The Hollywood Reporter (Weekly)
SARAH CARTER
SET DECORATOR
AS A YOUNG WOMAN, CARTER
thought she’d be spending her career in courtrooms instead of film sets. The Ohio native had studied criminal justice at Georgia State and took a job as a probation officer with the intent of eventually applying to law school. “I was interested in disparities in the criminal justice system and policy study,” says Carter, 42.
But after a few years, she grew disillusioned. “I expected [to be] making more of a difference, and I kind of felt like I was part of the system instead.”
To cope with her increasingly depressing job, she found comfort in the home-decorating shows that populated the airwaves in the mid-2000s, and developed a new ambition. Initially hesitant about starting over, “I got to the point where I was like, ‘I’m going to have to work the rest of my life, and as long as I’m willing to put in the work and the time and the effort, anything seems possible,’ ” she says.
So Carter went back to Georgia State, studying for a BFA in interior design while working at a fabric store in Atlanta. One day, a customer entered who was renovating the offices at Tyler Perry Studios. “Do you need an intern?” Carter asked her — and she did.
“That was the first time I became aware of the film industry,” says Carter, and after she graduated, she got a call to work as a set decoration production assistant on two Perry movies. The second project, Why Did I Get Married Too?, took her to the Bahamas, and “automatically I was hooked,” she says with a laugh.
“The hours were long and the work was stressful, but being able to be creative and collaborate was such a good thing,” she says, noting that junior associates in the interior design world would more likely be confined to cubicles all day drafting on design software like AutoCAD. “With the film industry, everybody was on the ground running, trying to make things happen. You were part of a bigger team.”
With production booming in Georgia thanks to film tax incentives, the Atlanta-based Carter
was able to find enough work to move up to buyer and eventually to set decorator. Perry’s go-to production designer, Mayhew, with whom Carter worked on her first two Hollywood projects, was the one who called her for Respect. “It really felt like the opportunity I had been waiting for, to be working on a production of this size and scope,” Carter says.
A history buff, she dove into every book she could find about Franklin and her civil rights activist father, the Rev. C.L. Franklin (played by Forest Whitaker). In addition to procuring period pieces from three decades, Carter found a unique challenge in locating era-authentic musical gear. “Some of the music equipment we couldn’t source, so we manufactured some pieces,” she says. “That was the first time I got into having to do drawings and having sheet metal cut.”
Carter believes that if not for Atlanta being such a production hub, her career might look completely different, as it meant being on crews that were generally more diverse than the typical Hollywood production. “I was really lucky to have people who made me feel comfortable talking to them,” says Carter, noting that white allies like set decorators Lance Totten and Maggie Martin, and role models of color like Mayhew, have been instrumental to her career. “I was in such awe of [Mayhew], being a Black woman running multiple departments and having so much responsibility, yet being very supportive in talking to me.”
Mayhew told Carter that not every Hollywood experience would resemble Tyler Perry’s world. “It’s not always going to be like this: People will doubt you, but once you put your hard work out there, it will speak for itself,” she told the younger woman.
“She couldn’t have been more right,” Carter says now, noting that although she has felt like “the token” on some previous projects, the industry’s investment in more diverse stories has had a gradual trickle-down effect on crews. But more is needed, and Carter points to internship programs in her
Atlanta hometown as instrumental in attracting young talent to the industry. “Otherwise, how do you even get film on your radar? When I was growing up, nobody I knew was working in the film industry,” she notes. “To really create sustainable [progress], it’s important to attract a more diverse group of people.”
OTHER CREDITS Dolly Parton’s Christmas on the Square and Heartstrings; Being Mary Jane
NEXT UP Netflix and Macro’s sci-fi comedy They Cloned Tyrone, starring John Boyega and Jamie Foxx; Disney+’s Giannis Antetokounmpo biopic Rise