{"id":9980,"date":"2014-06-08T07:00:24","date_gmt":"2014-06-08T11:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.frankwbaker.com\/mlc\/setting2\/"},"modified":"2023-12-07T10:08:53","modified_gmt":"2023-12-07T15:08:53","slug":"mockingbird-setting-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.frankwbaker.com\/mlc\/mockingbird-setting-2\/","title":{"rendered":"To Kill A Mockingbird: Setting – Part 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

SETTING, PRODUCTION DESIGN & ART DIRECTION<\/strong><\/p>\n

SETTING<\/strong> (page 2 of 4)<\/p>\n

\u201dAlthough To Kill A Mockingbird is literally a story that presents a new South evolving out of the old,\u00a0this metaphoric transformation in terms of race relations was something the entire mass audience\u00a0understood in 1962. Despite Universal\u2019s initial hesitations about the movie, the picture proved to\u00a0be a major critical and commercial success, and Horton\u2019s Foote<\/a>\u2019s reputation as a screenwriter was\u00a0established in Hollywood for the remainder of the decade.” 2 (Additional note: according to the text Box Office Champs, TKAM was #8 of the top grossing films of 1963, earning $7.5 million.)<\/p>\n

ART DIRECTION\/PRODUCTION DESIGN
\n“<\/strong>the art director must convince viewers that the world of the film is\u00a0undeniably real …” 3<\/p>\n

” …it is the art director who stands between the screenplay and the director of the film, turning the printed page into a place real or fanciful, constructed or found, and who does so for a price the producer can live with.”
\n“….if an art director is going his or her job well, we as spectators are not consciously admiring the ‘look’ as separate from the story unfolding and the characters involved.” 4<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\"\"
\nHenry Bumstead<\/a>
\nCo-Art Director
\nTo Kill A Mockingbird<\/em><\/td>\n		\"Alexander
\nAlexander Golitzen<\/a>
\nCo-Art Director
\nTo Kill A Mockingbird<\/em><\/td>\n		Storyboards<\/a>– a major tool of the art director
\nSee original storyboards
\nfrom the film and compare them to actual frames taken from the motion picture<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

Setting involves time and location. The challenge for the Art Directors of \u00a0To Kill A Mockingbird<\/em> (Alexander Golitzen and Henry Bumstead, who won the Academy Award that year) was to create a setting that was not only\u00a0authentic and believable but also realistic. The setting for the film is the Depression era\u00a0South in the state of Alabama. The producers of the film traveled there\u00a0but decided the cost of taking the production “on location” was too high.\u00a0So, the question became, how to create the fictional Macomb, Alabama\u00a0on a studio back lot in California?
\n\"\"
\nA sketch (above) made by an assistant to Henry Bumstead.
\n(Source: Production Design and Art Direction: Screencraft Publisher: Rotovision)
\n(see more of this sketch<\/a>)<\/p>\n

\u201dArt directors I think are one of the first people to get scripts, many times even before the director for Mockingbird. I went to Monroeville Alabama and I guess we rode for 3 or 4 hours and we took pictures. And I came home and designed the set all on\u00a0the lot. We finished the film and I began\u00a0getting calls from many different top art directors of MGM..and ‘where did we shoot that picture’, ‘where abouts in Alabama’? And I said ‘we did it on the back lot’, and they said come on Bobby you\u2019re kidding’ and said ‘no, it’s all on the backlot’\u2026and they said ‘God that\u2019s a helluva job’…And so I guess I began to realize then maybe it was a very good job, so I guess it was because I won the Oscar that year for it\u2026\u201d5<\/p>\n

\"Next<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

SETTING, PRODUCTION DESIGN & ART DIRECTION SETTING (page 2 of…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[202],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-9980","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-to-kill-a-mockingbird-popular"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.frankwbaker.com\/mlc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9980","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.frankwbaker.com\/mlc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.frankwbaker.com\/mlc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.frankwbaker.com\/mlc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.frankwbaker.com\/mlc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9980"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.frankwbaker.com\/mlc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9980\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24435,"href":"https:\/\/www.frankwbaker.com\/mlc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9980\/revisions\/24435"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.frankwbaker.com\/mlc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9980"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.frankwbaker.com\/mlc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9980"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.frankwbaker.com\/mlc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9980"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}