The idea of a “period bit” usually evokes images of Georgian ballrooms and crenellated strokes. But now that “Time to pretend” is a vintage -track (how terrible), someone TV show or film Located in the rear half of the 1900s is fixed a period project; And the 1970s can specifically be one of the most challenging decades for contemporary films and series to recreate.
There are a number of reasons why this is. Indiewire was enough for production designers who have worked with contemporary movies or shows in the 1970s – including Anastasia Masaro (“Other traveler“), Curt Beech (“Bulk clan“), Howard Cummings (“Behind the Kandelabra“), Aaron Haye (“Bohemian Rhapsodi“) And Beth Mickle (“Deuce“) – To ask how difficult they have found the time period and none of them classified the 70s as easy.
They emphasized all ways in which our cultural awareness of the 70s can trick movie herds and audiences into believing that we remember what the period should look like. But the memory, just like a shag mat, is difficult to maintain.
“It’s close enough to feel familiar enough, but so much has changed that every detail is important if you want to keep the world genuine and credible,” Haye told IndieWire. “For example, it can be difficult to find a place that still retains a real sense of the 70s. Small details such as tak antennas, graphic elements and of course more obvious things like vehicles and architecture are important to base a bit during that period.”
Yet, as a book pointed out, many of the material goods are actually from the 70s of lower quality than previous decades and Even more degraded than the relics of the period in the 80s and 90s. “Due to the (economic) decline, products manufactured and used during this period of lower quality than the baseline are today. Because of this, they have largely been moved to landfills. They had little value then and do not keep it. The upside is that all this adds an interesting visual story to try to tell,” pasture to indiewire.
Masaro told Indiewire that she and her team had to rely on many specialty stores and rents to create an authentic sense of the 70s in her sets. “What makes the 70s a little more manageable is that it is still a very desirable era, whether it is for the design or nostalgia, so there are collectors who specialize in it,” Masaro said.
Cummings agreed that one bright place to work during the decade is the nostalgic desire of the styles and objects most associated with the period. “The color palette alone in the 70s just immediately transforms the visual. Add exploration and use of structures … (it is) Heaven,” Cummings told IndieWire.
It only takes a certain diligent scan on eBay, chairman and Facebook market to get to heaven, it turns out at least when it comes to finding the appropriate furniture of the 70s. Mickle told Indiewire that it is not necessarily difficult to find pieces from the decade but that is Surry to use them properly and in the right proportion.
“The 70s saw a wave of more experimental styles (in) shapes and shapes used in architecture, furniture design and surface patterns, as well as clothing and vehicle design. But in order to recreate the period, it is important to remember that these more extreme visuals were not seen everywhere at once,” Mickle said to IndieWire. “If it is not kept in mind, it is easy to go overboard and flood the frame with the 70s clichés. The design can quickly feel like a caricatur of the period.”
Beech agreed to the danger to flood the zone; If he had any advice for others who worked on projects in the 70s, it would be to remember that people did not gather as many things in the way we do now. The temptation to fill the walls is something that production designers that go for period accuracy must fight against. “If you need to fill a space visually for a project from the 1970s, you must be more creative than squeezing the walls with things. It will be more about the basics of color, structure and shapes than” things, “Beech said.
The significance for the time period must also be balanced with a inhabited feeling of other time periods. Masaro’s work with “other travelers” is decades that are tightened, but she said that the key was that she could not seal the 50s and 60s when it was time to design her 70s sets. “What I find with any period is (you can’t) focus too heavy on the decade styles themselves, without including design choices from previous decades,” Masaro said. “To spend previous decades with” current “makes it feel more realistic and less like an advertisement for the 1970s.”
Since the colors, structures and geometric patterns that immediately scream the “1970s” are so strong deviations from both modern design and much of what came before in the 1900s, that balance is easy to get wrong or tip into Pastiche. “Only the 1930s are more difficult,” Beech said, about another era that may have become too iconic in our shared cultural imagination for its own good.
The 70s require a lot of patience to seek out scarce resources, to strain through incomplete research material and to fight our contemporary myths and misunderstandings that everything was water beds and egg-shaped chairs. “But if you are not excited about that challenge, you are in the wrong career,” Beech said. “I speak for all production designers when I say we live for the really hard assignments!”
Indieviews’70s presented by Bleecker Street ”RELAY. “Riz Ahmed plays a” fixer “in world -class that specializes in brokers lucrative payments between corrupt companies and the individuals who threaten their ruin.RELAY“” Sharp, funny and smart entertaining from his first scene to his last twist, ‘Relay’ is a modern paranoid thriller as Harkens back to the genre’s 70s heyday. “From director David Mackenzie (” Hell or High Water “) and also in the lead role Lily James, in theaters August 22.
