Polly Platt: Hollywood Production Design and Creative Authorship [Hardcover]

This book examines the career and creative labour of production designer Polly Platt. It focuses mainly on her contributions to 1970s Hollywood, but also considers her later work. Considering films such as The Last Picture Show, Paper Moon, The Bad News Bears, and The Witches of Eastwick, it argues that Platts construction of their visual palette and mise-en-sc?ne was so creative and so comprehensive that it can be considered authorial. Chapters discuss Platts life and its influence on her work, her attention to detail, her role in location decisions and costume design, and her use of colour. An epilogue discusses her later career as a producer and her mentorship to young filmmakers like Cameron Crowe and Wes Anderson. This is the first full-length examination of the career of one of the women practitioners whose work was so important to 1970s cinema, and provides an alternative methodology to the auteur-driven framing that so regularly defines the era.

[Aaron Hunter] charts Platts substantial contribution to the look of New Hollywood cinema through films like The Last Picture Show (1971) and Thieves Like Us (1974). Hunters book is an eye-opener, depicting production design as a collaborative role that cuts across every department from locations to costumes to script. In the 1970s, it was also an underappreciated and underpaid job. (Nancy M. West, LA Review of Books, lareviewofbooks.org, April 13, 2022)

Aaron Hunter lectures in the department of filc"