Oscar History
Film Bitch History
Welcome

The Film Experience™ was created by Nathaniel R. All material herein is written by our team.

This site is not for profit but for an expression of love for cinema & adjacent artforms. 

Powered by Squarespace
DON'T MISS THIS

Follow TFE on Substackd 

COMMENTS

Oscar Takeaways
12 thoughts from the big night

 

Keep TFE Strong

We're looking for 500... no 390 SubscribersIf you read us daily, please be one.  

I ♥ The Film Experience

THANKS IN ADVANCE

What'cha Looking For?
Subscribe

Entries in Production Design (227)

Thursday
Apr212022

Touring 'The First Lady' Suites  

By Abe Friedtanzer

Showtime’s new anthology series The First Lady debuted this past weekend. The series looks simultaneously at three First Ladies throughout history: Eleanor Roosevelt (Gillian Anderson) in the 1930s and 40s, Betty Ford (Michelle Pfeiffer) in the 1970s and Michelle Obama (Viola Davis) in the 2000s and 2010s. The Film Experience will be covering its run (more soon on invididual episodes). 

The network is rolling out a very specific type of red carpet to celebrate the series as it begins airing. Reporting for The Film Experience I was able to visit one of the First Lady Suites, which is a transformed presidential suite at the Ritz-Carlton in downtown Los Angeles. This is also happening in New York, Chicago, and Washington D.C. This was quite the lavish and detailed visual experience.

I snapped a few photos to complement my written descriptions of the visit…

Click to read more ...

Thursday
Dec302021

Chart Updates: Film Editing, Production Design, Cinematography!

by Nathaniel R

All of the Visual categories in the Oscar charts have now been updated save Costume Design which we tend to give its own articles -- playing favourites, sorry! But looking over the charts and the possibilities, it does beg the question: are Dune and West Side Story just going to be nominated in every category? And will any other films core as many nominations?  The year isn't short on films that are visually remarkable of course. There's Power of the Dog, Nightmare Alley, Tragedy of Macbeth, The French Dispatch, The Green Knight, Passing, and more.

But the question is always what are voters actually watching and what are they liking? Being remarkable only gets you so far...

Click to read more ...

Thursday
Apr222021

93rd Academy Awards: Best Production Design

by Daniel Walber

Is it a good year for the Best Production Design category at the Oscars? Is it a bad year? What does the word “good” even mean? Or, for that matter, the word “year”? Certainly not the same thing as “eligibility period,” given the way things have shaken out with the 93rd Academy Awards. Pour one out for First Cow.

But I digress. We have five films nominated for Best Production Design, and they’re a relatively modest batch. There’s the eternal joke about the Oscars nominating movies for “most” rather than “best” design, but by some miracle that hasn’t happened this year...

Click to read more ...

Thursday
Apr222021

The Furniture: John Waters, Small-Business Advocate

Team Experience is celebrating John Waters for his 75th birthday. So here's a special episode of "The Furniture," by Daniel Walber, our series on Production Design. 

Pecker is a rare, quiet(er) film in the John Waters filmography. It’s not as outrageous as Pink Flamingos or Female Trouble, nor as bombastic as Hairspray or Serial Mom. It’s plenty lewd, of course, and it’s hardly devoid of yelling. But it’s understated.

After all, it’s a movie about photography - pictures over words, that sorta thing. It’s about capturing the essence of Baltimore in crisp snapshots. The titular Pecker (Edward Furlong) is an amateur photographer with a passion for the little moments of his life: a burger on the grill, the Hampden neighborhood welcome sign, rats mating in an alley...

Click to read more ...

Wednesday
Mar242021

The Furniture: A Brief Tribute to Simone Signoret in a Brief Role

"The Furniture," by Daniel Walber, is a series on Production Design. 

Thursday marks 100 years since the birth of iconic French actress Simone Signoret. But how to celebrate? By my count, she was in three films nominated for Best Production Design. One of them, Is Paris Burning?, I covered way back in 2016. Another, Ship of Fools, also nabbed Signoret her second nomination for Best Actress. Unfortunately, it’s something of a bloated and maudlin mess.

That leaves us with La Ronde, a film made shortly before Signoret really burst into international stardom. She’s barely in it, playing a Viennese sex worker who bookends the meandering narrative. Even so, it’s her movie star quality that makes the whole thing work - that and the magic of Jean d’Eaubonne’s Oscar-nominated production design, of course. The film is Max Ophüls’s adaptation of an Arthur Schnitzler play, a circular jaunt that slips from paramour to paramour...

Click to read more ...