Henry Bumstead and the World of Hollywood Art Direction Book

"Dear Bummy, You take the BS out of filmmaking!" --Clint Eastwood's comment on Henry Bumstead's receiving the Lifetime Achievement Award in 1998 from the Society of Motion Picture and Television Art Directors "Making a movie with Bummy was always a pleasure because it was like going to work with a good friend who also had a fine, artistic eye, who shared your vision, and who knew infinitely more about the practical nuts-and-bolts business of putting a story on camera than you did. . . . Everything he designed served the movie. He knew how to visually bring it to life." --Robert Mulligan From a hotel in Marrakech in The Man Who Knew Too Much, to small-town Alabama in To Kill a Mockingbird, to Mission Control in Space Cowboys, creating a fictional, yet wholly believable world in which to film a movie has been the passion and life's work of Henry Bumstead, one of Hollywood's most celebrated production designers. In a career that has spanned nearly seventy years, Bumstead has worked on more than one hundred movies and television films. His many honors include Academy Awards for Art Direction for To Kill a Mockingbird and The Sting, as well as nominations for Vertigo and The Unforgiven. This popularly written and extensively illustrated book tells the intertwining stories of Henry Bumstead's career and the evolution of Hollywood art direction. Andrew Horton combines his analysis of Bumstead's design work with wide-ranging interviews in which Bumstead talks about working with top directors, including Alfred Hitchcock, George Roy Hill, Robert Mulligan, and Clint Eastwood, as well as such stars as Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Doris Day, Jimmy Stewart, Sidney Poitier, Bill Cosby, Jerry Lewis, and James Cagney. Numerous production drawings, storyboards, and film stills illustrate how Bumstead's designs translated to film. This portrait of Bumstead's career underscores an art director's crucial role in shaping the look of a film and also tracks the changes in production design from the studio era through location shooting to today's use of high-tech special effects.Read More