Category Archives: Women and New Hollywood
Field Day Podcast: Polly Platt interview
At the end of July 2020, the kind folks at the Field Day podcast (specifically, Cormac Deane) invited to me to chat about my research and writing on Polly Platt. The conversation, which stretches just over an hour, ranged from … Continue reading
Video Essay: Polly Platt – Designing the ’80s
Polly Platt is best known for two phases in her long Hollywood career. First, for her work as a production designer on some of the great films of the New Hollywood era (The Last Picture Show, What’s Up, Doc?, The … Continue reading
Production Design Texts: Introduction
As any scholar who writes about production design will tell you, film studies has not traditionally been very enthusiastic in its engagement with the topic of who actually creates the practical images we see on screen – or how they … Continue reading
Teaching Film Studies after Weinstein
This is my take on the recent disclosures about Harvey Weinstein. It is not meant to replace or supersede or in any way silence the many more heartfelt, eloquent, painful takes that others – mainly women – have been offering. … Continue reading
Call For Papers
Women and New Hollywood Maynooth University, Ireland 29-30 May 2018 Recent decades have witnessed no shortage of critical or academic writing on the industrial upheaval and creative innovations of New Hollywood (1967-80). But as scholarship has shaped the … Continue reading
Searching for Polly in the Bogdanovich Papers: Reflections
In July of this summer I spent two weeks at the Peter Bogdanovich collection at the Lilly Library at Indiana University. I went searching for material – particularly production-related material – on Polly Platt, who was married to Bogdanovich for … Continue reading
Searching for Polly in the Bogdanovich Archives: Week One
I’ve reached the halfway point of a two-week stint at the Peter Bogdanovich archives at Indiana University in Bloomington. I’m going to save the “big conclusions” for after the trip is complete because I still have a lot of material … Continue reading
The Other Side of the Director:
Polly Platt and Orson Welles’s Last Movie
Recent film and media news has been filled with excitement at the announcement that Netflix has acquired the rights to Orson Welles’s final, unfinished film project, The Other Side of the Wind. And rightly so! Wind was a labor of … Continue reading
The Bad News Bears: Design by Polly Platt
The Bad News Bears (1976) is the second film Polly Platt designed after several years of working solely with Peter Bogdanovich. The film features Walter Matthau as Buttermaker, the coach of a ragtag bunch of foul-mouthed kids playing little league … Continue reading
The Thief Who Came to Dinner: Design by Polly Platt
I recently watched The Thief Who Came to Dinner for the first time. This 1973 film was written by the great Walter Hill (and it’s got the punchy script to show for it), directed by an unsung Bud Yorkin,* and … Continue reading