The Talented Gary Jones Saucon Valley Designer May Sew Up Oscar For 'Mr. Ripley' Costumes
March 26, 2000|by POLLY RAYNER, The Morning Call / http://articles.mcall.com/2000-03-26/entertainment/3285120_1_costume-design-mr-ripley-prep-school
"Jones, along with his partner of 22 years, Ann Roth, met the
`Mr. Ripley` challenge well enough to be nominated for this year's Academy
Award for costume design."
In `The Talented Mr. Ripley,` which is set in the swanky precincts of Europe in the 1950s, the challenge for costume designer Gary Jones was to maintain what he calls `the old-fashioned aura.`
`There's a strong connection between the costumes in the film and the fashion in clothes today, and we had to be very careful to avoid self-consciousness,` says the Saucon Valley resident. `The job is to create for the characters a look for the movie that puts it in time, place and atmosphere without calling attention to itself.`
Jones, along with his partner of 22 years, Ann Roth, met the `Mr. Ripley` challenge well enough to be nominated for this year's Academy Award for costume design.
`Winning that nomination is a dream come true,` says Jones, 52, who will be attending the Academy Awards presentations in the Los Angeles Shrine auditorium tonight. `As a youngster, I used to watch the Academy Awards and felt -- wow! I sort of feel like that now. I'm ecstatic --a lovely end to the story after a year's work."
Costumes for the main characters, Ripley (Matt Damon) and Dickie (Jude Law), were marked by simplicity, says Jones. `It's really difficult sometimes for us to realize how innocent times were then -- the clothes weren't showy. There was no sexual innuendo -- all that came later, in the '60s," says Jones.
`Ripley's clothes are a mixture of prep school and prep school wannabe. As he evolves into someone more European, he begins wearing a classic, more tailored look.
`On the other hand, with Dickie, we don't get to see his real wardrobe. He's avoiding his past and he emulates a New York jazz look even in Europe. We dressed him in blazers, just right for the times. But we wanted to create a feeling that Dickie was someone who would look good in whatever he put on."
Research is an integral part of costuming a period piece like `Mr. Ripley.` `For 'Mr. Ripley' we had two trunkloads of work to research -- magazine clippings, photographs, swatches, pieces of fabric, and antique clothing which we used as prototypes for various sections of the movie -- helpful hints for what we might want a character to look like," says Jones. `You must make these ideas, shapes, colors come to life on the actor.
`The fitting room is the wonderful place where it all happens. It's not just a matter of trying on a few things and running out. It's important to work the character with the actor in front of a mirror.`
Each character gets a rack of clothes which are adjusted according to needs, followed by fittings of what works. `It's necessary to run through the entire movie and plot how everything works so that there's a dramatic, even flow of costumes and the film,` Jones says. `By the time you go to shoot a scene, 95 percent of the work is done.`
Actually, says Jones, the work begins with a meeting with the director who lays out the way he sees his characters in the movie. Jones points out that director Anthony Minghella also wrote the screenplay for `Mr. Ripley,` `so naturally he'd hold certain things important."
`Ripley` is the second time Jones has worked with Minghella. His first time was on the 1996 Academy award-winning `The English Patient."
It was with the film version of the musical `Hair" in 1979 that Jones' career as a costume designer began to soar. `It was my first experience with film," says Jones, as well as his first collaboration with Roth.
He continued working as her assistant on `Sweet Dreams" (1985), `Working Girl" (1988), `Postcards from the Edge" (1990), `The Bonfire of the Vanities" (1990), `Dave" (1993), `Wolf" (1994) and several other films.
Jones' journey to New York and Hollywood began in a little farming town near Toledo. He started his designing career creating costumes for student productions at Ohio University, and this became the impetus for his life's work.
`Actually, I started out as an actor and dancer, but when I switched to the design department,` Jones recalls. `That was home to me."
He studied art and costume history and costume design for two years, then decided to go to New York for a summer job working as an apprentice to a costume designer for a ballet company. `Unfortunately he had a bad knee injury and was unable to work, so that was the end of my apprenticeship there."
But Jones never left New York. He eventually met Anita Loos, author of `Gentlemen Prefer Blondes," which starred Marilyn Monroe and Rosalind Russell in the film version, who introduced Jones to the head of the costume shop for Joseph Papp's New York Shakespeare Festival.
Feb. 1, 2000John Calhoun | livedesignonline / http://livedesignonline.com/mag/talented-ann-roth
The Talented Mr. Ripley is set in a specific place, at a
very specific moment. Think Fellini and Via Veneto, on the late 50s cusp of
Kennedy's Camelot, and you're on the right track. It's la dolce vita
experienced through American eyes: a life and time costume designer Ann Roth
remembers well.
"The 50s were, for the most part, very dull
visually," she says. "In the 40s, we had the restrictions of the war
and limited fabric. After the war, Dior came with the New Look and that was
very interesting, with the use of more fabric, the bigness of the men's
clothes, the double-breasted things. When we went into the 50s, there was this
aspiration to look like a solid citizen. I guess if you watched TV, which I did
not, Lucy and Ozzie and Harriet were on your mind. Then, the jet-set thing
started to happen--Italians, the Riviera, Brigitte Bardot, and the Mambo Kings.
In New York, I remember going to El Morocco and the Peppermint Lounge,
underneath [noted costume builder] Karinska's. There was a certain air about
town which had to do with Marlon Brando and Anna Magnani, and dancing all
night. And I was right there."
At the time, Roth was a burgeoning designer, a Carnegie
Mellon graduate who had apprenticed with Irene Sharaff on several Hollywood
films and Broadway shows. "In the daytime, I wore short white gloves and
heels to work," she recalls. "I drove an MG without a top, and I wore
a hat. There was a propriety in the way you wished to look; you did not wish to
look wanton. At night, you would get dressed up, and be less perfect, less
ladylike, more fun. It was good to be fun.
"Now all that was very provincial, that was
America," Roth continues. "If you were one of the glamour people, you
were allowed to run away from school, and you ended up in Paris or on the
Riviera. And that's what The Talented Mr. Ripley is about."
Adapted by director Anthony Minghella from Patricia
Highsmith's 1955 suspense novel, Ripley is the story of one of those
"glamour people," Dickie Greenleaf (Jude Law), whose identity is
taken over by a wannabe, Tom Ripley (Matt Damon). The title character is a
working-class climber sent by Dickie's wealthy shipbuilder father to coax his
playboy son home from Italy. Instead, Ripley falls in love with his quarry, and
even more with the golden-haired youth's privileged bohemian lifestyle;
eventually, he disposes of Dickie and attempts to take over his enviable
existence. Complicating matters as the impostor moves around Italy, from Naples
to Rome to Venice, are Dickie's girlfriend, Marge Sherwood (Gwyneth Paltrow),
as well as another young American woman, Meredith Logue (Cate Blanchett).
"My job was to show this very well-off boy, Dickie, in
Europe, on a very strict allowance, but with a sensational lifestyle,"
says Roth, who won an Oscar for her work on Minghella's last film, The English
Patient. "I had him in a jacket and some shorts, or a jacket and some
linen trousers, and that jacket had to reflect a very rich background. And if
he had one or two made in Rome, it had to look that way." Dickie's wealth
is casually expressed, and, since he's avoiding his family, perhaps tattered a
bit around the edges; his Gucci loafers may be worn through, and his
tailor-made outfits may be ratty. But he still looks classy and stylish. Ripley
is another matter. "I had to do this kid who comes from America straighter
than anything," says Roth. "Both to show his insecurity about
dressing with any kind of flamboyance, and also that he had no bucks. He comes
from Princeton, and he's very American East Coast, but from Sears."
The design gets a good deal more complicated when Ripley
becomes Dickie. "He goes for it big time," says Roth, which means
that Damon is costumed in elegant outfits which are posher than anything we see
on Law's real Dickie. But beyond that, "there are times when he is, in the
same hour, seen by two different groups, one of whom thinks he's Dickie and one
of whom thinks he's Ripley. Those clothes I had to hold back on."
Roth's longtime assistant Gary Jones, who gets co-designer
credit on The Talented Mr. Ripley, goes into greater detail about Damon's
complex transformation in the film. "It never was literally meant as an
imitation of the other character," he says. "He borrows things like
cufflinks and rings, and there are things that he does with his voice and hair
that are all suggestive. We tried very hard to make it come organically, if you
will. And then, of course, there's a lot of back and forth, so there are
transitional pieces. The Ripley corduroy jacket, which he never loses totally,
is such a piece. We are never far away from the dual personality." Jones
refers to one scene at the top of the Spanish Steps, where Ripley watches
Meredith, Marge, and the character Peter Smith-Kingsley (played by Jack
Davenport) meet in the square below: "He's holding onto his glasses, and
he has the Ripley jacket. Any one of the characters could blow his cover. It's
great theatre at that moment."
Jones first worked with Roth on Milos Forman's movie version
of Hair, in 1978. "As trite as it seems, we just clicked," says
Jones, who has designed such films as The Other Sister, Vanya on 42nd Street,
and The Trip to Bountiful on his own. "She is an extraordinary talent, and
the fact that we clicked had to do with our realization that we were both
looking for the same thing, as much as any two artists could." Both are
dedicated to the idea of building the character through his or her costumes;
neither are very interested in simply making the stars look glamorous by
dressing them in the trendiest labels. "This is not going to be a fashion
show," warns Roth of Ripley.
Take Gwyneth Paltrow's Marge Sherwood, for instance.
"She's a girl who comes from a good family, and goes to Europe to
write," says Roth. "She hangs out in her pajamas and her skirts, and
she has a bikini on underneath her skirt and blouse when she goes to town. She
doesn't buy her own clothes, they are her parents' purchases she had from
school. I also wanted to reflect that in the jewelry, which might have been her
Aunt Mary's, and God knows where Aunt Mary got it." Roth says the
character is one she recognized instantly (not to mention the fact that she
knew Highsmith): "My friend Patsy Hemingway had her uncle's vicuna coat,
and she always wore loafers of a high quality. But if somebody said, where'd
you get those loafers, she wouldn't have had a clue. That was not interesting
to her. It's not like the designer's names now, the Tommy whomevers--in no way
did people think like that. We did love clothes, mind you."
And Paltrow certainly does have her share of lovely outfits
in The Talented Mr. Ripley. There's a calf-length blue cloth coat with rolled
collar lined in beige she wears in Venice, and a wonderfully period-perfect
leopard-skin print coat she sports in the Piazza San Marco. The former was
designed specially for the film, and made at Terelli's in Rome, but the latter
was a vintage piece, as are many of the film's costumes. "Ripley's clothes
as Dickie Greenleaf are all custom-made," says Jones of the elegant suits
made in New York by John Tudor, "and the clothes for Ripley himself are
mostly vintage, but all remade," says Jones. "There's not a formula
for that; it has to do with what looks best. Then there are requirements for
stunt people and so on, and sometimes you need three or four shirts because
they're going to get ruined when a bomb goes off. Invariably, the shirt that
you love, there's only one of."
Roth is known both for her own collection of period costumes
and for her network of vintage connections. In particular, she has a collector
friend in Philadelphia who "buys stuff he knows I will like." The
designer sees vintage clothing as a way of authenticating the character.
"Let me tell you something: I am the first girl in this business to use
real period clothes," she says, setting herself apart not for the first
time from the Hollywood norm. "I've done this for a long time, because I
come from this coast and they come from that coast. When they did The Sting, I
was doing The Day of the Locust. While I had some real stuff I had brought from
here, or worked out of museums, having clothes copied, they would just go into
the stockroom and pull things out."
"Our strength has always been clothing that looks
real," adds Jones. "Prior to Hair, Ann had certainly used vintage
clothing, but we started doing it even more from that moment on, and mixing it
with the custom-made clothes for the principals, or in scenes that had to be
custom-made because of color restrictions or whatever. The hope is that you
can't tell which is which. It's about the character rather than the label. Not
to say that you don't want to have attitude, because characters need that. It's
about the way the costume is worn, the silhouette or the color, almost as much
as what the costume is."
There's another important element to the Ripley design that
undercuts its fashion-show possibilities--it's the quality Roth calls
propriety, and Jones labels innocence. This is part of what fixes The Talented
Mr. Ripley as a period piece, predating a modern era whose beginnings Roth
locates sometime around the Kennedy assassination [for more of her thoughts, as
well as that of other designers, on contemporary costume design, see the March
issue of ED]. However rebellious, the women wear girdles and bras, and bodies
are for the most part chastely covered. "It was not a time when the
explicit language and behavior of today was accepted," says Jones.
"Although Italy is this great sexy country for Ripley, what he falls in
love with--Dickie and Marge living in these villas and cavorting around--is an
exotic lifestyle. It was out of the norm. We were extremely conscious of
maintaining the innocence of the time, both in the men and the women."
After a fashion, they do attempt to assimilate into European
ways. "There's a very famous photograph of an American girl walking
through Rome, wearing a peasant skirt," says Roth, who adds that that
photo provided part of her inspiration for Cate Blanchett's character, who
initially dresses like a "Marymount College girl," with gloves and a
belted coat, and eventually evolves into a more worldly look, wearing vintage
clothes all along the way. As for Paltrow, Jones says, "In the beginning
she wears things that are carefree and bohemian, and as the movie becomes more
serious, her style becomes streamlined and a little bit more severe." But
for the most part, "The shapes of the skirts Gwyneth wears are long and
full; once we established that that's what we wanted, we looked in every corner
for the period clothes, and recreated some things from prototypes."
Though Roth remembers the period well, research is always an
important part of the process for her. "There are very few people who have
done as much in the 30s as I have," she says, "but when I did English
Patient, I wouldn't have dreamed of doing it without starting research
again." For Ripley, the designer compiled files of "small Italian
villages, Romans, San Remo vacationers, bathing people, servicemen, nuns, and
religious parades. I had enough research to send two huge trucks of it to
Italy." Roth hired her daughter, Hannah Green, to help with the research,
and went to work with her New York assistant, Michele Matlin. In Italy, she
took advantage of "a superb Italian crew" to help make the costumes.
And, of course, there was Jones.
So how do the duties break down between the two
co-designers, one of whom clearly has seniority? "People often ask that,
and often we say we don't know," says Jones. "But the truth is, we do
address everything together at one point or another." An example is the
time frame of the script, which was originally laid earlier in the 50s. "We
wanted to make it later, when they had come out of the war more. We also wanted
to take it more into the jazz and Beat era." Both designers tended to see
the images in black-and-white terms. "That has partly to do with the
innocence and simplicity," says Jones. "But also, a lot of our
research, from Life magazine and Italian photography, was black and white.
There is color in the design, but it's a very subdued palette--though not
subdued chic. It's a mixture of pale colors. The photographs were as helpful to
the actors as to us. It gives them a feeling of what these people were
about."
Beyond this, he says of his collaboration with Roth,
"Sometimes it seems we're divided along the lines of men and women. Ann
was very active with Gwyneth and Cate, and I was very active with Matt and Jude
and Jack Davenport. But with a project this large, logistics play a big part.
We had many locations in nine cities, and we would take turns going ahead or
staying behind." As for sketches, he says, "Mostly Ann does the
drawings; she's much better at it than I."
Roth says her greatest pleasure comes in the fitting room.
"I do every fitting, and I choose every fabric. I'm not saying I'm a
control freak, but I'm a control freak. I like to create the character, or if
it's a lot of background people, I like to create the look of it--the
spectacle, the atmosphere." Jones feels the same: "It doesn't matter
how great it is, until you get it on and you stand there and you create the
character." Yet Roth says Jones comes in particularly handy on the set, using
a San Remo Jazz Festival scene in Ripley to illustrate her point. "We'd
have, say, 50 women and 50 men to get dressed, and get through hair and makeup,
and then the principals. I'd say to Gary, 'Would you mind looking at the band,
who are presumably Americans, and make sure their neckties are American?' Or,
'There's a man with funny hair; grab him and take him back to the hairdresser.'
Gary does that like a great gentleman, whereas I am more volatile."
Roth comes by her admittedly formidable personality
honestly; she is the product of a time and business that yielded some hardy
female survivors. Her first professional theatrical experience was as a scenery
painter for the Pittsburgh Opera, and she fully intended to continue in set and
production design. Then she met the legendary costume designer Irene Sharaff at
Bucks County Playhouse. "She said she thought I would be happier in
costume," Roth recalls. "I think that's because she was--she was a
successful scenery designer Off Broadway, but she was discouraged from doing
scenery on Broadway. Now, Irene was a very tough babe; I don't know how she was
intimidated--maybe the union didn't like women--but she was. Then she went to
Hollywood to work for Goldwyn, and there, I am very sure there were no lady
production designers."
Sharaff offered Roth an extraordinary opportunity for
someone so young and inexperienced. "She asked me to come with her to
California to do the film of Brigadoon. She put me in charge of dyeing all the
tartans." Sharaff put a limitation on Roth's apprenticeship: they would do
five movies and five Broadway shows together, and then the apron strings would
be cut. And that's what happened. Among the movies were A Star Is Born (for
which Sharaff designed the "Born in a Trunk" sequence) and The King
and I. Roth also assisted Miles White on the massive Around the World in 80
Days production, after which she went out on her own,and basically abandoned
Hollywood.
"I wanted to come to Broadway; Hollywood was not
someplace I wanted to be," she says. "I had a very good training
experience out there under Irene and a man called Al Nicholl, who ran Western
Costume. But it's a world I'm not super comfortable in. It really is like
working for the Prudential Insurance Company. When Edith Head or Helen Rose
were going to do a Debbie Reynolds movie or a June Allyson movie or even a
Grace Kelly movie, they would sit with a sketch artist, draw the leading lady's
clothes, and then the wardrobe ladies would organize the rest of the
show." Roth, who recently received the Edith Head Lifetime Achievement
Award from the International Fashion Institute, hastens to add, "I'm not
taking anything away from Edith. She was there to invent the glamour of
Hollywood. I love that, but I'm not interested in doing it."
Sharaff was an exception--"When Irene was doing The
King and I, everything down to the rings was designed. She had to get special
permission to do it, and that was very offensive to some people." But the
structure of the unions in Hollywood, split between a costume designers' association
and costuming and wardrobe guild, made it difficult to carve out the kind of
position and career Roth wanted. So she returned to New York, where she
received her first solo designer credit on the play Maybe Tuesday, in 1958. At
some point, she started meeting the talents--directors, mostly--who have been
so central to her career. Foremost, perhaps, there were Mike Nichols and Neil
Simon, whom Roth first worked with on the 1964 Broadway production of The Odd
Couple. Her association with Simon extended to his plays The Star-Spangled Girl
and They're Playing Our Song, as well as such films as Murder by Death, The
Goodbye Girl, California Suite, and last year's remake of The Out-of-Towners.
With Nichols, meanwhile, she has enjoyed perhaps her most satisfying
collaboration, designing every one of his films since Silkwood (including the
upcoming What Planet Are You From?), and many of his Broadway forays, including
The Real Thing and Hurlyburly. Other stage credits include Purlie, Play It
Again, Sam, and The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.
Roth's first movie costume design job was on The World of
Henry Orient, in 1964. The director was George Roy Hill, whom she reunited with
on The World According to Garp. Roth's film vitae is packed with credits, but
some highlights are The Owl and the Pussycat, Klute, Coming Home, Dressed to
Kill, Places in the Heart (which garnered her her first Oscar nomination),
Sweet Dreams, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Sabrina. Other favorite
filmmakers are John Schlesinger (Midnight Cowboy and The Day of the Locust) and
Sidney Lumet (The Morning After and Q&A), and Robert Mulligan (Up the Down
Staircase).
The designer says her success with a director or lack
thereof is a matter of sensibility. "One time, when I was working with
Robert Mulligan for the first time," she recalls, "it was a big
dinner table scene, with family conflicts and whatnot. I said, 'What do you
want here?' And he said, 'You do it, and I'll find it.' He had chosen me
because my sense of things--my sense of humor really--was something that he
got. Mike Nichols and I are the same person: if we walk into a very stylish
room, and there's a pompous person with egg on his tie, we both see that.
Schlesinger's the same way." As for Minghella, she says, "There's a
youngness about Anthony's work patterns. He likes what I like, which is the
fitting room. I almost never let a director come to the fitting room, but I
invited him. Like Mike, he has divine taste."
Shared taste is also what has allowed Roth and Jones to work
together so long and fruitfully, though the senior designer, recalling her
abbreviated working period with Sharaff, likes to encourage him to maintain his
separate career. But clearly, the two of them have a good thing going,
particularly when it comes to a complex job like Ripley. "I would say our
partnership is unique," says Jones. "Nothing was ever written down
orparticularly defined; we've just gone forth, one project at a
time."Despite he r antipathy to Hollywood ways and her capacity to rock the
boat by being "somebody who does the elevator operator," Roth has
managed to create one of the most prolific and vital film careers of any
costume designer. "If you keep yourself safely in that cocoon of working
with people like Mike or Anthony, you're fine," she explains. "I
don't care which medium I'm working in; I have only a strong feeling for the
director. People say, 'Did you have fun making Ripley?' Jesus, you don't have
fun, fun isn't part of it. But working with the director on the script you want
to realize is a way to spend your life."
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