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LATimes.com/CalendarLive.com
August 2, 2001
By KEVIN THOMAS
Times Staff Writer
SCREENING ROOM
A Star Behind the Scenes
Hollywood festival honors a production designer who was key to films by Hitchcock and others.
The fifth annual Hollywood Film Festival opens Friday at the Paramount Studio Theater with the U.S. premiere of Christopher Monger's breezy but conventional "Girl From Rio," which takes too long to get off the ground but has a clever finish. Hugh Laurie plays an ineffectual London banker with a passion for samba who eventually gets caught up in romance and adventure in Rio, where he pursues the girl of his dreams (Vanessa Nunes). The weekend festival, which also unspools across Melrose Avenue at Raleigh Studios and is presenting 42 films, closes Sunday at Paramount at 6 p.m. with Woody Allen's "The Curse of the Jade Scorpion."
On Saturday at 2 p.m. at Raleigh's Chaplin Theater, the festival presents Daniel Raim's Oscar-nominated "The Man on Lincoln's Nose," a warm and illuminating 39-minute documentary on veteran production designer Robert Boyle, who will be present afterward for a Q&A session on his seven-decade career. Now the American Film Institute's chairman of production design, Boyle will be among honorees at the festival's Monday-evening awards gala at the Beverly Hilton.
A USC-trained architect, Boyle entered the industry in 1933 as an assistant to Paramount art director Wiard Ihnen and began his long association with Alfred Hitchcock on "Saboteur" (1940). Through clips, and Boyle's reflections and recollections, Raim reveals the all-important task of the production designer, which Boyle defines as "being responsible for the space in which a film takes place." Boyle's contributions to key Hitchcock films are crucial, as they have been to the films of many others, especially those of Norman Jewison, with whom Boyle also has had a long association.
"The Man on Lincoln's Nose" -- which was the original title of "North by Northwest" and which also refers to Boyle's actual experiences on Mt. Rushmore in preparing the film -- is a delightful reminder that not all of Hollywood's greatest stars are actors. (310) 288-1882.
Copyright 2001 Los Angeles Times
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