![]() Roped stanchions prevent visitors from getting too close, yet this exhibition also represents the first time the public can view such a wide-ranging collection of hand-painted backdrops in person. “Astonishingly, they shared that they would prefer the loan to be a donation to UT Austin’s Texas Performing Arts Hollywood Backdrop Collection as teaching assets for future generations under my care and stewardship.” Backings with a request to borrow 17 of their backings, including the iconic paintings from Ben-Hur, North By Northwest, and The Sound of Music,” Maness adds, noting that Lynne Coakley’s company quickly agreed - and went one step further. “We knew treasures existed beyond UT Austin’s collection, so we reached out to J.C. She immediately invited Walsh to co-curate the event. ![]() ![]() The scenic designer, whose credits also include An American in Paris and Brigadoon, passed away in 2001.įast-forward to 2020, when Lippman was able to reach Maness and offer up his museum’s space for an exhibition. He spent about two years seeking homes for the backings around the globe, diverse locations that ranged from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to UT Austin and the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in Glasgow, which gratefully accepted five backdrops painted by Gibson, who was Scottish by birth. “They determined there were 207 backdrops they weren’t going to take with them, bottom-of-the-pile pieces that weren’t being rented,” Walsh explains. That conversation led Walsh to create the Art Directors Guild Backdrop Recovery Project, a project in which he, Maness and Coakley photographed and catalogued the to-be-discarded backdrops, hopeful of finding new homes for each. When John Gary Coakley’s daughter and current president of the company, Lynne Coakley, knew they would have to edit roughly 200 backdrops out of their collection when they moved to new headquarters, she called Walsh in New Mexico, where he was working on Netflix’s Longmire, to ask if he knew who might be interested in acquiring them. Backings, I’m not sure many of these would have survived,” Lippman says. Backings purchased discarded backdrops from MGM, Disney, 20 th Century Fox and other studios, in some cases rescuing them from the fate of garbage dumpsters. The firm was founded in 1962 by John Harold Coakley and John Gary Coakley, a father-and-son team with deep ties to the industry: several of their backings are seen in 1965’s The Sound of Music, while John Harold’s father, John Coakley, worked as a scenic artist under the legendary George Gibson, who headed up MGM’s scenic-design department from 1938 to 1968 (Gibson’s first film for the studio was 1939’s The Wizard of Oz, though his Technicolor-friendly backdrops for that film are unfortunately thought to be lost). Backings, a Culver City company that specializes in creating backdrops for film and television rental (while they still produce hand-painted backdrops, many of today’s backings are produced on vinyl or as digital art). ![]() Like many objects from classic films, most of the backdrops in the exhibition were rescued years ago from forgotten corners and basements in studio buildings, many by J.C. “Once I spoke with Karen, it was apparent enough were available to create an exhibition,” Lippman notes. An alumnus of UT Austin, Lippman decided he would try to get in touch with Maness and discern whether the backdrops might work as the subject of their own museum show. The segment included interviews with Walsh and with Karen Maness, assistant professor of scenic design and figurative painting at the University of Texas at Austin and the co-author of a seminal book on the subject, 2016’s The Art of the Hollywood Backdrop. The exhibition is the brainchild of museum executive director Irvin Lippman, who was watching CBS Sunday Morning in February 2020 and caught a story that explored a renewed appreciation for the once-forgotten backdrops from many of Hollywood’s golden-era films. Stu Silver, 'Throw Momma From the Train' Screenwriter, Dies at 76 ![]()
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