Art Director

Abstract

Abstract Vincente Minnelli was one of only two major Hollywood filmmakers who began as art directors (the other was Hitchcock). Having started in Chicago designing shop windows for Marshall Field’s, Minnelli quickly graduated to New York, where he worked for the Paramount Theater, moonlighting with Earl Carroll’s Vanities. For Carroll, Minnelli displayed his two principal influences: contemporary art deco and the Russian Ballet’s lush, decadent orientalism (“a decidedly Negroid sense of color,” Robert Benchley called it in the New Yorker). In 1933, he became art director of Radio City Music Hall, which, after an enormously publicized December 1932 opening, had nearly failed. At Radio City, Minnelli produced the kind of elaborate, sophisticated kitsch that paralleled Busby Berkeley’s simultaneous inventions for Warner Brothers (see 42nd Street). By 1934, Minnelli was staging his own monthly Radio City spectacles: “Coast to Coast,” for example, took audiences on tours of the Riviera, Ascot, Africa, and San Francisco, all concocted from picture books and paintings of places he had never seen. Two years later, he was directing Broadway musicals, including some work on a 1936 revival of Florenz Ziegfeld’s Follies (in which Bob Hope introduced “I Can’t Get Started”). His finale, 1939’s Very Warm for May, was a famous flop, the last of the Jerome Kern–Oscar Hammerstein collaborations, wrecked by changes Minnelli ordered out of town. Even the show’s great hit, “All the Things You Are,” couldn’t save it.