Their goal: save movie backdrops
Art Directors Guild Recovery Project trying to keep famous scenes out of dumpsters
VALENCIA, California — On top of a hill in Valencia, where the wind blows most days, the buildings are big, new and absolutely nonforthcoming. They could house anything — a doctor’s office, a car dealership, a secret government agency. Inside one, against the back wall, lies a pile of large equally nondescript pieces of canvas. Most are long and tied up with string; some have been folded into thick squares and stacked. They could be anything — enormous window treatments or very thin floor coverings.
Until they are unrolled and reveal … the world.
Hillsides, houses, airports and cathedrals; cityscapes, landscapes and the ocean rocking toward the horizon; courtrooms and bedrooms, bungalows and castles; gas stations, skyscrapers, apartment buildings; the roofs of Paris and New York, corridors, tapestries, train depots and a mineshaft burrowing into an icy mountain.
The magic of Hollywood, in a Valencia warehouse, rolled up and waiting to be claimed.
These are the 90 painted backdrops that remain of more than 200 saved through the Art Directors Guild Backdrop Recovery Project, a two-year attempt to keep a relatively few pieces of irreplaceable art and Hollywood history from the fate of so many sets, props, costumes and backdrops: the studio dumpster.
“Hollywood started as a green industry and then became brown,” says former ADG president and Recovery Project founder Tom Walsh. “Everything was used repeatedly; nothing went into storage. Then when studios began to decline, they got rid of everything, sold things in auctions or just threw them away. And the first to go were backings. We will never know how many were lost, and if I go down that road I will just start to cry.”
“These, though,” he says, “we were able to save.”
There is no more iconic Hollywood image than the backdrop. Backdrops, or backings, are the enormous paintings that make the movie and television industries possible by stretching the confines of a studio set into endless possibility. With a good backdrop, western plains can stretch to the horizon, snowy peaks of mountains create the suspense of dizzying heights, jungles bloom, skyscrapers loom and cities wink through apartment windows. Sets cradle the action; actors, writers and directors create characters and drama; but backdrops build worlds.
Many are imprinted on our collective memory — the Georgian sunset against which Scarlett O’Hara vowed never to be hungry again, the island beaches of “South Pacific, the view of the Danube from the Von Trapp family’s terrace in The Sound of Music, Mount Rushmore in North by Northwest.
In the early years of Hollywood, studios hired artists to paint their own backings, which were sometimes used repeatedly and sometimes thrown away, depending on need, space and the studio’s financials. In the 1950s, a few scenic artists realized this was not a great system, that studios somehow sharing backings might work better, and a few artists began striking out on their own, painting and purchasing various backdrops they would then rent out.
Nowadays almost all backings, painted and otherwise, are furnished by rental companies.
JC Backings is one of the best known of the now handful of rental companies with the most notable collection of historic backdrops in the business. A business that has increasingly shifted away from painted backings to photograph and digital versions. Over the years, JC Backings has regularly, and out of necessity, culled its collection. Even when rolled or folded, backdrops are big, difficult to move, and require temperature-controlled storage. Those not making money as rentals are literally just taking up space.
Two years ago, President Lynne Coakley decided the company no longer needed 207 of its older backings. But this time, instead of filling up an oversize dumpster, she donated them to the Art Directors Guild, which unrolled, photographed and cataloged each one, and then set about finding each one a home.
Most of the more famous images went quickly. The film academy took the backdrop from the Fit as a Fiddle number in Singin’ in the Rain, the eerie landscape of Forbidden Planet, the tapestried walls of Marie Antoinette, the office from Adam’s Rib.
Others, such as the Sistine Chapel from The Shoes of the Fisherman were given to colleges; the Autry Museum of the American West has eight (including two from the 1947 Katherine Hepburn/Spencer Tracy Western The Sea of Grass) and a few went to the Royal Scottish Academy. (George Gibson, the legendary head of MGM’s scenic design department, where many of the backdrops were painted, was Scottish.)
In their new homes, the backings function in a variety of ways — as exhibits, teaching tools and occasionally theatrical backdrops, but all, including the ones still in storage in Valencia, mark another important shift in Hollywood. For many who work in the cinematic crafts, the real tragedy of the digital revolution and the end of the studio system has been the loss of so many iconic props and artworks. Now, as more studios are dismantled, absorbed or re-purposed, there is a growing demand that the working assets of old Hollywood, be they research libraries, backdrops or remainders of sets, be preserved.
In the short version of the story, the Backdrop Recovery Project began with a phone call. In 2017, Walsh was working in New Mexico as production designer on the Netflix western series Longmire when he got a call from Coakley. She said: “Well, Tom, we’re going to move.” He managed not to drop the phone, but it was a big and upsetting announcement. JC Backings was founded by the Coakley family, which has been part of the scenic art world for five generations. Over the years, the company acquired the collections of MGM, Universal, 20th Century Fox, Disney and Paramount.
For 40 years, the company operated out of the famous MGM scenic paint studio on what is now the Sony lot in Culver City and had a history with the studio for even longer. Lynne’s great-grandfather, John Coakley, was a scenic artist there, working under Gibson’s tutelage, when, in 1936, he fell to his death from a studio scaffolding. MGM’s method of compensation was to hire his son, John Harold Coakley, as an apprentice. John Harold eventually went to 20th Century Fox and, after Cleopatra nearly bankrupted the studio, he bought its backdrop collection. In 1962, he formed JC Backings with his son, John Gary Coakley.
In 1972, the company moved to MGM and its still gold-standard scenic studio.
JC Backings remains in the painted backdrop business — a backing from the 1958 musical South Pacific, for example, was recently used on an upcoming Netflix series and several equally venerable backings were recently rented for new Marvel projects (none of which Lynne can name because she signed nondisclosure agreements). But at least half the company’s inventory is photo and digital, and it made no sense to pay for the MGM studio, which was built for painting scenic backings and did not have the storage space the company needed.
When Lynne Coakley decided to move the headquarters to a larger facility in Culver City, with a warehouse equipped for painting in Gardena, she eyed the 3,000 or so painted backings in the company’s collection and realized more than 200 had not been used in years.
Moving those backings, some of which are more than 30 feet wide and, affixed to wooden battens, weigh several hundred pounds, is no joke. Nor is the work of unrolling each one and trying to identify the films for which it was used. Especially when you have only a couple of weeks to do it.
But if the three weeks it took to catalog and move the backings were difficult, they were also exhilarating. “No one knew the Fit as a Fiddle backing was in there,” says Walsh. “Or the tapestries from Marie Antoinette.
“If it weren’t for JC Backings,” he says, “this library, which dates back to the 1930s wouldn’t exist.”