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Author:
Pamela K. Johnson
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Pamela K. Johnson is a filmmaker and was a 2007 Fellow in AFI's Directing Workshop for Women and winner of the WIF/GM Acceleration Grant for Emerging Filmmakers in 2006.
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Pamela K. Johnson was a 2007 Fellow in AFI's Directing Workshop for Women.
She made her second short film, Stitches, in the DWW program. It is a fictional tale of a fashionista who gets displaced by Hurricane Katrina and must share a room with a girl who has no style, until the unhip girl provokes the stylish one to show who she is inside the pretty clothes.
Johnson was a recipient of the Women In Film/General Motors Acceleration Grant for Emerging Filmmakers in 2006 and she is the co-author of two books, one being Santa and Pete, made into a 1999 CBS TV movie starring James Earl Jones, Hume Cronyn and Flex Alexander. She is managing editor of health-oriented ABILITY Magazine.
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PROCESS: KRISTI ZEA - CONFESSIONS OF A PRODUCTION DESIGNER-HYPHENATE
As a little girl, Kristi Zea seemed to be skipping towards a career in design. Growing up on New York City’s Lower East Side in the 50’s, she frequently rearranged her bedroom furniture to suit her tastes, and dolled up her Barbies in fashions she created. So it shouldn’t have been a surprise to anyone in the old neighborhood when she went on to become a top production designer, creating the memorable worlds of The Departed, Good Fellas, Silence of the Lambs and more.
We spoke one evening recently as she wound down from a long day of shooting Confessions of a Shopaholic in Manhattan. The romantic comedy centers around financial journalist Rebecca Bloomwood (Isla Fisher), who is wrestling with her spiraling addiction. The script was adapted from the first two in a series of Shopaholic novels by British author Sophie Kinsella.
“The story is quite wonderful, well-written and fun. It’s an homage to consumerism,” Zea says. Bling doesn’t come cheap. A Jerry Bruckheimer production, the film was budgeted in the $60 million range. At this writing, they were shooting five days a week and rehearsing on Sundays, which was scheduled to continue until early May.
On The Job
Usually Zea is the third person hired on a project after the actor, who gets the movie green-lighted, and the director. As the production design department head, she works with a team, including the art director, assistant art director(s), location manager, property master, set director, researcher(s), art department coordinator, a couple of production assistants, buyers, shoppers for set décor, illustrators, a graphic designer, an assistant to the graphic designer and a half-dozen location scouts.
A few decades back, Zea had to be her own assistant. A liberal arts graduate from Columbia University, her career began to take shape after she helped a stylist friend who worked for a photographer.
She later went on to style commercials for print and TV ads, such as Whisk’s “Ring Around the Collar” campaign, hot-footing it around whatever town she happened to be in to find locations, talent, clothing, props and furniture for one- and two-wall sets. She went on to do costume and sets for two afternoon children’s TV specials, but her big break came when director Alan Parker hired her to do costumes for the cult fave Fame.
Based on New York City’s High School of Performing Arts (the sister school to Zea’s alma mater High School of Music and Art), the 1980 film was about a bunch of insecure yet talented kids from different backgrounds, who were desperate to make it in show business. The project propelled Zea’s career, and gave her a peak into the ka-ching potential of film’s auxiliary revenue streams.
Get Jiggy With It
“Prior to Fame the only color that dancewear came in was black, pink and white,” she recalls. That’s why her costume team bought every white garment Capezio had, “overdying them, ombreing them, distressing them. Back then, dancers shredded their leotards, put them on their heads, added cuts t-shirts, used safety pins to hold everything together.
“We took all those looks that dancers wore and added to it, pushed it. The irony is that we took this stuff into a meeting with executives at the studio and said, “We could produce a line of dancewear that does what the white suit did for (1977’s) Saturday Night Fever. They said, ‘Nah, we’re not interested.’ ” But soon after, during her exercise guru era, Jane Fonda produced a line of active wear, which probably proved a cash cow, Zea adds.
Sure her paychecks have gotten bigger, as has her staff, but sometimes Zea deals with the dumb stuff just like everybody else. The progress she has made, she believes, is in how she reacts to those crazy-making moments. “As I’ve gotten older, I recognize that it’s only a movie. Before I would have thought It’s my life. Something is wrong with me if things are not working out. Now I have the confidence to say, Maybe it’s not supposed to work out; maybe it’s the idea and not me. I’ve developed a tough skin and, I hope, not lost my sense of humor.”
Breaking Down A Script
Switching hats on occasion, Zea has produced such films as 1993’s Philadelphia and 1997’s As Good As It Gets. When she is first given a script, she reads it as she would a book. “I want to be attracted by the story. That’s very important to me. If I can’t get behind the story, it’s hard to design it. I also imagine working with that particular director on the story. I make a list of locations. How much interior work vs. exterior work, who the main character is. I might single out a line, and ask myself Why is the character saying that? What’s the purpose of this scene?”
“After that, I imagine where the character would live, the kind of apartment they would have. Locations are predominant in film. I may start to look at photographers’ work, especially if it’s a period film. If it’s modern day, I pull out tear sheets from different magazines, put them on foam board or in plastic sheets. I bring that in when I sit down with the director. As I was reading the script for (1988’s) Married to the Mob, the world I kept imagining was a book of photographs by Amy Arbus. That book kept singing to me. It was the world of that period."
Plays Well With Others
Though she enjoys solitary activities such as writing and sewing, Zea is passionate about film’s collaborative process. “Lots of people are working on the same thing, coming up with great ideas and implementing them, which is infinitely more rewarding for me.”
Occasionally one of her films is in post, while another is shooting, and the producer or director of the former may ask her to have a look. Perhaps they’ve added computer generated images and seek her input to make sure that they’re compatible with everything else they’ve done. Certain directors, such as Jonathan Demme or Martin Scorsese, will show her a rough cut of a nearly finished project for feedback or just as a courtesy. “It may be the last time before they lock picture.”
Rumor has it that in a nod to Scarface, everybody who’s about to get whacked in 2006’s The Departed has “X”s in the scene leading up to the kill. Zea confirms this. “Marty (Scorsese) wanted to play with this, to utilize it in shadow form, patterns. Marty and I talked about it, but he talked about it more with the director of photography, Michael Ballhaus.”
How Novel!
Zea gets especially inspired by novels. “I love when there’s a world that I can read in more detail about. When we did (1991’s) Silence of the Lambs, that book was our bible. With Beloved, that book became a bible, too. I underlined passages, used tabs to mark pages. A lot of writers are very visually minded. They create these worlds
“Whenever possible, I incorporate that world. With (1998’s) Beloved, Toni Morrison wrote the description of the inside of [character] Sethe’s house in such incredible detail. I printed [those descriptions] out in big letters and put them on the walls. Same with Confessions, Sophie Kinsella gives tremendously detailed descriptions. Her world is British and our heroine in is American, so I spoke to Sophie because we wanted an interpretation of the American world that would parallel the British in terms of trendy clothing, what the hot buttons are in interior design ”
Wearing Producer and Director Hats
“With As Good As It Gets, I was asked to come on as creative producer. Jim Brooks and I had done a couple of films together, and he wanted me to interface between the production designer and him and the studio in terms of the costume and the set, and make everything seamless. I acted as the visual police. Unfortunately I didn’t have a lot of experience with irate agents and ballistic executives. I don’t like putting out fires, I like making them.”
She was the second unit director, on such films as Beloved and Philadelphia, as the first unit was working elsewhere. Being a part of the second unit, “usually entails shooting a lot of sequences that don’t involve the primary actors. It may be getting establishing shots, scenes of crowds, close-ups, inserts and other small sequences. Jonathan [Demme] would give me those, because as a production designer I would know to find visually related material to add to what already existed.” Zea shot the opening sequence of Philadelphia.
The Family Tree
Her late father, James, was a TV commercial producer, who started out as a World War II correspondent. Her mother, Alice, who lives in Connecticut, worked in mail-order advertising. “Both my parents had an interest in the arts, but were not artists per se." But Zea’s daughter, Norma, 17, appears to be skipping down the artistic path like her mom. “She’s very interested in theater, mostly dancing and acting and singing.”
As a professor at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, where she’s taught for the last five years, Zea has plenty of surrogate children as well. Recently she invited her class over to the Confessions set to observe and ask questions. “It really pays to give them as much input as I can,” she says, “since they’re going to be the next generation of production designers.”
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