‘Ma Rainey’ work earns Diana Stoughton first Oscar nomination
Diana Stoughton may be one of the only people in Pittsburgh who got to see “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” on a big screen.
While most people saw the movie on Netflix, there was a short window in December when it enjoyed a theatrical release exclusively at The Manor theater in Squirrel Hill. Stoughton and five friends went to see it there before COVID-19 restrictions ended its moviehouse run.
Seeing “Ma Rainey” in a theater was special for Stoughton because she was the film’s set decorator during its 2019 production in Pittsburgh. Last week, “Ma Rainey” picked up an Academy Award nomination for best production design, Stoughton’s first Oscar nomination in her more than three-decade career decorating movie sets.
“It’s stunning,” the 60-year-old Bloomfield resident told the PostGazette. “My husband and I looked at each other and we screamed.”
Stoughton is one of many local folks who earned a shot at Oscars glory this year. That list also includes Carnegie Mellon graduate Ann Roth vying for best costume design, also for “Ma Rainey,” and Beechview native Jan Pascale competing with Stoughton on best production design for her work on
David Fincher’s “Mank.”
It’s a friendly competition; Stoughton and Pascale have been friends since they worked together at Pittsburgh Public Theater in the early 1980s. Roth won a best costume design Oscar in 1995 for “The English Patient.”
“We have a long history of art department success in this town,” Stoughton said. “It’s pretty funny right now how everything is coming full circle.”
She’s been a staple in the art departments of movies and television shows filming in Western Pennsylvania since the late ’80s. Her most high-profile gig as a young up-andcomer was an assistant set decorator role on 1991’s “Silence of the Lambs.” She has since earned assistant or full set decorator credit on locally filmed “Lorenzo’s Oil,” “The Mothman Prophecies,” “Adventureland,” “Zack and Miri Make a Porno” and “Mindhunter.”
“Ma Rainey” wasn’t even the first time Stoughton was tapped for an adaptation of an August Wilson play. She received an Emmy nomination for her set decoration work on the 1995 TV movie version of “The Piano Lesson,” which is about to get both a Broadway revival and anotherfeature-film adaptation.
“We knew we were onto something special then,” she said. “We had the same feeling with ‘Ma Rainey.’ It’s something you can
sense on set, that everyone’s working hard toward something special.”
For “Ma Rainey,” Stoughton worked under production designer Mark Ricker with co-set decorator Karen O’Hara, whom she had also collaborated with on “Silence of the Lambs” and “Lorenzo’s Oil.” Their job was to transform contemporary Pittsburgh into 1920s Chicago.
“Everything you see on screen that isn’t a wall or an architectural piece” is their work, Stoughton said.
“It’s like being the interior designer of the film. Everything from the curtains and rugs to the pencil
on the table is the responsibility of the decorators.”
It took a tremendous amount of research and consultations with other departments ranging from props to lighting for Stoughton to make director George C. Wolfe’s vision a reality. Wolfe told them to think of the recording studio where most of “Ma Rainey” takes place like a boxing ring, and they used that guideline to “create a space that Ma could battle all the other elements she had to battle,” Stoughton said.
Wolfe “thinks in metaphors and visuals,” she said, to the point where he designed the basement rehearsal space to look like the lower deck of a slave ship. The director came up with the door that Levee (the late Chadwick Boseman) couldn’t open as a stand-in for life’s disappointments. His eye for detail was so keen that he even had the production department install windows in the rehearsal space so that the lighting could help delineate the passage of time.
Stoughton is perplexed that Wolfe hasn’t enjoyed more awardsseason love, and even more so that “Ma Rainey” was snubbed from the best picture field at the Oscars.
“We attribute it to the algorithm,” she said. “Voting, you just don’t know. It’s why Monday morning was so suspenseful. We’re just sitting on our couches at home going, ‘I have no clue.’”
She has no idea if COVID-19 restrictions will allow her to attend the Oscars in Los Angeles. If so, she will certainly be there if at all possible, she said.
If Stoughton does get to go, she’s looking forward to reuniting with the Pittsburgh “Ma Rainey” crew.
“You cannot thank the crew around you enough, because it doesn’t happen unless you have an incredible crew,” she said. “It’s so much fun to work with your friends for 35 years on and off. It’s one giant family in Pittsburgh.”