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Henry Bumstead’s Legendary Life
A Conversation with Legendary Production Designer Henry Bumstead
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| Bumstead with MM’s Eric Nazarian |
Everybody calls me Bummy," chuckles two-time Academy Award-winning production designer Henry Bumstead (To Kill a Mockingbird, The Sting), as he slides into a corner booth at the Colonial Kitchen in San Marino, California. Fresh off the set of Clint Eastwood's thriller Blood Work, based on the novel by Michael Connelly, Henry is taking the afternoon off to reflect on his 63-year career that is now just a few films shy of a hundred.
Born and raised in Ontario, California, Henry found
his way into the motion picture industry via high school football.
He won a scholarship to USC, where his time was divided between
the field and the fine art and architecture department. After a
serious back injury that resulted in a prolonged stay at the Good
Samaritan Hospital in downtown LA, he decided that the time had
come for a serious and less painful education. He quit football
and hit the drafting table. Within a year, he landed his first job
in an industry struggling to shake off the Great Depression.
Over the course of the afternoon, Henry shared his memories, spanning from the Depression-era Hollywood where he started his apprenticeship with legendary art director Hans Dreier (Sunset Boulevard) to his collaborations with Alfred Hitchcock, George Roy Hill, Clint Eastwood and Martin Scorsese, among countless others.
The Early Years
I finished my sophomore year at USC and got a call to go work at RKO as an apprentice draftsman at $35 a week. In those days, there were about 80 art directors in town; now there are over 800. It was during the height of the Depression. Life was tough. People were struggling I guess I got lucky.
The following summer I got a call to go work at Paramount for $35 a week. That was when I made the decision to make movies my life. I was working with Hans Dreier, who came to Hollywood from UFA with Ernst Lubitsch and Marlene Dietrich. One of the first and maybe the most important lessons I learned during that period in my career came from Dreier, who was the head of the art department. One day he walked into my office, briefly looked over my sketches, nodded his head and said "Ah ha! The character who inhabits that room must be a very learned man." Then he walked away. I didn't know what he meant, so I went back to the script, re-read it and shook my head because the main character was anything but an educated person.
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| Production designer Henry Bumstead discussese a sketch with director Alfred Hitchcock. |
When I looked at my drawing, I realized that I had designed the main character's house with more bookcases than you would find in most people's homes. The bulb went on and I realized my first lesson: design sets that are livable for the specific type of people who inhabit them and don't try to show every trick you know.
From 1937 until the break of World War II, Henry worked as a draftsman, sketch artist, model maker and assistant art director. After the war, he returned to Paramount and worked as an art director on several films, including Anthony Mann's The Furies, Mark Robson's The Bridges at Toko-Ri, Nicholas Ray's Run for Cover and Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much and Vertigo, for which he received his first Academy Award nomination.
Hitchcock
Hitch was very conscious of the everyday little details of a character's life. I didn't stack bookcases in Jimmy Stewart's apartment with encyclopedias or books because he was a cop, not a reader. [laughs]
I'd pick the locations, take photos, get Hitch's approval, then design and build the sets. Nowadays, the half-hour photo labs help art directors a lot because we can take all these pictures of a location and show them to the director on the same day.
I did four films with Hitch: The Man Who Knew Too Much, Vertigo, Topaz, and Family Plot. We'd [shoot] from 9:00 in the morning until 5:30 p.m.—never later than that, especially on his last film. Hitch knew what he was shooting so well that he never looked through the camera—and most of the time sat in his chair looking terribly bored. He resented the fact that it took so long for the cameraman to light the set. One day on the set of Vertigo I noticed that he was frowning so I walked up to him and said 'Hitch, what's wrong?' He slowly turned his head toward me and said "Nah-thing I'm thinking about my next picture because this is terribly boring."
During the actors' strike in 1960, Henry left Paramount for Universal. He was scheduled to go to Africa with Howard Hawks to make Hatari for Paramount, but persistent back problems and a four-picture deal with Universal, which had signed with the actors persuaded him to leave.
"I really would have liked to work with John Wayne, but I just couldn't see myself riding across the African terrain with my bad back. Shortly after I signed with Universal, they sent me to Italy with Robert Mulligan to do Come September with Bobby Darin, Gina Lollobrigida and Rock Hudson."
Come September led to three back-to-back films with Mulligan including To Kill a Mockingbird, for which Henry was awarded the first of two Oscars for Best Production Design.
Friends and Favorite Films: Eight with George Roy Hill
I was vacationing in Oregon when I got a call from Alexander Golitsen, then head of the art department at Universal and co-art director on To Kill a Mockingbird. He said that George Roy Hill wanted to meet with me regarding a film adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five. I bought the book, read it, flew down to LA and met with George. He hired me and the next thing you know, we were scouting locations across Romania, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. It was a tough movie to make, but George is one of the best directors I've ever worked with. I've done eight pictures with him because he realizes what a good art director can add to a picture. When we started filming The Sting, I suggested that we do the whole picture in browns and sepias that would evoke that vintage 1920s smoky, backroom feel. George and the great cameraman Bob Surtees liked the idea, so we did it. Well, that film got me my second Oscar.
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| Top: Bumstead won his first Oscar for To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), starring Gregory Peck and Mary Badham. Below: Slaughterhouse-Five (1972) marked Bumstead’s first of eight films with director George Roy Hill. |
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Remaking Cape Fear with Martin Scorsese
Everybody loves working with Marty—he's an encyclopedia of film. When my agent called me and said that Martin Scorsese wanted me for a film, I automatically thought that he wanted to interview me for the job. "No" my agent said, "he wants you.'"I said, 'Well I can't understand it. He's a great New York filmmaker. Doesn't he use New York people all the time?' My agent said "no" with an exclamation, so I immediately agreed and went to work. We shot in Ft. Lauderdale; that was another great experience. Marty remembered films and people I'd worked with that I'd forgotten! We had a marvelous cameraman, Freddie Francis from England. As I remember it, it was the first time Marty used matte shots. We built a huge stage for the ending with dump tanks, hoses, gimbals and everything under the sun!
Ten and Counting with Clint
I had the same relationship with George Roy Hill that I now have with Clint Eastwood. What I love about Clint Eastwood is that he has taken all the BS out of making pictures. Clint has branched out and done difficult films over the course of his career. He's one of those directors who really understands that the set is a character in a film.
The first picture I did with him was Joe Kidd (1972), directed by John Sturges. We built sets in the high Sierras and in Tucson, Arizona, where the train runs into the saloon at the end. Clint liked what I did on Joe Kidd and years later hired me to do Unforgiven. Unforgiven was a very rushed production; we scouted and picked the location for Big Whiskey in Calgary, Canada in one day. What helped me the most was designing a simple and uncomplicated period set—no Victorian gingerbread and no big mirror behind the bar with a nude woman centerpiece.
I made the drawings in LA, flew to the location and built the set in 36 days with a lot of good help. The only person I took with me was my painter, Doug Wilson, who has worked with me since 1960. It was another one of my favorite experiences. On Space Cowboys, we built the flight deck and mid-deck of a space shuttle. I was knee-deep in computers with help from my young colleagues.
In Blood Work, Clint's character lives on-board a boat. I thought it would be marvelous to have the boat down by the Queen Mary. That way, the audiences from the midwest that haven't traveled out to California would get a kick out of seeing the Queen Mary in the background. That was the main location we picked.
The big challenge on Blood Work was building the interior of an old freighter where most of the action takes place, aging it down and filling the engine room with water for the climax. I really enjoyed the fact that we shot the whole movie around town so I could go home every night and sleep in my own bed. I'm 87, you know. It's nice to have everything local.
Even at this old age, my interest and love for a project is what keeps me going. Otherwise, I wouldn't do another film. In a nutshell, my job is to break down the script, find the best possible locations, make a budget and design the appropriate sets that correspond to the story. By the way, I don't work on a computer because I'm from the old school. I prefer designing by pencil rather than computer. However, I realize that young art directors need to know how to design with computers.
Between films, Henry teaches production design at the American Film Institute. In recent years, he has received many lifetime achievement awards from various schools, film festivals and universities. Film scholars and documentary moviemakers continue to study his contributions to 63 years—and counting— of American cinema.
Up next, Henry will be in Boston shooting Mystic River with Clint Eastwood, marking their eleventh collaboration.
Reminiscences
I'm very happy. Nobody could've had more fun than I had. I've seen the world first-class and worked with lots of talented and wonderful people. Sometimes I wake up in the night and just can't believe that I've been able to raise four kids, send them all to universities and, at the same time, been so lucky to do what I've always loved to do. It's been a great life every minute of it. MM
Eric Nazarian is a moviemaker and photojournalist
based in Los Angeles. He is currently making a post-war drama in
Armenia and the U.S.
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This story was published in the Fall 2002 MovieMaker Magazine. The headline was:
Loving Every Minute of It / A Conversation with Legendary Production Designer Henry Bumstead
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