab. I called on a chilly Tuesday morning in January of 2001 and left a message. Within half an hour, Sylbert was back to me.
I suggested that Menzies was one of the great unsung figures of motion picture history. “Oh he was sung,” Sylbert responded in his native Brooklynese, “but he was overshadowed by the credit mongers like Cedric Gibbons who worked for the major studios and called themselves supervising art directors and didn’t do a fucking thing. When Gibbons died, he had a thousand credits. He had thirty-nine nominations and eleven Oscars. When William Cameron Menzies died, he had one Oscar. The difference between production design and bullshitting is right there.”
I hadn’t asked about Cedric Gibbons, the autocratic enforcer of the gloss long associated with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, but Sylbert scarcely needed prompting. The matter of Gibbons was particularly vexing because he knew that in nearly forty years of designing for the screen, Gibbons saw to it that Menzies never worked at M-G-M. “Do you know that people wouldn’t make a movie until they got Menzies? That’s how powerful he was at one time. Alexander Korda, when he was making Thief of Bagdad, got the actor he wanted, got the director he wanted, because Menzies was going to do the picture. And you know Menzies got credit on it, but Vincent Korda took over because Menzies was still busy with Gone With the Wind and [he] got screwed out of both of them. Korda got a nomination for The Thief of Bagdad, and Lyle Wheeler, another phony, got an Oscar for Gone With the Wind. And all Menzies got was a stupid little plaque.
“He didn’t want to play the game. He used to say to me, ‘Those fucking stock clerks out in California …’ They’d go to the stock bins and pull out scenery, because they used to have huge sets standing at all the studios. And he was the only one who never became a supervising art director because he wanted to do the job. These guys didn’t do the job; they talked about it. Some of them were quite interesting; Grot was interesting, and [department head] Hans Dreier over at Paramount was interesting, and Richard Day [at 20th Century-Fox] would try to be a working designer, but how can you be a designer if you’re doing twenty-five pictures a year? You’d need roller skates.
“So they didn’t do the job. Menzies wanted to do the job, because Menzies’ whole interest was as a dramatist, not a designer, in the sense of an art director, as they called these guys. He wanted to do the job. You couldn’t do the job if you were running a studio. You just came in in the morning. It was so disgraceful. Gibbons had a heart attack in the mid-forties, showed up occasionally in the next ten years, and got two more Oscars! Because Louis B. Mayer and he set it up—they institutionalized credit stealing. M-G-M and Fox were the biggest studios, so they always got the most votes. No matter how you cut the pie up, Anton Grot I don’t think ever won an Oscar. So you can imagine what the game was. The game was: I’ll vote for the guys who can give me a job. And that’s what happened for forty years. So the decent men like Menzies and Grot and Dick Day, who was between them, got shut out.
“ ‘One picture is worth a thousand words’ is what Menzies realized—that you could actually draw this movie out—only because that was the kind of person he was. He loved doing the job. He loved the idea of structuring a movie. Did you ever see a little picture called Ivy? It’s a perfect Menzies picture. There isn’t one frame of that picture you can’t see him drawing. Ivy is pure Menzies—not a great movie, but it’s Menzies. A black-and-white Menzies movie in which he is in total control. Like he was on most of Sam Wood’s films.
“When we used to sit in that room and he would draw, he would draw angles, and he was very, very economical. He didn’t care what was outside this one shot. ‘The way to do this,’ he would say, ‘is to shoot down. It’s cheaper and it’ll look more interesting.’ Or you shoot up. Or you do this. We did everything in black-and-white. Black, white, or gray. He did the same thing in Androcles and the Lion, he told me once. He couldn’t get shadows that were dark enough for the sand, so he put black sand on the shadow. Everything he thought up, he wanted it pure. That’s why Ivy is interesting to look at. It’s a pure negative. He knew what he was going to get when it was over.
“I did seventeen black-and-white pictures—I won an Academy Award for black-and-white—but I did them in color. So that I was actually trying to develop these black-and-white ideas, but I was never quite sure how it was going to come out. You know, it wasn’t a big deal, but it never had that clarity that Menzies got when he did his own stuff in black-and-white. When he did his color, it was different. It’s his black-and-white pictures that tell you the most about him, if you ask me. Gone With the Wind is terrific, but with Gone With the Wind he began to see what I saw later, which are musical ideas. He has movements in Gone With the Wind. There are moods, big passages of what in a symphony would be: slow, fast, slow. He would do it with colors. You know—a whole section of grays and browns and then move on to another. He was an artist, and a lot of these other guys were just architects. Architects are fine—nothing against architects—but he was the artist.”
I brought up the films Menzies had directed, such as Invaders from Mars, and the largely indifferent results he got as a director. “He was not a great director,” Sylbert conceded. “Even on Things to Come, which is a wonderful picture. Menzies could never have had a career as a director, because he just didn’t have that thing. What he had was the visual dramatics. He couldn’t get the emotional dynamics. You know what I’m talking about. In other words, his narrative structure was entirely in pictures. When I started designing for Kazan, the last thing in the world anybody talked about was pictures. What they talked about was the emotional dynamic of the narrative. So it swung to actors. By the fifties it had become an actors’ medium—still is, as a matter of fact, except on rare occasions. But it wasn’t then. It was much more visual. When Anton Grot did those pirate movies, they didn’t need actors—they could have had dummies. Those pictures could have been silent movies and they would have worked. But it changed in the fifties, when Bill had trouble getting work.
“I only spent a couple of months with Menzies—we did two black-and-white pilots of Fu Manchu together—Sax Rohmer was still alive—and the cast was brilliant: Cedric Hardwicke, John Carradine, Melville Cooper, John Newland, Rita Gam. It was the first thing done in a studio on film in New York, independent of anything else, for television. It was just a bunch of people from television who got together with Herb Swope, the producer, and rented the old Gold Medal Studio, which was a mess, and did this thing in nineteen-hundred and fifty-two. That was between my doing Hamlet for Maurice Evans on television and Richard II. I took a break. They were the two biggest live television shows there were up to that time. Menzies didn’t know that I was doing Richard II next, but after it aired I got a call from him and he said to me, ‘I knew you did that show before I saw the crawl.’ Which I’ll never forget, because Menzies had a fingerprint.
“The best thing he ever said to me didn’t mean as much at the time as it means at this point. I used to live in a fifth-floor walk-up on West 85th Street, and he’d come puffing up the stairs. And he looked at the drawings and he said to me, ‘You know kid, you ought to go out to Hollywood. You’ve got a lot of stuff.’ Hollywood—you know I never thought of it? He said, ‘Yeah, you should go out to Hollywood and put a little dignity back into the business.’ That’s exactly what he said. That’s how he felt about it. It had lost its dignity. These stock clerks and credit mongers and bullshit artists had taken control of the business.
“And I know what he meant, because when I went out there we started the New York Revolution. We blew the place up. It’s back now, in many ways, to the way it used to be, but it’s much improved because there are no more supervising art directors and there are no more companies. There are no studios that anyone works in permanently.… I came in at the end of studio, with Marty Ritt and Sidney Lumet, and when you come in that way, you’ve got to find a way to take control. Which I have obviously done. It’s very different than Menzies. It has much more to do with patterns. And with musical structure, rather than with individual shots. You don’t get into a room with Kazan and three great actors and tell him where to put the camera. Because he’s waiting for those actors to tell him where to put the camera. So what I worked out over the years, a little bit here and a little bit there, is to actually sit down and write a recipe for a movie before it’s ever shot. And I’ve proven it again and again and again. I know it works, and it’s another version of structural control, which is really what Menzies was after anyway. He wasn’t interested in chaos … Menzies was a classicist. You can use that word. In other words, he formalized a picture.”
Menzies burst upon the Hollywood scene in 1923 with his startling designs for the original Thief of Bagdad. Trained as an illustrator rather than an architect, he created a fantasy world that was integral to the action and not merely a backdrop. He gave the film size, and with it came a sense of wonderment. That picture made Menzies, and over the next six years he refined a technique that pre-visualized a film compositionally, recasting actors as graphic elements and teasing out the dramatic values of tone and texture. Occasionally he had a canvas as big as for his initial triumph—The Hooded Falcon (for Valentino), The Beloved Rogue, The Dove, Tempest, and for the latter two he was awarded the first Oscar ever given for art direction. He brought the illustrator’s eye to the camera and graphic validity to an art form that was all too often theatrical rather than cinematic.
The natural course of Menzies’ career took him to directing, but he lacked the ability to extract a performance and displayed no sense of pacing. Paired, as was common in the early days of sound, with a director to handle the actors, Menzies managed an uneven slate of pictures, excelling at films that traded in thrills and fantasy. His Alice in Wonderland hewed too closely to the drawings of John Tenniel, but Things to Come became a visionary masterpiece, hobbled only in terms of the stilted dialogue imposed on the picture by its author, H. G. Wells. Producer David O. Selznick engaged him in 1937, and by the following year he was in charge of the overall look of the decade’s most important production, Gone With the Wind.
Selznick’s plan was to have Menzies compose and sketch every shot in the movie prior to filming, giving it a bold visual style that hid the fact that multiple directors were employed in its making. The technique also gave the producer ultimate control of the production, saving money while permitting him to effectively direct the film himself. Of the hundreds of actors, writers, artists, and craftsmen who contributed to the making of GWTW, only two were on the picture from its earliest days through to the last shot—Selznick himself and William Cameron Menzies. The film won eight Academy Awards, including one for Lyle Wheeler for color art direction, but there was no category for what Menzies had done, and so a special award was created for “use of color for the enhancement of dramatic mood.” On screen, there was similarly a special credit: “This production designed by William Cameron Menzies.”
One of the uncredited directors on Gone With the Wind was Sam Wood, a generalist who was fascinated by the continuity boards Menzies and his staff developed for GWTW, and soon Wood formed a creative partnership with Menzies that resulted in some of the most memorable films of the 1940s. Since Wood had no visual sense of his own, he gave Menzies full rein over the look of their pictures, preferring to concentrate instead on matters of story and the performances of his actors. Together, the two men constituted one great director, and their output was singular in terms of range and technique—Our Town, The Devil and Miss Jones, Kings Row, Pride of the Yankees, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Address Unknown (directed by Menzies, produced by Wood), and the aforementioned Ivy.
Five years after the collaboration ended with Ivy, Bill Menzies urged Dick Sylbert to go to Hollywood to put a little dignity back into the business. In 1956, Sylbert made the jump to the big screen with Elia Kazan’s Baby Doll. Eventually he designed over fifty films, including such seminal titles as Splendor in the Grass, The Manchurian Candidate, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Graduate, Carnal Knowledge, and Chinatown. Sylbert never stopped exploring the process of addition and subtraction, a form of structural problem solving Menzies had taught him, and he never stopped paying tribute to the man who had revolutionized the look and technique of American motion picture production.