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To honor contributions of legendary Production Designers and Art Directors of the past, the Art Directors Guild has established a Hall of Fame that inducts new members into its ranks at the Annual Awards Banquet.
HILYARD BROWN (1910-1981) won an Academy Award' in 1963 for Cleopatra, the film that almost ruined 20th Century Fox. His portfolio includes Hooper, Billy Jack Goes to Washington, Hustle, Von Ryan's Express, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Al Capone and All My Sons. Brown entered the industry in 1937 as a draftsman for Warner Bros. His first screen credit was as an Assistant Art Director on Citizen Kane (1941), widely recognized as a masterpiece. The most important of Brown's later films, from a design perspective, was The Night of the Hunter, the only film directed by Charles Laughton.
HENRY 'BUMMY' BUMSTEAD (1915-2006) passed away this year, still designing after a 70-year career and more than 100 movies. He had just concluded work on two still unreleased Clint Eastwood movies'Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima. 'Bummy' designed a total of 13 films for Eastwood. He received Oscars' for recreating rural Alabama of the 1930s in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) and for his sets of Depression-era Chicago in The Sting (1973). He received Academy Award' nominations for Eastwood's 1992 western Unforgiven and for Alfred Hitchcock's thriller Vertigo. The Art Directors Guild honored him with their Lifetime Achievement Award in 1998. 'Bummy' worked on three other Hitchcock films'The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), Topaz (1969) and Family Plot (1976). His association with Clint Eastwood began with the 1972 western Joe Kidd. His first job as an Art Director was in the 1948 Paramount film Saigon. Other credits include The Great Waldo Pepper, Slap Shot, The Front Page, Cape Fear, Mystic River and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.
CARROLL CLARK (1894-1968) was nominated for seven Academy Awards' including The Gay Divorcee (1934), Top Hat (1935), A Damsel in Distress (1937), Flight for Freedom (1943), Step Lively (1944), The Absent Minded Professor (1961), and Mary Poppins (1964). He won the Scientific and Engineering Academy Award' in 1943, sharing it with F. Thomas Thompson for the design and construction of a moving cloud and horizon machine. Clark was trained as an architect, but he pursued a career in commercial design before joining Path' Studio in the mid-twenties. His most important early assignment was Howard Hughes' extravagant war film Hell's Angels (1930). But his real achievements came when he joined RKO two years later. He worked with the great Production Designer Van Nest Polglase on King Kong. He created some of the most memorable and elegant sets of the era with some of the great Fred Astaire movies and then adopted the totally different noir style with Hitchcock's Suspicion and Notorious. When RKO closed shop Clark joined Disney as Supervising Art Director and was largely responsible for creating its powerful image in the 1960s.
STEPHEN GOOSSON (1889-1973) began his career as an architect before moving on to moving pictures as Art Director for film producer Lewis J. Selznick in 1919. He later worked for Mary Pickford Productions, Frank Lloyd, DeMille Productions and Fox until being hired by Columbia, where he would work for the rest of his career. This included 25 years as its Supervising Art Director. His work was always meticulously researched, authentically built and rich in details from the pencil drawings to the final full-scale sets. He won an Academy Award' in 1937 for his incredible sets of Shangri-La for Frank Capra's Lost Horizon. He was also nominated for four Academy Awards' for Just Imagine (1930), Holiday (1938), The Little Foxes (1941), and A Thousand and One Nights (1945). A hall of mirrors, the climactic sequence in Orson Welles' The Lady from Shanghai (1948), designed by Goosson with Sturges Carne, is one of film's most arresting images.
HARRY HORNER (1910-1994) won two Academy Awards for The Heiress (1949) and The Hustler (1961). He was also nominated for They Shoot Horses, Don't They' (1969). He worked for a young Otto Preminger and later for the legendary producer Max Reinhardt, whom he followed to the United States in 1935. Horner worked on many Broadway and Metropolitan Opera productions before moving to Hollywood in the '40s. He directed a number of 'B' movies and early television series, but it is as Production Designer that he will be remembered. After directing such films as the cult favorite Red Planet Mars (1952) he returned exclusively to Art Direction.
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