Polly Platt was a mostly unsung jack-of-all trades, married to Peter Bogdanovich at one point, a crucial collaborator on his extraordinary run of early films, and one of those people behind the scenes without whom great movies can’t happen. And someone like Platt won’t get the credit for her contributions – it’s just the nature of the game – but that doesn’t make what she did any less of an accomplishment.
An admirer of Platt, as I am, I could not have been more thrilled that Karina Longworth, creator of the massively successful podcast You Must Remember This devoted an entire season to the career of Polly Platt. It’s a hell of a listen, it’s a far deeper dive into her work than has ever existed before. Even when she died in 2011, and all the amazing tributes started coming in – it’s entirely different than having a multi-part series on her entire career.
She worked on some of my favorite movies of all time, although “worked on” is an understatement and her smarts and drive and creativity (not to mention her work as a producer) helped to actually create movies like The Last Picture Show, What’s Up Doc?, Paper Moon and my God Bad News Bears. She was the production designer for Barbra Streisand’s A Star is Born, she wrote the screenplay for the very controversial film Pretty Baby (and also produced), she was executive vice president of James Brooks’ production company. She was the first woman in the Art Directors’ Guild. (This is nothing to cheer about though. It was the freakin’ 1970s. You all should be ASHAMED of yourselves.) She was art director Terms of Endearment (and was nominated for an Oscar), and co-produced a bunch of classics, indie and non-indie, films like War of the Roses, Broadcast News, Say Anything, Dogtown, Bottle Rocket, production designed The Witches of Eastwick … the list goes on and on (and you’ll notice she worked in so many different fields: art direction, writing, producing, production design. She was often the only woman in any given room.
As a collaborator, she was innovative, smart, and made things happen. She always had her eye on the whole of every project. She did not toil away in a corner on her own little piece of it. Every choice she made dovetailed into the larger concern. This is what is meant by collaboration and Polly Platt was one of the greatest of collaborators.
In the midst of sometimes chaotic movie shoots when people start to lose track of their own names, not to mention their moral compasses, let alone remember what the hell it is they are trying to make, Polly Platt ALWAYS remembered what they were “trying to make”.
Polly Platt described, in her own words, how she solved a problem during the shoot of Paper Moon. I love the story. Pay attention to how she thinks about said problem, and solves the problem, but also look at how she weaves the solution into the WHOLE. She justifies her choice in terms of character (“this hat belonged to her mother”), and the hat itself becomes a potent symbol and character-detail that is one of the unforgettable parts of the movie.
This is how you create art. You solve problems, but you don’t just solve them to solve them. You justify your choices. This is true for actors (justify, justify, justify) and it is true for everyone working on a movie.
Working under the gun to solve an urgent problem, Platt came up with a solution that not only solved said problem, but expands out the character for us, letting us know more about her.
If you think this is easy to do, then you know nothing about making movies.
Polly Platt:
One day Alvin Sargent and Peter Bogdanovich came to me and they said, “There’s a scene in the movie where the sheriff is looking for the money and it’s hiding in plain sight: How can we have the money hiding in plain sight where the sheriff can’t see it? What do we do?” They came to me with the problem. And Paramount had the most beautiful old laces and velvets and silks and buttons and I remembered this extraordinary brown lace and the lace was quite intricate and I realized that if I designed a hat for Tatum which, in my mind, was the hat of her mother, I thought, we could have the lace go around the hat and then we could tuck the money right into the lace. Unless you were really looking for it, nobody would really know it was there. So the hat itself was designed as they were doing improvements on the script. That’s how that came to be, and they were very happy with my solution.
