Conversations avec / with Dean Tavoularis

Published in conjunction with the November 2022 retrospective of Dean Tavoularis’ films at the Cinematheque Française, Conversations avec / with Dean Tavoularis is a large format, heavily illustrated, dual language text that surveys the eminent set designer’s most significant work from sixty years of filmmaking. The text’s four main parts cover Tavoularis’ design of films related to “New Hollywood” (Bonnie and Clyde, Little Big Man, and Zabriskie Point), “The Godfather Trilogy,” “Breaking and Entering” (The Conversation, The Brink’s Job, and Apocalypse Now), and “Design Dreams” (The films of the Zoetrope Studios including One from the Heart, Rumble Fish and Tucker). Interviews with filmmakers who worked with Tavoularis—Warren Beatty, Francis Ford Coppola, Vittorio Storaro, and Milena Canonero—describe their experiences with him. Guided throughout by Jordan Mintzer’s questions, Tavoularis discusses his work on these films, offers his thoughts about the changing film industry and evolving role of the motion picture set designer over these years, and presents readers with numerous insights into what set design contributes to the style of a film.Conversations begins with Tavoularis’ discussion of his earliest work in the Disney studio animation department where he tediously drew the stages of an alligator’s bite for a sequence in Lady and the Tramp. (Eight frames of the alligator sequence appear close to Tavoularis’ mention of them.) Transferred to live-action work in Disney’s art department when he threatened to quit, Tavoularis worked on the design of some Disneyland attractions before being assigned to assist Robert Clatworthy, an established set designer, on several Disney projects including Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. Clatworthy proved to be Tavoularis’ mentor: “I worked very closely with Bob, who took me under his wing and taught me about set design and art direction.” (37) When Clatworthy left Disney, Tavoularis went with him.In time, a hairdresser who had worked on a film with Tavoularis tipped him off about a new project that was being directed by Arthur Penn with Warren Beatty starring and producing. He told Tavoularis he had suggested him to them for the film and urged Tavoularis to meet with Penn and Beatty. When he did, they hired him as the art director for Bonnie and Clyde. Tavoularis’ description of the interplay of chance and planning in the progress of his early career is a leitmotif that runs through Conversations in his discussions of his later work.For example, there was an eight-hour long pre-production meeting for The Godfather at which Francis Ford Coppola led the film’s department heads through a page-by-page reading of the script in which every detail was discussed. The discussion was taken down by a stenographer for use as a guide during production. (Pages of the transcript are reproduced in the text.) Contrastingly, a chance meeting with an onlooker while he was searching for a New York City street that could be used as a 1917 setting in the next Godfather movie led to a basement full of vintage photographs of New York from that era collected by a Ukrainian youth group. As a result, he discovered a block of 6th Avenue that was perfect for the 1917 street. At this point, the text offers the reader a detailed diagram of the street with each shop’s purpose labeled, followed by storyboards of rooftop action there, production photos, and four pages of still photos that capture the entire sequence filmed on the street which ends with young Vito Corleone killing Don Fanucci. The development of a set for a key sequence began with a chance encounter.At various points, Tavoularis explains different stylistic qualities that a set designer can contribute to a film. For example a set designer can establish an entire visual design program to illustrate a film’s key themes. For The Conversation, a film about a professional spy, Tavoularis developed the idea of transparency as a visual equivalent for over-hearing, the film’s aural subject.Though Tavoularis does not mention it, transparency always risks opacity. As Harry Caul’s last name implies, one can always misperceive as well as mishear. More generally, a design program may be drawn from a painter’s works, as was the case with The Brink’s Job, for which Tavoularis drew images from Edward Hopper’s paintings.Design programs also involve a limited choice of colors, or a color palette, to match a film’s themes. For the Godfather films, “we did have a general color palette on all three movies that favored purples, browns and blacks in order to suggest the morbid atmosphere of the Corleone family.” (140) The relation of color to drama in Bulworth, a movie about a disillusioned politician, was worked out in detail.For Apocalypse Now, Tavoularis borrowed a color effect from Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris to use in the plantation home.The unique design program that Roman Polanski required for Carnage was based upon the actors’ choreography within the film’s purpose-built apartment set. Polanski demonstrated what he needed during a read-through of the script with Tavoularis:The most daringly stylized films that Tavoularis designed were those produced at Zoetrope Studios, the production facility that Francis Ford Coppola bought with his earnings after finishing Apocalypse Now. Coppola dreamed of turning what had been Hollywood General Studios, rechristened as Zoetrope Studios, into a modern United Artists, a mecca where talented directors could realize their films without the stifling control of studio executives. Coppola was himself Zoetrope’s driving creative force. Having spent 238 days shooting Apocalypse Now on location in the Philippine jungles, Coppola decided that his next project, One from the Heart, set in Las Vegas, would be filmed entirely within the confines of the studio. Everything, including a drive to and from the airport and a climactic scene set on the Las Vegas Strip would be done entirely on a sound stage. Tavoularis realized “that if we put everything on the soundstage, then it should be stylized—we couldn’t shoot a realistic movie because you’d have to make people believe in the illusion.” (241) Thus for the drive to and from the airport, Tavoularis designed a miniature desert highway fifty or sixty feet long with sand dunes, a gas station, and a motel. This was photographed and used as the background seen out the car’s windows during the drives.Rumble Fish, also directed by Coppola, was an experiment in black-and-white filmmaking. Only the fish in an aquarium are in color. The rest of the film is in shades of gray. Tavoularis and Steven Burum, the film’s cinematographer, photographed different colors in black and white to see which shade of gray each color would be. This enabled to know how a set constructed in color would look when filmed in black and white. While the film’s sets were in color, Tavoularis painted black and gray shadows on the set to stylize the images.Much of Conversation’s illustrative material admirably extends the meaning of the text. Yet for a text that is so verbally attuned to the visual qualities of set design, some illustrations are unexplained or offer barely legible explanatory text. Two drawings on a page in the section on Zabriskie Point illustrate the problem. The reproduction of an architectural drawing is too small for its many annotations to be legible, while the annotations on the sketch of a considerably less important advertising flag can be read quite easily because the image is larger than necessary. (77) Similarly, the extensive text on a map detailing each stop of a journey labeled “Willard’s Odyssey” is almost impossible to read even with a magnifying glass. (197) The lack of identifying labels is especially acute for strings of thumb-size frame grabs. A reader familiar with the films may not need identification, but for anyone less familiar with a film, the unlabeled frame grabs serve merely as atmospheric eye-candy.Despite this weakness, Conversations is considerably better than most books about set designers. Tavoularis’ clear voice and lack of self-aggrandizement present an unusually balanced perspective on the cooperative nature of film production. Indeed, there is far more worthwhile material in Conversations than this brief review can cover. Readers will find that Conversations increases their understanding of the components of motion picture style

Art · Sociology · African history and culture studies · Philosophy