Creating the Studio "Look"

A commonplace of film history states that during the thirties each studio developed a distinctive style, a special visual “look.” The notion needs qualification. It is more accurate to say each studio typically developed a distinctive house style when it produced the most important films on its roster at the level where differentiation would normally be most effective. And the extent of this differentiation depended on a combination of factors, among them the stars on the payroll, the specialty genres of the studio, the creative personnel on the staff, and the size of the production budgets.

Studio art departments potentially had the greatest impact on the look of a picture. Describing MGM’s operations, Morton Eustis said the art department is responsible for “everything that can be seen on the screen, with the exception of the faces, the figures and the motion of the actors themselves. This includes settings and props, real or unreal, lights and costumes and other less tangible but no less important elements.” Organized during the twenties, the great Hollywood art departments used a two-tier system of organization that divided responsibility between a supervising art director, who visualized the script, and a unit art director, who did the actual design and oversaw its construction. The most powerful supervising art directors in Hollywood, Cedric Gibbons at MGM, Van Nest Polglase at RKO, and Hans Dreier at Paramount, headed departments of between fifty and eighty people, among them unit art directors, architects, illustrators, model makers, and set decorators.

Original sets were designed for class-A pictures; class-B pictures either reused older sets or were shot on standing sets to save money. As each class-A picture was placed in development, the art department broke down the script to determine the number of sets, costumes, exterior locations, and other requirements to physically produce the film. The studio wanted the breakdown not only to determine costs but also to inform each technical department (property shop, special effects, miniature shop) exactly what was required and in what sequence. After the front office approved the picture and its budget, the supervising art director gave the go-ahead to the unit art director who had been assigned the project.

Having created the basic design concept of the picture, the unit art director produced sketches of the master scenes. From these sketches would emerge the selection of locations and the final designs for the sets, miniatures, and special effects. Some unit art directors and sketch artists specialized in certain types of pictures, such as crime films or Westerns, but most had to be versatile enough to work in every historical style. The actual building of the sets was done by construction crews working around the clock, six days a week, with most of the work being done on the night shift. Afterward, the set decorator completed the process by dressing the set with furniture, draperies, and props acquired from the property department or from rental sources or by purchase.

From the point of view of studio investment, Hollywood’s most ambitious efforts of the decade were prestige period pictures. Whatever the period—ancient Rome, medieval Paris, Elizabethan England, eighteenth-century Versailles, or Victorian London—films had to conform to commonly accepted norms of authenticity. Working hand in hand with art and costume designers, a studio’s research department authenticated the setting, costumes, and other elements of the mise-en-scène that reflected the period of the picture. To aid them, specialists in the research department organized reference libraries containing art history books, prints and illustrations, and art and architecture magazines.

Although the unit art director did the designing, the supervising art director customarily received the main production credit above the name of the unit art director whether or not he personally contributed to the project. MGM’s Cedric Gibbons may have initiated the practice. Joining the studio as head of the art department in 1924, he had a clause inserted in his contract stipulating that his credit would appear on every picture the studio produced, a stipulation that the studio respected with few exceptions until his retirement in 1956.

Art directors, like other creative and technical personnel at the studios, worked under exclusive term contracts. For example, Anton Grot at Warners worked on year-to-year contracts. In 1932, Warners paid him $250 per week, about the same amount as Joan Blondell and other contract actors, but considerably less than James Cagney’s $1,750 weekly salary. During this period Grot single-handedly designed as many as eleven productions a year. By 1939 his lot improved somewhat; he was earning $450 a week on a two-year contract and had to design only two pictures. Art directors were not unionized until the mid forties when the Society of Motion Picture Art Directors, which had been functioning as a professional organization, became affiliated with the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE).

The famous MGM look was created mainly by one individual, Cedric Gibbons. “The nearest thing to a movie star that Hollywood art direction ever had,” Gibbons was “one of the most powerful personalities in America’s most powerful studio for thirty years.” 32 Joining the newly merged MGM in 1924, Gibbons oversaw the construction of a vast assortment of permanent sets on the studio’s backlot—a village, several town squares, city streets, a park, and a waterfront, among others. He also set up some of the finest ancillary departments in Hollywood, such as scene painting, models and miniatures, and special effects. Unlike those of other studios, MGM’s ancillary departments were tightly centralized and existed to serve one person, and that was Gibbons. In one way or another, Cedric Gibbons’s art department affected the work of 70 percent of the studio’s forty-five hundred workers.

As the industry’s most prestigious and financially secure studio, MGM became justly famous for the designs of award-winning period pictures and fantasies such as THE MERRY WIDOW (1934), DAVID COPPERFIELD (1935), MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY (1935), THE GOOD EARTH (1937), MARIE ANTOINETTE (1938), and WIZARD OF OZ (1939). But MGM is equally renowned for popularizing modernism in Hollywood art design. After attending the landmark Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in 1925, Gibbons came under the influence of art deco and art moderne. He first promoted these modernistic styles in OUR DANCING DAUGHTERS (1928), MODERN MAIDENS (1929), and OUR BLUSHING BRIDES (1930), MGM’s trilogy of carefree youth in the Jazz Age starring Joan Crawford. The designs for these pictures “were drawn in accordance with what he called his philosophy of the uncluttered—they were clean, functional and often highly stylized, a look that was to cause a major revolution in movie decor.”

Since modernism became associated with luxury, glamour, and affluence, it became the perfect visual style to complement Thalberg’s urban strategy of producing pictures based on contemporary sources and themes. MGM’s most famous modernistic set is undoubtedly the stunning art deco lobby of GRAND HOTEL (1932), which Gibbons designed in collaboration with Alexander Toluboff. Donald Albrecht described its design as follows:

Circles are prominent in every aspect of the Grand Hotel’s design—an appropriate image for the spinning-wheel-of-fortune scenario. The circular motif appears in the hotel’s round, multilevel atrium with open balconies, in the continually revolving doors, and in ornaments on balcony railings. It also appears in the round reception desk, which acts as a pivot for the curving shots that follow the movement of the film’s characters, who travel across the black-and-white floor like pawns in a chess game. Movie plot and architecture have seldom been so closely harmonized. ( Designing Dreams: Modern Architecture in the Movies [New York: Harper and Row, 1986], pp. 139-140)

Influential exhibitions held in America such as the Museum of Modern Art’s “Modern Architecture” in 1932 and the Chicago Century of Progress the following year marked the peak of modernism’s popularity. By then, modernism had become the style of choice of Hollywood art directors when designing such perquisites of wealth as penthouses, nightclubs, executive suites, and ocean liners.

Some of the most dazzling modern set decor of the period was done at RKO. Under the leadership of Van Nest Polglese, RKO’s art department was “second to none in stylishness, tasteful flights of fancy, and an enjoyably identifiable studio imprint.” KING KONG (1933), THE INFORMER (1935), MARY OF SCOTLAND (1936), and THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME (1939), to name a few, demonstrated the range and quality of RKO’s atmospheric designs, but the studio’s most polished work was done for the Astaire-Rogers musicals. Van Nest Polglase and unit art director Carroll Clark received credit for most of the pictures, but the designs were actually collaborative efforts that also used the talents of set designer Allan Abbott and illustrator Maurice Zuberano. This design team introduced what Arlene Croce has called “the fixed architectural institution … known as the B.W.S. (Big White Set).” It appeared as grand hotels, nightclubs, and boudoirs in such pictures as THE GAY DIVORCEE (1934), TOP HAT (1935), and SWINGTIME (1936). Using art deco to “evoke a feeling of stark elegance,” the B.W.S. characteristically incorporated streamlining, sharp contrasts of black and white in the decor, and geometric decorative motifs. 34 Describing their effectiveness, Ellen Spiegel said,

The sets were simple enough to act as backdrops for the dance sequences, which were after all what the public came to see, and to highlight the costumed, elaborately-decorated bodies. But the attention given the design of the sets by Polglase and the art department shows that they were more than just rooms to be danced through. Their style had to co-ordinate with that of the costumes and the movement, since the sets formed an integral part of the action. Astaire and Rogers danced over the banisters, down staircases, over chairs, and around balconies in all their movies. (“Fred and Ginger Meet Van Nest Polglase,” Velvet Light Trap 10 ¹⁹⁷³, p. 19)

Working in the same architectural tradition as Gibbons and Polglase but using expressionism rather than modernism to create atmosphere and mood, Charles (“Danny”) Hall designed Universal’s most distinctive defining genre, the horror film. Hall’s formula was perfected in DRACULA (1931), FRANKENSTEIN (1931), THE OLD DARK HOUSE (1932), THE INVISIBLE MAN (1933), and THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1935). Dracula’s mysterious castle with its crumbling stone staircase and cobwebbed rooms and Frankenstein’s modernistic laboratory housed in a decaying tower, among other sets Hall designed for these pictures, did more than differentiate Universal’s films from its competitors; they also participated in the action.

Hans Dreier, supervising art director at Paramount, was even more concerned with individual shots and scenes. A Munich-born architect and former scene designer at the UFA studios in Germany, Dreier joined Paramount at the invitation of Ernst Lubitsch and served as the head of its art department from 1932 to 1952. Dreier ran a tight ship, but unlike Gibbons and Polglase, he encouraged his unit art directors to develop their own personal styles. In addition to his administrative duties, Dreier remained a practicing designer and developed a distinctive style as a master of “subtle and evocative atmosphere” collaborating with the studio’s European-oriented directors. Among Dreier’s most influential designs were the art deco set for Lubitsch’s TROUBLE IN PARADISE (1932); the enchanting fairytale kingdom for Rouben Mamoulian’s LOVE ME TONIGHT (1932); and a stylized expressionistic setting for Josef von Sternberg’s THE SCARLET EMPRESS (1934). Dreier collaborated with Von Sternberg more closely than with any other director and was responsible for many arresting effects in Von Sternberg’s pictures. Like Danny Hall’s sets, Dreier’s created mood for each scene and participated in the action. As Beverly Heisner described it, Dreier’s sets “must be stepped through, seen through, they interfere with the actors. Curtains fall into faces, the camera moves with erotic intent through crevices in the wall—first blocking and then admitting the viewer. In a Von Sternberg film the surroundings engage the actors.”

Two designers, Anton Grot of Warner Bros, and the free-lancer William Page 91  Cameron Menzies, had the most success in translating their ideas into completed motion pictures. Born Antocz Groszewski in Poland, Grot worked as a full-time art director for Warners from 1927 to 1948. An extremely prolific and imaginative designer, Grot exerted a tremendous influence on directors Michael Curtiz, Mervyn LeRoy, and William Dieterle. (Grot received four Oscar nominations, but Warner’s only Oscar for art direction during the thirties was awarded to Carl Jules Weyl, for his storybook designs for THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD ¹⁹³⁸.) Designing for Warners, Grot had to work with tight budgets, but he made a virtue out of necessity by doing storyboards, frame-by-frame sketches in black ink or charcoal containing finely detailed shadings of light and shadow. As Grot did them, storyboards ensured that only the parts of the set that showed were built, but they also had the secondary effect of limiting “directors to the camera positions and angles he visualized.”

Fashioning sets seemingly “only of light and shadow,” Grot created superb designs for the studio’s specialty genres, among them the horror film (SVENGALI ¹⁹³¹), the gangster film (LITTLE CAESAR ¹⁹³¹), and the musical (GOLD DIGGERS OF 1935). When Warners moved into the prestige market in 1935, the new studio look was largely of Grot’s creation. His continuity sketches for CAPTAIN BLOOD (1935) and THE PRIVATE LIVES OF ELIZABETH AND ESSEX (1939), for example, were followed almost shot by shot. In addition to these pictures, Grot designed A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM (1935), ANTHONY ADVERSE (1936), THE LIFE OF EMILE ZOLA (1937), and JUAREZ (1939).

Hired by David O. Selznick as production designer for GONE WITH THE WIND , William Cameron Menzies made a major contribution by preplanning the color and design of the entire picture. To save money and to retain tight control over the shooting of the epic picture, Selznick wanted almost every last camera angle nailed down before production began. Working directly from the book—since a screenplay had yet to be written—Menzies created a “complete script in sketch form, showing actual camera setups, lighting, etc.” Executed in color and with daring, Menzies’s storyboards are the most famous of the period. The directors who worked on the film followed his storyboards slavishly. In recognition of Menzies’s contribution to GONE WITH THE WIND , Selznick created the special credit “Production Designed by William Cameron Menzies.” Since there was no precedent for what Menzies had done, the Academy awarded him a special plaque at the Oscar ceremonies to recognize his “outstanding achievement in the use of color for the enhancement of dramatic mood in the production of Gone With the Wind .” 37 Although storyboarding is a common practice today, Grot’s and Menzies’s influence over the visual look of their pictures confounds the notion of film authorship that is focused exclusively on the director.

Like the art department, the costume department of a Hollywood studio was hierarchically organized, supervised by a chief designer who was assisted by the head of wardrobe, several junior designers, sketch artists, period researchers, wardrobe assistants, and seamstresses. Responsible mainly for dressing the stars in a picture, the chief designer sketched their clothes and prepared a wardrobe plot indicating what they would wear in each scene. Costumes, like sets, served a narrative function; they helped define character, social status, and historical period.

Take the case of Scarlett O’Hara’s costumes in GONE WITH THE WIND. Walter Plunkett’s designs were among the most famous of the period. They were authentic in every detail and also had the distinction of revealing character in an original and complex way. Scarlett’s costumes clearly reflected the two different periods of her life—"the petulant Southern belle, and later the postbellum woman who turns her back on her earlier life of picture-book elegance to face despair, poverty, and the bare necessity to survive." For the first period, Plunkett designed a wardrobe of organdy and tulle, light and sheer fabrics. For the second, Plunkett used velvets, a heavier and darker fabric. Costume reveals the start of Scarlett’s second period of her life when she tears down the green velvet curtains in her mother’s dining room and orders Mammy to sew a dress she can wear to ensnare Rhett Butler, who has the means to pay the property taxes on Tara and save it from foreclosure. Thereafter, as Scarlett rises to greater affluence, Plunkett dressed her in different colors and weights of velvet, creating a kind of motif.

The fame of Hollywood’s leading costumers—Adrian of MGM, Travis Banton of Paramount, Orry-Kelly of Warners, and Walter Plunkett of RKO—rested primarily on the clothing they designed for their studio’s superstars. Undoubtedly, the most famous costume designer in Hollywood’s history was MGM’s Adrian, born Gilbert Adrian Rosenberg. “During his tenure at the studio [1928 to 1942],” Edward Maeder said, “he was treated like a star, and he was so well known that press releases would often trumpet his work as a special—sometimes the most important—element in a film.”

Adrian’s most ambitious project was MARIE ANTOINETTE (1938), a vehicle Irving Thalberg conceived for his wife, Norma Shearer, the queen of the MGM lot. Taking three years to produce, the film probably involved more period research than any other picture of the decade. Research experts were dispatched to Europe to gather antique prints, folios of drawings, actual garments of the period, and rare accessories. Adrian carefully studied the objects and made hundreds of sketches for his staff. The MGM costume shop turned out twenty-five hundred costumes; Max Factor and Company made more than two thousand wigs; and an international assemblage of artisans executed Norma Shearer’s thirty-four costumes. Describing the effort that went into Shearer’s costumes, W. Robert La Vine said,

Special silk velvets and brocades were woven in Lyons, France’s silk center, and hundreds of yards of gold and silver lace and intricate trimmings were imported from the few small factories in Austria and Italy that still manufactured them. Eight embroiderers were brought from Hungary to decorate the costumes with exquisite handwork, and a former milliner of the Imperial Russian Opera costume department, discovered in Paris, agreed to oversee the making of hundreds of hats and headdresses for the film. Sydney Guilaroff, MGM’s famed   hairdresser, … made Norma Shearer’s eighteen wigs, and Jack Dawn created her porcelainlike makeup. Dozens of copies of eighteenth-century buckled shoes were made by hand. Embroidered gloves and a fortune in jewelry, some set with genuine precious stones and diamonds, were assembled. Not even history’s real Marie Antoinette had been dressed with a more lavish hand! ( In a Glamorous Fashion: The Fabulous Years of Hollywood Costume Design [New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1980], pp. 44, 50-51)

Conceived in a modern idiom, Adrian’s stylish outfits for Greta Garbo and Joan Crawford made a huge impact on women’s fashions. For example, a white ruffled organdy gown Adrian designed for Crawford in LETTY LYNTON (1932) became all the rage and was widely copied by the fashion industry on New York’s Seventh Avenue. Macy’s claimed to have sold fifty thousand inexpensive copies of the dress. Even more influential was Adrian’s famous design for Crawford, the wide-shouldered, narrow-hipped silhouette that became her most important fashion trademark.

Contrasting with the theatricalism of Adrian’s designs, Travis Banton’s designs for Paramount’s stars such as Carole Lombard, Miriam Hopkins, Kay Francis, and Claudette Colbert were elegantly simple. La Vine said,Travis Banton’s understated and deceptively simple designs elevated motion picture costumes to the status of high fashion. His innate understanding of the bias cut … and his sense of exquisite balance in a garment perfectly captured the new sophistication that arrived with the thirties. A Banton gown, with a softness and sultriness that followed a woman’s body, was Hollywood design at its most sublime. ( In a Glamorous Fashion, p. 63)

For the likes of Mae West and Marlene Dietrich, Banton outdid himself. To underscore the campiness of Mae West’s comedies, Banton’s formula was “‘Diamonds—lots of ’em’ and huge hats, feather boas, fox stoles and vertical panels of light material or brilliants with darker side panels to slim her down.” To complement the exoticism of Marlene Dietrich’s Sternberg pictures, MOROCCO (1930), SHANGHAI EXPRESS (1932), and BLONDE VENUS (1932) Banton’s formula consisted of “chiffon,” “mountains of fur,” “white tie and tails,” and “lustrous black coq feathers.”

To costume Bette Davis, Warner’s prima donna, Orry-Kelly used “utter simplicity and high fashion without theatricality.” Unlike other superstars, Davis loathed being type-cast and insisted on changing her appearance from film to film—for example, from a spoiled Southern belle in JEZEBEL (1938), to a rigid spinster in THE OLD MAID (1939), to a headstrong and vulnerable queen in THE PRIVATE LIVES OF ELIZABETH AND ESSEX (1939). Bette Davis’s rather plumpish figure presented problems, but “with the skill of an engineer, Kelly restructured her figure with cleverly cut, well-made garments that successfully created the desired image.”

The necessity of creating the desired image for a star was also a principal responsibility of the director of photography. The impact of new technology on cinematography during the thirties is discussed elsewhere. What is at issue here   is the relationship of the director of photography to the studio look. Professionally, cinematographers were tied to the American Society of Cinematographers (ASC), which was neither a labor union nor a guild, but a tightly knit professional association that held a closed-shop contract with all the major studios. The first craft organization of any kind in the industry, the ASC was incorporated in 1919 for the interchange of ideas and technical information. Membership was by invitation and open only to accomplished directors of photography; later the ASC accepted second cameramen and assistant cameramen as members in a junior division. Firmly established by the thirties, the ASC became the only reliable talent pool from which producers could draw experienced cameramen. The ASC served as bargaining agent for all cameramen, but this function was taken over by the cameramen’s union in the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees during the mid thirties.

The return of single-camera filmmaking following the conversion to sound reorganized the camera crew and more clearly demarcated the cinematographer’s responsibilities on the set from the director’s. The camera crew now consisted of the director of photography or cinematographer, whose principal creative input was to design the lighting for the shot and to oversee the camera setups in consultation with the director; the camera operator, who actually ran the camera, was “responsible for the mechanical perfection of the scenes”; and the assistant cameramen, who took care of the equipment, loaded and unloaded film and acted as focus pullers, among other jobs.

A combination of factors influenced lighting style above and beyond the inclinations of the cinematographer: the house look, the star, and the story. A studio’s specialty genres obviously dictated a certain look. Warners, for example, developed a somber house style for its social-problem pictures. To fit with the realism of these pictures, the style consisted of austere, flat lighting and highly contrasted images. To complement MGM’s opulent and sophisticated house style, Gibbons imposed on MGM’s pictures a consistency of style and mood; settings were bathed in brilliant high-key lighting that created a soft gray-white glossy look. In practice, this meant that Gibbons supervised the lighting of all the large, important sets, but left the lighting of close-ups entirely to the judgment of the cinematographer.

Since the entire production process revolved around stars and since stars constituted some of the biggest investments of a studio, the prime responsibility of the director of photography in a picture was to safeguard the image of a star. Protection meant designing the lighting to present the star’s image to best advantage. As cinematographer Gregg Toland pointed out, “The best angle, the most appropriate lighting for the scene, may have to be discarded in favor of the particular angle or light value most flattering to a star or principal. Such photo-flattery often means the subjugation of realism to personality.” Karl Struss, director of photography at Paramount, put it another way: “We must strive to convey an impression, not alone of actuality, but of perfected actuality. Our aim is to show players and settings, not merely as they are, but as the audience would like to see them.” 45 In practice, this meant that at MGM and Paramount, for example, cinematographers typically used a glamorous form of backlighting called “Rembrandt lighting” in close-ups of both its male and female stars.

Certainly the most famous star-cinematographer collaboration of the era was between MGM’s Greta Garbo and William Daniels. Working with Garbo on her first U.S. picture, T HE T ORRENT (1926), Daniels was able to capture Greta Garbo’s unique features, and after Garbo became a star, she had it written into her contract that the cinematographer on all her pictures would be Daniels. Lee Garnies collaborated closely with Josef von Sternberg at Paramount on a number of the most stunning Marlene Dietrich pictures. Ernest Haller was Bette Davis’s favorite cameraman at Warner, but she also admired the work of Tony Gaudio and Sol Polito. Arthur Miller at Fox was entrusted with young Shirley Temple. Commenting on how he created her image, Miller said, “I always lit her so she had an aureole of golden hair. I used a lamp on Shirley that made her whole damn image world famous.” And Joseph Valentine’s handling of Deanna Durbin at Universal was described as “the difference between making a musical bright and fluffy or allowing it to settle like a cold souffle.”

Efficiency would suggest that cinematographers be brought in early to consult with the art director, costume designer, and director. But cinematographers were seldom consulted in pre-production. Typically, they were required to move from project to project with little preparation time in between. Once production had begun, tight schedules and budgets kept expensive retakes and experimentation to a minimum. Because the system forced cameramen to fall back on conventional forms of shooting, Hollywood cinematography during the thirties all too often lacked individuality.

But the wonder is that so many cinematographers transcended these institutional constraints to imprint their visual signatures on their films. Gregg Toland’s experiments with deep-focus photography working for independent producer Sam Goldwyn distinguished him as one of the most inventive and creative cinematographers of the period . MGM’s most distinctive cinematography was done not only by William Daniels who photographed the studio’s leading ladies—Greta Garbo, Norma Shearer, Jeanette MacDonald, and Eleanor Powell—but also by Hal Rosson, who shot THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939), and by Karl Freund and Joseph Ruttenberg, who won Academy Awards for their cinematography on THE GOOD EARTH (1937) and THE GREAT WALTZ (1938), respectively. Paramount’s most distinctive cinematography was created by Karl Struss, who devised the filter work for the transformation process in DR . JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE (1932) and by Lee Garnies, Charles B. Lang, Jr., and Victor Milner, who won Academy Awards for SHANGHAI EXPRESS (1932), A FAREWELL TO ARMS (1933), and CLEOPATRA (1934). Warner’s most distinctive work was done by Hal Mohr and Tony Gaudio, who won back-to-back Academy Awards for A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM (1935) and ANTHONY ADVERSE (1936). Tony Gaudio also designed the cinematography for LITTLE CAESAR (1931) and the Paul Muni biopics. Sol Polito designed the effective black-and-white cinematography for I AM A FUGITIVE FROM A CHAIN GANG (1932) and the expressive lighting for the Technicolor THE PRIVATE LIVES OF ELIZABETH AND ESSEX (1939). Polito and Tony Gaudio together designed the lighting for another dazzling Technicolor production, THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD (1938). After shooting J EZEBEL (1938), a Bette Davis vehicle, Ernest Haller co-photographed GONE WITH THE WIND (1939) with Ray Rennahan at Selznick and then returned to work with Davis again on DARK VICTORY and other pictures.

Other distinguished cinematographers include J. Peverell Marley, who established the lighting style for 20th Century-Fox’s prestige pictures; Arthur Edeson and John Mescall, who designed the lighting for Universal’s horror   pictures; and Joseph H. August, who created the atmospheric photography for some of John Ford’s most memorable films at RKO.