R.I.P., Polly Platt

News just in that jack-of-all-trades genius Polly Platt has died, and it has made me pause for a second, to reflect on her work, and all that it has given me. She worked on some of my favorite movies of all time, although “worked on” is certainly an understatement and her smarts and drive as a production designer and producer helped to actually create the look and feel of movies like The Last Picture Show, What’s Up Doc?, Paper Moon and yes, Bad News Bears. Former wife and partner of Peter Bogdanovich, Polly Platt was a hustler (in the best sense: she got things DONE) and an artist, a woman who knew what she wanted and was damned if she was going to be kept out of the Big Boys club, even when things started to crumble publicly with her husband. The respect from her colleagues was enormous. She did EVERYTHING (as the anecdote below shows). She was the go-to gal to solve problems, on the spot. She figured shit out. Things get tense when you make a movie. Producers and directors could come to her and say “we need this impossible thing to happen” and she would make it happen. She was innovative, smart, and always had her eye on the whole of every project. She did not fritter away in a corner on her own little piece of it. She was always thinking of the grand theme, the look of the entirety of it, and what the director was trying to DO overall. Every choice she made dovetailed into that larger concern. This is what is meant by collaboration and Polly Platt was one of the greatest of collaborators.

A real trailblazer, her choices (when you know about them, that is, because much of her work was behind-the-scenes and, of course, the director gets to take credit for everything) were always artistic and somewhat delicate. She knew what she wanted, she knew what had to happen, she stuck to her guns, and had the final product in her mind at all times, even in the midst of sometimes chaotic movie shoots when people start to lose sight 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”.

A production designer, she is responsible for making sure that the feel of that Texas town was realized in Last Picture Show. Bogdanovich knew he could RELY on her for that.

Polly Platt describes, in her own words, how she solved a problem on the set of Paper Moon. But look at how she thinks about said problem, look at how she weaves the solution into the WHOLE. She is not “just” solving a problem. 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 that beautiful movie.

This is how you create art. You solve problems, but you don’t just solve them to solve them. You justify your choice. This is true for actors (justify, justify, justify) and it is true for everyone working on a movie.

Working under the gun, with an urgent problem that needed to be solved, Polly Platt came up with something that not only solved said problem, but is perfect, and fits in with the whole.

If you think that is easy to do, then you know nothing about making movies.

Here’s 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.

The elegant and emotional connectivity of her solution. It gives me goosebumps. Practical, and yet grounded in the themes and the character.

To me, she was a true artist.

One in a million.

Rest in peace.