Of course, the visual artist in McLane wanted to meet the expectations of Zadan and Meron, and the show’s director Don Mischer, for a new Oscar look. After flying to Los Angeles from his New York base and curling up in the Dolby orchestra seats, he went into his usual process, drawing hundreds of pages of doodles. The ceremony’s theme this year is music and the movies, which is to play out over the course of the evening’s 12 distinct segments, or acts.
“That is a theme I kind of riffed on in the designs, and in images that were potentially beautiful and appropriate for the show and still honored the grandeur and glamour of the event,” McLane said, adding that he tried not to be “on the nose about it. You won’t see musical notes or treble clefs on the stage.”
If the designs are as arresting as the one he was allowed to share — a rendering of what’s called “the closedown, sort of like our show curtain” — there will be dazzle tonight. Inspired in part by the Busby Berkeley film extravaganzas of the 1930s, the image is an arch with hundreds of Oscar statuettes dangling inside it like the charms of a bracelet. (A total of 1,051 Oscars painted silver rather than gold, to better reflect the lighting design, populate the set.)
The glittering effect gets its illumination from a multitude of clear, incandescent bulbs suspended on aluminum rods: The nominated stars will themselves be stargazers.
McLane says the hiatus from the theater has been fun, but it is a short one. Immediately after the Oscars, he heads back to New York for the start of preview performances of his latest Broadway design job, playwright Richard Greenberg’s new stage adaptation of Truman Capote’s “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”
For that assignment, the sets have to speak directly to the author’s intentions. At the Oscars, he gets to worry more about whether he has fashioned his version of a red-carpet breath-stopper.
“At the end of the day, a lot of the images were chosen because we thought they were beautiful,” he said. “That is different from designing a play. You rarely have something on a stage that’s just pretty.”
This commenter is a Washington Post contributor. Post contributors aren’t staff, but may write articles or columns. In some cases, contributors are sources or experts quoted in a story.
Comments our editors find particularly useful or relevant are displayed in Top Comments, as are comments by users with these badges: . Replies to those posts appear here, as well as posts by staff writers.
To pause and restart automatic updates, click "Live" or "Paused". If paused, you'll be notified of the number of additional comments that have come in.
Comments our editors find particularly useful or relevant are displayed in Top Comments, as are comments by users with these badges: . Replies to those posts appear here, as well as posts by staff writers.
Loading...
Comments