http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-bumstead27may27,1,5012187,full.story?coll=la-news-obituaries
From the Los Angeles Times
OBITUARIES
Henry Bumstead, 91; Veteran Film Production Designer
By Dennis McLellan
Times Staff Writer
May 27, 2006
Henry Bumstead, the veteran Hollywood production designer who won
Academy Awards for his work on "To Kill a Mockingbird" and "The Sting"
and whose longtime association with actor-director Clint Eastwood kept
him on the job into his 90s, has died. He was 91.
Bumstead, who reportedly had prostate cancer, died Wednesday [May 24,
2006] in
Pasadena, his family said.
In
a nearly 70-year career that began when he was a draftsman in the art
department at RKO in the late 1930s, Bumstead's first picture as an art
director was the 1948 Paramount drama "Saigon," starring Alan Ladd.
Bumstead
received his Academy Awards for his depiction of 1930s rural Alabama in
director Robert Mulligan's 1962 drama "To Kill a Mockingbird" and for
re-creating Depression-era Chicago in George Roy Hill's 1973
comedy-drama "The Sting."
He also received Oscar nominations for
his work on Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 romantic thriller "Vertigo" and for
Eastwood's 1992 western "Unforgiven."
Bumstead, who was
affectionately known as Bummy, had more than 100 films to his credit,
including "Come Back, Little Sheba," "Cinderfella," "The Great Waldo
Pepper," "Slap Shot," "The Front Page," "Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here,"
Martin Scorsese's 1991 version of "Cape Fear," "Mystic River" and
"Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil."
Bumstead recently
completed work on Eastwood's companion movies "Flags of Our Fathers"
and "Red Sun, Black Sand," the last of a 13-film collaboration.
"Bummy
was one of a kind," Eastwood said in a statement Friday. "He seamlessly
bridged the gap between what I saw on the page and what I saw through
the camera lens. He is a legend in his field and a cherished friend. We
will all miss him terribly."
Bumstead once described his job as
a production designer by saying, "In a nutshell, my job is to break
down the script, find the best possible locations, make a budget and
design the appropriate sets that correspond to the story."
For
Eastwood's 2002 crime thriller "Blood Work," which was shot in and
around Los Angeles and Long Beach, he built the elaborate interior of
an old freighter with a flooded engine room.
"That was a big
set, and I got to do some wonderful aging," Bumstead told The Times in
2002. "I'm a stickler for aging — the rust and the dirt. It was just a
beautiful set."
The tall and bearish Bumstead was an unpretentious, down-to-earth
survivor of the old Hollywood studio system.
"I
love doing films," he said in a 2002 interview with the Dallas Morning
News in which he made note of his career longevity and said, "I've
never been laid off, I've never been fired and I've never looked for a
job."
In the same interview, Bumstead added: "I wouldn't be working now at my
age if it weren't for Clint Eastwood."
Their
professional relationship began on the 1972 western "Joe Kidd,"
directed by John Sturges and starring Eastwood. That was followed by
the Eastwood-directed 1973 western "High Plains Drifter."
While
working on "Million Dollar Baby," Eastwood's Oscar-winning 2004 drama
about a female boxer starring Eastwood and Hilary Swank, Bumstead
learned that he had prostate cancer.
"Clint furnished me with a
car and driver and a wheelchair," he told Daily Variety last year. "I
went through radiation and chemotherapy, but I was still able to work
for him."
"What really makes him invaluable is that he has a
great reservoir of memory and technique of working with everybody from
Hitchcock to [Billy] Wilder," Eastwood told Variety. "Of that era, he's
the last man standing."
Lloyd Henry Bumstead was born in Ontario on March 17, 1915.
He received a scholarship to USC, where he briefly played football and
studied architecture.
After finishing his sophomore year, he received a call to work at RKO
for the summer as an apprentice draftsman at $35 a week.
In
1937 he went to work at Paramount and, he recalled in a 2005 interview
with MovieMaker magazine, "That was when I made the decision to make
movies my life."
At Paramount, he worked for German-born art
director Hans Dreier, who headed the art department and provided
Bumstead with a valuable lesson. As he told MovieMaker:
"One
day, he walked into my office, briefly looked over my sketches, nodded
his head and said, 'Ah-ha! The character who inhabits that room must be
a very learned man.' Then he walked away. I didn't know what he meant,
so I went back to the script, re-read it and shook my head because the
main character was anything but an educated person.
"When I
looked at my drawing, I realized that I had designed the main
character's house with more bookcases than you would find in most
people's homes. The bulb went on and I realized my first lesson: Design
sets that are livable for the specific type of people who inhabit them,
and don't try to show every trick you know."
Bumstead, who
enlisted in the Navy during World War II and was stationed in
Washington, D.C., said in the 2002 Times interview that he also was
taken under the wing of Dreier's assistant, Roland Anderson, who was
Cecil B. DeMille's art director.
"I worked for him seven years before I became an art director,"
Bumstead said.
He
was working on director Michael Curtiz's 1956 costume drama "The
Vagabond King" when he was recommended to Hitchcock for the director's
1956 thriller "The Man Who Knew Too Much."
In addition to
"Vertigo," Bumstead also worked on Hitchcock's 1969 film "Topaz" and
his 1976 film "Family Plot," the director's final movie.
In 1998, Bumstead received the Art Directors Guild's lifetime
achievement award.
He
is survived by his wife of 23 years, Lena; three sons, Robert, Marty
and Steven; a daughter, Ann Jones; two stepdaughters, Carolyn Ehret and
Sue-Ellen Gittings; and 11 grandchildren.
The family requests
that contributions in Bumstead's memory be made to the USC School of
Architecture, care of Dottie O'Carroll, Watt Hall 204, Los Angeles,
90089-0291.
Copyright 2006 Los Angeles Times