Lecture by Patricia Woodbridge

Both lecture and screening are included with single-feature admission. The screening will begin at 8:30.

This installment of Behind the Scenes features Patricia Woodbridge, a New York–based art director who spent over a decade designing theater sets on and off Broadway before abandoning the proscenium arch for the silver screen. Since that time, she has worked on Sherlock Holmes, Shutter Island, I Am Legend, City by the Sea, Mona Lisa Smile, and many others. Woodbridge will lead us through some of the productions she's helped create, giving us a privileged view of the expressive impact of a film's setting. Her talk will illustrate how a film's scenic design communicates more than a superficial look––art direction, at its best, renders a precise milieu and mood, subtly defining the characters and the story they inhabit. The author of the definitive guide Designer Drafting for the Entertainment World (2000), Woodbridge will also discuss how the art director and her immediate cohorts, the production designer and cinematographer, collaborate to bring the overarching filmic vision to fruition.

Followed by:
I Am Legend
Francis Lawrence (U.S., 2007)

Costing $180 million, I Am Legend uses much of that production budget to make Manhattan appear empty, the sly outcome of intentionally inauspicious design. Adapted from Richard Matheson's 1950s novel, the film recounts one man's struggle to survive in Manhattan after a plague has decimated humanity, leaving behind carnivorous monstrosities. Will Smith plays the principal character, Dr. Neville, a virologist miraculously immune to the plague who sets out to find a cure while foraging the abandoned streets. The challenge of I Am Legend was to set the action in signature locations sans the 1.6 million New Yorkers who normally inhabit them. To advance the apocalyptic scenario, the city was reconstituted as a ravaged metropolis slowly succumbing to natural deterioration. Major sites such as Washington Square and Fifth Avenue were dressed, while a replica of Times Square was built in the Bronx. Patricia Woodbridge will talk about the seamless merging of real locations, crafted sets, and computer graphics to create a cityscape transformed by neglect.––Steve Seid