Sketch to Screen-- Hollywood's Oscar Nominees Talk Costuming

By the time you read this, the 2020 Oscar results will be in the books, and  the world will know who has taken home the golden statuette for Best Costume Design . Could it be Mark Bridges, who outfitted the Joker in his wine-red suit? Or Jacqueline Durran, for her color-coded gowns reflecting the prim nineteenth century world of Little Women? Perhaps the winners were Christopher Peterson and fifteen-time nominee Sandy Powell, joining forces on the 6,000 period costumes needed for The Irishman. Or Mayes C. Rubeo, a first-time nominee who made a big impact on a small budget (I loved those telltale spectator pumps) with Jojo Rabbit. Or maybe Arianne Phillips, who captured the Hawaiian shirts and the laid-back styles of 1969 for One Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood.

Sitting at my computer on the morning of the Oscar ceremony, I didn’t know who had triumphed. But I was thinking back to a very special event I attended on Saturday, February 8. Called “Sketch to Screen,” it was a celebration of costume design, sponsored by UCLA’s David C. Copley Center for Costume Design, along with Swarovski, the crystal company that is now enjoying its 125^th year in business. The highlight of the afternoon was a spirited panel led by UCLA professor and costume historian Deborah Nadoolman, herself an Oscar nominee for the over-the-top designs in Coming to America. All six of this year’s nominees were present on-stage, and Nadoolman’s smart questions led them to reflect in colorful terms on their profession.

All agreed that costumes are essential contributions to Best Actor and Best Actress performances. Why? Because appropriate clothing and footwear help performers connect with the time and place their characters are supposed to inhabit. Beyond this, they help the actors shape their characters’ approach to life. Said the always articulate Nadoolman, “We give actors the clothes; the actors give the world the performance.” Generally lead actors are part of the discussions about their costumes, and  try them on far enough in advance to incorporate their look and feel as they create their characterizations. But sometimes the costume is the first thing that introduces an actor to his or her part. Arianne Phillips remembers one low-budget quickie for which Malcolm McDowell admitted he hadn’t had time to read the script: the clothing she’d designed provided his first instructive glimpse of the man he was supposed to be.

The panelists all admitted they were bothered when actors insisted on comfortable modern footwear (like, for instance, ugg boots) hidden beneath period finery. The story was told about how director Stephen Frears, shooting Dangerous Liaisons in 1988, allowed Michelle Pfeiffer to wear her own cowboy boots underneath her 18^th century gowns. This may have put her at ease, and but it also affected her gait on screen in a way that was far from appropriate.

Of course no one expects 100% fidelity to the hugely constricting styles of the past. And there are times, for the purposes of artistry and character exploration, when designers deviate from strict fidelity to period dress. Sandy Powell, whose designs for last year’s The Favourite were deliberately eccentric, insists, “We’re not making documentaries.”

Sometimes, though, an authentic fabric or ornament establishes the reality of an outfit. For Brad Pitt’s role in Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood, Phillips located a massive vintage belt buckle that proclaimed its wearer a proud member of the Stuntmen’s Association. This buckle, along with Hawaiian shirts, jeans, and moccasins, helped turn Pitt’s Cliff Booth into a cool customer whom audiences, and award-giving bodies, have loved.

  

OK, now the results are in. Congratulations to Jackie Durran for her award-winning designs – period frocks with deliberately modern touches -- for the four March sisters

The Four Little Women and How They Grew

“Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents.” So Little Women begins on the page, and so previous screen versions have always begun: with the four March sisters lamenting the poverty they face while their father is off in the Civil War. One striking feature of Greta Gerwig’s new version is that it dares to break the mold and play with the book’s chronology.

Growing up I was a serious Louisa May Alcott fan. I read most of Alcott’s novels, which fall into the category you could call 19^th century YA, and I later persuaded my kids (yes, my son as well as my daughter) to enjoy Little Women, as I had. More recently I’ve read Alcott biographies, and also the fictional March (about the Civil War escapades of Jo’s father), plus Anne Boyd Rioux’s scholarly Meg, Jo,Beth, Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters. So I guess you could call me a true believer.

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As such I’ve always been partial to the 1933 George Cukor screen adaptation, at least to Jo as portrayed by Katharine Hepburn. Alcott’s original description of Jo, her own literary alter ego, was that she was “tall, thin, and brown, and reminded one of a colt, for she never seemed to know what to do with her long limbs, which were very much in her way.” No other Jo in my memory comes so close to this physical description as Hepburn, and her striking combination of awkwardness, intelligence, and occasional pig-headedness makes her my nostalgic favorite. The 1949 musical version features, alas, June Allyson warbling about being “the man of the family now that Papa is away from home.” Allyson is just too cute and perky to be my Jo. In this iteration, directed by Mervyn LeRoy, Janet Leigh makes a conventionally pretty Meg, Margaret O’Brien an appropriately fragile Beth, and Elizabeth Taylor  an extremely unlikely Amy, overgrown and wearing a distracting blonde wig. (Yikes!)

Hollywood then left the story alone until 1994, when an actual female director, Gillian Armstrong, took it on. Her version, much loved by many women I know, conveys a nice warm sense of family, presided over by a glowing Marmee (the mother character) in the person of Susan Sarandon. I’ve admired the young Claire Danes as Beth and the even younger Kirsten Dunst as a perfect snip of an Amy, though at 12 she could not play Amy’s later scenes and had to be replaced by Samantha Mathis. It all looks gorgeous but I just can’t accept Winona Ryder: too petite and too pretty to ever be awkward, intense Jo.

Greta Gerwig had the bright idea of focusing on Jo’s literary aspirations by starting the film near the story’s end, with Jo living in New York as a fledgling writer. Gerwig’s structure is complex, moving us back and forth in time. Uniquely, she focuses on a Jo who genuinely spurns marriage in favor of a career. How does she handle the fact that Alcott’s Jo does indeed fall in love and get married? There’s a clever twist I don’t think it’s fair to fully disclose; suffice it to say that this is the most “meta” of Little Women adaptations, so that the Jo we meet is in many ways Alcott herself, adapting her family’s story for popular consumption. Other virtues: Laura Dern’s Marmee and Florence Pugh’s Amy are far more complex than usual; Meryl Streep is a hoot as stern Aunt March; and Saoirse Ronan’s uninhibited romping with the boy-next-door, Timothée Chalamet, captures a delightfully warm relationship that  she cannot allow to ripen into love.

The Virgin Suicides of Five Little Women

I’ve just watched the beautiful and talented Kirsten Dunst, at 12, play snippy little Amy March—a schoolgirl obsessed with fashion, popularity, and nice noses—in the 1994 screen version of Little Women. What a shock to jump five years and see Dunst as a very different young woman in Sofia Coppola’s debut film, The Virgin Suicides.

The Virgin Suicides, based on a sensational 1999 novel by Jeffrey Eugenides, was the then-twenty-eight-year-old Coppola’s debut as a film director. She has said that prior to reading the novel, she had no clear artistic path. It was her intense enthusiasm for this book that led her to adapt it for the screen, and then to find her calling as a director. She loved this novel because—grim as it was—it seemed to capture her sense of young womanhood as a time of transition, a tumultuous passage from innocent girlishness into the powers (and fears) of an adult female life. Eugenides is the rare author who wholeheartedly praises the film made from his novel. He notes, though, that in his mind the tale had chiefly focused on the young suburban boys who obsessed from a distance over the macabre doings of the five gorgeous Lisbon sisters. The film version, he notes, necessarily puts the five beautiful blondes at the visual center of the action, giving us clues to their surprising choices, though by no means putting their mysteries to rest.

Yes, this is a film about suicide, beginning with that of the youngest Lisbon, Cecilia. She had previously explained her nihilistic mindset to an emergency room doctor who gently chided, “What are you doing here, honey? You're not even old enough to know how bad life gets.” Her matter-of-fact response: “Obviously, Doctor, you've never been a 13-year-old girl.”

The young teenaged sisters so vividly depicted in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women were facing real problems: poverty, serious illness, an absent father wounded on the field of battle, the rigidly circumscribed role of a young lady in 19^th century America. Yet, blessed with lively minds, strong moral fiber, and a sublimely understanding mother, they all coped—and even managed to truly enjoy the innocent frolics of their girlhood. It’s startling to move from the world of Little Women to late twentieth-century suburbia, where the Lisbon family sends its daughters to a tony local school. The Lisbons seem to have no health issues and no particular money woes. True, Mom (Kathleen Turner) and Dad (James Woods, as the school’s math teacher) are intense both in their Catholic devotions and in their household rules of conduct. They don’t seem the sort of parents you’d come to with your personal woes. Maybe that’s why Cecilia, at thirteen, is so determined to end it all. And maybe it’s also why fourteen-year-old Lux (played Dunst) finds her own ways to rebel against the family’s rigid standards of behavior. Hardly virginal, Lux seems committed to giving herself to any boy who’s tempted by her beauty. 

Commenting on The Virgin Suicides years after the film was made, Dunst has noted that her role required her to explore the rawer emotions of the adult world she was personally poised to enter.  Though she’d been acting professionally since age 7, this was her first offbeat independent production, as well as perhaps her first chance to delve into her own sexuality on screen. That’s something Amy March and her older sisters never seem to do. Which makes the world of Little Women, for all its hardships, a friendlier place than the one the Lisbon girls so uneasily inhabit.