Richard Sylbert

Richard Sylbert, production designer: born New York 16 April 1928; twice married (three sons, two daughters); died Woodland Hills, California 23 March 2002.

The production designer Richard Sylbert was responsible for some of the most haunting and evocative sets in American cinema. Among his creations were the hotel of Rosemary's Baby with its sinister faded glory, and the Los Angeles of the 1930s which formed the backdrop for the intriguingly convoluted chicanery of Chinatown. Both of these films were directed by Roman Polanski, one of several leading directors who regularly worked with Sylbert, among whom were Elia Kazan, Mike Nichols and Warren Beatty.

Sylbert also created the starkly atmospheric settings for John Frankenheimer's masterly cold-war thriller The Manchurian Candidate, the distinctive bar-room set for the television series Cheers, and he was the winner of two Academy Awards, for Nichols's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Beatty's Dick Tracy. Frankenheimer said,

Richard more than any production designer I've worked with gave a definitive look and feel to a movie. He was a true collaborator in every sense of the word.

He was also the only production designer to become head of production at a major studio.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1928, Sylbert and his twin brother Paul were inseparable. (Paul won an Oscar in 1978 as production designer of Heaven Can Wait.) They served together in the Korean war in the army infantry unit, then studied painting at the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia. Richard also studied under William Cameron Menzies and did his first screen work on a film Menzies was directing. He stated that initially he was terrified, but he got a unique education when each evening Menzies would patiently sketch out the next day's shots for him on hotel stationery. "What he did was structure a film's visual content," said Sylbert, something he would himself be lauded for later in his career.

Most of the Sylberts' early work was done for television. Richard worked for NBC in New York, initially as a set painter, while Paul took a similar job at CBS. Richard graduated to art director on the television series Inner Sanctum in 1954, and in 1956 worked for the first time as a movie production designer with Patterns, a powerful tale of corporate corruption and deceit adapted by Rod Serling from his television play and shot in New York. The two brothers served as art directors on Kazan's Baby Doll (1956), and Richard worked for Kazan again on A Face in the Crowd (1957) and Splendor in the Grass (1961), which showcased his flair for recreating a bygone period (in this case the late 1920s) with both flair and unfailing accuracy.

The film's star, Warren Beatty, was quick to recognise Richard Sylbert's great talent, and when he became a director he hired Sylbert to create the look of Shampoo (1975) and Reds (1981) plus the highly stylised, Oscar-winning cartoon world of Dick Tracy (1990). Beatty said, "Dick was always logical, he was unpretentious, he was no-nonsense. I was interested in his opinion on everything to do with the movie." For Sidney Lumet's version of O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night (1962), Sylbert captured the claustrophobic atmosphere of a musty family manse in 1910, and his sets for The Manchurian Candidate (1962) were an important contribution to the film's compelling mise-en-scène.

One of the most memorable sequences, in which captured prisoners are brainwashed into believing they are attending a lecture at a women's institute, was credited by the director Frankenheimer to his designer:

The famous 360-degree shot, from the hotel lobby in New Jersey, with the ladies talking about the garden club, to the amphitheatre in Manchuria, where the psychiatrist is describing the brain-washing process – that was all Richard,

his design. I told him what I wanted and he figured out how to do it. His production design was total production design.

Mike Nichols asked Sylbert to create the sets for the first film he directed, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966). Most of the film's action took place during one fraught night in the university dwelling where a married couple (Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton) play host to a younger pair, and its intensity owed much to Sylbert's Oscar-winning evocation of a college professor's living room. Sylbert was a stickler for detail and later, for a single shot of a home library in Stanley R. Jaffe's Without a Trace (1983), he instructed the set decorator to buy 300 books, from ancient classics to feminist Georgian poets, so that the bookshelves would be convincing as those of an English teacher.

Other Nichols films designed by Sylbert included The Graduate (1967), Catch-22 (1970), Carnal Knowledge (1971) and Day of the Dolphin (1973). Roman Polanski's two most successful American films, Rosemary's Baby (1968) and Chinatown (1974) were both designed by Sylbert. The exterior shots for the old apartment building in which most of the former took place were actually the façade of the famed Dakota, where John Lennon was later killed, but the eerily cavernous interiors were created by Sylbert and contributed to the uneasy mood of this superior piece of Gothic horror. "Our craft," said Sylbert, "is not about pointing at a building and saying, 'That will do.' "

For Chinatown, which won Sylbert his first Oscar, he made all the buildings white to reflect both the summer heat of Los Angeles and the film's motif of drought. Other colours were primarily yellows and browns, and combined with John A. Alonzo's superb photography gave the noir classic an incisive look of period and place. Peter Biskind, in his book on the films of the 1970s, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, wrote that one of Sylbert's strengths was to "boil down a script into one or two visual metaphors that express the essence of a movie".

Sylbert first became involved in production when he worked as associate producer on What's New Pussycat? (1965), and 10 years later he was to replace Robert Evans as vice-president in charge of production at Paramount, the only time a production designer has achieved such a position. Evans said,

I was as impressed with Richard's brilliant literary mind as his production design mind, so I made him head of production of the studio when I resigned. It was because of his knowledge of material and the people he's worked with and knew who respected him.

Among the films made during Sylbert's tenure were The Bad News Bears (1976), Bugsy Malone (1976), The Tenant (1976) and Looking for Mr Goodbar (1977), but he confessed later that his heart was in design, and he left Paramount in 1978 to apply his flair to such films as Reds (1981), The Cotton Club (1984), Bonfire of the Vanities (1990) and My Best Friend's Wedding (1997). He designed the set for the Broadway production of Neil Simon's comedy The Prisoner of Second Avenue (1971) and won an Emmy nomination for his bar-room set for the long-running Cheers. He earned six Oscar nominations, and last year received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society of Motion Picture and Television Art Directors.

Sylbert remarked in 1990,

No one has any trouble understanding what a costume designer does. But "production designer" is a title without any definition. I tell people that, just as a painter organises pigment and a musician organises noise, a production designer organises visual material.

Tom Vallance