COSTUMES IN FILM AND THE ROLE OF WESTERN COSTUME COMPANY:
AN ORAL HISTORY PROJECT
A Project
Presented to the faculty of the Department of History
California State University, Sacramento
Submitted in partial satisfaction of
the requirements for the degree of
MASTER OF ARTS
in
History
(Public History)
by
Claire Thompson Tynan
SPRING
2012
COSTUMES IN FILM AND THE ROLE OF WESTERN COSTUME COMPANY:
AN ORAL HISTORY PROJECT
A Project
by
Claire Thompson Tynan
Approved by:
__________________________________, Committee Chair
Patrick Ettinger
__________________________________, Second Reader
Christopher Castaneda
____________________________
Date
ii
Student: Claire Thompson Tynan
I certify that this student has met the requirements for format contained in the University format
manual, and that this project is suitable for shelving in the Library and credit is to be awarded for
the project.
__________________________, Graduate Coordinator
Pattrick Ettinger
Department of History
iii
___________________
Date
Abstract
of
COSTUMES IN FILM AND THE ROLE OF WESTERN COSTUME COMPANY:
AN ORAL HISTORY PROJECT
by
Claire Thompson Tynan
Costumes have played an important role in the history of films and television in
the United States. However, it is a topic that has not been widely examined by scholars.
The role of Western Costume Company, a Los Angeles-based company that has provided
costumes for countless films, in the costume industry is the subject of this project. Oral
histories provided a tool to create a historical record of Western Costume Company and
of costuming in general. The nine oral histories conducted for this project were used to
supplement the historical record of both the history of Western Costume and the history
of costuming in general. Oral history interviews also allowed for personal insights from
people in the field.
In addition to the interviews, secondary research was conducted on the history of
film, the history of costumes, the history of Western Costume Company, and the history
and methodologies of oral histories. This thesis relates the process of creating an oral
history project, the stories that the interviewees provided, and a broader history of
costumes in film.
_______________________, Committee Chair
Patrick Ettinger, Ph.D.
_______________________
Date
iv
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I feel so fortunate for my time at Western Costume Company, and for the
opportunity to work on this project. The people I met were fascinating, and I enjoyed
hearing all of their stories. Thank you to everyone who participated in the interviews. A
big thank you to Bobi Garland for everything you did. This project would not have been
possible with out her.
Thank you to Dr. Patrick Ettinger for being a wonderful advisor. Thank you for
allowing me to take the oral history class as an independent study, and for being so
supportive of this project.
Thank you to Aaron Puzarne for being there through more breakdowns than I
would care to admit throughout this whole process.
The biggest thank you of all to my parents. Thank you for dragging me to
countless museums and historic sites all over the world. While I might not have
appreciated it then, you truly instilled a love of learning in me. You have shown me
through example that learning is a life-long journey. Without your support, monetarily
and otherwise, none of this would have been possible.
v
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
Acknowledgments............................................................................................................... v
Chapter
1. INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................... 1
An Oral History Project .......................................................................................... 3
2. HISTORY OF COSTUMING ........................................................................................ 5
A Brief History of Film and Costuming ................................................................. 5
Terms Defined ...................................................................................................... 14
Costume Designer Versus Fashion Designer ........................................................ 16
Western Costume Company ................................................................................. 17
3. HISTORY OF ORAL HISTORIES .............................................................................. 31
What Are Oral Histories?...................................................................................... 31
What Makes a Good Oral History? ....................................................................... 36
Problems and Concerns......................................................................................... 38
4. DEVELOPING AN ORAL HISTORY PROJECT ...................................................... 40
Interview Preparation ............................................................................................ 40
Preparing Questions .............................................................................................. 43
Recording Equipment ........................................................................................... 45
Interview Process .................................................................................................. 46
Processing Interviews ........................................................................................... 50
Transcriptions ....................................................................................................... 51
5. FINDINGS AND CONCLUSIONS ............................................................................. 57
Who Are The Interviewees and How Did they Get Here? ................................... 57
Credit Where It’s Due ........................................................................................... 60
Historical Accuracy .............................................................................................. 63
Finding the Importance in Costumes .................................................................... 66
Time and Money ................................................................................................... 68
vi
Competition........................................................................................................... 70
Films and Costumes as Part of Our Lives ............................................................. 72
Leaving and Returning to Western ....................................................................... 73
Western as a Family .............................................................................................. 74
Final Thoughts ...................................................................................................... 75
Appendix A. Costume Design Procedure For a Film ....................................................... 76
Appendix B. Sample Interview Questions ........................................................................ 78
Appendix C. Sample Field Notes...................................................................................... 81
Appendix D. Sample Time Log ........................................................................................ 82
Appendix E. Sample Interview Release Form .................................................................. 83
Appendix F. Transcript – Interview with Eddie Marks .................................................... 84
Appendix G. Transcript – Interview with Bobi Garland ................................................ 123
Appendix H. Transcript – Interview with Harry Rotz .................................................... 159
Bibliography ................................................................................................................... 178
vii
1
Chapter 1
INTRODUCTION
An audience in 1895 viewed the first moving image film. In the hundred-plus
years that have followed, films have become an integral part of Americans’ lives.
However, it is important to remember that writing about films is still in its infancy. As
Gerald Mast so nicely writes in his book, A Short History of the Movies, “the history of
the movies is, first of all, the history of a new art.”1 Costume design for film is a subject
that has not been written about to a huge extent. In fact, “from the first motion picture in
1895 until the early 1920s little was written on film costume, until it became apparent
that film would be a significant medium for establishing and spreading twentieth-century
fashion.”2 While it is now clear that costume design has played a substantial role not only
in films, but in influencing fashion, the subject is still not treated as having much weight.
Yet, films have impacted American society, and costumes play a very significant role in a
film. As Deborah Landis says, “film costumes serve two equal purposes: to support the
narrative by creating memorable characters, and to provide balance within the frame by
using color, texture and silhouette.”3 The way that a movie star looks in a film can be
instantly recalled by millions of Americans. We will never forget Dorothy’s ruby red
slippers and blue gingham dress.
1
Gerald Mast, A Short History of the Movies: Fifth Edition, rev. Bruce F. Kawin (New York: Macmillan
Publishing Company, 1992), 2.
2
Susan Perez Prichard, Film Costume, An Annotated Bibliography (Metuchen N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1981),
x.
3
Deborah Nadoolman Landis, ed., 50 Designers/50 Costumes: Concept to Character (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 2005), 3.
2
In her interview for the oral history project that is the subject of this thesis, Bobi
Garland, Western Costume Company’s Research Librarian, talked about how large of a
role films played in her life growing up:
Of course like every kid (I) fell in love with the movies really young, and I think
that everyone my age, we watched the Wizard of Oz every Easter, so that was a
big event. And I loved all the costumes drama. It was a big family thing to sit
around and Friday nights we had ice cream, and Saturday we had sodas. And it
was movie night.4
Many Americans today could relate to Bobi’s experiences, because in the last one
hundred years, there are few other things that Americans have united around like the
films. Adrienne Munich, in her book Fashion in Film, even goes as far as to say that
“film costume design not only boosted U.S. success in an international economy but, I
would argue, went further. It helped to define an American identity.”5 While this new art
may still be in its infancy, the impact that film has had on American culture, and the
impact that American culture has had on film, can be strongly felt. As Mast says, there is
a “close connection between the movies as cultural artifacts and conditions in American
culture as a whole. Particular cultural conditions influence, if not dictate, the particular
qualities and quantities of films in any given era.”6
Western Costume Company plays a significant role in the history of costuming in
Hollywood. The company has been in business for one hundred years, almost since the
beginning of the film industry itself.
4
Bobi Garland, Interview by author, North Hollywood, CA, February 8, 2012.
Adrienne Munich, Fashion in Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 19.
6
Mast, A Short History of the Movies, 5.
5
3
An Oral History Project
This thesis describes the process of creating an oral history project centered
around Western Costume Company. To commemorate Western Costume Company’s
centennial, the company sought to document its history. It was determined that an oral
history project would be an integral part of the historical record and help emphasize the
craft and importance of costume design in the entertainment industry. The project sought
to explore the history of Western Costume and its important place within the industry, as
well as the personalities and relationships of the people associated with Western Costume.
Oral histories were a perfect tool to create a historical record of Western Costume
Company because they create primary records of a subject that is not fully documented. It
also allows for many different viewpoints to be shared. The oral histories conducted for
this project supplement the historical record on both the history of Western Costume and
the history of costuming in general, and allow for personal insights from people in the
field.
Conducting oral histories for this project was also important because few oral
records exist from people involved in the costuming field. An effort has been made to
document the history of film and television, the most notable being the oral history
archives at The University of California, Los Angeles, The Margaret Herrick Library at
the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and the Archive of American
Television. However, these repositories hold only a few oral histories from costumers,
resulting in a very small scope of information. While these oral histories are meant to
4
provide a history of Western Costume Company they also expand the sphere of
information on a craft whose documentation is limited.
Between August 2011 and February 2012, interviews were conducted with
various people involved in the costuming field. Transcriptions have been completed of
four of the interviews and are included as appendixes to this paper. The interview
subjects are costume designers, costume supervisors, craftspeople, and other employees
of Western Costume Company.
5
Chapter 2
HISTORY OF COSTUMING
A Brief History of Film and Costuming
From the invention of the moving picture, films quickly became popular with a
large audience. By the 1910s, movies appealed to a wide range of audiences and
American middle and upper classes were captivated. At the time, France and New York
were the centers of filmmaking.7 In these early years of film, costumes were almost an
afterthought. Actresses were often responsible for their own costumes. In his book, In a
Glamorous Fashion, W. Robert LaVine points out that “those fortunate actresses who
had extensive wardrobes of their own received more parts than more modestly dressed
women. Most films at the time required one or two ensembles, perhaps with changes of
accessories and costume jewelry.”8 The production of most American films took place in
New York, so many of the costumes came from Broadway rental houses or were
purchased at department stores. A French director named Louis Gasnier created one of
the earliest costumes made for an actress in his movie Mysteries of New York (1918).9
Although a Frenchman designed the first film costume, the craft quickly became an
American specialty, due in part to the war in Europe. World War I restricted production
throughout Europe, making it possible for American-made costumes to gain a large
percentage of the business.10
7
Melinda Corey and George Ochoa, eds., The American Film Institute Desk Reference (New York:
Stonesong Press, 2002), 21.
8
W. Robert LaVine, In a Glamorous Fashion (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1980), 12 – 13.
9
LaVine, In a Glamorous Fashion, 13.
10
Corey and Ochoa, The American Film Institute Desk Reference, 27.
6
During the first decades of film making, changes abounded. American
filmmaking quickly moved to California and burgeoned. LaVine points out that Southern
California was a desirable place for a number of reasons. The first being the weather. Its
proximity to Mexico was also useful as it was, “a place where film producers felt they
could escape the worldwide monopoly of the Motion Pictures Patents Company, a
consortium of American and French moviemakers that legally controlled all film
production. The location also provided the studios with plenty of cheap labor.”11 During
these early years of films, technical advances were made as well, the most important
being the addition of sound. By the end of the 1920s, over forty percent of US movie
theaters were wired for sound. It is important not to underestimate the importance of this
development, especially when it came to costumes. Adrian, one of the most famous
costume designer’s of all time, said, “with the entrance of the human voice, actresses
suddenly became human beings.... Everything had to be more real.... The clothes took on
a genuine character.”12
Interestingly, by the 1920s actresses were generally provided with costumes, but
there were no costumers to assist the actresses with their costumes. As Lillian Gish, one
of the most successful actresses of the era, said, “in those days there was no one to keep
track of what an actor was wearing from scene to scene. He was obliged to remember for
11
LaVine, In a Glamorous Fashion,15.
Deborah Nadoolman Landis, Dressed: A Century of Hollywood Costume Design (New York: Collins
Design, 2007), 72.
12
7
himself what he had worn and how his hair and makeup had looked in a pervious
scene.”13
Once the film industry became established in Los Angeles, major studios quickly
developed. By the 1930s, MGM, Warner Brothers, Paramount, RKO, Universal,
Columbia, Disney, and Fox controlled most US screens. As The American Film Institute
Desk Reference states, “by mid-decade, each studio would have an individual identity:
high-toned MGM offered big stars and high-quality productions; “Poverty Row”
Columbia traded on Harry Langdon – trained Frank Capra’s comedies; Warner Bros.
made gritty social dramas and gangster films.”14 The studios were, in many ways, welloiled machines that could produce movies at record speed. In any given week in 1948,
Universal, 20th Century Fox, Columbia, Warner’s, and MGM were each working on three
to five pictures at a time.15 The studios were able to produce so many movies at once
because they took cues from the manufacturing plants of the early twentieth century. As
Mast points out, “like Ford’s plant, the Hollywood studio broke the manufacture of its
product into a series of operations, and each cell of the whole organism fulfilled its
particular function.”16 This included developing a wardrobe department in each of the
studios.
The studios benefited from running each department efficiently, and this meant
that costumes had to be created or obtained quickly and in an inexpensive manner. While
13
Lillian Gish with Ann Pinchot, The Movies, Mr. Griffith, and Me (Englewood Cliffs N.J.: Prentice-Hall,
Inc., 1969), 139.
14
Corey and Ochoa, The American Film Institute Desk Reference, 49.
15
Anthony Dawson, "Patterns of Production and Employment in Hollywood," Hollywood Quarterly 4, no.
4 (1950) www.jstor.org/stable/1209815 (accessed March 16, 2012), 345.
16
Mast, A Short History of the Movies,102.
8
cost effectiveness was a factor in developing costume departments in studios, there were
other reasons for the development of the studio costume design departments. Films
produced in California could not rely on the Broadway costume houses, as the films
produced in New York had, and special costumes were needed for the period pieces and
westerns that were popular at the time.17 By the early 1920s the studios began focusing
on costumes, and the costumes interested film viewers. As LaValley explains, “the
largest studios began to maintain enormous costume departments; the costume designer,
heretofore anonymous for the most part, now began to assume a vital and well-publicized
role in the production of period films.”18
During the 1920s and 30s, the role of the costume designer gained some
prominence. As Landis points out, “studio chiefs, directors, and producers recognized the
power of costume to create the look and feel of a movie, and deliver the female audiences
to the theater.”19 By the 1920s, still early in the history of film, the United States
dominated the business, and American costume designers’ work was seen by millions
world wide.20 By the 1930s, studio wardrobe departments had become huge operations
that employed as many as two hundred employees, and produced costumes by the
hundreds.21 However, the craft was still not completely respected. While costume
departments were well established in the studios by the late 1920s, the newly founded
17
LaVine, In a Glamorous Fashion,15.
Satch LaValley, “Hollywood and Seventh Avenue: The Impact of Period Films on Fashion,” In
Hollywood and History: Costume Design in Film, Edward Maeder, ed., 78 – 96 (Los Angeles: Thames and
Hudson Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1987), 86.
19
Landis, Dressed, 8.
20
Munich, Fashion in Film, 19.
21
LaVine, In a Glamorous Fashion, 27.
18
9
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences did not have an award for costume design
at their first Academy Awards ceremony in 1928.22
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the film industry continued to flourish. In 1927,
Picture Play magazine published an article about Western Costume Company and other
film prop businesses. As the author of the article said, “all of these interesting businesses
depend directly or indirectly upon motion-picture production and contribute in varied
degree to the screen’s progress. What an industry the movies are getting to be, to support
so many lateral arms of endeavor!”23 While the film industry continued to be a big
business in Hollywood, movies also played an important part in everyday American life
as films and movie stars had staked their place in American society. The movies
influenced how Americans dressed, and the costume industry had a large impact on the
fashion industry during the 1930s.24 New technologies in garment production also played
a role in influencing fashion as well. The development of inexpensive synthetic fabrics
meant that glamorous Hollywood costumes could be recreated with cheaper fabrics for
everyday Americans.25
During the 1940s, Hollywood could not escape the realities of war. During World
War II, some of Hollywood’s biggest names were recruited to serve. Famous stars like
Jimmy Stewart, Clark Gable, and Frank Capra were called to duty. Even with some of
Hollywood’s biggest stars at war, there was still a large demand for movies, in large part
because Americans used movies as both an escape and for information. Movies allowed
22
Landis, Dressed, 34.
Caroline Bell, "What Do We Have Here? Everything!" Picture Play 25, no. 6 (1927), 35.
24
LaValley, “Hollywood and Seventh Avenue: The Impact of Period Films on Fashion,” 87.
25
Ibid., 88.
23
10
both soldiers and their families on the home front to escape their troubles and enjoy
themselves.26
However, the war did change how Hollywood, and specifically costume
designers, worked. Taking cues from wartime production and the streamlining of the
assembly-line process, costume design departments began to form hierarchies. As Landis
explains:
The departments were divided into three segments: costume designers, who
created the look for each film and costume; costumers, who aided in the
budgeting and organization of the production and worked on the set dressing the
actors; and seamstresses and tailors, who toiled in the workroom manufacturing
the costumes. The top designers still handled the lead actresses’ costumes,
working on several films at once and receiving only the credit ‘Gowns by.’27
Wartime rations also played a role in costume design “as the government imposed
limitations, known as L-85, on the use of fabrics and other materials needed for period
costume. Good fabrics became rare, and then nonexistent.”28
The film industry quickly bounced back following the war, and 1946 was the
most profitable year in the film industry’s history, grossing $1.7 billion dollars.29 It was
during this time that costumers were finally recognized for their craft. In 1949, the
Academy of Motion Pictures awarded the first Oscar for costume design.30
By the 1950s the film industry had changed once again. The huge youth
population became the largest movie-going audience, and Hollywood produced films to
26
Mast, A Short History of the Movies, 276.
Landis, Dressed, 140.
28
LaValley, “Hollywood and Seventh Avenue: The Impact of Period Films on Fashion,” 90.
29
Mast, A Short History of the Movies, 275.
30
Two Oscars were awarded for costume design in 1949; one to Roger Furse for Black and White
Costume Design for his work on Hamlet and one to Dorothy Jenkins and Barbara Karinska for Color
Costume Design for their work on Joan of Arc. The two categories merged into one in 1958.
27
11
appeal to their tastes.31 Fewer people were going to the movie theaters, and the studios
felt it. Box office revenues dropped below a billion dollars in 1958.32 “In 1959, 42
million Americans went to the movies weekly – less than half the attendance numbers
during World War II. One reason was television.”33 Television had a huge impact on the
film industry, although it was not the only factor. As Americans moved from cities to the
suburbs after the war, they moved away from the movie theaters that had been built in the
city centers. It was not until the 1970s that multiplex movie theaters were built out in the
suburbs.34
By the 1960s, the studios were less powerful and more films were being made by
independent companies. By 1969, the studio film industry was struggling to stay afloat.
The years of 1969 to 1971 marked a depression for the American film industry.
According to The American Film Institute Desk Reference, “in 1970 MGM, once
Hollywood’s grandest studios, had sunk so low as to auction of its costumes and props –
everything from the ruby slippers worn by Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz to BenHur’s chariot.” 35 Also during this time, costume designers struggled to stay relevant. In
his biography of Edith Head, one of the most famous costume designers of all time,
David Chierichetti writes that “as much as possible, Edith avoided the use of store-bought
or any kind of already existing clothes in films, knowing that they could end the practice
LaValley, “Hollywood and Seventh Avenue: The Impact of Period Films on Fashion,” 91.
Mast, A Short History of the Movies, 275.
33
Corey and Ochoa, The American Film Institute Desk Reference,74.
34
Mast, A Short History of the Movies, 277.
35
Corey and Ochoa, The American Film Institute Desk Reference, 97.
31
32
12
of designing and making costume.”36 Ms. Head was right. During the 1960s many
contemporary costumes were being purchased in department stores “and that was a job
for an increasingly important person in the wardrobe department, the shopper.”37 The
most notable change to costume design came in the 1970s. During that time, “every other
costume designer [besides Edith Head] who appeared on the list of Academy Award
nominees was a free-lancer working on a single-picture contract.”38 The days of the
studio costume designer were over, and costume designers were left to find work on their
own.
Hollywood struggled through the 1960s and 1970s, but it was also a time of
innovative filmmaking. Young filmmakers like Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese,
and Steven Spielberg invented whole new genres of film, after living through a period of
social turbulence. By the 1980s, Hollywood learned how to make money again. In 1989,
box offices grossed over $5 billion for the first time. Jaws and Star Wars were the first
films to earn more than $100 million in rentals. This changed how Hollywood did
business, as they focused on the annual production of a few huge blockbusters, “usually
youth-oriented, genre-based, action-packed, and laden with special effects.” 39 As Bobi
Garland said, producers became “… much more interested in what they think little boys
are interested in, which are video games.”40 The film industry saved itself by learning
how to make films profitable, which meant producing products and advertising to go
David Chierichetti, Edith Head: The Life and Times of Hollywood’s Celebrated Costume Designer (New
York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2003), 104.
37
Landis, Dressed, 244.
38
LaVine, In a Glamorous Fashion, 151.
39
Corey and Ochoa, The American Film Institute Desk Reference, 97.
40
Bobi Garland, Interview by author, North Hollywood, CA, February 9, 2012.
36
13
along with their big budget films. As Corey says, “moviemaking became a competition to
see who could produce the most astonishing special effects, generate the most sequels,
and sell the most tie-in merchandise.”41 This left little room for the role of the costume
designer.
Today, special effects have once again changed the movie industry, and in turn
the designer’s job. In his interview, Bryan Moss discussed how special effects are
changing the costuming field:
…if you would have told me thirty years ago that they’d be able to you know,
create a crowd of people all looking differently. I’d be like, what, with out using
extras or whatever? But this day and age they’ll take ten guys dress them up in
1800s clothes, tell them to go march out in the field, and then what they do in the
lab, before you know it you have a crowd of a few hundred guys marching through
the field.42
Deborah Nadoolman Landis addressed this issue in her book, Dressed: A Century of
Hollywood Costume Design. She says, “virtual stunt doubles replaced principal actors,
and computer-generated toga-clad extras filled the Roman Coliseum.”43 Landis goes on
to talk about how costume designers can benefit from this technology. However, many
designers are not interested in embracing the new technologies. Bobi Garland shared an
anecdote about how costume designers are computer illiterate in her interview:
There’s a company that is affiliated with the film industry that teaches computer
classes to the industry and it’s subsisted by the film industry…. And when I took
a class from him he was teaching a class of Photoshop for costume…. He could
only get 4 people out of all the costume designers in all of 705, only 4 people
signed up…. The director of that school said to me “costume thinks that they’re
41
Corey and Ochoa, The American Film Institute Desk Reference, 109.
Bryan Moss, Interview by author, North Hollywood, CA, August 3, 2011.
43
Landis, Dressed, 478.
42
14
waiting for the bomb to hit, the bomb, the computer bomb has already hit. You’re
in the winter. You’re in a napalm winter and you don’t even know it.”44
In her interview, Susanna Sandke discussed the important role of technology. She said,
“you need to change with it. So for example, the designers and costumers who didn’t
want to learn to use the computer. To me, that’s a mistake. Learn what’s out there for
you. Be ahead of the curve.”45
Terms Defined
It is important to take a moment to define terms that will be used throughout this
paper. Many interviewee’s use industry lingo that the average reader may not be familiar
with. Here I will attempt to give the reader some basic knowledge into the language of
the costume world.
As La Motte points out in Costume Design 101 the terms that are used today came
into being when the Costume Designer’s Guild (Local #892, Hollywood) was formed in
the 1950s.46 The union was created to provide support to designers who were
transitioning from being part of the studio staff to becoming freelance designers.47 When
it was established, the Costume Designer’s Guild defined the terms and job descriptions
for positions related to costume. Below is a simplified version:
Costume Designer:
- Determines the look of the production
- Reads and break downs the script to access costume requirements
- Performs research
- Drafts a preliminary budget with the Costume Supervisor
44
Bobi Garland, Interview by author, North Hollywood, CA, February 9, 2012.
Susanna Sandke, Interview by author, North Hollywood, CA, February 8, 2012 .
46
Richard La Motte, Costume Design 101 Second Edition (Studio City, CA: Michael Wiese Productions,
2010), 1.
47
Landis, Dressed, 179 – 180.
45
15
-
Supervises the hiring of costume personnel
Oversees the acquisition of costume area supplies and equipment
Meets with actors, producers, and directors to develop a design concept
Attends production meetings
Sketches designs
Realizes the designs and the look of the film
Oversees the fittings
Assistant Costume Designer:
- Performs most of the same duties as the costume designer except for
designing independently
- Aids and assists the designer with research
- Assists with fittings
- Acts as liaison between the designer and the work room for made to order
pieces
While the costume designers generally receive most of the recognition for
designing a costume, it takes a large staff to make sure that everyone in a film is dressed.
It was actually the wardrobe workers, not the designers, who first formed a union
(Motion Pictures Costumers Local 705) in 1937.48 The key position in Local 705 is the
Costume Supervisor. La Motte describes the differences between a designer and a
supervisor best by saying, “The Designer does the art and the Super does the business –
or, the Designer does the ‘look’ and the Super makes it happen.”49 The Costume
Supervisor’s duties are as follows.
Costume Supervisor:
- Can perform all the duties of a Costume Designer and an Assistant Costume
Designer except design
- Manages the costume department
- Sets up offices, workrooms, and trailers
- Coordinates schedules
Set Costumer:
48
49
Landis, Dressed, 73.
La Motte, Costume Design 101, 32.
16
-
Sets the costumes for the day’s work
Maintains wardrobes on set
Reports back to design department
As Deborah Landis explains:
Costumers are valued partners who help create the costume budget and costume
breakdown, dress the actors, aid in fittings, procure and manufacture the costumes,
keep track of continuity (the right costume at the right time), and ascertain that the
costumes are all worn correctly (according to the costume designer's intentions).
Costumers keep clothes looking good on camera (i.e. protecting collars, and
helping to keep clothes wrinkle-free) while actors are in-between takes.
Costumers have too many duties and responsibilities that can possibly be listed
here!50
Also included in Local 705 are the many crafts people who manufacture the
costumes. Their job titles include: Pattern Maker and Fitter, Women’s Garment Tailor,
Women’s Figure Maker, Women’s Draper, Men’s Tailor Cutter, Men’s Tailor Fitter,
and Men’s Wardrobe Specialty Manufacturer, among others. Also important to note is
that a member of the costumer’s union can be penalized if they design a costume, and a
costume designer cannot perform duties that a member of the costumers union
would.5152
Costume Designer Versus Fashion Designer
Often, the average person will confuse the role of a fashion designer and a
costume designer. It is important to take a moment to discuss the difference, as it is
substantial. As Landis points out, the two roles really have little in common besides
50
Debora Landis, "Costume Designers, Costumers & Fashion Designers," Costume Designers Guild,
www.costumedesignersguild.com/press-room/costume-designers-costumers-fashion-designers.pdf
(accessed March 1, 2012), 2.
51
Prichard, Film Costume, xii.
52
There are many guides for what goes on behind the scenes on a film or a television set, that go into more
detail than this paper can. For a basic understanding of how the design process works, please see Appendix
A.
17
creating clothes. The biggest difference is that fashion designers are creating an art to be
noticed and sold. As Landis says, “Fashion is commerce…. Clothes serve the purpose of
the consumer, keeping each of us modest or sexy, warm or cool, and protecting us from
the elements.”53
The Costume Designer’s role is dependent on the type of show that he or she is
working on. The work that they do on a period picture will be very different from a
commercial film. Edith Head, one of the most famous costume designers of all time, was
asked about the similarities between costume and fashion designers. She answered, “I
think there is no similarity. [A fashion designer] expresses his own ideas. They have his
stamp on them…. But a studio costume designer has absolutely no control over what he
does.”54 While a modern costume designer may have more control than one working for a
studio, there are still few similarities to a fashion designer. As Landis points out, often the
designer is considered successful if the audience does not notice the costumes, “but are
nonetheless deeply affected by the characters.”55 As Bernie Pollack, a successful
Costume Designer and Costume Supervisor, said, “my job, I felt was never to be ‘oh look
at those clothes’ it’s to help tell the story and to have it be as natural and right. And if
they don’t notice the clothes, then I’ve done a good job.”56
Western Costume Company
The history of Western Costume is inherently linked to the history of film.
Around the turn of the century, Los Angeles was a sleepy Western town. During the early
53
Landis, "Costume Designers, Costumers & Fashion Designers," 2.
Corey and Ochoa, The American Film Institute Desk Reference, 35 – 36.
55
Landis, "Costume Designers, Costumers & Fashion Designers," 1.
56
Bernie Pollack, Interview by author, North Hollywood, CA, October 24, 2011.
54
18
twentieth century an entrepreneur by the name of Louis L. Burns traveled to Los Angeles
from his home in Arizona. Burns tried his hands at many businesses. Burns collected
Native American paraphernalia, and sold it to other collectors. At some point in the early
1900s, he connected with J.W. Benham, and according to the 1909 Los Angeles City
Directory, Burns became a clerk at the Benham Trading Company.57 In 1912, Burns
stumbled upon a Western movie set, “where actors portraying Native Americans were
wearing a clownish concoction of beads, furs, and blankets, with no resemblance to the
actual attire of American Indian tribes. When Burns objected to the man in charge, silent
cowboy star William S. Hart, he was hired to outfit the Indians accurately, and Western
Costume Company was born.”58 In 1914, Burns combined his company with the stock of
Benham Indian Trading Company.59 60 Burns moved his company to 710 W 7th Street in
Los Angeles in 1915, and what had started as a hobby of supplying cowboy and Indian
costumes for early western film producers, became Western Costume Company.61
In 1915 there were only six costumers listed in the Los Angeles City Directory.
The largest, besides Western, was Fischer’s Costuming Company. Burns bought Fisher’s
Costume sometime between 1915 and 1923.62 During the early years of the business,
57
The Benham Indian Trading Company, founded by Mr. J.W. Benham, sold beadwork, bead looms, and
other Indian and Mexican goods. The company also produced postcards for tourists.
58
Landis, Dressed, 6.
59
Ruth Harbert, “Assignment in Hollywood,” Good Housekeeping 137, no. 4 (1953), 17.
60
When L.L. Burns acquired the company, it became the Burns Indian Trading Company. At some point
the company may have become Western Publishing and Novelty Co., which produced many postcards of
sites and buildings in Los Angeles.
61
Prichard, Film Costume, 193 and LA City Directory, 1915.
62
“There’s No Business Like Show Business and No Show Business Like Western Costume Company,”
Internal publication by Western Costume Company, 4 and Los Angeles City Directories, 1915 and 1923.
19
Western provided the costumes for the D. W. Griffith movie Birth of A Nation. The
movie’s star, Lillian Gish, wrote about the film’s costumes in her biography:
Men during the Civil War era were rather small in stature … so genuine uniforms
could not be used by the later generation. Uniforms for The Birth were therefore
made by a small struggling company, which has since become the famous
Western Costume Company.63
Burns was an entrepreneur and costumes were not his only interest. Around the
time he founded Western, Burns connected with a man named Harry Revier and formed a
partnership that was involved in producing films and renting studio spaces. In 1913 they
acquired the Stern Family Barn in Hollywood, which was located on the site of a former
lemon grove, and begin renting it out, first to the comedian Fred Mace, and then, later in
1913, to Cecil DeMille.64 Today the barn is known as the Lansky-DeMille Barn, and it is
a California State Historic Landmark. It is known for being one of the first film studios in
Hollywood. 65
In the 1920s, L.L. Burns moved Western Costume Company to a building on
Broadway between Ninth and Tenth Streets. The building was completely modern and
streamlined, and included an elevator that customers could drive into and take their cars
to the roof.66 The building had ten floors, and included a research library run by Ned
Lambert.67 By the end of the 1920s, every major studio had a research library, but none
63
Gish, The Movies, Mr. Griffith, and Me, 138.
"Hollywood Heritage Museum," Hollywood Heritage, Hollywood California History & Architecture
Preservation Organization, http://www.hollywoodheritage.org/museum/timeline.html (accessed January 29,
2012).
65
DeMille shot his first film The Squaw Man (1914) for Jesse Lansky’s Feature Play Company in 1913.
The Squaw Man was the first feature film to be filled in Hollywood.
66
Kurt Cox, Interview by author, North Hollywood, CA, February 9, 2012.
67
“Western Costume – Our History,” Western Costume Co., http://www.westerncostume.com/history.html.
64
20
was quite like Western’s. In the 1920s, Western’s library was “worth hundreds of
thousands of dollars – millions to the cinema producer.”68 By the 1930s, Western’s
librarian, C.F. Cook, had files that included:
75,000 pictures of all sorts of people of all lands since the invention of
photography four decades ago and numerous sketches printed prior to 1850. In his
cabinets are 700 authentic pieces of military, naval, diplomatic and lodge
uniforms, together with 2,000 authentic pieces of equipment – buttons worn by
Turkish soldiers, Mexican generals’ badges, Brazilian belt buttons…..69
During the 1960s, when the studios were selling off costumes, they also sold off
their libraries. These resources had been vital to producers, directors, writers, and
technicians as well as to designers and craftsmen. As La Vine says, “they sold or threw
out their own history.”70 Western managed to keep their library open through the years,
keeping gems such as issues of the illustrated London News from 1842 and the complete
history of Life Magazine.71 This has been a huge asset to Western, as its library remains
the largest and oldest in existence. Bobi Garland describes how advantageous the
decision to keep it open has been:
There is nothing like this research library. Nothing. Everybody has something.
But no one has … quite what they’ve put together here. First of all, it’s 100 years
old, it was invented with the costume house. It has things, it has files that you’ll
not find anywhere…. It’s a pretty exciting place if you have the time to dig.72
In the days of the studio systems, all of the major studios had huge stocks of
wardrobes, but Western managed to flourish as well. As David Chierichetti points out, “if
Fred Gilman Jopp,“They Ask Me Another Man,” Photoplay 33, no. 3 (1928), 35.
“Movie Costumes Worth Millions," Popular Mechanics 65, no. 1 (1936), 83.
70
LaVine, In a Glamorous Fashion, 152.
71
“There’s No Business Like Show Business and No Show Business Like Western Costume Company,”
Internal publication by Western Costume Company, 3.
72
Bobi Garland, Interview by author, North Hollywood, CA, February 9, 2012.
68
69
21
Paramount didn’t have as many costumes as it needed to garb all the extras for a big
period picture, it could rent from nearby Western Costume, which also handled some of
the sewing if the studio workroom became overloaded.”73 As Edith Head said, “…even
we at Universal rent a great deal from Western, particularly when it comes to period
clothes, because no studio would have enough to do a large period picture.”74 By the late
1920s, Western had grown into a huge operation, with “over 200,000 square feet of floor
space crammed with every conceivable variety of clothing – from uniforms of every
nation and period of history even to the proverbial fig leaf.”75 They employed over 200
people and had amassed over one million costumes.76
Western also offered something different at the time. As Kurt Cox said, “Burns
takes it in a whole different direction. He’s serious about the clothes…. They want to
make everything perfectly here, and period correct. And this is something new. Because
it’s not just costumes, it’s not just masquerade.”77 In fact, the costumes were so accurate,
that Western had to be careful about lending out complete costumes, especially of
modern uniforms. As one article about Western said, “…to combat the usage of police
uniforms to people who might use them for crime, they are never given in completeness
except to the largest studios and then only under a heavy bond.”78 Not only was Western
the best place to find authentic costumes during the time, they also provided props for
movies. There was even a rug dealer and fur dealer located in the Western building in the
73
Chierichetti, Edith Head, 15.
"Dialogue on Film: Edith Head," American Film 3, no. 7 (1978), 45.
75
Jopp, “They Ask Me Another Man,” 36.
76
Prichard, Film Costume, 34.
77
Kurt Cox, Interview by author, North Hollywood, CA, February 9, 2012.
78
Norman Paige, “Gadget, Garb, and Glamour!” Movie Classic, February 1937, 74.
74
22
1920s.79 From its inception through the late 1920s, Louis L Burns continued to run
Western with help from Vice President John Parson.80
By 1929, a combination of the onset of the Depression, new competition, and
mismanagement forced Burns to sell the company. 81 Western was bought by the
Greenberg brothers: Ike, Dan, and Joe. In 1932, the Greenberg’s moved Western
Costume to 5335 Melrose Avenue, a building in front of Paramount Studios. The
company would remain at this location for almost sixty years. The Melrose building plays
a central role in Western’s story, and is integrally tied to the company’s history. The
building is almost like a character in the story of Western because of its architectural
personality. Many interviewees had stories to share about the building. As Bernie Pollack
said, “the old Western, over on Melrose, that was [Western] in its heyday.”82 Many
people still feel this way today, and have a sense of nostalgia for this old building.
Part of the nostalgia for the old building comes from the sheer size of the place.
When asked his first impression of the building, Brian Moss said “My very first
impression was [pause] boy there are a lot of clothes in here [laughter]. Yeah, so, I was
just, I remember being overwhelmed, like wow, there’s a lot of inventory in here.”83 The
building had six floors, and many different departments. As Jim Tyson explained it, “it
happened to be an old furniture company …. That’s why it had all the floors. It was the
first earthquake-built lobby in Los Angeles incidentally, not a lot of people know that.
79
LA City Directory, 1926 and 1927.
Parsons and Burns must have met through Benham as the 1909 city directory lists Louis Burns as a
Clerk at Benham’s and John E Parsons as a traveling salesman at the same company.
81
Carol Easton, “The Craft of Illusion,” Westways 66, no. 11 (1974), 68.
82
Bernie Pollack, Interview by author, North Hollywood, CA, October 24, 2011.
83
Bryan Moss, Interview by author, North Hollywood, CA, August 3, 2011.
80
23
You could have dropped a freaking atom bomb in that place, and that lobby would still be
standing.”84 The building housed stock costumes, tailor shops, a hat department, a boot
and shoe department, a leather department, a dyeing department, among others.85
The complexities of running a costume house, and the realities of running a
business during the Depression, proved to be too much for the Greenbergs. They were in
the business of saving companies, but they were not prepared to run a costume business.86
In 1934, the Greenberg’s sold the company to Abe and Joe Schnitzer.87 Throughout these
turbulent years, Western could still be depended on to create amazing costumes. They
could provide obscure costumes such as a costume for The Follies Bergere doorman, as
one producer requested.88 Western could also be depended on to produce a large number
of costumes in a short period of time. One employee in 1928 said, “once, at twenty-four
hours’ notice, we completely outfitted a Confederate Army of one thousand men.”89
Western was known to have “every military change of uniform in the history of the
United States from the buckskin shirt and flat felt hat of the Virginia infantry of 1774 to
the open-neck tunics of Uncle Sam’s 1935 soldiers.”90 Kurt Cox, now the head of
military uniforms at Western, experienced this as a child. Growing up in Los Angeles, he
was interested in military uniforms: “When I wanted to see what a Civil War Shell jacket
looked like as a kid, I went to Western Costume in Hollywood and I looked at a real Civil
84
Jim Tyson, Interview by author, North Hollywood, CA, August 11, 2011.
“There’s No Business Like Show Business and No Show Business Like Western Costume Company,” 3.
86
One report claims that the Greenberg’s were also bottling wine on the 6 th floor of the Melrose building.
87
“There’s No Business Like Show Business and No Show Business Like Western Costume Company,” 7.
88
“Movie Costumes Worth Millions," 82.
89
Jopp, “They Ask Me Another Man,” 92 and 114.
90
“Movie Costumes Worth Millions," 84.
85
24
War Shell Jacket because they had them for rental.”91 Most notably during the 1930s
Western created the costumes for Gone with the Wind and the ruby slippers for The
Wizard of Oz.
Western, known for its uniform selection, supplied costumes for the World War II
films that were popular in the 1940s, and flourished. According to legend, in 1941, just
after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Western Costume lent uniforms to the California
National Guard who had a sudden need for more uniforms.92 During the 1940s, Western
provided stable jobs to many employees in Hollywood. The only other company
associated with the film industry that offered more jobs in 1947 was Metro-GoldwynMayer.93 Western was not only able to offer a lot of jobs, but also a greater amount of job
security than any other employer in the motion picture industry. The reason for this was
that studios had slower or busier times of the year, and hired and fired accordingly. At
Western, the costumers were working on clothes for all the studios, and since different
studios were busy at different times, Western was always busy.94
After the postwar boom, the company struggled once again and during the 1950s,
the Schnitzers sold the company to a consortium of studios, and the company began to
flourish under the leadership of John Golden. Golden overhauled the company and made
it more efficient.95 He divided Western into two operations; the made-to-order
department, which worked with designers to create costumes from their sketches, and the
91
Kurt Cox, Interview by author, North Hollywood, CA, February 9, 2012.
Linda Williams, "Paramount Acquires Western Costume Co.," Los Angeles Times, May 12, 1988.
93
MGM offered 187 jobs in 1947, as to compared to Western’s 167. The next closest was 20 th Century Fox
with 139.
94
Dawson, "Patterns of Production and Employment in Hollywood," 349 – 350.
95
“There’s No Business Like Show Business and No Show Business Like Western Costume Company,” 7.
92
25
rental department, which was the profitable part of the business.96 Designers like Edith
Head flocked to the Melrose Building. As Chierichetti says:
the ladies’ workroom at Universal was good at making alterations, but Edith
didn’t like the patterns they made from her sketches, so she decided to have all
her production done at Western Costume. This wasn’t dangerous politically, as
Universal was one of the studios that owned Western (the others were MGM,
Paramount, and 20th Century Fox).97
While the 1960s were not a great time for the studios, Western managed to thrive
by meeting the needs of television, commercials, theater productions, and private rentals.
In his interview, Jim Tyson described what the atmosphere was like at Western Costume
during the 1970s:
Everybody came for their stuff. All the designers would come, and we were stock
guys and we would fill the orders for them. I did SWAT, Kojak, all those kind of
shows. We did it whether it was period clothes or whatever, and we did
commercials, but we did -- we all chipped in and did those things…. And we were
really, really busy. I mean to where you did have to work six and seven days a
week. There was never a five day week. It was that busy…. Universal at that time
was such a factory, it had many, many of the mini series back in the sixties like
WWI and all that stuff got fit at Western. Sometimes we did two to three hundred
fittings every single day at Western.98
Through the 1970s and 1980s, Western’s business was constantly busy, as
evidenced by the fact that it still employed so many people. In the 1980s, when milliner
Harry Rotz came to work at Western for a short time, “they had a women’s milliner, they
had a man’s hat maker, and they had a full-time cap maker. Those three positions were
full time all the time and they were always slammed with work.”99 This would be
unheard of today. However, the building on Melrose, while still impressive was
Easton, “The Craft of Illusion,” 68.
Chierichetti, Edith Head, 178.
98
Jim Tyson, Interview by author, North Hollywood, CA, August 11, 2011.
99
Harry Rotz, Interview by author, North Hollywood, CA, February 8, 2012.
96
97
26
beginning to lose its luster. Celebrities and designers still visited Western regularly, but,
the building was showing its age and as Rotz said, “it was absolutely filthy. Truly,
filthy.”100
In 1988, Paramount Pictures bought Western Costume. At the time, Western’s
annual revenue was about five million dollars, and it employed 75 people. However,
Paramount was not interested in keeping the company. As Earl Lestz, the president of
Paramount said, “the only reason we bought the company was to get control of the
property.”101 The Western building on Melrose Avenue was next door to Paramount, and
Paramount wanted to tear down the old building, and make it into a parking lot. They
immediately began looking for someone to buy the company. AHS Trinity Group, an
investment group owned by novelist Sidney Sheldon, television agent Bill Haber, and
businessman Paul Abramowitz, purchased the company and immediately began looking
for a new facility. This, of course, was not an easy task. At the time, the collection was
made up of three and a half million costumes.102
Eddie Marks was brought on as Vice President when the company was purchased
and he described the hectic nature of the move:
The biggest task that I faced when I came in in 1989 is by March of 1990 we
needed to move the company and we didn’t know where we were going to go. At
the time the real estate business in Los Angeles was really busy and from my
knowledge there was only like two buildings in all of Los Angeles that would
100
Harry Rotz, Interview by author, North Hollywood, CA, February 8, 2012.
Daniel Cerone, "Western Costume: Preserving Fabric of Hollywood History," Los Angeles Times,
March 14, 1989, 1.
102
Valli Herman, "Screen Nostalgia Behind Closed Doors - But Western Costumes Making Plans to Go
Public With Its Cache of Costumes," Daily News of Los Angeles, January 14, 1990.
101
27
have housed us that were available, unlike today when you could get whatever
you want.103
Paul Abramowitz, the president of Western, located a building at 11041 Vanowen Street
in North Hollywood that would be large enough to house the collection, and the company
started the enormous task of moving. During spring of 1990, Western kept normal
business hours at their Melrose building during the day, and moved racks of clothing at
night. The move to the new building marked a significant change at Western, moving
from an old dirty building to a new and clean facility.
AHS Trinity Group was interested in restoring Western Costume Company to its
former glory. Sheldon was quoted as saying, “Hollywood has been run down for a long
time, and we’re trying to put a stop to it. We want to preserve it, not sell it off. We’re
going to make Western Costume a tourist attraction and a museum.”104 However, this
never happened. During his interview, Eddie Marks discussed this, and said that he
believed that opening a museum would not make a lot of sense financially. “I would like
to see when we start getting into more social media, rebuilding my website, I would like
to have a virtual museum online. To set up a building where you have overhead and
everything else, it doesn’t make sense.”105 But others disagree. Edward Maeder, Los
Angeles County Museum of Art’s curator of costumes and textiles, was quoted in 1990 as
saying, “I don’t think people realize a Hollywood costume museum could be a money-
103
Eddie Marks, Interview by author, North Hollywood, CA, February 9, 2012.
Cerone, "Western Costume: Preserving Fabric of Hollywood History,"1.
105
Eddie Marks, Interview by author, North Hollywood, CA, February 9, 2012.
104
28
making situation…. Costumes are still looked at as a recyclable source of income in
Hollywood. That’s the bottom line.”106
At the time of the move, things were not going as well as the new owners would
have liked. Bobi Garland described Western during that time by saying, “the company
was pretty down on it’s luck when Mr. Haber bought it…. He felt that Western Costume
was an institution and wanted to preserve a Hollywood institution.107
Moving the company alone could not save Western’s financial problems. As
Eddie Marks described “Once we got here we were even in more financial trouble. We
set a budget to do the move…. To build it out with racking and lights but it cost way
more than we budgeted. And moving. So, for survival the guy who was the president
decided that he wanted out. And I was asked to stay on as the President by Bill Haber.”108
The company needed cash to pay its bills, which lead to the sale of some of Western’s
great costumes. By 1993, a popular appreciation for all things Hollywood developed, and
collectors were willing to pay top dollar for costumes worn by Hollywood stars.
Butterfield & Butterfield auction house put on two auctions, one in October of 1993, and
one in July of 1994. Included in the sale was a dress from Gone with the Wind (which
sold for $33,350), Kurt Douglas’ loin cloth from Spartacus (which sold for $3,450), and
Rudolph Valentino’s coat from the 1926 film, Son of the Sheik. The 1993 auction alone
brought in close to $600,000.109
106
Gaile Robinson, "Gone With Neglect 'Recycling,' Sales and Rentals Have Resulted in the Loss of Many
Hollywood Costume Favorites," Los Angeles Times, February 23, 1990.
107
Bobi Garland, Interview by author, North Hollywood, CA, February 9, 2012.
108
Eddie Marks, Interview by author, North Hollywood, CA, October 24, 2011.
109
Patricia Ward Biederman, "Movie Rags to Riches: At an auction of film costumes, a coat worn by
29
While the company lost many assets during these sales, as Bobi Garland explained,
“when he moved it to this warehouse they didn’t have any money. They needed to sell
those clothes to pay for the move….When we first came out here, things were pretty
dowdy. It wasn’t nearly as exciting as it is today.”110
In the early 2000s, Western focused on rebuilding the company and acquiring
new collections. Under the leadership of Eddie Marks, as president of the company,
Western’s staff has gotten smaller, but the company became stronger. One of the
collections that Western has acquired in the past few years is the Dorothy Weaver
Collection. The lengths that Marks went to to acquire the collection show his
commitment to strengthening the collection. He speaks about it here:
I got a phone call one day saying did I know Dorothy Weaver, and I said no. And
they said, well she’s a costume company in New York and they are selling her
company. So, I called a friend of mine, Ann Roth and asked her if she would go
and look at these clothes and she made an appointment, or I made an appointment
for her to go look at these clothes as 6 o’clock. And at 6:30 she called me and she
said you better come out here now. So that night, literally I found out that day. I
was on a red eye that night.111
The collection, and the others that Western has acquired in the last ten years, including
the Helen Larson Collection and the Dykeman Young Collection, have helped to turn
Western from a dirty old warehouse to a thriving business.
Marks has also been dedicated to modernizing a business which has traditionally
been a bit stuck in its ways. Western began using Rental Tracker Pro, an inventory
Rudolph Valentino is expected to bring $15,000 or more," Los Angeles Times, July 15, 1994.
110
Bobi Garland, Interview by author, North Hollywood, CA, February 9, 2012.
111
Eddie Marks, Interview by author, North Hollywood, CA, February 9, 2012.
30
tracking software. This software allows stock to be easily tracked and checked in and out.
This has made the business run more smoothly.112
Western Costume Company’s history is long and ingrained within the film
industry in Los Angeles. Because there are still many people living who remember the
history of Western, conducting oral histories about the company provided a lot of
information.
112
Anna Wycoff, "Articles & Videos," Costume Designers Guild IATSE Local 892.
http://costumedesignersguild.com/articles-videos/feature-story/ (accessed March 30, 2012).
31
Chapter 3
HISTORY OF ORAL HISTORIES
What Are Oral Histories?
As William Moss states in his article, “Oral History: What Is It and Where Did It
Come From,” “Oral history is a peculiar beast. It defies easy definition. A technique in
the service of so many disciplines, it fits neatly into no particular discipline, and it is
found in many activities outside the world of academic disciplines.”113 While it is
difficult to confine an oral history to a single definition, for the purpose of this paper it is
important to make an attempt. An oral history is generally defined as a collection of
memories, of some sort of historical significance, that have been recorded as interviews
and preserved for future use. An oral history is different from other interviews because
they are processed in some way and made available in a library, archive, or other
repository.114 An oral historian, on the other hand, is “...a person who uses all kinds of
materials, in addition to recording spoken memories, to document and explain the
past.”115 Oral history interviews capture history in a unique way. They allow historians,
researchers, or any interested party to hear first-hand an individual’s memory of events
that took place. In the last fifty years, historians have recognized that oral histories can be
William Moss, “Oral History: What Is It and Where Did It Come From,” In The Past Meets the Present:
Essays on Oral History. Ed. Stricklin, David and Rebecca Sharpless (Lanham, MD: University Press of
America, 1988), 5.
114
Donald A. Ritchie, Doing Oral History: A Practical Guide (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003),
24.
115
Charles Morrissey, "Oral History Interviews: From Inception to Closure," In Handbook of Oral History.
Ed. Charlton, Thomas L., Lois E. Myers, and Rebecca Sharpless, (Lanham, MD: Altamira Press, 2006),
175.
113
32
a valuable resource, and oral history interviews have become increasingly popular. Oral
history has found its place in mainstream academic history.
In his book Doing Oral History: A Practical Guide, Donald Ritchie points out that
oral histories are nothing new, and have taken place since history was first recorded.116
For as long as people have communicated, they have shared stories and passed on oral
traditions. Until the late nineteenth century, oral sources were considered legitimate and
important historical sources. During the late nineteenth century, when historians began to
think of history as a science, oral histories were perceived as less objective than written
sources, and therefore unreliable. During that time, the German school of scientific
history was popular, and they eschewed less ‘objective’ sources of history.117 It was not
until the 1930s that oral histories became popular again. During that time, the Works
Progress Administration hired writers to interview everyday Americans. Not only did the
project put writers to work during the depression, it also gave historians a lasting glimpse
into life during the time. In her article, “The History of Oral History,” Rebecca Sharpless
discusses other early recorded interviews, most notably the historian Forrest C. Pogue,
who spent D-Day interviewing wounded soldiers at Normandy. By the time Pogue was
recording his interviews in Normandy, tape recorders were becoming commonplace
making it easier to record interviews.118
During the 1940s, historians began using oral histories for academic research.
116
Ritchie, Doing Oral History, 19.
Ibid., 20.
118
Rebecca Sharpless, "The History of Oral History," In Handbook of Oral History. Ed. Charlton, Thomas
L., Lois E. Myers, and Rebecca Sharpless (Lanham, MD: Altamira Press, 2006), 11.
117
33
During that time, Allen Nevins, a historian at Columbia University, was conducting
research for his biography of President Grover Cleveland. He was disappointed by the
lack of written records left by the President and his staff. Nevins found that the telephone
was replacing written communication, and less was being written down for future
historians to discover. To supplement the written record he decided to conduct interviews
with people who he thought would be important to future historians. His first interview
took place in 1948.119 Nevins’ continued recording interviews, and convinced his friend
Frederic Bancroft, to donate one and a half million dollars to Columbia University to
found the Columbia Center for Oral History.120
The first oral history interviews in the 1940s conformed to the historical trends of
the time. The interviews were focused on important white males who were, for the most
part, involved in politics.121 In those early days, oral histories were conducted differently
than they are today. The most notable difference was that the tapes were often erased. At
the time tapes were expensive, and budgets often did not allow for the tapes not to be reused. Because of this, the emphasis of the oral history record was placed on the transcript
rather than the recording.122
During the 1950s and 1960s, recording oral histories became increasingly popular
and more university oral history programs were founded. These included programs at the
119
"What Is Oral History?," History Matters: The U.S. Survey Course on the Web,
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/mse/oral/what.html (accessed January 28, 2012).
120
Sharpless, "The History of Oral History,"10
121
Ibid.
122
Elinor Maze, “The Uneasy Page: Transcribing and Editing Oral History,” In Handbook of Oral History.
Ed. Charlton, Thomas L., Lois E. Myers, and Rebecca Sharpless (Lanham, MD: Altamira Press, 2006), 238.
34
University of Texas in 1952, University of California at Berkeley in 1954, and University
of California at Los Angeles in 1959.123 In 1961 the National Archives began
interviewing people associated with the outgoing Presidential administration. The
program grew at an astonishing pace. As Sharpless points out, “by 1969, the year after
Lyndon Johnson left office, his oral history project already had 275 tapes.”124
By the 1960s oral histories had found their way into mainstream history. However,
there were still no real guidelines for how to conduct oral histories. For example, the
Truman Library and Columbia University both recorded interviews but did not save the
tapes or transcribe all the interviews.125 Today, that would be unthinkable, but at the time,
every oral history program had its own set of standards. It was not until 1968 that the
newly formed Oral History Association adopted standards and best practices for
conducting interviews, calling them “Goals and Guidelines.” As Sharpless says, these
guidelines “crystallized a common set of goals and standards.” 126 These guidelines
proved necessary to produce scholarly oral histories, rather than just interviews. Once the
Oral History Association published these standards, they remained the standard for over
ten years, as different oral history organizations adopted them as their own. Beginning in
1968, courses that taught people how to perform oral histories began appearing at
universities around the country. The first such course was offered at UCLA, and other
programs were quickly developed. UC Berkeley published the first how-to oral history
123
Sharpless, "The History of Oral History," 10 -11.
Ibid., 11.
125
Ibid., 13.
126
Ibid., 14.
124
35
manual titled “Oral History for the Local Historical Society” in 1969.127
The Oral History Association gave credibility to a fledgling field. As Ronald Grele
points out in his essay, “Oral History as Evidence,” members of the organization argued
that interviews, when properly completed and housed in archives, would provide research
for historians in the future. The goal of the organization was not to completely change
how historians studied history, but rather to “…complement the existing written record
with information gleaned from interviews and fill in the gaps in that record in the same
manner that letters, journals, and diaries had done since the dawn of widespread
literacy.”128
By the late 1960s, oral histories had become, if not mainstream, moderately
respected in the history world. At the same time, a new generation of historians entered
academia. In the 1950’s and 1960’s the number of Ph.D.’s in history quadrupled. Many
of these new Ph.D.’s were “children and grandchildren of immigrants, they had a
personal incentive for turning the writing of their dissertations into a movement of
memory recovery.”129 The number of women entering the field also influenced the
change, as they brought a completely new viewpoint to the discipline. These new Ph.D.
students were ready to transform history. “Between 1958 and 1978, the proportion
written on subjects in social history quadrupled, overtaking political history as the
127
Sharpless, "The History of Oral History," 15.
Ronald Grele, "Oral History as Evidence," In Handbook of Oral History. Ed. Charlton, Thomas L., Lois
E. Myers, and Rebecca Sharpless (Lanham, MD: Altamira Press, 2006), 45.
129
Joyce Oldham Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret C. Jacob, Telling the Truth About History (New
York: Norton, 1994), 146-147.
128
36
principal area of graduate research.”130 Social historians wished to create, as Grele puts it,
“a history of the everyday lives of those who had theretofore been ignored by historians
and therefore produce a ‘better’ history....”131 Social history quickly became the norm in
the academic world.
This turn to social history meshed nicely with a new interest in oral histories. Oral
history projects began to document not only important white men, but people from all
walks of life. One of the first large-scale projects to document an ethnic group was the
Doris Duke project on Native American History. Doris Duke donated five million dollars
between 1966 and 1972 to establish oral history centers at the universities of Arizona,
Florida, Illinois, South Dakota, New Mexico, Utah and Oklahoma, which documented the
diversity of Native Americans across the country.132 The women’s movement and the
civil right’s movement also encouraged historians to record oral histories with those
populations.
While many oral histories were produced by universities or by the National
Archives, local history groups also began to see the importance of recording oral histories.
Soon, oral histories were not only important to academics, but they were used to
document all kinds of histories.
What Makes a Good Oral History?
As Moss points out, the popularization of oral history has caused some to believe
130
Appleby, Telling the Truth About History, 147-148.
Grele, "Oral History as Evidence," 47-48.
132
Sharpless, “The History of Oral History," 15.
131
37
that it is easy to “interview anyone about anything.”133 This could not be further from the
truth, as a good oral history takes a lot of work and a lot of practice. There is no one way
to perform an oral history, although there are certainly guidelines. The first thing for an
oral historian to consider is the objective of the project. In determining the goal of the
project, Ritchie advises that oral history project planners should search for information
that is not widely available. The purpose of any oral history project should be to find new
information and to build on what is already known.134 In his essay “Planning an Oral
History Project,” Stephen Paschen recommends considering the goals of the institution or
organization that is connected to the project. Often oral history projects are associated
with a historical society or a museum, and it is important for the goal of the project to be
in line with the institution’s mission.135 In his essay “Ethics and Politics in Oral History
Research,” Howard Sacks points out that “when conducting oral history, you deliberately
enter into another person’s life.”136 He gives advice on making sure that everyone
involved in the project is comfortable with the outcome. The leader of the oral history
project must consider the rights and feelings of the interviewee as well as the goals of the
project.
Keeping the project’s objectives in mind is important, but, as Donald Ritchie points
out, regardless of the project’s objectives, “a good oral history will always leave room for
Moss, “Oral History: What Is It and Where Did It Come From,” 7.
Ritchie, Doing Oral History, 47.
135
Stephen Paschen, “Planning an Oral History Project,” In Catching Stories: A Practical Guide to Oral
History (Athens: Swallow Press, 2009), 21.
136
Howard Sacks, “Ethics and Politics in Oral History Research,” In Catching Stories: A Practical Guide
to Oral History (Athens: Swallow Press, 2009), 42.
133
134
38
interviewees to speak their own minds, and will not try to shoehorn their responses into a
prepared questionnaire or mind set.”137 He believes that interviewers should allow room
for the interviewee to speak their minds. However, he also believes that the interviewer
must guide “the interview away from nostalgia to confront the past candidly and
critically.”138
Problems and Concerns
One perceived problem with oral histories is that of memory. How much do people
remember, and how often do they tell the full story? Valerie Raleigh Yow discusses these
issues in detail in her book Recording Oral History. As she points out, “human memory
is both fallible and - when we approach the oral history document critically –
trustworthy.”139 Yow discusses the scientific studies of memory and different types of
memory, but basically believes that human memory is better than most people think. As
she says, “oral historians may find that overall a narrator’s account is accurate but some
details may be missing or erroneous. Needless to say, some inaccuracies do not negate
the value of the entire testimony.”140 It is also important to remember, as Ritchie points
out, that people remember what they think is important, not what the interviewer might
think is important. While the interviewee might want to talk about one subject, the
interviewer can lead the conversation to the topic that they are interested in exploring.
However, a good interview will also leave room for the interviewee to discuss what they
137
Ritchie, Doing Oral History, 32.
Ibid., 35.
139
Valerie Raleigh Yow, Recording Oral History: A Guide For The Humanities and Social Sciences, 2nd ed.
(Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2005), 36.
140
Yow, Recording Oral History, 43.
138
39
believe is important. Both will allow the interviewee to remember as accurately as
possible.
As Yow points out, there are sometimes inaccuracies and biases in oral histories, as
there are in all historical sources. The biases that exist in oral histories are perhaps more
blatant than other historical sources, and oral historians must take these into account
when conducting interviews and researchers must take them into account when using oral
histories.
Another perceived problem with oral histories is the lack of guidelines and
standards. In 1973, the Committee on Oral History of the Society of American Archivists,
published an article in The American Archivist. In the article, they sought to establish
guidelines and procedures for institutions and professional organizations who dealt with
oral histories. 141 While guidelines have since been established, today there are still no
steadfast rules for conducting oral histories, because each is so unique. However, the last
sixty years have proven that oral histories certainly can be significant historical resources.
Society of American Archivists, “Oral History and Archivists: Some Questions to Ask,” The American
Archivist 36, no. 3 (July 1973): 361-365.
141
40
Chapter 4
DEVELOPING AN ORAL HISTORY PROJECT
In Doing Oral History, Ritchie succinctly sums up his interview suggestions by
stating: “Do your homework; be prepared; construct meaningful but open-ended
questions; do not interrupt responses; follow up on what you have heard; know your
equipment thoroughly; promptly process your recordings; and always keep in mind the
practice and ethics of interviewing.”142 These simple steps towards preparation are good
advice for how to prepare for and conduct a successful oral history project. There are
many steps to an oral history project, and I will divide my discussion of experiences into
the following steps: interview preparation, preparing questions, recording equipment, the
interview process, processing interviews, and transcriptions.
Interview Preparation
As Paschen points out, “poor planning kills projects.”143 It is easy to see how this
would be the case. In undertaking an oral history project, it is vital that a proper plan is
laid out before the project commences. The interviewer, or the project committee, must
consider the goals for the project, who they will interview, what kind of questions they
will ask, and how long the project will take, among other things, before they begin
conducting interviews.
Paschen’s first suggestion for implementing a successful plan is to create a
focused topic and interviewee list. While it is useful to think of who the ideal
142
143
Ritchie, Doing Oral History, 84.
Paschen, “Planning an Oral History Project,” 21.
41
interviewees are, there is no right number of people to interview for a project as Ritchie
points out. He advises oral history project planners to think about how many hours will
be necessary to meet the goal, but to leave the list of possible interviewees open and
flexible. He also suggests interviewing the most important players first, and then
continuing on with less important interviews if time and money permits.144
Paschen also suggests connecting the plans for the oral history project to that of
the institution.145 This is very important, especially in projects with a for-profit company.
Even when corporations hire oral historians to work on corporate oral histories, they do
not always understand what an oral history is or how oral historians work. They often, as
Ritchie says, “... do not value or use their corporate archives and fear the consequences of
allowing outsiders to see their records.”146 This can result in a unique set of challenges.
Obviously for-profit companies are in the business of making money. While they may be
interested in projects that do not make them money (for example, documenting the
company’s history), at the end of the day the company needs to focus on the parts of their
business that makes them profitable. If there is any way to show how documenting an
organization’s history can be good for business, this will help. It can also be useful for the
oral historian to align herself with the senior members of the organization, while at the
same time not tailoring their interviews to only show the corporation in a positive light.147
This was definitely an issue that I faced often during the course of my oral history
project. Since I was working on a corporate oral history project, I did at times feel like I
144
Ritchie, Doing Oral History, 85.
Paschen, “Planning an Oral History Project,” 24.
146
Ritchie, Doing Oral History, 44.
147
Ibid., 44-45.
145
42
needed to show the corporation in a positive light. I also saw the importance of aligning
myself with the senior management. Without their support, this project could not have
gone forward. I worked to show how this project could benefit the company, but it was
difficult to get attention from the company’s executives when there were other more
pressing concerns for the organization.
For this project, I worked with Bobi Garland, the Research Librarian at Western
Costume Company, to develop the plan for the project and to set up the interviews.
Before I entered the picture, Bobi had the idea of doing oral histories of former and
current Western Costume employees. Former employees are aging, and the 100th year
anniversary of the company seemed like a good time to start interviewing them and
preserving the institutional memory.
When I came onto the project, Bobi started putting together a list of who Western
would like to have interviewed. She was able to give insider information that I needed to
set up the interviews. The list included people who have worked or been associated with
Western for a long period of time. The interviewees who were chosen all have a long
history with Western Costume Company. The interview order was chosen by who was
available at a certain time.
We worked together to come up with a goal for the project, and attended an
UCLA workshop on conducting oral histories. This workshop proved to be very helpful
because we met people who were conducting other oral history projects. It was
interesting to learn about other projects, and the problems that other people were facing.
We also learned some useful information on how to prepare questions.
43
Preparing Questions
As Mary Larson points out, most oral history projects fall into one of four
categories: subject-oriented histories, life histories, community history, and family
history.148 Most oral history guides suggest preparing interview questions either
chronologically or thematically, depending on what type of oral history it is. For some
projects an interviewee’s whole life story is relevant; other times only a segment is
relevant. The interviewer should consider this before they begin.149
In this case, as the purpose of the project was to commemorate Western’s
centennial, the interviews were subject oriented, it was important that the questions be
focused on the interviewees’ experiences at Western Costume Company, Because of this,
the list of interview questions was kept short. The interviewees’ hobbies, for example,
were not as important in this case as they might be in others. The questions were created
to focus on the interviewees’ craft and their experiences at Western.
That being said, I did include a small number of background questions. I felt it
was important to find out a bit about each interviewee’s background, and how they ended
up in the costuming business. As Ritchie says, “jumping right into the main question is
not the best approach... build up to the climactic questions by establishing the historical
setting and making the interviewee more comfortable with the process.”150 While these
questions did not necessarily relate to Western Costume Company, they do give the
interviews some more depth and allow the listener to understand why and how the
148
Mary Larson, "Research Design and Strategies," In Handbook of Oral History. Ed. Charlton, Thomas L.,
Lois E. Myers, and Rebecca Sharpless, 105-134 (Lanham, MD: Altamira Press, 2006), 106.
149
Ritchie, Doing Oral History, 91.
150
Ibid., 91 – 92.
44
interviewee ended up in the business. The background questions also allowed for the
interviewee to be more comfortable with the interview process before getting to the heart
of the interview.
I worked with Bobi Garland to prepare a standard list of questions (Appendix B).
The questions were divided into four sections: 1. Background, 2. Western Costume, 3.
Western Costume Today, 4. Reflections. The questions were meant to focus on the
interviewee’s experiences at Western Costume Company and create a record of
Western’s history. The questions were altered depending on who was being interviewed.
If I knew about other aspects of the interviewee’s career, I would bring that into the
interviews.
Most oral history guides suggest doing a lot of research before conducting
interviews. Morrissey suggests finding out what is written about your interviewee,
written by them, about their work, lifestyle, and any institutions they are associated
with.151 In this case, research was quite difficult. There is very little written about
costumers, costume designers, or costume design in general in traditional academic
sources. Western Costume Company is mentioned in few books, so I had to be creative in
my research and learn as I went. Working with Bobi Garland was invaluable. Her
institutional knowledge of Western, and about the costuming field in general, helped
greatly in learning about the craft. This knowledge helped to develop questions. I also
altered the questions after conducting a few interviews. The more I learned, the more I
knew what kind of questions to ask.
151
Morrissey, "Oral History Interviews: From Inception to Closure," 175.
45
While it is important for the interviewer to have prepared questions, as Ritchie
points, it is equally important for the interviewer to be a good listener.152 In every
interview the interviewer should be listening for opportunities to ask follow up questions.
Some of these questions can be to clarify, while others can be probing questions. These
follow up questions can elicit better information from the interviewee. These questions
could be: Did that ever happen to you? Can you give me an example of that? Or, where
or when was that?153 The interviewer should also leave time for the interviewee to go off
on detours or tangents. As Ives says in his book The Tape Recorded Interview, “assume
that you are going to direct the interview, but interviewees may have ideas of their own
that they want to talk about.”154
Recording Equipment
Recording equipment is continually changing, and any guide for oral historians on
recording technology seems to be quickly outdated. For example, Ives’ The Tape
Recorded Interview, proved to be a valuable resource in guiding the oral history process,
even though a large section of his book discusses tape recorders. This information was
outdated, and finding guidance on what kind of recorder to use was difficult.
I ended up using the Zoom H4n Handy Recorder without an external microphone
for these interviews, simply because it was what was available to me. The Zoom H4n
Handy Recorder is a powerful handheld digital recorder. It has a number of capabilities,
however my project did not require me to try out many of the features. Luckily the
152
Ritchie, Doing Oral History, 84.
Edward Ives, The Tape-Recorded Interview (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1995) 53-54.
154
Ibid., 49.
153
46
recorder was fairly simple to use and I easily figured out how to perform basic recording
functions and how to transfer the recordings onto a computer.
After performing the interviews, I immediately saved them onto my MacBook
computer. The files were saved as .wav files, which is the standard file format for oral
history interviews. Once the files were saved onto my computer, I backed them up to an
external hard drive. I also saved the files onto CD’s to be deposited with this project.
I had one technical problem with the recorder. The recorder plugged into the wall,
and at one point the cord did not stretch long enough. I did not have an extension cord or
batteries with me. I was able to find batteries and use the battery back-up power. This
experience taught me to always make sure that batteries were available for back up if a
wall power source was not available.
The sound produced from the recorder was not wonderful, but certainly
acceptable. If I had had more resources I would have used an external microphone to
increase sound quality.
Interview Process
Ives’ book has some good suggestions on how to conduct interviews. He suggests
recording an introduction on the recording to make it clear that the recording has begun.
This is also useful for future researchers. When a researcher is listening to a recording, it
is best to make it clear when the recording was made, who was in the room, and where it
was taking place. These things can be important to the researcher, and it also helps to
make the interview seem official. At the start of every interview, before I turned the
recorder on, I told each interviewee that when I turned the recorder on, I would do a brief
47
introduction before asking questions. That introduction always consisted of the date, who
was in the room, and where we were.
There are two points that Ives makes in his book that I found especially useful.
The first is not to be afraid of silence.155 I think it is natural for people to want to fill
space in conversation rather than sit in silence. This does not help an interview. I tried as
hard as possible to allow the interviewees to continue to talk rather than interrupting them.
I also tried to allow them to think about the question after I asked it. The only time I
interrupted interviewees was when I needed clarification on something they were saying.
This relates to the second point that Ives makes. He suggests that the interviewer should
be the intermediary between the interviewee and the researcher.156 The interviewer
should attempt to make the interview as clear as possible for future researchers. Ives uses
the example of an interviewee saying that something was “this long” and using his hands
to demonstrate to the interviewer. Ives instructs the interviewer to reply, “so about three
feet long?” to the interviewee’s statement. This way, the researcher will have an idea of
what length the interviewee was talking about. If the interviewer did not mention the
length in the recording, the researcher would have no reference point. I attempted to do
this as often as possible in my interviews. I also attempted to ask interviewees to further
explain things that I thought might not be common knowledge. This can be a difficult
thing to do for an interviewer who is very familiar with the subject matter. One advantage
I had, being an outsider to the industry, was that I was less familiar with things, which
155
156
Ives, The Tape-Recorded Interview, 54.
Ibid., 46.
48
made it more natural to ask questions. As often as possible, I tried to ask the interviewees
to explain and elaborate so that researchers would not be completely lost.
While an oral historian should not be afraid of silence, they also should not be
afraid of rambling. This seemed to be an issue that I faced much more often than silence.
Most of my interviewees were very happy to talk about their careers and time at Western.
At times, it can be difficult to know when to allow an interviewee to continue to talk, and
when to try to get them back to answering the question. In most cases it is advisable to
allow them to continue to talk. You never know what valuable information might come
from their monologue, so it is best to allow them to continue, and then get back on track
during the next question.
An oral history should solely be about the interviewee and not the interviewer.
Therefore, it is best for the interviewer to speak as little as possible between asking
questions. I found this difficult at times, because phrases like “uh hum” are commonly
used in conversation to let the speaker know you are listening. As often as possible, I
tried to use non-verbal affirmations (like nodding my head or smiling) to allow the
interviewee to know that I was listening. This results in better recordings and
transcriptions where the emphasis is placed on the important part of the interview (what
the interviewee has to say), rather than being clouded by the interviewers interjections. I
believe that you can see the progression of my interviews. The later ones are better than
the earlier ones, as I grew more comfortable with the process.
The interviews were all conducted at Western Costume Company, in less than
ideal conditions. As Morrissey points out, it is best to interview people where they are
49
most comfortable, which generally means their home.157 In this case that was not possible,
and there are few reasons why the workplace was a less than ideal space to conduct
interviews. The first is that it is not completely quiet. The building has an intercom
system that can be heard during some of the interviews. In a few of the interviews you
can hear the phone ring, or someone enters the room; this is one of the problems with
using a public space; there are often interruptions. The second issue is not one that I
necessarily found, but it could have been an issue. It is slightly awkward to interview
people about their workplace at their workplace. If they had anything negative to say,
they might not have felt comfortable talking about it there. Although, they might not have
felt comfortable talking about it anywhere. The third problem is that the atmosphere at
Western Costume is rushed and busy at all times (as is everything in the business). It was
difficult at times to get people to sit down and do interviews. I think that conducting the
interviews at the workplace did not allow the interviewees to relax and not be caught up
in the rush of that atmosphere.
The choice to do the interviews at Western was made mostly because it was the
easiest thing to do. I was doing interviews about people at Western, so it was easiest to
interview them while they were at Western. It also allowed me to do several interviews in
one day. Another reason why it was best to do interviews there was because it helped my
“insider status.” As Norton Wheeler points out, “researchers more easily gain access to
157
Morrissey, "Oral History Interviews: From Inception to Closure," 182.
50
the extent their subjects come to know and trust them.”158 Conducting the interviews at
Western, and introducing myself as a former intern at Western, allowed me to gain the
trust of my interviewees which allowed them to be more comfortable speaking to me.
Most of the interviews were done solely by me. However, a few were conducted
by both Bobi Garland and myself. The first interview we did, of Brian Moss, was
conducted with both of us in the room, and Bobi asking most of the questions. Generally,
it is best to only have one interviewer conduct an interview. However, as Donald Ritchie
points out, there can be a benefit in having two interviewers if one is a student or novice.
He also notes that if there are two interviewers, one should take the lead role, and the
other should only ask follow-up questions.159 Charles Morrissey suggests that having two
interviewers present can be beneficial if one has specialized knowledge that would be
helpful to the interview. But, he goes on to say that “before the interview, you and your
partner need to agree on three matters; who will solely be in charge of the recording
machine, who will pursue which lines of questioning, and that neither will interrupt the
other.”160 In this case, it made sense for Bobi to primarily conduct the first interview, as
she had the specialized knowledge on the subject. In that first interview, we were able to
see what worked, and able to change the questions from there.
Processing Interviews
As James Fogetry says in his essay, “Oral History and Archives: Documenting
Context,” “the interview itself is neither the beginning nor the end of the process of
Norton Wheeler, “Gaining Access and Sharing Authority: What I Learned about Oral History from an
Episode in US – China Transnationalism,” The Oral History Review 31, 2 (2004): 53.
159
Ritchie, Doing Oral History, 63.
160
Morrissey, "Oral History Interviews: From Inception to Closure," 185.
158
51
creating oral history…. An interview should never become a ‘found object,’ stripped of
the story of its creation and without any record of its context.”161
To make sure I kept my oral histories well organized and documented, I kept a
folder for each interviewee on my computer. Each folder was labeled with the
interviewee’s name. Inside the folder was a copy of their questions, the .wav file of the
interview, a copy of the field notes (Appendix C), time logs (Appendix D), and the
transcript. This way all of the materials related to the interviewee were kept together in
one place that could easily be accessed. I always made sure to back up the files on an
external hard drive as well.
I also kept physical copies of all the Interview Release Forms (Appendix E).
These forms are important for all interviewees to sign so that they release the right to
their interview to the interviewer. This is necessary for archives to release the interviews
to a researcher. I used the UCLA Oral History Deed of Gift form as my template for this
project. Because of the nature of this project, I did not worry about any interviewee’s
being uncomfortable with releasing their interviews. There was nothing discussed in the
interviews that would be considered libelous or defamatory.
Transcriptions
In discussing the importance of transcriptions, it is also relevant to discuss the
ongoing debate of whether the transcript, or the recording, is the oral history. As
discussed earlier, early oral history tapes were rarely saved, so emphasis was placed on
James Fogerty, “Oral History and Archives: Documenting Context,” In Handbook of Oral History. Ed.
Charlton, Thomas L., Lois E. Myers, and Rebecca Sharpless, (Lanham, MD: Altamira Press, 2006), 207 –
209.
161
52
transcriptions. Today, archivists generally consider the recording the primary document,
and therefore the oral history.162 However, many projects have found that almost no one
listens to the recording, and therefore the transcription is more relevant, and should be
considered the primary document. Therefore, many archives have emphasized the
importance of the final transcript, as few researchers take the time to listen to the tapes.163
Regardless of what is considered the primary source, because of the reality of few people
listening to the tapes, it is important to have good transcriptions.
Oral historians have different opinions on how and if oral histories should be
transcribed. Generally the decision is made based on the goal of the project and the
resources available. Transcribing interviews can be costly and time consuming, but
extremely useful to researchers. Deciding whether to transcribe all the interviews is often
determined by budget, but should also be determined based on the goals of the project.
As Donald Ritchie points out, while researchers prefer transcripts over recordings, if the
end goal is a documentary or exhibit, the recording is the important part of the
interview.164 Generally historians favor transcripts, because they are more accessible for
researchers, and they last longer than recordings in archives.165 Transcriptions are also
preferred because “eyes can read easier than ears can hear.”166 For the purpose of this
project, a transcription of each interview did not seem necessary. I chose six interviews to
transcribe. This decision was primarily made based on the time that was available. If I
162
Ritchie, Doing Oral History, 66.
Ives, The Tape-Recorded Interview,75.
164
Ritchie, Doing Oral History, 64.
165
Maze, “The Uneasy Page: Transcribing and Editing Oral History,” 239.
166
Ritchie, Doing Oral History, 64.
163
53
had time, I would transcribe them all.
All oral history projects need to decide on one set of transcription guidelines to
follow. The most important part of transcription is setting rules, and sticking to them.
There is no one way to do transcriptions, but it is important to have consistency
throughout a project. I followed the Southern Oral History Program’s transcription
guidelines for this project. The Southern Oral History Program is part of the Center for
the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina. The program is
working to create an archive of recordings documenting southern life in the twentieth
century.167 The program also organizes regular oral history workshops, and produces
practical guides for oral historians. I found this practical guide to be one of the most
useful guides in all my research, especially the transcription guidelines.
The following are the standards that I adapted from the Southern Oral History
practical guide:
- Double space throughout.
- Page numbers are located in the top right corner and should include the interviewee's
last name.
- Indent each time a new speaker enters. Use the whole name the first time the speaker
enters; then use initials each time thereafter.
- Use ( ) to indicate where a word or phrase is inaudible.
- Use -- to indicate when a speaker interrupts himself.
- Noticeable pauses are indicated by using [pause] and laughter is indicated with
[laughter].
It was very useful to have a technical guide to follow when transcribing
interviews. The guide also lead me to an audio program called Express Scribe. I was able
167
"Southern Oral History Program - The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill," Southern Oral
History Program - The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
http://www.sohp.org/content/our_mission/ (accessed August 1, 2011).
54
to download this program online for free, and use it to aid in my transcription. The
program supports .wav files and allows the user to use ‘hot keys’ to play, stop, and slow
down the audio. I found this program invaluable for my transcriptions. I set up ‘hot keys’
for stopping and starting the particular interview that I was working on. I would start the
recording at fifty percent speed, and stop it using my designated ‘hot key’ when I needed
to catch up. Then I could use my start ‘hot key’ to resume the recording when I was ready.
This allowed me to keep my word processing program in the forefront of my computer
and allowed me to continue typing with out having to switch over to the audio file
program. I found that at fifty percent speed, I could pretty much keep up with
transcribing, and did not have to backtrack very much. I would go through the whole
recording and do the complete transcription. I would then go back and listen to the
recording at normal speed while reading through the transcription. This allowed me to
edit and catch things I missed the first time though. I found that one problem of listening
to the recording at half speed was that I would sometimes miss the emphasis of a
sentence, and would put a period where a comma should be. I was able to fix these things
when listening to the recording at normal speed.
The most difficult part of transcriptions was making decisions about editing.
There are many different theories on how much editing should be done to transcriptions.
As Ives says, “no two people will transcribe a passage in exactly the same way.”168 One
of the decisions I made was to take out the “ums” “ers” “you knows” and “likes” from
the transcriptions. This issue is contested by oral historians. Some believe that in taking
168
Ives, The Tape Recorded Interview, 82.
55
out these parts of speech, you are misrepresenting the interviewee and the way that they
speak. These parts of speech may tell a future researcher something about the interviewee.
On the other hand, as Frisch points out, “to transcribe each pause or false start or tic
would make an otherwise clear tape absolutely unreadable on paper....”169 I felt that it
was more important to make the transcriptions readable, than to capture every word the
interviewee said.
It is generally accepted that even when transcription is not possible, or not relevant,
it does not mean that the interviewers should just place the recordings in box and be done
with it. All interviews should, at the minimum, have abstracts written and be indexed. For
each interview, I created a Field Notes form. This form includes information on the
interview, the interviewee, the place and time of the interview, and a brief synopsis of the
content of the interview. This information would be useful to a researcher to determine if
they wanted to read the transcript or listen to an interview. I also created a Time Log for
all the interviews that I did not transcribe. The time log lists the minutes of the interview,
and recalls what is discussed in that portion of the interview. This allows researchers to
skip ahead to the parts of the interview to which they are interested in listening.
For this project I did not have the interviewees review the transcripts. Oral
historians seem to be divided on this issue. Elinor Maze discusses the issue and writes
that some argue that “the transcript gains authenticity when the interviewee has had a
chance to correct, amplify, even censor the written account of what he or she said.” She
169
Michael Frisch, A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History.
(Albany: SUNY Press, 1989), 45.
56
goes on to point out that others argue that “...only the unedited, verbatim transcript is the
true account.”170 I tend to agree with the later. I also believe that for the sake of this
project, the material is not sensitive enough to need censoring or review.
170
Maze, “The Uneasy Page: Transcribing and Editing Oral History,” 256.
57
Chapter 5
FINDINGS AND CONCLUSIONS
This oral history project yielded insights not only into the inner workings of
Western Costume Company but into the costuming world in general. There were many
things to be learned from interviewing different people associated with Western Costume.
The interviews provided a broad sense of what a career is like for someone who works in
costuming, and how their roles fit into the film industry. Certain themes came up multiple
times in the interviews, and I will discuss these themes here.
Who Are The Interviewees and How Did they Get Here?
The interviewees came from around the country and from all sorts of different
backgrounds. However, one thing they all had in common was that few of them had any
intentions of being involved in costuming. While many were creative, artistic, or had a
love for films, few had any training or schooling in costuming or even fashion.
Eddie Marks, the President of Western Costume, was interested in electronics as a
kid, but when he needed a summer job, he followed his father (who was a costumer) to
the studios. As he explains it, “my dad’s boss asked me if I wanted to work at MGM
Studios in the wardrobe department for the summer. So I thought, sure, why not? And I
think I was making $100, 150 a week.”171 The money he was making was so enticing that
he was willing to forgo college and stayed on at the studio, always imagining that he
would move over to the sound department, where his interest in electronics would come
into play. “I still thought that would be for me, kind of cooler than working the wardrobe
171
Eddie Marks, Interview by author, North Hollywood, CA, October 24, 2012.
58
department.”172 But Marks found success early on in the wardrobe department, and
stayed there.
Many costumers had an interest in acting and theater as children. Bernie Pollack
moved to New York City after graduating from high school. “The last thing I ever
dreamed of being was a costume designer. Had no intention, no background, no
knowledge of what it took or anything. All I wanted to do was sing, act.” Brian Moss
described how an interest in theater randomly brought him to Western Costume. He
became interested in theater in high school, but did not have any interest in the costuming
aspect. After he finished college in Missouri, Moss decided to move to Los Angeles. As
he explains, “they were throwing a going away party for me in Missouri at the college.
And someone who owned a local bar there called the Mule Lip came up to me half way
through the evening. After all of us had been partying for quite a while, and he mentioned
that he still stayed in touch with a couple of guys at Western Costume Company.”173 A
chance meeting at a bar led Moss to a career in costuming.
Eventually, once the interviewees came around to costuming, they all had to
acquire the necessary skills. The costume industry does not require a degree, and many of
these people learned from doing and from mentors. As Eddie Marks explained, “I learned
from the old timers, my dad being one, and all of the people he was around. Everyone
seemed to do the job the same way.”174 For everyone who started their career at Western
Costume, on-the-job training came from working in stock. Working in stock at Western
172
Eddie Marks, Interview by author, North Hollywood, CA, October 24, 2012.
Bryan Moss, Interview by author, North Hollywood, CA, August 3, 2011.
174
Eddie Marks, Interview by author, North Hollywood, CA, October 24, 2012.
173
59
was truly a training ground for many costumers. As Bill Burchette said, “Western was a
school at the time. It basically was a school to train you to become a costumer on the
outside.”175As Bryan Moss explained, “I heard stories of guys being in the stock
department for like two years before they got in on the floor start doing costuming, say
pulling clothes for shows and things like that. Then you hear reports of other guys who
were in there for a few months and then they got on the floor started doing that. It all
depended on--everyone had a different set of circumstances how it happened.”176 As
Susanna Sandke said, “…we were sort of trained as we went along…. We moved up
from doing stock to doing single person rentals and then to double person rentals, and
then we would get assigned maybe a tv show and then we’d move up to film.”177
In the Western Building on Melrose, a large staff was needed to work in stock. As
Jim Tyson explains, “It was very difficult, it was not so open like this is.… In the other
place [the Melrose building] nobody ever knew where a god damn thing was. So you had
to have somebody with you all the time. You couldn’t pull a show together because it
was so massive and on all the floors. Even though it was organized, the outsiders always
depended on the insiders to pull the show.”178
While Western has always been a great training ground for new costumers, it has
also allowed newcomers a way into the union. As Jim Tyson explained, “…many people
would come in and get their 30 days, you had to have your 30 working days to get in the
175
Bill Burchette, Interview by author, North Hollywood, CA, August 11, 2011.
Bryan Moss, Interview by author, North Hollywood, CA, August 3, 2011.
177
Susanna Sandke, Interview by author, North Hollywood, CA, February 8, 2012.
178
Jim Tyson, Interview by author, North Hollywood, CA, August 11, 2011.
176
60
union and bolt. So I would call them the 30 day wonders.”179 At various times in its
history, Western Costume Company was the largest union employer in Hollywood, so
many people came to Western to get their union hours, and then left to work on films.
Credit Where It’s Due
One issue that many of the interviewees spoke about was not receiving credit for
work they did. In the early days of film, there was little emphasis placed on unique and
individual costumes created from a designer’s sketches. The costumes “were hastily
assembled, and extras lined up to receive their disguises each morning and return their
borrowed outfits when the workday ended.”180 The design department consisted of a head
of wardrobe and a support staff. As Richard La Motte points out, “there were a few studio
staff Costume Designers; others would be called out from Broadway on a show-by-show
basis, usually to do stars’ costumes or large-scale musicals, while the bulk of the shows’
costume were delivered by the Wardrobe Department Supervisors.”181
The wardrobe department supervisors were supported by a studio system that
allowed them to design exclusively for principal actresses, while costumers put together
the menswear and costumes for all the secondary characters.182 Deborah Landis goes into
further detail about this. She says:
When Irene Sharaff arrived at MGM from Broadway in 1942, she inspired a
radical shift in the studios’ approach to costume design. Until that time, most lead
designers or executive costume designers had created costumes for the female
lead of the film, and another designer had created costumes for the men and the
179
Jim Tyson, Interview by author, North Hollywood, CA, August 11, 2011.
LaVine, In a Glamorous Fashion, 16.
181
La Motte, Costume Design 101, 1.
182
Holly Cole and Kristin Burke, Costuming for Film: The Art and the Craft (Los Angeles: Silman-James
Press, 2005), 30.
180
61
supporting players. The wardrobe department staff coordinated costumes and
accessories for the extras. As Sharaff noted, ‘Hardly any attention was given to
integrating the costumes of stars with the company, and little thought was given to
a degree of coherence in the look of a scene and of the production as a whole.’183
While Irene Sharaff and others were becoming more interested in the look of the
entire production, rather than just the principal actor, it did not necessarily mean they
were doing all the work. In fact, most menswear was created by male costumers who
were never credited for their work.184 Jim Tyson saw this happen first hand as a young
costumer. In his interview, he said:
You ever hear of designers like Irene Sharaff and Edith Head? I worked for Edith
several times -- and Bob [Pecina – a costumer at Western Costume Company]
was the one who won those Oscars for them -- they never came to the men’s
fittings if Bob was doing them. Can you imagine that? Because Bob was at
Western and he was the anchor of Western. And if Bob was there, the big name
designers came because he was that good.185
Bernie Pollack also discussed this in his interview. He worked with Edith Head on
several films. Specifically, he discussed working with her on The Sting. As he said, “she
was involved in the top 5 characters. And we talked about it, and talked about the look.
But she didn’t have time. She was doing 3 or 4 films at a time.”186
As Deborah Landis explains, when the costume designer was too busy to be
involved in all of the characters looks on a film, the costume supervisor generally stepped
into the role of the costume designer, without getting any credit for doing so.187 On a
movie, only so many people can be credited with creating the costumes. While it takes
183
Landis, Dressed, 139.
Chierichetti, Edith Head, 122.
185
Jim Tyson, Interview by author, North Hollywood, CA, August 11, 2011.
186
Bernie Pollack, Interview by author, North Hollywood, CA, October 24, 2011.
187
Landis, Dressed, 244.
184
62
many people to dress the entire cast, only a handful of people are generally credited on a
movie. This can lead to a lot of tension.
Bernie Pollack gave an example of how tense the situation could be when he
described working with Edith Head on a film, and not receiving any credit. When Edith
won the Oscar for the film, she failed to thank any of her assistants. Bernie called Edith
to confront her about the situation. As he tells the story, “ I said, ‘Congratulations, but
you would have shown a little class if you had thanked those people who helped you to
get the Oscar.’ …. I don’t think she even realized it, because that’s just the way it
was.”188
Another interesting dynamic emerged when television entered the picture. In the
early days of television, costume designers generally did not work on shows, and
costume supervisors would handle the design. Eddie Marks spoke about his experience
working as a Costume Supervisor without a designer. He explained that today it is rare
for a television series to not have a designer. He went on to say that today, “it seems that
the producers think that they have to have a costume designer on everything - and they
don’t - they just have to have a costume supervisor. Most of them are too young to know
the difference and the rules.”189
Today, costumers continue to struggle for credit on films. Bobi Garland used
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull as an example of the battle for credit.
She explains that in “Los Angeles they had over 50 costumers, and 2 assistants, and the
188
189
Bernie Pollack, Interview by author, North Hollywood, CA, October 24, 2011.
Eddie Marks, Interview by author, North Hollywood, CA, October 24, 2012.
63
designer. They also shot in New Haven, and they also shot in Hawaii, and they added
more costumers at those two locations. When they did the credits there were 12
costumers that were credited….” She does not see that as a good sign for the costume
industry. “They are losing ground as far as respect goes.”190
Historical Accuracy
In the field of public history, there is a common belief that history is never
complete. History is always viewed through the eyes of the present. In David Glassberg’s
book Sense of History: The Place of the Past in American Life, Glassberg notes that
“…the meanings of a place are socially created, multiple, and change over time.”191 He
notes that a historical memorial not only symbolizes the historical time or event that it is
trying to preserve or memorialize, but also serves as a representation of the era in which
it was built. The same concept holds true for costuming. Often, a period film will have
the look of the period in which it was made rather than the period it is attempting to
recreate. Maeder does an excellent job of describing how designers, even when they have
the best intentions, struggle with this challenge:
In designing the costumes for Gone with the Wind (1939), Walter Plunkett strove
for authenticity, a re-creation on film of the way people looked in the American
South during the Civil War period. He spent months researching the styles….
Viewers left the theater convinced that they had just seen a true reflection of the
past; but almost a half century later, a fashion historian cannot help noticing that
many aspects of the film’s costume styles are rooted more in the 1930s than in the
1860s.192
190
Bobi Garland, Interview with author, North Hollywood, CA, February 9, 2012.
David Glassberg, Sense of History: The Place of The Past in American Life (Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, 2001), 157.
192
Edward Maeder, “The Celluloid Image: Historical Dress in Film,” In Hollywood and History: Costume
Design in Film, edited by Edward Maeder (Los Angeles: Thames and Hudson Los Angeles County
Museum of Art, 1987), 9.
191
64
In an interview, Edith Head once shared an anecdote that demonstrates the
dismissal of historical accuracy in the early days of film:
In period pictures, we used to give the women low-necked dresses with the
bosoms hanging out. I would say, ‘but you know, they did not wear low-necked
dresses in the old days!’ The director would say, ‘My dear Edith, if everybody
had worn high-necked dresses, you wouldn’t have been here today. There
would’ve been no sex.’193
This is a theme that recurred often during interviews. Eddie Marks commented that “in
the 50s, designers would make dresses from the 1800s and put zippers in the back. Today,
designers won’t even look at those clothes. And if they’re going to make something it’s
going to be correct to the period.” As a businessman, he tries to make sure that his
collection is up to par with what the designers are looking for. He said “we want to make
sure that anything that we make or buy for our stock is going to be historical accurate.”194
Today, there tends to be more attention to historical accuracy. However, an
increased awareness of attempting historical accuracy and research does not mean that an
actor will look exactly how an average person would have looked during the time. As
Maeder says, “a designer must transcend the contemporary aesthetic standard, an
impossible task because the designer must also create a wardrobe that will address the
contemporary audience in a fashion language that they understand.”195 Bobi Garland
speaks about how the best designers do this successfully. She says:
193
"Dialogue on Film: Edith Head." American Film 3, no. 7 (1978), 38.
Eddie Marks, Interview by author, North Hollywood, CA, October 24, 2012.
195
Maeder, “The Celluloid Image: Historical Dress in Film,” 13.
194
65
It’s really interesting what’s happened. We’ve gone through a dramatic transition
where they’ve been, the costume people, have become really committed to the
time…. Mad Men all of them, they’ve really worked hard on historical accuracy.
And then the particularly brilliant ones, the designers, take that history and then
they do what they need to do to fit the story. Like Janie Bryant for Mad Men she
really, really worked hard on being historically accurate to the 60s. And then she
just exaggerates it so it’s everybody’s memories in Technicolor. Those women are
padded like crazy so that their behinds are even more heart shaped than you
remember…. She really studied the under pinning’s and then took it to the next
level and the same with the men. It’s so precise the lines, and it wasn’t quite as
nice as she makes it. So she, she took what the story needed and exaggerates it so
that it fits the imagination. And it works there, it works beautifully.196
Of course, everyone has different opinions on the subject, and the costume
designer cannot design without support from the director. In Costume Design 101,
Richard LaMotte discusses a piece of advice he was given in film school: “When as a
Designer, someone tells you, ‘I want this picture to look as real as possible,’ they most
likely don’t mean it, not in the historical sense anyway; what they mean is, ‘I want this
picture to be acceptable as real.’”197
A costume designer with the best intentions can only have so much affect on how
a film appears. As Kurt Cox said, “When it comes down to it they’ll change things. Three
Kings. The director didn’t like that they wore black belts so they wore tan belts. Accuracy
goes out the window when it’s convenient.”198 At the end of the day, Harry Rotz summed
it up when he said, “My job is to give the designer what they want and what they
need.”199
196
Bobi Garland, Interview by author, North Hollywood, CA, February 9, 2012.
La Motte, Costume Design 101, 70.
198
Kurt Cox, Interview by author, North Hollywood, CA, February 9, 2012.
199
Harry Rotz, Interview by author, North Hollywood, CA, February 8, 2012.
197
66
Finding the Importance in Costumes
In the early days of film, costumes were just recycled and reused again and again.
Edith Head explained how studios would move principals costumes to stock after they
were used: “Then [the costumes] are used on a secondary character, a different collar, for
instance, is put on. The third time around maybe we will shorten a skirt and put a ruffle
on it. After that the costumes go into the background or extra class.”200 In other cases,
principal actresses’ costumes were sold to raise money for charity or donated to
charitable causes. Other times, studios would sell the costumes to their own employees:
“The office typists and telephone girls are the most determined bidders for the stellar
cast-offs.”201 As Watterson explains, “In the ‘50s and the ‘60s, studio managements were
less than enlightened…. I don’t think they realized what they had. Costumes were sold,
lost and otherwise gotten rid of. Now, people can’t account for them.” It is only in the last
few decades that “a new appreciation for historic Hollywood costumes has led studios to
document and protect their prize holdings.”202
The studios were not the only ones who sold or reused costumes. Renting out all
costumes was standard back in those days and was an activity that Western Costume
certainly participated in. A costume house makes money by renting costumes, so Western
rented out all the costumes they made to make money, including those worn by principal
actors. Eddie Marks commented that before the 1980s or so, people just did not care
"Dialogue on Film: Edith Head,” 45.
“What Happens to the Stars’ Clothes,” Film-Lovers Annual 1 (1933), 53.
202
Robinson, "Gone With Neglect.”
200
201
67
about costumes, and did not look at them as memorabilia or anything valuable. As he said
in his interview:
Western Costume rented out dresses Vivian Lee wore in Gone with the Wind for
Halloween. People didn’t pay attention to a star piece like they do today. ... And
through the years we always heard that people were pilfering clothes out of
Western Costume.…. What was happening was we were losing clothes like Clark
Gable, or Glen Ford, Rudolph Valentino and they were replacing it with junk.203
Jim Tyson also spoke about his experiences with renting out important costumes from
Western:
Nobody knew what they were. I mean I lost a petticoat of Vivian Lee’s when I
was managing. Somebody rented it and I knew the actress, I won’t mention her
name that took it, and I called her on the telephone, I called her house because I
had her credit card. She said ‘Oh I took it off in the car.’ I said, ‘you took it off in
the car, a petticoat, in the car? You must be good.’ ….I think that’s one of the
things that Western, I think their stock and collection would be even more
impressive and their history, but in those days it was about making money and
there were lots of loss and damages and things like that. Things that went on
shows, and of course these were iconic clothes you can’t really replace them when
it comes to period stuff….204
While there was not a wide recognition for what Western was losing, some
employees felt that some of the costumes should be saved. One employee said in 1974 “if
someone wakes up and builds the museum Hollywood should have, I’m going to ‘find’
that vest [Clark Gable’s from Gone With the Wind]…. Things here that should be in a
museum, anybody can walk in off the street and rent ‘em. Then when they’re worn out,
they’re just thrown away.”205
203
Eddie Marks, Interview by author, North Hollywood, CA, February 9, 2012.
Jim Tyson, Interview by author, North Hollywood, CA, August 11, 2011.
205
Easton, “The Craft of Illusion,” 70.
204
68
When Western was purchased by AHS Trinity Group in 1989, an effort was made
to start saving these valuable collections. The owners created “The Star Collection,”
which is made up of costumes that had been worn by principal actors. The costumes are
sometimes hard to identify, except by the labels that are sewn inside. This label often has
the name of the star, and sometimes the name of the show it was worn on. By 1990, the
company had built up its star collection to be worth between one-and-a-half and two
million dollars.206
Today, the Star Collection, which started with just 100 items, is housed as an
annex to Western’s research library, and houses about 6,000 items. Included in the
collection are costumes from movies such as Gone with The Wind and The King and I,
and costumes worn by stars like Marilyn Monroe and Julie Andrews. Bobi Garland,
Western’s librarian, is in charge of the collection, and is committed to preserving the
gems that are in her care. As she said in her interview, “I took classes through Cal State
Long Beach Continuing Education Program on learning to be a Collection’s Manager and
to start to care for these clothes, so in the past two years Western has really started to
make the commitment to turn ... the collection into a proper archive.”207
Time and Money
Time and again, interviewees spoke about how today there is no time or money
left for costumes in film. While modern costumers have noticed a change in the timespan
of their careers, this problem is not new. When the studio system started its decline, and
206
207
Herman, "Screen Nostalgia Behind Closed Doors,” L16.
Bobi Garland, Interview by author, North Hollywood, CA, February 9, 2012.
69
their support crews were dissolved, designers were forced to become even more
resourceful.
Edith Head noticed these changes back in the late 1970s. She said, “today,
designers don’t have the time or the budgets they once had. In the past, the designer was
much more important because everything for a film was made. If the star had to wear an
old, ragged apron, we made it because she was a star. But today, partly because so many
films are contemporary, instead of period, we buy blue jeans, sweaters, skirts.”208 These
changes affected how Western worked in the 1970s as well. They went from having
enough work for twenty costumers, to sixteen in the matter of a few years. Western’s
business also dropped because designers began using short cuts. Because of their
decreased budgets, designers began casting extras to fit into costumes they already had,
rather than finding costumes that fit, eliminating the need for so many costumers.209
Western Costume Company has felt the pain as well. In 1988, the workroom at
Western supported twenty-five men’s tailors and seamstresses. Now, the men’s staff is
down to five, and the same in the women’s department. Rather than being able to create
custom clothes, the tailors are used to alter off the rack items.210 The costume
department’s budget has been cut too much to justify creating clothes from scratch.
The time given to prepare costumes has also diminished. Edith Head said that,
“on an average contemporary picture, say an Alfred Hitchcock film, I would have from
two to eight weeks to prepare….On a Cecil B. DeMille picture, like The Ten
"Dialogue on Film: Edith Head,” 34.
Easton, “The Craft of Illusion,” 72.
210
Landis, Dressed, 412.
208
209
70
Commandments, we would have fifteen months to three years to prepare.”211 In his
interview, Harry Rotz said, “There’s no time anymore. There’s no time and there is no
money. There used to be time to develop a project, to develop prototypes for garments or
craft pieces that were needed. They would hire a crew. Now they don’t even cast until the
last minute, so there is nothing for you to do until the last minute.”212
Because of the limited budget, designers can typically only make new costumes
for the number one and two characters in a feature film. The rest of the costumes are
generally bought or rented. This has caused Western’s business to change over the years
to do less manufacturing and more rentals. Eddie Marks explained that there are
companies in Los Angeles that do not rent costumes, but just manufacture clothes. These
companies are able to produce clothes for much cheaper than a costume house can, so
Western has lost a lot of its manufacturing business to these companies.213
Competition
Western Costume Company is not the only costume house in Los Angeles, but in
conducting interviews, the interviewees said time and again that it is the biggest and the
best. Its long history has certainly added to its reputation. As Bobi Garland said,
“[Western] is a name that still is greatly respected, even when it was down on its luck, it
still had tremendous respect, because it’s so old. It’s lasted.”214
Its vast quantity of costumes has also helped Western stay ahead of its competition.
As Bernie Pollack said, “I think by far, Western is the most complete costume house.
"Dialogue on Film: Edith Head,” 34.
Harry Rotz, Interview by author, North Hollywood, CA, February 8, 2012.
213
Eddie Marks, Interview by author, North Hollywood, CA, February 9, 2012.
214
Bobi Garland, Interview by author, North Hollywood, CA, February 9, 2012.
211
212
71
There are other costume houses that have certain period clothes that are in good shape
and are really good but only certain pieces and certain areas.”215 Under the leadership of
Eddie Marks, Western has continued to acquire new costumes, and costumes of very high
quality. While part of the reasoning for buying costumes has been to improve stock, and
make Western a more complete collection, another motive has been to keep the
collections away from competition. Eddie Marks talked about purchasing the Dorothy
Weaver collection and said, “the price I paid for it, I bought it for half the money I paid
and the other half the money I paid kept it away from my competitors….I don’t need my
competitors to get a hold of something that I really want. And I paid more money for it,
but you know what, I have it and my competitors don’t.”216 This has made a huge
difference, as Western is known as the place where you can find anything. As Bill
Burchette said of the other costume houses, “they don’t have the stock we have. We are
bigger.”217
Western’s focus on hiring excellent people, and concern with customer service
has certainly helped them reestablish themselves in a time when there is a lot of
competition. As Bernie Pollack said in his interview:
90% of the costume house is who you can get to help you….[Eddie] got very
good people in. I think one of the smartest moves he ever did was get Frank
Allegro in. Frank is very good and customer friendly and he brings in a lot of
people because he’s very good…. In the key areas, there is no place that can touch
Western.218
215
Bernie Pollack, Interview by author, North Hollywood, CA, October 24, 2011.
Eddie Marks, Interview by author, North Hollywood, CA, February 9, 2012.
217
Bill Burchette, Interview by author, North Hollywood, CA, October 24, 2011.
218
Bernie Pollack, Interview by author, North Hollywood, CA, October 24, 2011.
216
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As President, Eddie Marks has worked to improve customer service to make sure that
Western can stay completive. As he said, “the product is there, but we had to give our
customers the best customer service we could do…. You have to basically give [costume
designers] the tools that you need. And if you didn’t do that, then you didn’t have a
product that they were going to come in for.”219
Films and Costumes as Part of Our Lives
Films are an integral part of American lives. As Mast says, “To compare Mr.
Smith Goes to Washington of 1939, with The Best Years of Our Lives of 1946, with Rebel
Without a Cause of 1955, with The Graduate of 1967, with Saturday Night Fever of
1977, and with Flashdance of 1983 is to write a history of American culture over the past
five decades.”220 Films, and in turn, costumes, are influenced by everything else that is
going on in society.
When conducting research for costume designers, it becomes apparent to Bobi
Garland how intertwined films are with the real world. In her interview she shared a story
that speaks to this. One of her first projects as Western’s librarian included doing
research on New York City police officers. She called the police, and spoke to an officer
a few months after September 11, 2001:
… he was at the site. And so he’s talking to me, and I kept hearing all this noise in
the background and he said, “I have to go back to work I’m down at the site.”
Which at that time everyone knew what the site was. And I burst into tears, and I
was like “oh my god, I’m so sorry that I’m talking about something so irrelevant,
like where do your Sergeant stripes go.”
219
220
Eddie Marks, Interview by author, North Hollywood, CA, October 24, 2011.
Mast, A Short History of the Movies, 5.
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Bobi also spoke about how important it was to her to make sure that the Sergeant’s
stripes were right though, because she wanted to be able to represent them in a way that
was respectful. Bobi is constantly reminded of how films reflect what is going on in the
world:
That’s the most interesting part of the job is that events are always contemporary
to you in research so there is all this stuff going on that is continuing in your
face…. You get really chocked up thinking of those soldiers, and then when you
see it on film and it comes alive at another level you – it’s painful. And same, I
think that people forget about what’s going on in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan.
Well I have just been working on a film about Pakistan so it’s really real to me.
Films represent the time, and adding to the accuracy can be important. Films can reveal a
lot about the time in which they were made.
Leaving and Returning to Western
Many of the interviewees that I spoke to have been associated with Western
Costume Company for a long time, and many worked for Western in the beginning of
their careers, and then came back to Western later in their careers. As Harry Rotz
mentioned in his interview, “because Western is one of the largest employers in the city –
in costuming certainly– that’s where you go. You try to get a job at Western. You put in
as many hours as you can.”221 Many of the interviews first came to Western to get into
the union, or to learn the craft. Then, many left to work on other things. Eventually, they
came back and finished out their careers at Western Costume Company.
Many of the interviewees came to work at Western for what they thought would
be just a short period of time. When Bobi Garland was asked to return to Western as the
221
Harry Rotz, Interview by author, North Hollywood, CA, February 8, 2012.
74
Research Librarian, after leaving for a year she expected to only stay three months. Now
she has been at Western for ten years. Eddie Marks, who was brought in to the company
in 1988 to help with the move of the company, expected to be at Western for only a year.
Fourteen years later, he is still running the company.
For some employees, the decision to return to Western Costume Company was
made for job security. Costuming is an industry that generally involves moving from one
project to another. As Harry Rotz said in his interview, he got to a point where it was
“time to settle in someplace and find a niche for myself rather than having to pack up my
kit every couple of months and schlep it somewhere else. It just became difficult to go
from project to project to project.”222 For others, returning to Western was returning to
an institution that had given them so much in the beginnings of their careers. Susanna
Sandke, who worked at Western at the beginning of her career in the 1970s, and then
came back in the 2000s, told Western “when I get old and ready to settle down, I’ll come
back and give you the rest of my life. Unbeknownst to me that that’s actually what would
happen.”223
Western as a Family
As a former employee of Western said in the 1970s, “Western is not just a place
of employment; it’s home…. This isn’t the business to have a family in. I had a family
once upon a time. Now this is my family.”224 Many of the interviewees of this project
222
Harry Rotz, Interview by author, North Hollywood, CA, February 8, 2012.
Susanna Sandke, Interview by author, North Hollywood, CA, February 8, 2012.
224
Easton, “The Craft of Illusion,” 70.
223
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expressed that Western has been their home and their family. As Harry Rotz said,
working at Western “means getting to work with my friends all day.”225
There is a sense of camaraderie at Western Costume Company, and perhaps it
comes from the hard work that the employees do, but it also comes from the fact that
most of them are doing what they love. When asked what Western means to him, Bill
Burchette replied, “It means that I’ve spent 34… 36 years working at something I love.
I’ve really enjoyed being here…. There are moments when you do hate it, but you can’t
help that. But I’ve enjoyed working here.”226 This sentiment was expressed by many, and
in general there was a sense of feeling lucky that they got to do what they loved, in an
institution that is loved and recognized by so many.
Final Thoughts
Western Costume Company is obviously important to the many people who have
been involved in it throughout its one hundred year history. Because of its sheer size, and
dominance in the industry in the past, there are few people involved in the film industry
who do not know of Western. The history is fascinating, and deserves to be documented.
The interviews conducted for this project not only document lives of individuals involved
in the costuming industry, but preserve the history of a Hollywood institution as well.
225
226
Harry Rotz, Interview by author, North Hollywood, CA, February 8, 2012.
Bill Burchette, Interview by author, North Hollywood, CA, October 24, 2011.
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APPENDIX A
Costume Design Procedure For a Film
Phase 1, design analysis
1. Read the script straight through the first time, making only a few notes.
2. Hold preliminary discussion with the director. (Many times this is the job interview.)
3. Break down the script
a. Read the script again. The script is your blueprint.
1) Mark it to separate principals, supporting characters, and extras.
2) Number days and nights.
3) Underline character descriptions.
4) Make notes about action.
b. Make a day/night schedule, to track the passage of time in the script; discuss with the script
supervisor and the director.
c. Make the character breakdown chard for
1) Principals
2) Supporting characters
3) Extras
Phase 2, preliminary research
1. Make a research list.
2. Make a prop list.
3. Make a stunt breakdown.
4. Make an extras breakdown.
5. Make lists of questions for all departments, i.e. for the AD (assistant director), DP (director of
photography), art director, etc.
6. Research and Xerox, using
a. Libraries and bookstores;
b. Research agencies;
c. Movies;
d. Internet;
e. Other costume designers and filmmakers;
f. Locations where shooting will take place;
g. Costume houses.
Phase 3, preliminary design
1. Talk concept and exchange questions and ideas with visual departments, including
a. Art department;
b. Set decoration;
c. Director of photography;
d. Prop department (go over prop list);
e. Hair and makeup (if on-board)
2. Develop preliminary designs and presentation (quick sketch and collage, etc)
Phase 4, design
1. Design costumes
a. Do renderings
b. Hire illustrators
c. Swatch fabric
3. Final design meeting with the director and/or producer(s)
a. show research
77
b.
c.
d.
Show designs
Show samples
Ask all questions that you have
Phase 5, prep, in which most of the film’s wardrobe is assembles and prepared for approval and shooting
1. Make a budget, and meet with unit production manager and/or producers
2. Set up and hire the costume department.
3. Meet with actors (many times by phone and fax).
a. Discuss character.
b. Show research.
c. See them, if possible, and get measurements.
d. Try on a few samples, to get ideas.
4. Show designs to all visual departments
5. Talk logistics and exchange questions with production departments, including
a. Assistant director (shooting schedule and day out of days)
b. Stunt coordinator (go over stunt breakdown)
c. Choreographer
d. Special effects (blue screen, etc.)
6. Gather costumes
a. Made to order
b. Rentals
c. Purchases
d. Product placements
7. Fittings
8. Alter, age, dye costumes
9. Have meetings with logistical departments, same as above, plus the following:
a. Extras casting (show them how you want extras to look)
b. Locations (facilities, etc.)
c. Wranglers and animal handlers
d. Sound department
e. Transportation department
10. Outfit and load wardrobe trailer; set up on-location wardrobe department.
Phase 6, the shoot. Final refinements are made to the designs before being committed to film, and
additional wardrobe is delivered according to shooting schedule deadlines.
Phase 7, final wrap. The costumes are returned, if appropriate, and held or stored for additional footage and
re-shoots that may be required after completion of principal photography (the footage shot during the
original shooting schedule). The designer may already be off payroll by the time final wrap is underway.
Credit: Durina Wood’s Costume Design Procedure For a Film from Costuming for Film: The Art and The
Craft by Holly Cole and Kristin Burke. Silman-James Press: Los Angeles, 2005.
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APPENDIX B
Sample Interview Questions
I. Background
Where did you grow up?
As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
What were your hobbies as a child?
Talk about your impressions/experiences with entertainment (film/tv/theater) as a child.
When did you come to Los Angeles? What were your reasons for coming?
How did you first get involved in the costume industry?
How did you learn your skills?
Who were your mentors?
Describe your jobs before coming to Western.
II. Western Costume
How did you first come to Western? What year?
Had you heard about Western before you came to work here? What had you heard?
What were your first impressions of Western?
What was your first job here?
How was business when you first arrived at Western?
What were the big shows at Western during that time?
Describe an average day for you.
What did you work on?
79
Who did you work with at that time?
Who were the biggest characters?
Were there any conflicts?
What was your favorite aspect of your job?
Describe the building on Melrose.
III. Western Today
How did you find out that Western was moving to a new building?
How did you feel about the move?
What did you think when you came to the new building?
What is the biggest change? How is the atmosphere different now?
When you started was there much competition from other costume houses?
How is that different today?
Have you noticed a difference in designers being more concerned with historical
accuracy?
How has the collection grown over the years?
Have you worked Halloween? Describe.
Describe the spring cleaning sale.
Describe what you are working on now.
IV. Reflections
In what ways is Western different from other places you’ve worked at?
80
What was your favorite show to work on?
Who do you admire most in the field?
How has the industry changed over time?
What do you think the future holds for the costume industry?
Do you have any favorite stories about working at Western?
Do you have any stories about interactions with Western’s iconic figures?
How has Western’s reputation changed over time?
How do you balance your working life and personal life?
What advice would you give to young costumers coming into the field?
What are you most proud of?
What is the hardest part of your job?
What does Western mean to you?
If you had one word to describe Western, what would it be?
Is there anything else that we haven’t talked about that you would like to discuss?
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APPENDIX C
Sample Field Notes
FIELD NOTES -- Harry Rotz
(Compiled February 8, 2012)
Interviewee: Harry ROTZ
Interviewer: Claire Tynan
Interview Date: February 8, 2012
Location: Western Costume Company
THE INTERVIEWEE. Harry is the milliner at Western Costume. He started his career in
the costume department at Juilliard. He has worked in theater, opera, ballet, films and
television. He owned his own hat making business, Harry Hatz.
THE INTERVIEWER. Claire Tynan is a former intern at Western, and a graduate student
in Public History at CSU Sacramento.
DESCRIPTION OF INTERVIEW. The interview was conducted in an office at Western.
The room was quiet and there were no interruptions.
CONENT OF INTERVIEW. Harry discusses his career before coming to Los Angeles
and the various theater company’s he worked for around the country. He also discusses
working at MGM to get into the union, and about briefly working at the old Western in
the 1980s. He discusses the old building. He also talks about his craft and about what has
changed over the last thirty years. He discusses his decision to come back to Western and
what Western is like today.
NOTE ON RECORDING. ZOOM H4n Handy Recorder without an external microphone.
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APPENDIX D
Sample Time Log
TIME LOG
INTERVIEW WITH HARRY ROTZ
February 8, 2012
Minutes
0 – 3:00
3:00 – 4:00
4:00 – 5:00
5:00 – 7:00
7:00 – 8:00
8:00 – 8:30
8:30 – 10:30
10:30 – 12:00
12:15 -13:30
13:30 – 15:00
15:00 – 17:00
17:00 – 19:00
19:30 – 21:30
21:30 – 22:30
22:30 – 24:00
24:30 – 27:30
27:30 – 29:00
30:00 – 31:00
31:00 – 32:00
32:00 – 33:30
35:00 – 36:30
37:00 – 38:00
38:00 – 42:00
Childhood and growing up in Miami, Florida and getting involved in
theater and productions.
Moves to New York to act, but needs a job. Gets a job in the costume
department at Julliard.
Came out to San Francisco and works at ACT in SF, Ashland Shakespeare
Festival, Santa Fe Opera, Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. Comes to LA in
1981.
Learning skills and apprentice at Julliard becomes interested in millinery.
Earned union hours at MGM. Freelancing.
Working on millinery full time.
Process of designing hats.
Created his own business – Harry Hatz.
Came to Western in 2002.
Western’s reputation – way to get into the union.
Working in the millinery department in the 1980s and relationships at
Western.
Building on Melrose.
Milliner, cutter/fitters, people at Western.
Atmosphere at Western during the 1980s.
Move to the new building in North Hollywood.
Average day at Western Costume.
Competition. Western’s place in the business.
Historical accuracy.
Working the Spring Sale at Western.
What’s different about working at Western Costume.
Less time and money for costumes today.
Working on Oz last year.
Advice to young costumers. Reflections on career and teaching others.
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APPENDIX E
Sample Interview Release Form
INTERVIEW RELEASE FORM
I, ____________________________________ , do hereby give to Western Costume Company the series
of interviews ________________________________________ recorded with me beginning on or about
_______________________ to be used for any research, educational, or other purpose that Western
Costume Company may deem appropriate. I give these as an unrestricted gift and I transfer to Western
Costume Company all right, title, and interest, including copyright. I understand that I may still use the
information in the recordings myself without seeking permission from Western Costume Company.
Unless otherwise specified above, I place no restrictions on access to and use of the interviews.
Interviewee (Signature) ___________________________________________________
Printed Name __________________________________________________________
Address _______________________________________________________________
Phone Number______________________ E-mail Address _______________________
Date _____________________________
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APPENDIX F
TRANSCRIPT -- EDDIE MARKS
(compiled February 2, 2012)
Interviewee: EDDIE MARKS
Interviewer: Claire Tynan
Interview Date: October 24, 2011
Location: Western Costume Company
Length: 29:10
START OF INTERVIEW
Claire Tynan: Today is October 24th, 2011 and we’re interviewing Eddie Marks at
Western Costume Company and this is Claire Tynan doing the interview. So, you grew
up in LA and you came from a costuming family. Can you tell me a little bit about your
family growing up?
Eddie Marks: My dad -- we came from New Jersey, and my dad was in the jukebox
business in New Jersey as his father was and in the early 50s my dad followed my uncle
and his family out here to California and worked for my uncle for a while. My uncle had
connections to the studios because he had a store called the “Surprise Store.” So, he sold
clothing to all the studios like MGM and Fox and Paramount and Western Costume
Company. And my dad worked for him and then there was an opportunity, I think
somewhere around 1952 for my dad to go to work at MGM studios in the costume
department -- he didn’t know anything about costumes. That was kind of where his career
began and he proved himself as a key costumer supervisor for the next thirty plus years,
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and he worked in Fox and he worked at Universal. He did the costumes on Murder She
Wrote and many other movies and worked with Elvis a bunch. Glenn Ford, I mean he
was around in the 50s and 60s, you know big Hollywood movies. So, that was what he
did. And then I kind of -- my background started in -- right around summer of 65 after
high school. And I really didn’t want to get into the wardrobe department, but I needed a
summer job. That’s kind of where I started.
CT: So when you were a kid do you remember, do you remember your dad’s work
and were you ever kind of around movie stars or his business?
EM: My dad, as in today, movies are done on location. I always remember my dad
going on location to Tucson, Oregon, sometimes he would -- I think he did a movie
called Sweet Bird of Youth, they may have gone to South Carolina, North Carolina. So I
remember him being gone a lot. But, I also remember when he would work in the studios
that I’d go and visit. I always used to hang out in the camera department or the sound
department because I was always tinkering around with erector sets building hand radios
and things like that, so there was a lot of stuff that kept my interest on the set the last
thing I thought I would do was clothing. You know? But, that’s -- it turned out that I was
kind of like a set kid, I grew up on sets and I really enjoyed it, really liked it. And
meeting actors and actresses. My dad was always a real social guy so we would go spend
the weekend, or go spend the Sunday at Jim Hutton’s house on the beach. Or we would
go to Glenn Ford’s house. All the actors liked my dad, he always got along good with all
the actors and stuff. So when it came time to socialize my dad was, they’d invite him
down to the house, and we’d go down there and play on the beach or wherever we went.
86
CT: Mh hm. And you said you liked building things? Did you have other hobbies
when you were a kid? What did you like doing?
EM: You know... I always remember using my hands. I don’t know -- I think there
was a time when I was sick. I couldn't do a lot of activities and stuff like that. Somebody
bought me a radio to build. So once I did that, and working with erector sets and stuff like
that, I just liked it. Even today I tinker around with, I can kind of fix almost anything, or
I’ll attempt to fix almost anything.
CT: And did you have any idea when you were a kid what you wanted to be when
you grew up?
EM: I probably -- yeah, I liked building things and working with my hands and
electronics I probably would have become some kind of electrician for some electrical
engineer of some kind. Fixing television sets or who knows what, but that was kind of
what I though -- in high school I took electronics all through high school. And when I
started college I took electronics in college. I only lasted college really for only a few
weeks, maybe one semester. Taking some drafting classes and electronics. I was too into
making a little bit of money in the studios.
CT: Mh hm. And so you started working because you needed a summer job?
EM: Yeah, I needed a summer job and my dad was on location. And my dad’s boss
asked me if I wanted to work at MGM Studios in the wardrobe department for the
summer. So I thought sure why not? And I think I was making $100, 150 a week. From
not making any money to that, it was like boy I have gas in my car, I had a car. It was
great. I mean I was able to do whatever I wanted. Kind of an independence. I still lived at
87
home, which was fine, at least for the time. So I spent three years. I tried to go back to
school, but that didn’t work, I just thought well maybe I’ll make this my career. Thinking
that maybe one day I’ll transfer into the sound department at MGM, I still thought that
would be for me, kind of cooler than working the wardrobe department. But after
working about three years I finally had had enough with the guy who was my boss and I
went downstairs to talk to the guy in charge of the department, I can’t work up here
anymore. The guy doesn't like me, anything I do I’m doing it wrong, so I’m going to quit.
Then the next day they put me on a movie, so from then on I started working on movies
like - the first movie I ever worked on was called Ice Station Zebra somewhere around
1967-1968 and I did that. I ended up after that doing maybe a couple of other movies at
MGM where I wasn’t, I didn’t really have any responsibilities, just helping out on a Doris
Day movie. And there was even a movie that Herman Hermits did. Herman’s Hermits
used to be a group. So I worked on different movies at MGM then the time came for me
to get laid off I think, things got slow and then Paramount hired me to go to work in that
was about, I got married somewhere along the way, 1967 then I got divorced a year later,
but I went to Pennsylvania and worked on a movie called The Molly Maguires and my
responsibilities there was just to take care of Richard Harris, the actor. And after I
worked one movie with Richard on The Molly Maguires he asked me to go to Mexico
with him and work on a movie called A Man Called Horse. So that kind of started my
career as being a set man in the industry. I started to get other jobs because they knew
that I could be a set man and go from one movie to the next, and before you know it
you’re doing three to four movies in a row and you don’t have any time off. And I was
88
kind of on a role, so it kind of worked its way from being a set person to becoming a
costume supervisor when now I had more control and i was in charge of the budgets and
in charge of the look on shows. There were a lot of shows that I was basically the
designer once I got going. Just doing a lot of rambling.
CT: No, it’s good.
EM: You can ask me more questions.
CT: Did you learn a lot as you continued. Do you think -- I mean did you have any
mentors? Did your dad teach you a lot?
EM: I didn’t work with my dad very much, which was a good thing. But, I always
paid attention when anyone was teaching me. I learned from the old timers, my dad being
one, and all of the people he was around. Everyone seemed to do the job the same way.
Today, it’s too bad that the people who are doing costuming today didn’t learn from the
old timers. A lot of the attitude today is I know it all. I don’t have to be taught anything, I
know how to do this job, and it’s too bad because the way that we were taught -- the old
school way, there was defiantly a different way of learning how to do certain things, and
you just did it over and over and over and you knew it like the back of your hand. I see
kids today that don’t have a clue what they’re doing.
CT: Can you give an example of how something was done before?
EM: Just breaking down the script. There was kind of a format that everybody used
when breaking down the script. You read a script, you highlight it. Back then you read a
script and you’d underline things even before highlighter. Today you use highlighters,
different color highlighters. But I would go through and highlight a script. Put down the
89
main characters, but down what I think they’re going to wear. Today, I think that
everybody relies on their computers way too much. I was one of the first people to use a
computer. Even when I had an Atari computer I built a program to do a wardrobe break
down, and then I went to Macintosh , but I never, I was able to break the scripts down but
it was never the same as doing it long hand. Using your fingers to underline things. Your
fingers actually have brains in them because when you have to talk about a script, you
knew that script backwards and forward. When you do it on the computer and you
highlighted your script and entered it into the computer, it was just different. But there is
so much other stuff that learning, learning how to iron, learning organization on a truck,
where things are, what stuff goes in drawers, what stuff goes in bins. Everybody does it
different, everyone has their own systems. It was just nice to be taught by the old timers
they had been taught by the, almost like the people who started everything.
CT: Who else was around then that you learned from?
EM: There was one of my dad’s best friends, his name is Bobby Ellsworth. There
was another guys, () Rose. Tony Scarano. And all these people, they all had relationships
with Western Costume as well. Western, back then, Western was the only place to get
any kind of costume. There wasn’t -- it was before all the small mom and pop costume
houses came into play.
CT: And so you went from working on movies, to working in television? Is that
right?
EM: I did. I kind of worked on movies, then I did some television. I worked on the
TV series The Streets of San Francisco. Which was really the biggest TV show I worked
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on. I was on it for 6 years. Which was great, cause I was on location for 6 years I was in
San Francisco. So it was really great to work up there, then the hiatus sometimes I would
come back to LA, sometimes we would do another pilot or series in San Francisco, stay
up there, thru the hiatus and just keep working. It was great, I was getting housing money
per diem. And I saved up enough money eventually to buy a house here in LA.
CT: Did you find that it was different to work on TV shows than movies?
EM: Television is harder to work on because it’s a faster pace. Movies seem a little
bit easier because you have a longer time to prepare for it and you have a longer time to
shoot. Television you shoot ten to eleven pages a day. Movies shoot 2 pages a day. So,
the whole pace is slower on a feature film than television. Television is the best learning
tool. If you can do a television series, you can do anything because you have to think fast,
you have to work fast. It’s great training for anybody who works on television.
CT: I heard that you won an Emmy award?
EM: I did, I won a n Emmy award for a movie a move of the week. Which was first
called Madam of the Sunset Strip, but I think they changed it to, Shakedown on the Sunset
Strip. I did it with Deborah Hopper, who is costume designer today that does all Clint
Eastwood movies. I was the key supervisor slash costume designer. We didn’t have a
designer, we did it ourselves. It was the same story as LA Confidential. It was done for
television in 1980 -- 88? And I did it for a friend of mine. I was already well established
doing features, but my old Streets of San Francisco directors, one of my favorite directors,
asked me to do this movie of the week, it was a movie of the week. Joan Van Ark who
was the star, but it was the exact same story as LA Confidential. About a madam who
91
corrupted the LA PD.
CT: And did you have any idea that you’d win an award for it?
EM: No, not at all. You just do the best job you can. You get the best clothes you
can. Make everything look good. As it turns out, we didn’t have too much competition
that year. Which was nice. But it was really a good piece. The clothes, it looked really
good. Back then there wasn’t too much stuff that was on television that you go an
opportunity to make it look real, and that’s what we did.
CT: And so you got credit for that movie, but did you work on a lot of other things
where you weren’t credited?
EM: No. Other movies that I did without a designer I did a movie called Taps with
Timothy Hutton and Sean Penn and Tom Cruise. Then I did another movie called All the
Right Moves with Tom Cruise - no designer. Again I used Deborah Hopper as my
assistant. Dead Poet’s Society, no designer, and I really liked doing that. I really tried to
get movies where I didn’t have to work with designers al the time. It was kind of nice.
Today it’s rare that a movie is done without a costume designer or a TV series. It seems
that the producers think that they have to have a costume designer on everything - and
they don’t - they just have to have a costume supervisor. Most of them are too young to
know the difference and the rules.
CT: And did you just like having the freedom of not having a designer?
EM: Yeah it was nice, I really liked working with designers too, don’t get me
wrong. I worked with Ann Roth a lot, Ruth Myers. I worked with Anthony Powell who is
a wonderful, wonderful man. Worked on a lot of stuff. Just 3 or 4 pages, everyone says,
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oh your resume is too long you have to cut it down. I never did, I just turned in 3 to 4
pages worth of stuff because I was proud of every bit of it.
CT: So how did you first come to Western?
EM: I was doing a movie called Postcards from the Edge with Ann Roth, she was
the designer. In 1989 Western Costume had just been purchased from Paramount Studios
and they were looking for somebody that had a good reputation and might be able to
bring people into Western. So, I interviewed for the job, but I thought this will be good. I
can stay home, not travel, watch my kids play little league, watch my kids grow up. I’ll
give it a shot for a year, try it. I thought after a year or so, I thought my reputation would
withstand me being gone for a year or so. I thought after that, I thought if I don’t go back
to doing films people will forget about me and I’ll lose my contacts. So i kind of had a
window of opportunity for about a year or so. When I first started at Western I was
promised a lot of different things, that we would have money for this or money for that.
And it turned out that it wasn’t so because the company’s financial situation wasn’t good
when they first bought it. They needed their money for paying the bills and things like
that, so we needed police uniforms, I couldn’t buy them. Well this isn’t good because I’m
giving up a year of my life to do this, and I was promised I’d be able to change Western
Costume, build it up, bring my friends in. But if I can't buy the tools I need to get the
people in, how am I going to keep my job, hows my job going to survive if I can’t bring
my friends in. The way to bring my friends in is to make sure I can give them good
costumes. So slowly that started to change and we had a little bit more money for one
thing or another, but then we had to move the company from Hollywood to North
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Hollywood. and that was a big move. It took us a month to do. Once we got here we were
even in more financial trouble. We set a budget to do the move, to build the building that
we’re in now. To build it out with racking and lights but it cost way more than we
budgeted. And moving. So, for survival the guy who was the president decided that he
wanted out. And I was asked to stay on as the president by Bill Haber.
CT: Were you brought in a Vice President?
EM: I was brought in as vice president. And when, also when I was brought in I
ended up replacing somebody that I have a lot of respect for, and I didn’t know I was
replacing somebody. I thought that he was going to be right along with me, that we’d
both be there. But as it turned out, he was the one who got ousted. And I didn’t feel good
about that, because he had kind of been a friend for years and stuff like that. But, after a
while I realized that the company is changing there are reasons why you have to go
through and do certain things. We started to do ok. I started to bring some of the people
back in. We were known as a dirty old warehouse in the beginning, so the guy who was
the president decided to leave and like I said, I was asked to stay on. I was asked if I
wanted to become the president of the company and I had a meeting with Bill Haber at
his office at CAA. And he said, I don’t want you to make a decision right now, go home
and talk to your wife about it. It’s a big move. So, I went home and only a couple of
weeks earlier than that my dad had passed away. He would have been real proud to know
that I had become the president of the company, which he probably knew anyways. But,
so my wife and I discussed it and we thought it was a good move, so I became president
of the company. Now I only had two owners who I had to deal with. They are both
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absentee owners. Bill Haber would be in Beverly Hills, and the other owner was Sidney
Sheldon the writer, who has since passed on. We never heard anything from Sidney. He
didn’t have anything to do with the day to day operation. Neither did Bill. And we just
kind of trucked along and did our thing. I tried to clean up the best we could. And then
some business people came in, I think they were brought in by Sidney Sheldon. On what
we could do to liquidate things in the company, and still keep the company open. So we
ended up having some auctions to get some money. Which was a good thing, because we
paid off some debt that we had and we cleaned out the warehouse a bit and we started to
get customers to come in. Slowly to where we are today, people don’t refer to it as a dirty
old warehouse anymore. We’ve tried to put money in the office and getting the customers
these collections of clothes. I spent a lot of time researching and buying other companies
that have fabulous women's clothing and mens clothing that have built us up to what we
are today.
CT: Do you remember the old Western? Did you pull from there when you were
working on shows?
EM: Sure. And I had different guys there. A guy named Hamlet. A guy named
Jimmy (). I just would get on the phone and call these guys and tell them what I needed.
Western was kind of, it was an okay place to go, I really didn’t prefer to go there when I
was a costumer and it was up to me to get costumes. I wanted to go to the places that had
the best clothes. Some of my competitors actually had better clothes than Western did.
And I would go to those companies. I would always go to Western if I had a lot of stuff
to pull, because they had the quantity.
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CT: So that was in 70s?
EM: That was in the 70s and 80s, yeah.
CT: So you’d go to the other...
EM: I’d go to the other houses. Like CRC which specialized in uniforms. And
American Costume specialized in 20th century clothes. So, each company had their own
little niche. But Western was like the grandpa. We all went to Western when we had to.
CT: So when you first came to Western, it had just been sold.. or?
EM: When I came to Western, that same year it had been purchased from
Paramount studios and I was working for the new owners.
CT: And Paramount purchased it...
EM: Paramount, I believe the way it went was that Paramount purchased it from
there were four studios that owned it. Paramount was only interested in the property. But
they had to buy the company before they could buy the property. So once they owned the
company, they put it up for sale almost immediately because what they wanted was they
wanted for someone to buy it to get out of there and knock the building down and have a
parking lot.
CT: And so how was business at the time? Was the company very valuable?
EM: The company was purchased it was a good asset. The clothing value was much
higher than the purchase price, but somebody had to put it together, someone had to
know what to do. The three owners who bought it had no idea how to run a costume
company. The president Paul Abramowitz, young guy, and he had good ideas for the
company his background was product. And the difference with what I helped educate him
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is that we couldn’t refer to ourselves as a product company, we had to refer to ourselves
as a customer service company. The product is there, but we had to give our customers
the best customer service we could do. Because bringing me in from the outsides, that
was one of the reasons I didn’t shop at Western Costume Company all the time was
because I didn’t think they gave very good customer service. I wanted to be taken care of.
And the costume designers, they are a different breed of people, you have to take care of
them, you have to wine and dine them. You have to basically give them the tools that
they need. And if you didn’t do that, then you didn’t have a product that they were going
to come in for. I kind of understood that from the beginning. Paul, I taught Paul that, I
think he knew that too, but he also had to represent the product. I was more interested the
customer service aspect. I figured if I could get them to come in then I could get them to
come in again. That is kind of the way I am in today with all my employees. If we can
keep a new costume designer in here, we can keep them because we do go out of our way
to help them.
CT: So when you were restructuring the company did you have a model of what
you were trying to accomplish?
EM: I had no idea what I was doing. I had no, I had no education of how to run a
business. I had no education of finances. It was kind of like.... I don’t know, it was very
strange because here I am trying to work with accountants and people and all I kept
thinking of was make sure that you take care of the customer and that I think that’s what
helped us all the way to today. And by doing that. By taking care of the customers,
making sure they come back in here, renting clothes. The funds that we’ve gotten from
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these customers who have helped us purchase the things that we didn’t have. All the
vintage dresses now the mens vintage suits and all of that is because of the great
customers we have today. Loyal customers a lot of them worked at Western Costume a
lot of them are alumni of Western Costume and those are the people that make sure that
Western survives.
CT: Ok. Well we’re about at 30 minutes. So that sounds like a good stopping place.
[end of interview]
TRANSCRIPT -- EDDIE MARKS
(compiled February 20, 2012)
Interviewee: EDDIE MARKS
Interviewer: Claire Tynan
Interview Date: February 9, 2012
Location: Western Costume Company
Length: 54:03
START OF INTERVIEW
Claire Tynan: Today is February 9, 2012 and we are interviewing Eddie Marks at
Western Costume Company and this is Claire Tynan. So the last time we talked we left
off when you first came to Western and we talked about the sale of the company, and that
was in the late 80s, so I want to go back to that time a little bit. And I just wanted to know
what the atmosphere was like in the company when you first started and how the
employees reacted to the sale of the company.
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Eddie Marks: I think that the morale was very high because it was newly taken over.
I think all the employees had real high hopes that the company was going to get back on
their feet quick. Even though they were [pause] -- their business continued, but there was
kind of a downswing in the late 80s, and with the hopes that new management was taking
over, they thought that Western Costume would become number one again. So, morale
was -- I think that everyone was real hopeful that everything was going to go real good.
In early 1989, March 89, is when the new ownership took place. I came in in November
of 1989 and things had picked up a little bit, we were still in the old building, so nothing
had really changed other than the management. There were --- we began to buy things
that we were lacking like in uniforms, we bought LAPD uniforms, California highway
patrol, things that hadn’t been done very much in the past. So there was, there was some
moneys that we spent and tried to get a little bit back more on our feet. Designers were
coming around to check out the new management and see what was going on. The
biggest task that I faced when I came in in 1989 is by March of 1990 we needed to move
the company and we didn’t know where we were going to go. At the time the real estate
business in Los Angeles was really busy and from my knowledge there was only like two
buildings in all of Los Angeles that would have housed us that were available, unlike
today when you could get whatever you want. And one of them was in Glendale and was
that a furniture manufacturing company and it was all glass. So it had glass sky lights, it
had glass windows around the sides. Which would have been detrimental to costumes,
not to mention there was no insulation in the building at all. And I talked to one of the
owners and I said this was not -- would not be feasible for us to go there. And I think that
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was the better, I wasn’t involved in the money stuff, I wasn’t involved in the purchasing
of the building, but I think he heard me and then we ended up finding another building in
North Hollywood right near the Burbank airport. Which is where we are today. And this
was an airplane manufacture at one time, it was printing plant at one time. So there was a
lot of -- a lot of excess metals and toxins it seemed like in this building that had to get
cleaned away before we could go in there. Which they did, they did some power washing
and they got, for the most part they got all of this stuff out. But with the printing, they
used inks and it was kind of evident when we went in there that you kind of had a smell.
But by the time we came in march it was all gone.
CT: Did they have to do a lot of building in here, to build things up? Or were the
offices already...
EM: The offices were here. Upstairs and downstairs. There were some more
partitions or less partitions and we partitioned them off to coordinate so we could make
offices. But the warehouse was pretty much open and it was basically two room -- three
rooms -- which is like how it is now. There were big fire doors separating these rooms. It
was a challenge to figure out how to go about separating the mens clothes from the
women’s clothes. And figure out where our shops were going to go. One of the owners
had the cages constructed, which was really brilliant that the costumers and the designers
could be separated from each other once they rented their clothes they could put them in
these cages that they could work on their clothes from there.
CT: Who was in charge of figuring out how the racks were going to go up and -- or
the rails -- and where everything was going to go?
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EM: We contracted a kind of a rack architect specialist. And he drew blue prints of
-- we sat down with him and said we need women’s clothes separate from men’s clothes,
we need the shops. So, the architect kind of did a couple of different plans that made
sense and then the challenge was as he was building the racks, beginning right around
March 1, 1990, we started moving. We were open -- we moved in -- we kept our normal
business hours during the day and they moved starting at about 5 o’clock at night going
until midnight. So, I was kinda doing double shift making sure things got done right. But
we basically contracted a moving company and the moving company moved us in like
wardrobe boxes, stand up wardrobe boxes. So we did a grid, kind of like a spread sheet
where we knew that our racks were going to be 3 tiers high, so that became A, B, C and
we started with 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and then so on. So the clothes that got moved
on a certain day from Hollywood we labeled those clothes where they were going to go.
But because the rack company wasn’t as fast as we were it made us run all around the
Hollywood building knowing that the women’s clothes were going to go first, because
thats where they started building. So once we figured out what was rack one A, B, or C
rack 2, A, B, or C we started boxing those things since they would be the first to come
over and as they got over to the building the following morning the staff would hang
them up. So we really were able to move the clothes from Hollywood to North
Hollywood and with each box only being 24 inches, we were able to label the boxes if it
was 1A, we could label it 1A 1 through 25, knowing that our racks were about 50 feet
long, we really knew exactly where the boxes were going to go. So we’d line them up
and we’d unpack them and hang them right up on the rack.
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CT: Was there any problems during that transition that people couldn’t find things?
Like if someone wanted something you wouldn’t know what building it was in?
EM: It actually worked out pretty good. I mean, to begin with as we’re moving our
business defiantly slowed down. People -- the costumers and the designers didn’t want to
get involved when we were moving. It took us a month to move. But we pretty much
knew what was where and if somebody came, I think I was in both buildings part of the
day in one, part of the day in the other. The phone calls they would tell us what there
were looking for, we’d be sure to move that at night even if we put it on racks. So we
tried to accommodate the costumers and the designers as best we could.
CT: So overall do you think the move went pretty well? Or was it really a crazy
time ...
EM: The move went amazing. I mean if you think about moving at the time it was
probably six miles of clothes. Because we also had another building on Santa Monica
Boulevard that had to be moved at all, I seem to remember that that building was 20,000
feet...
CT: What was that building?
EM: Um. Uniforms and things that weren’t used on an everyday basis. A lot of
military stuff, but it did come over here, and it took us a long time. We were a dirty old
warehouse, and coming in we cleaned it up. We did some painting, but not a lot, we just
didn’t have the time. Paramount at the time that they bought the company in March of
1989, Paramount gave us demands that we had one year to move, and if we didn’t move
within that year I think that our rent was just going to go crazy. We waited, we kinda
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waited too long, we should have been moving in July of 1989. But it didn’t happen that
way.
CT: Mh hum. And then Paramount tore the building down and built a parking lot?
Is that right?
EM: Yeah, I think that what happened was that they had ideas as soon as we were
out of there they were going to knock it down. But the Hollywood preservation society
stepped in and said you can’t tear this building down. It was the first earthquake proof
building in California, or Los Angeles anyway. And so that got held up for, I want to
think it got held up for like 2 years that Paramount was not able to tear it down. And then
when they finally did tear it down, the walls were 18 inches think. I think I went over
there one day to see, watching them swing that ball into the cement and it was like, it
wasn’t damaging the building at all [laughter]. I think they had to go to other means of
knocking the building down. The traditional way of knocking a building down then was
swing the ball, but I don’t think that worked. They didn’t do an explosion, they didn’t
knock it out that way. But, it took a while to bring that building down.
CT: I heard there was a ghost in the building? Do you know anything about that?
EM: I only know one story. I only know one story, because I came from a costume
background I was used to working 14-16 hours a day, that when I got the job at Western
Costume I would show up at 6 o’clock in the morning. Now people didn’t come to work
until 8 -9 o’clock. I’d go to my office and do some work. The whole building is dark
except my office. I was busy at the computer, and out of the corner of my eye I thought I
saw something whisk by me like a cape. It was just weird, because I just thought oh
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you’re -- you’ve heard there are ghost stories and now you’re imagining this. So, a few
minutes later I decided I was going to walk out into the stock, so I walk out and I turn
around a couple of lights, and on the floor, about fifty feet from my office was this black
cape in the middle of the floor.
CT: Huh.
EM: So as far as there were ghosts, I don’t know. But at night time, anything that
was on the floor would have got hung up.
CT: Interesting. So, were you sad to see the old building go, or were you just so
concentrated on the move and excited about the business?
EM: I think I was excited about a new beginning of the company. Didn’t like the
fact that we were going into this kind of a warehouse effect. But compared to where we
were then, and where we are today. It’s exciting every time I do something new. We
changed the whole facade on this entire building. This building that a real 1950’s look
with bars on the windows and in between the windows was this rock kind of these rock
squares.
CT: Mh hm.
EM: And it was really a 1950s look, and it was really ugly. And I wanted to build a
whole new facade so I went to some different constructions sites to see these builders of
today and I took some pictures and when it came time to do something. I did it more for
the insulation, because they were single glass windows and I needed to create some more
insulation for the warmth and the comfort of the costume designers. That started the
whole thing. So if we’re going to change the windows, why not re-skim the building. And
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make it look like a nice building of today which is what we did and I got the color
combinations from some new construction that I had seen that I liked the color
combinations and we transformed a 1950s front building into a 2000s front building. It
looks nice today.
CT: And were the owners supportive of all the changes you wanted to make to the
building?
EM: Yeah, well it was always, talk to the owners, well we need to put new
windows in because its bad. I didn’t necessarily tell them that I was re-skiming the
building and making it look nice. But yeah, I mean the whole thing was first of all it’s
like the movie [pause] oh what was the Kevin Costner baseball of movie. Field of
Dreams. If you build it, they will come. I really believe that, if you make it comfortable
they will come. And with everything that we’ve done by changing the front of the
building, painting offices, putting new carpet down, buying new collections of clothes,
showing my customers that I’m here for the long haul. That Western Costume wants to
stay around. We’ve been in business this year 100 years, and I want to make sure that at
the time I leave this company that its set to continue on, whether it’s another 100 years or
however long it is. Everything that we do is good. And this is a total customer service
operation. Yes, we have a product, but I have to listen to my customers and I have to
make them comfortable in every way that I can.
CT: So did you notice any change in the atmosphere and the feeling of the people
when you moved to the new building?
EM: Well, we kind of made some promises to people that we weren’t able to keep
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because the move cost us a lot of money. I think that the move cost us a lot more money
than we anticipated spending, and where we needed to buy clothes for our customers, we
didn’t have the money. Things really slowed down. So we tried to deal with stuff -- the
same stuff we had and people complained that things were dirty, we had to get them
cleaned. So it was a whole transitional period. There were a lot of people who stayed
away from us, because it was a dirty warehouse and we brought dirty things with us.
Over the years that’s changed, things went off to the cleaners, we’ve painted, we’ve
dropped ceilings down where we could, we’ve tiled floors. Everything that we do on a
daily basis -- re-doing bathrooms -- makes our customers more comfortable to come in
and stay. Today, literally, every office is taken, every cage is taken. I spend half my day
moving people around like a chess game, knowing that someones going to leave on a
certain day and whose going to come in here because we’re limited on the space we have
and i want to accommodate as many of the costume designers as I can.
CT: Can you talk about that a little bit, who comes in and uses the offices and cages
and how you kind of reach out to people to get them to want to come here?
EM: Well, I know that if the customers come in, if the costume designers come in
and work with us on one show they’ll come back, just for the customer service factor that
we really treasure as far as treating the people right. But we have costume designers like
Deborah Scott, Colleen Atwood, Sandy Powell, Deborah Hopper, these are all costume
designers that work on A movies and when you have the A movie costume designers
doing shows out of your place, other designers are attracted to that as well. If Colleen
Atwood is doing a movie here, Julie Weiss is here. It’s kind of a domino effect and since
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we’ve been buying the collections showing these costume designers that we’re serious
about what we do here and the customer service factor, we are able to get all the costume
designers in here.
CT: Mh hm. And do the costume designers always have a choice where they are
going to work at? Or sometimes are they told where they are going to work?
EM: Pretty much they have a choice. Sometimes a production office will set up in a
studio or in a big facility and they’ll want all of their people under the same roof. But for
the most part when a movie is being done and there is a lot of background to be pulled,
whether its a baseball movie that takes place in 1940 or The Changeling that takes place
in 1930. When they have to dress hundreds of background, it doesn’t make sense to have
an office in Playa Del Rey when the clothes are out here in North Hollywood. So for the
most part, they’ll take an office with us, they may go over there for part of the day, but
they need to be where the clothes are. Almost all the time. And the -- for the most part the
production companies, they don’t tell them too much where they have to be. Whether its
in my shop or somewhere else, its their choice. A producer is not going to tell a costume
designer you have to use a certain company or one of the other companies because then
in the end if they go to a certain company and they don’t get the result they want all of a
sudden it’s back on the producers back. So, they pretty much just leave it up to the
costume department where they want to go.
CT: Can you talk a little bit about the different collections that you’ve brought in
since you’ve been there.
EM: One of the first collections that I bought was a company that was in Los
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Angeles, on 3rd Street and it was a company called Leathers and Treasures. And it was
all leather jackets, fabulous leather jackets, bomber jackets, military jackets, leather
indian jackets. And they also had jeans and spurs and it was just a conglomeration of a lot
of stuff. And it just made sense to do that. Because here I’m going to buy a whole
collection, all sizes, some of it was painted up, it was some of it was from the hippie
generation all the way through some military jackets and a lot of motorcycle jackets. It
was a good match for us just to get our feet wet, and we bought that. And then the second
collection I bought, I got a phone call one day saying did I know Dorothy Weaver, and I
said no. And they said, well she’s a costume company in New York and they are selling
her company. So, I called a friend of mine, Ann Roth and asked her if she would go and
look at these clothes and she made an appointment, or I made an appointment for her to
go look at these clothes as 6 o’clock. And at 6:30 she called me and she said you better
come out here now. So that night, literally I found out that day, I was on a red eye that
night. And Dorothy Weaver had passed away 2 years earlier, and her brother wanted to
sell the company. He just wanted -- I think that running a company to rent costumes was
not what he wanted to do, I think he was in the real estate business and what he wanted to
do was to rent that space to one person. So, I was able to make a deal with him. And
about three weeks later I was loading up a couple of trucks in New York to have them
come back here. I purposely -- I over saw that move after I was the president of the
company. I went back to New York, I actually I hired people, but I oversaw the move to
get those out here. The next collection that we bought was a collection that we had
looked at for years, and Helen Larson was one of the most costume company’s here in
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Los Angeles. And while she was alive she contemplated selling the company, and she
wanted too much money. But she had a fabulous collection. So years later her daughter
Jane called me and said that she was thinking about selling, she was tired and she didn’t
want to run the company after Helen passed away any longer. And so I went out to
Whittier to kind of look at everything and Jane and I were able to make a deal. And that
was the best purchase that I have ever made even to date because Helen’s clothes had the
reputation of dressing principal actresses from turn of the century even into the 1800s.
She had the most fabulous clothes, 20s, 30s, she had a decent stock of mens, but she
really focused on women’s clothes. They were pristine. Every single piece. And Jane and
her mother Helen, any time something came back with a little hole they mended
everything themselves so when I got the clothes everything was in tip top shape. It took
us a while to move that collection. But you know, Helen’s clothes were set up in a house.
She basically had a whole house, bedrooms everything had racks of clothes. When you
went in there, you didn’t go through the racks. She brought the stuff out that she showed
you what she wanted to rent. But bringing it over here, this gave the costume designers
the opportunity to see the whole collection. A lot of the costume designers had never seen
the whole collection. So we brought that in here and set it all up and what we did was
now we had to start moving things around. So we kinda took where our shops were and
moved them around the corner, still in our building, but we found empty spaces and just
to utilize the space the best we can it seems like we’re constantly moving things around.
So we brought Helen into what we now call The Collection at Western Costume. So then
about a year or so after I bought Helen, Patty Norris and I talked for a while about
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purchasing her collection. It just, it just seemed like we were the right fit for everybody.
They knew we were going to take care of everything. The company was going to last, we
were going to go on. That was really important to Jane and to Patty as well. So we bought
Patty’s clothes and her collection was called Private Collection and Patty had moved her
collection from Glendale to Colorado to West Lake Village, so eventually we took over
the West Lake Village Company and we moved it in about a month. I had it moved in
here. We moved it to a separate building. We moved it next door. What we did was we
racked out a building next door so we could organize it and figure out where we were
going to move it. We brought it into our building where we are now and blended it in
with Dorothy Weaver, Helen Larson, and Private Collection. Our building is packed. We
don’t have room for anything anymore. It was kind of the end of the collections. There
just wasn’t anywhere to put them.
CT: What about the Dykeman Young collection?
EM: I was just going to get to that [laughter]. So then I had been talking to Mike
Dykeman who was the owner of Dykeman Young, his partner Craig passed away. Mike
didn’t know what he was going to do. If he was going to continue with the company, but
the different costume designers that he knew, and I knew they were instrumental in
telling Mike that if he was going to sell the company to sell it to Western Costume.
Which was nice to have the respect of the costume designers. Seeing what we were doing,
and them making the recommendation to another company to if you’re going to sell it,
sell it to Western Costume. So Mike and I talked several times. I went back to Buffalo,
New York, or to Jamestown, New York where Mike’s company was. I brought Nancy
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McArdle with me because I’m not going to make the ultimate decision. This was
definitely going to be the biggest collection that we ever bought. And the question was to
buy the clothes was one thing. Where was I going to put them? So, we, I stressed out a lot
trying to figure out buying the clothes. I had to buy them because I had to keep them
away from my competitors. That was the main -- my main focus was, it would be great to
have these clothes, we already have a lot of the same, but I don’t want these clothes to get
into the hands of my competitors, that didn’t make sense. So even if I was going to lay
out this money, and take these clothes and put them in a building and never see them
again, it would be better than letting my competitors get hold of these clothes. So Mike
and I made a deal. And Nancy and I went back to Jamestown again and set up a whole
schedule of how we were going to move everything out to California. And we decided
that we were going to put it in big trucks, and put the trucks on the rail and have them
come out on freight trains, on the rail cars. And the next task was getting them out here,
what am I going to do with them. So the same time that Nancy was back in Jamestown, I
was busy out here. We had found a building that was 15,000 square feet and like
everything else, starting from scratch I get my rack architect in there. We set up the racks,
we set up the lighting, which costs a lot of money. I took a year lease on the building. I
knew that in one year -- I didn’t want to rent a building for three years -- I knew that i
needed to get these clothes into my building. Everybody else liked the building that I
rented and wanted me to keep it there. But even, we were four miles apart, the customers
complained...
CT: That’s far in LA!
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EM: They had to drive all that way to the other building, four miles. And it made
more sense, if I was going to have a couple of people over there I might as well have
them at the main building doing the work. So, anyway. I saw a sign it took a year to lease
[phone rings] with the building racked out we started bringing these trucks in. One truck
at a time, one truck a week. That’s how we mapped it out. So we’d get one truck a week,
Nancy loaded up one truck a week. Took a week to get out here, so we were kind of on a
three week schedule from when the clothes got loaded up in Jamestown to the time they
got unloaded and it was extremely organized. By the time we hung everything up it was
almost in the place where we wanted it to begin with because Nancy knew what she was
packing up. I knew what we were receiving. And we worked great together. We did it
again kind of like a spreadsheet. We knew what was going to go where from what box -CT: So, was this going into the other building?
EM: This was going into the Fulton Street building.
CT: Mh hm.
EM: So I had a year to figure out what I was going to do, but prior to this whole
move and the purchase and everything. I got myself so worked up over the purchase
because it was a lot of money. Where am I going to put it? How am I going to clean out
my building? I got hives -- not hives, I got shingles. From, just the stress of all of this.
Which was pretty uncomfortable. But in the long run it really worked out. Then what we
had to do, we had a year. So every day I’d walk around our building. The main building.
To try to figure out where am I going to put this stuff. And something had to give. So we
started going through our inventory and basically retiring a lot of clothes that were either
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too chewed up, things that never rented, things that didn’t make sense to have. And little
by little, each rack, if we found six inches from one rack we’d scoot it down and we’d
move the next rack over and before you knew it at the end of fifty feet you had 12 feet
that you just saved. So little by little going though the building and moving clothes out,
we started to put them in containers and figure out what are we going to do with these
now that we have all the stuff. So we said, well let’s have a sale. So we started to set up
our Spring Cleaning Sale which we’ve been doing now every year for about four years.
So every May we’re open to the public. We have this huge, huge sale in our parking lot.
We advertise a little bit, we get on the radio and people come from all corners of Los
Angeles to try and get a piece of movie memorabilia. Or, one year we had some ladies
blouses that were torn up, probably from the late 1800’s and I saw a lady and I said what
are you going to do with that blouse it’s all torn up? She says I make pillows for doll
houses! It was perfect. So you know, there’re a market for everything. And it’s
interesting that we’re able to really capitalize on the stuff that we needed to get rid of that
really we could have put it in a dumpster. But, one person’s something, what is it?
CT: One person’s trash is another’s treasure?
EM: Treasure. Exactally [laughter]. So, [pause] that being said, we started to make
a lot of room here. And then, it still wasn’t enough room. And we had these areas that -where one department had too much room, so I cut down half their room. Said ok well
we’re going to move you out, we’re going to put stock in here. And the big move was
that we moved our shipping department from kind of like the middle of the building,
which was not the right place to begin with, it should have been next to a door, all the
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way to the back door, which made sense. And it created this enormous space where we
had our shipping department and today that’s what houses the women’s Dykeman
collection. And still we were overloaded with women’s clothes that we still needed to
move more stuff out so we kinda set it up like a T. The main section is the top of the T
and the bottom part was an aisle we took over from regular stock. The Dykeman
women’s clothes are like a T and we kinda did the same thing in the men’s area, we took
a whole wall and we racked this wall four tiers high for men’s suits and shirts and pants
and then we did a T down for sports clothes. So, we couldn’t keep it all together as one
unit, but what we did is we -- and it was real important from the costume designers to me
-- it was real important that this stuff didn’t become part of the collection, they didn’t
want these clothes miked in with Helen Larson and Dorothy Weaver. They wanted this
stuff to be more accessible, and they wanted it priced the same as our general stock.
CT: So was the Dykeman not quite at the level as the Helen Larson and ...
EM: No, it totally was.
CT: Oh it was?
EM: It totally was, but I made the commitment to the designers that if I got this
stuff that I would keep it in normal stock and keep the stock prices on it. And what we
did was label it with hot pink tags so my employees know that when these clothes come
back from rental they staple a hot pink tag on it and it gets put in the Dykeman Young
collection. But where a suit might rent from the collection for $185 for a two piece suit,
we still rent the Dykeman Young stuff for $150. So I’ve kept it affordable for my
customers. The Collection is The Collection, Dykeman Young is Dykeman Young, and
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our regular stock is regular stock. But little by little the regular stock is turning into as
good of clothes as the Dykeman Young so it just makes sense that stuff is in the general
stock.
CT: So it sounds like when these collections went for sale, or you found out about
about it you were really quick on top of it to get there. Did you feel like there was a lot of
competition from your competitors to get this stuff?
EM: There was some, I knew, without mentioning names, I know that if I didn’t
buy the Dorthy Weaver collection, I knew that there was another costume company that
was going to show up there in about a day and they absolutely would have bought it. I
don’t know if Helen Larson, if Jane, Helen’s daughter ever approached any other
company other than us. I know that Patty Norris did not, I think we were the only choice
that she had when she wanted us to have the clothes. And as far as Dykeman goes one of
my major competitors definitely wanted it. But, I think that Mike was influenced a lot by
mutual costume designers and he wanted to make sure that this stuff went to the right
place. So, with Mike knowing that he wanted to sell it to us, we really wanted it. There
was only one other collection that came up after the fact. A company called [pause]
Repeat Performance. And Repeat Performance was an A quality costume company here
in Los Angles that went up for sale in probably 2010 and they asked me to come out and
look at it, again knowing that I was buying collections they included me in the survey and
to see if I was interested. So I took Nancy McArdle over there with me to buy it. And
buying the collection you have to look at the volume of clothes that you’re going to get
because if there is a big volume obviously when you think of per piece it drops the price
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down per piece. That’s one way to look at it. When Nancy and I went over to look at the
Repeat Performance we determined that every thing that we saw that was for sale could
fit into one truck that we loaded up from Mike Dykeman - the Dykeman Young
collection. And the money that they wanted was just astronomical and it didn’t make
sense to spend that kind of money for a small inventory. So as much as I didn’t want to
pass on it, I had to pass on it because it wasn’t a good deal. And one of my competitors
bought it. But, it didn’t bother me because I know that they had to pay too much money
for it. And there wasn’t enough clothes. There wasn’t enough clothes of any one period to
make a difference in what I already had. Where the Dykeman Young collection, I still
think to this day, I only bought it for half what I bought it for. And what I mean by that is,
the price I paid for it, I bought it for half the money I paid and the other half the money I
paid kept it away from my competitors which I think -- I wasn’t brought up in a business
world but I don’t, but it’s kind of like Gimbels and Macys. I don’t need my competitors
to get a hold of something that I really want. And I paid more money for it, but you know
what, I have it and my competitors don’t.
CT: So you’re talking about the spring cleaning sale and getting rid of some of the
excess collection, but, have you heard of any stories about real gems being lost back in
the day from Western?
EM: Oh yeah. I mean there’s stories that you know, up until the -- probably the
early 80s, the word memorabilia wasn't invented really when it came to costumes. Other
than Debbie Reynolds buying everything that she could at the MGM auction, and that
was in 1970 because I worked at MGM studios when they were liquidating everything.
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And I think that was like 1969-1970. So all that stuff started to become memorabilia. So
when I said 1980, I mean 1970. Before that, people didn't care. Western Costume rented
out dresses Vivian Lee wore in Gone with the Wind for Halloween. People didn’t pay
attention to a star piece like they do today. Marilyn Monroe’s stuff went out for rental.
And through the years we always heard that people were pilfering clothes out of Western
Costume. Whether it was a dress, and they were just giving us some old dress. The
people that ran shipping, they really didn't care, it wasn’t their clothes to begin with, so a
dress for a dress, no problem. A suit for a suit, no problem. They just wanted to make
sure that they checked off inventory but what was happening was we were losing clothes
like Clark Gable or Glen Ford, Rudolph Valentino and they were replacing it with junk.
So, when we took over the company in 1989, even in the late 80s, up to maybe 19871988, we only had a Star Collection of maybe 100 pieces. Today we have a Star
Collection of 5000 pieces. So, when my employees find things in inventory that say Basil
Rathbone or Rudolph Valentino or Bob Hope they’ll bring it up to us and we’ll put it up
in the Star Collection.
CT: When did the Star Collection start?
EM: The Star Collection really started, I’ll call it 1989 because I think that when we
took over the company in March of 1989 the new owners kinda set forth that lets start
finding some of these star pieces. It wasn’t like we had people go through -- start going
through inventory. But anyone that was working there at the time and knew of a star
piece, we took it and put it up in the star collection on the 6th floor, we locked it up. And
by the time that we came over here to the new building there were a lot of pieces found
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because we started going through everything. And as we went though, as we would go
through aisles of pirate coats we would find a coat worn for Captain Blood, Errol Flynn,
we started accumulating a lot of clothes. Like I said, today there are 5000 pieces in there.
Which, is a major asset to the company.
CT: I read something that Sidney Sheldon said in 1989, in a news article, in the LA
Times actually, he said, “we’re going to make Western Costume a tourist attraction and a
museum.” What do you think happened there?
EM: You know, it’s always been, even today, Sidney Sheldon is no longer owner of
the company, but Bill Haber he still would like to see some type of museum at some
point. They, there is a museum in Hollywood, the Hollywood History Museum which
I’ve been through several times, I know the owner. It doesn’t seem like it makes a lot of
money, even though they have really famous clothes. I would like to see when we start
getting into more social media, rebuilding my website, I would like to have a virtual
museum online. I think that that way more people will see it, will figure out if someone’s
going to pay 99 cents, why don’t we make an app for it right? We’ll make it so they can
see it right on their iPhones, I just thought of that. Umm... but I think that’s the way
would be able to show what we have. To set up a building where you have overhead and
everything else, it doesn’t make sense. What makes sense it to be able to see it over the
internet.
CT: And do you ever loan pieces out from the Star Collection for museum special
exhibits or something like that?
EM: Once in a great while. But anytime people want to come into Western
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Costume and film or something, they’re doing a story about dressing Hollywood or
anything like that. We always take them up there. It’s an exciting place for the public to
see. The name Western Costume has been around for ever. But, it’s a look behind the
scenes really, which is why I’d like to do this virtual museum at some point.
CT: Yeah. In 1988, I believe that there were about 175 employees at Western and
in 1998 there were about 75. Does that sound about right?
EM: No. In 1979.
CT: In 1989.
EM: 1989. Yeah, that’s about right, maybe even a bit more maybe 80 or 90. Today
we have 60.
CT: What happened?
EM: Well, it was a big change in watching how designers work. In 1979 a designer
would get a movie, let’s say they’re doing 1940s. They’d call up Western Costume and
say, “I’m doing 1940s, I need 500 men’s costumes and 500 women’s costumes.” Well the
Western Costume busy beavers would get together and they would pull 500 men’s
costume 500 women’s costume line it up the designer would come in and they’d go: “yes,
yes, yes, yes, no, yes, yes, no, yes, yes, yes, yes, no.” And they’d eliminate a few pieces.
Today, the costume designer wants to touch everything. So, where I had staff to be the
costumers and actually pull the clothes, today we are Pavilions and Safeway, we are the
check out people. Because now, I’m real proud that we’ve barcoded our clothes, it’s easy
for the customer to come in and pull everything they want and they bring their team into
pull. The costume supervisor will set up a team of people and they’ll set up a team of
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people to pull those 500 men’s and 500 women's costumes on their own. What they do is
they beef up their own staff on the production and eliminate me, or Western Costume,
pulling the clothes for them. And, when you think about it, they are the ones using the
clothes, let them. Some of them have a certain color pallet that they want to do, they want
to chose certain pieces. So that’s fine with us. And over the years what’s happened is, I
haven’t laid off all these people. People retired, people moved, people passed away. So
instead of replacing one for one as people retired and such, we just didn’t need to replace
them because what we did was we’ve kept a man power to restock our clothes and to
build them out for the most part. In the -- with the exception of military, military is very
specific and I’ve got Kurt Cox here who is really military aficionado, and a costume
company needs that person because you can’t just pull a military costume, put a bunch of
ribbons on the jacket and say here’s your costume, you have to know what each of those
ribbons are, and Kurt knows, and has learned what all that stuff is. As far as the regular
stock we definitely train the people that are working here how to research something and
go find something because we still do probably 30-40 orders a day where we have to pull
those clothes. So we still have a staff of people who are knowledgeable in costume, and if
they’re not knowledgeable in a certain period they are trained how to research something
so then they can find them. The clothes are stocked a certain way, chronologically in the
men’s department and the women’s so that if you’re doing 1760 all those clothes are
going to be together and you’ll be able to find what you’re looking for. We have people
that are good at pulling costumes and that’s what they do all day long.
CT: It sounds like maybe the staff specialized and informed rather than having a lot
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of people on the floor pulling stuff?
EM: It was. And early on in the 1979 remember, Western Costume was owned by 4
studios so I’m not sure how the management worked on that, how they did as far as
managing their staff. There was a lot of excess people here. Even when I was a costumer
and came in to pull clothes, there were way too many people working here. And at the
time, I didn’t know what everybody’s jobs were or how it all worked. But, then when I
came in here. I could see where the fat was. I could see why there were so many people
here and it was easy for me when somebody retired not to replace them because there
wasn’t enough work for everybody to do with to begin with. So now having a couple of
people gone gives more work to people who could do the work. And eventually people
would leave here to go work on movies and stuff like that. So it just made sense to start
lowering the staff. And a lot of the staff happens in the workrooms. So if your workrooms
aren’t busy you can’t keep 9 people waiting for somebody to walk in the door and say
can you make a dress for me. So that would be one place I would cut. So I kept a head
tailor and a first hand on the seamstress side and the men’s side and if we were busy
making suits or doing alterations we would hire from the unions. We would bring more
people in. So even today that staff’s up and down. We usually go from 55 to 70
employees depending on how busy we are in the shops.
CT: Oh ok. What percentage of your business is doing costumes for films and TV
and how much is private rentals?
EM: It’s probably 95% movies and television.
CT: And has it always been that way?
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EM: Yeah. A lot. They do some theater business. But the entertainment business
takes up at least 95% maybe more.
CT: Did it used to be more theater business?
EM: Um, I think so. But now it seems that our business -- I mean I heard today, or I
heard yesterday, that we have 14 theater projects going on. So, that is picking up which is
really good.
CT: Um. How many costumes are made for stars now and how many are bought
from stores?
EM: Ppincipal actresses they still probably try to make at least half of what they’re
wearing. Same with the men. The costume designer is a designer. They want to make
things. THey don’t want to shop things. But if you’re doing a period movie like Mark
Bridges just did for The Artist, he probably made 90% of his principal clothes because
that’s where the money is. And in the background, he rented clothes for the background.
CT: And has that changed over the years?
EM: Not too much. In the past -- early on, they used to make a lot more stuff. But
now, with budgets being really tight, they could only afford to make things through
number 1 and number 2.
CT: And does that affect Western’s business?
EM: It affects our shops and generally now the costume designer has the option to
not only go to a costume house but there are several companies that are set up just to do
manufacturing. That’s all they do. They don’t have costume companies, but they’re set up
as outside work rooms. So, they can, they usually can work on making clothes cheaper
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than what we can and there are several options for them to go to.
CT: Um. Have you noticed at all, in the time that you’ve been here that designers
are more or less interested in historical accuracy for their costumes, or is it based on
designers...
EM: No, they’re more. More so. They’re totally into historical accuracy. In the 50s,
designers would make dresses from the 1800s and put zippers in the back. Today,
designers won’t even look at those clothes. And if they’re going to make something it’s
going to be correct to the period.
CT: And do you think that affects your business at all?
EM: Not really, because we’re also on the same wavelength as that. We want to
make sure that anything that we make or buy for our stock is going to be historical
accurate.
CT: And you guys have kind of always been known as the place to go to period
clothing?
EM: We have competitors. But I think that on everybody’s mind when they read
the script and they see that they have to do 100, 200, 500 background that Western
Costume comes into their head on every film. Whether they use us is another story. Some
costume designers will come in and hand pick from us, they’ll go to my competitors and
do the same thing and they’ll get the best of both worlds. Some companies come in and
they don’t have the money to make deals with everybody so they'll come in and want to
make a deal with me and they’ll do 90% or 95% with us and that’s how they’re able to
make a better deal with me if I know that we’re doing a bulk of their show.
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CT: Ok.
[end of interview]
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APPENDIX G
TRANSCRIPT – BOBI GARLAND
(compiled February 26, 2012)
Interviewee: BOBI GARLAND
Interviewers: Claire Tynan
Interview Date: February 8, 2012
Location: Western Costume Company
Length: 37:49
START OF INTERVIEW
Claire Tynan: Today is February 8, 2012 and we are at Western Costume
Company interviewing Bobi Garland and this is Claire Tynan. So Bobi, where did you
grow up?
Bobi Garland: In a small town in Iowa. It was a town of 500 people and my dad –
it’s a farm town – and my dad was a grain dealer so he was the business of the town.
CT: And what were your hobbies when you were a child?
BG: Well, I had a big family, I have 6 brothers. So one of my hobbies was
obviously sports. It was playing catch with my brothers I was really active in sports and
then of course I did everything that grandmothers at that time taught their granddaughters
to do. So I did a lot of knitting and embroidery, my mother made a lot of my clothes she
was excited to have a daughter. So she made the clothes and I would say, I directed what
I wanted. I wasn’t really a seamstress as she was.
CT: And would she let you direct what you wanted?
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BG: She was pretty good about it. I mean not on length. But.. then I was an avid
reader. I really read a lot. And of course like every kid fell in love with the movies really
young and I think that everyone my age we watched The Wizard of Oz every Easter, so
that was a big event. And I loved all the costumes drama. It was a big family thing to sit
around and Friday nights we had ice cream and Saturday we had sodas. And it was movie
night.
CT: And did you have any idea what you wanted to be when you grew up when
you were a kid?
BG: I just knew I wanted to be in a city. I didn’t know anything about what I
wanted to be when I grew up. But I knew I didn’t want to be in a small town any longer.
Now I would love to be in a small town [laughter] now that I’m in a city trying to figure
out how to get out.
CT: So, you left Iowa and can you talk about what you did next?
BG: I have been really lucky in that I’ve been able to do a lot of things. But when
I first left Iowa the first thing is I went to the University of Iowa which has a great writers
program and they had a small film program at the time with a wonderful professor there
named Dudley Andrews. So I was really lucky there to be in the writing program and the
film program. So I had access to a lot of things that you don’t usually have access to in
film school. There was cameras for everyone you didn’t have to sign up and wait forever
to use a camera. And then I went to the University of Massachusetts. And then it begins
to sound like quite a patchwork quilt. It was a different time so I, you know, we would
think that we would like to go to Key West when we were in Boston so we would
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literally, my girlfriend and I, would hitchhike down to Key West. So it’s hard to describe
what that was like. It’s inconceivable if somebody told me that they decided they would
hitchhike to Key West [laughter]. And when we would run out of money we would
waitress. So I did that. I liked in Washington D.C.. I lived in -- outside of New Haven,
Connecticut. I lived a lot of places. Manhattan, of course, Boston. We lived a lot of
places and did – everyplace did something different. But most of the things that I did had
something to do with story. It was either involved in writing, or usually centered around
writing or story. And then it would be, I would do things to support that. Or art, I was
involved in the arts a lot in many different ways.
CT: And during that time did you have any thought about a future career or were
you just totally living in the moment and just enjoying what you were doing…
BG: I was absolutely living in the moment. I kept looking – as I say, it was a
different time. And at that time we would look at everybody who had real jobs and think
oh my god, I’m going to do that the rest of my life. And so, I just kept jumping around. I,
when I lived in New York, I got a call to come out to Los Angles about a job. So I
thought, well, I’ll go see what that’s about. And then when I got to LA I got a call to
come back to New York for a really good job, and as I was in the cab going to the plane,
then I got a call from a head of a studio to be his assistant, and I thought that would be a
good way to start my Hollywood career. So then I turned around and that was my first job
in Los Angeles was working for a head of a studio.
CT: So what first brought you to LA?
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BG: Film. Film. It was 82. I’d been married, so I was with my husband, and so
that was one of the reasons that I had moved to some of the places that I had gone to. And
I lived in Vermont. We were in California at Stanford for a while. So I did that bit. And
then when that was all cleaned up, then I decided that I always had wanted to be in film.
And I had done things in film when I was in New York. But I’d also worked as a book
editor, I worked in education, book editor, I worked in art therapy. I was going to
graduate school in art therapy. So I tried, I came of age when you got to try everything
and I thought why not? But I loved film, so I finally decided that I’d come out here and
pursue that.
CT: And will you talk a little bit about your first job in the film business?
BG: Well. It was the – I think 1982 – 83 and the person I worked for at that time
they’d given him 100 million dollars to start, it was a big television company. And he
came from Columbia and they gave him 100 million dollars to start a million dollars to
start a movie company for that. It was Lorimar which had huge success in television.
They had all these big shows, like Dynasty and Dallas and whatever that show that says
goodnight Bob Joe, all those kids [pause] The Waltons, they had on television so they had
a lot of money. And, but they wanted to be in film. So they hired a man named Craig
Baumgarten who had a very spontaneous personality. And he was told about me because
I was so placid people thought it might work out to have somebody who wasn’t very, that
didn’t react to his spontaneity should we say. So it was a lot of fun. I came out, he had -I know it doesn’t sound like any money today, but at the time it was as lot of money. And
so he – our phone sheets were 4 – 5 pages every day. And everybody called, and actors
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came in and it was different than how it works now. But actors came in all the time and it
was really, it was exciting and I learned every phone number in Los Angeles. There are
still numbers that I can’t believe that I remember.
CT: So who were you calling?
BG: Well we primarily dealt with producers and directors. It was really fun. It
was like Sidney Lumet, A (). Really great people from that period of time called every
day. There was a writer named Joe Eszterhas that we were doing some projects with, and
Joe was a big, big personality. And because I was next in line to my boss I talked to all
those guys. And then Ridley Scott was in London and he’d be up all night so he would
just call. Well we worked until 9 o’clock at night. So he would call, he was working on
all these films I remember one was a film that failed for him, Legend, and he would call
and tell me what disaster I think Pinewood burned down at that time it was one disaster
after another at that time. So he would call and tell me that. Richard Marquand who did
one of the Star Wars movies was around all the time, we did a film with him. So I talked
with all those guys all the time on almost a daily basis. And all the lawyers. Of course
because we were making all the deals, so I dealt with all those lawyers and because
you’re in a job and you’re dealing with all those people they are always calling you to get
tickets for things. So I dealt with all the theater people in New York. People from LA
would be going out, so I’d be calling the theater producers getting theater tickets for so
and so, or Sidney Lament wanted to go see Bruce Springsteen so I would be calling those
people. So you ended up – you have a pretty great Rolodex when you leave a job like that.
But you’re tired. [laughter]
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CT: How long did you work there?
BG: A little over a year. And then I left to do another job which my boss then said
you’ll never work in this town again. So I went through a little bumpy period where we –
I would go to get a job, I was to work for Dawn Steel at Paramount, and I said to her that
Craig’s going to call you and tell you not to hire me. And she said no that’s not going to
happen. But sure it did. And she didn’t, because she had a stronger relationship with
Craig than with me. So I went through that period on a low level, but knowing that that is
real. That people do say you’re not going to get a job and they do prevent you. And one
of the people that participated in that later because a very close friend a man named
Daniel Melnick. He was the head of MGM and then he was a producer after, and a real
patron of the arts, and he would, he was a very good patron for me of the assemblage art
that I did. But when I reminded him of participating in preventing me from getting work
he said, oh my that’s not very nice is that? Well, funny, but not when you’re unemployed.
Eventually I went to work for a producer. And then I don’t know how to explain how to
people outside of the business how things just, opportunities just come along and you just
say yes I’ll do that. I do assemblage art so I made props for films. I, you know people and
they say can you do this? And if you’re willing you do it.
CT: And so did all those contacts from your first job help with that kind of stuff,
when you were starting out?
BG: I think more than the contacts from that first job what really helped was just
being willing. I never really pursued any job in my life. It just happened. And I happened
to be someplace where people were talking, and they’d say are you interested in this, and
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I would always say “yes, I would like to do that.” I’ve never – there are very few jobs in
Los Angeles that I haven’t at some point had a finger in of helping to do just cause that’s
what you do. I’ve even done some, a little bit of special effects make up which I know
nothing about, but it was happening and I happened to be by, so I did that.
CT: So you kind of did all sorts of things did you have another kind of big job
before you came to Western or was it all kind of things just pieced together?
BG: I had some pretty great jobs. One was I did development for a company that
was developing children’s films. And that was kind of exciting and fun because we were
working with new talent who -- Billy Bob Thorton -- there were a lot of people who at
that time, the project went on for a couple of years and never – it was so huge, it was
smart, but it was huge and it never really got off the ground. And then by the time it
really started to progress computers were coming in, video games were going to be the
thing for kids not children’s films. But a lot of the people who we developed scripts with
and worked with at the time have gone on to really nice careers. So it’s fun to look back
on all of that. And meeting those people really young and excited, to see how they’ve –
I’m sure they’d say the same thing about me, “oh my god, what happened to her?”
[laugther] So I did that. One of the things I’m most proud is I did props for a movie called
White Oleander which was really fun. And I started to do more props for projects and
then that gets into another – if you – doing collaborative work like that wasn’t suitable to
my personality. When I do a piece of assemblage art I like to begin it and finish it. And
when you do projects for film or television there is always someone who – it can be
anyone – that decides that they should add this or take this away and so you walk away
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and you come back and everything has changed and I didn’t have the personality. I’m
that way in some things but not about art, I think that the artist has the… in that frame of
mind. I just didn’t have the – I care about my art in a way that is different than
collaboration so that didn’t work for me. And the props that I did were always very
specialized. It wasn’t as a general it was more of a representation of art.
CT: Mh hm. And so when you were working in LA doing different things, had
you heard about Western?
BG: Always. Western was really famous. Is really famous. And you couldn’t
drive by Paramount and not see Western Costume on the side of the building and not be
curious about what was in there. And then everything was in there so of course you were
dying to get in there and see that. I was only in that building I think once. And then I,
when it moved out here I just couldn’t believe that this is Western Costume. It was pretty
shocking to think from that grand old building to a warehouse but that’s the reality. But
of course, you can’t be, to me in my mind, you couldn’t be in Los Angeles, in the movie
business, and not have heard of Western Costume.
CT: And so when did you first get the opportunity to come work here?
BG: I – one of the things that I’ve done consistently to make money is research. I
am, I always say that everyone has at least one talent, and mine is I can find anything.
And I was really good at treasure hunts as a kid. I was always picked first to be on teams
that had treasure hunts as part of their activities because I am lucky about that. So I
consistently would support myself doing research for everything. I can do medical
research and not even understand what I’m reading but find the trail necessary. So I did
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research for a lot of different people here. And I would do research for costume designers
and for period films. You know, I’m really always interested in story and research is a
story. So in one of the costume designers, Susie DeSanto I was doing some research for
her. And I would do commercials to pick up money. I think everybody in town has done
one commercial in their life. I would do commercials, because they were non-union and
so it was easy and you’d make a lot of money. And so I was – Susie said, “well you need
to get health insurance.” I was getting older. And I said, “well, yeah that would be a
really good idea.” And she said, “well you should get in a union.” She says, “well do you
feel like being a costumer?” And I go, “Well sure, that’s fine.” I wasn’t so in – well I can
address more to that, but it wasn’t – being a costumer was not interesting to me. Telling a
story with clothes is really interesting to me. But the idea, I’m not a big fashionista. I
don’t care. I care about designers and a story, like I’m really excited to go to the Gaultier
exposition. I care about costume as art and as story, but I have no interest in clothes. The
worst day of my life is shopping, is having to go shopping especially for myself. I don’t
like to try on clothes, I don’t like to look in the mirrors because I believe that the mirrors
are from a amusement parks that they have waves in them to make you look shorter and
fatter, so I’m not into clothes. I’m not into shopping. And if you can’t shop, it limits your
life as a costumer, because you need to be in those stores. It’s just not my thing. So, but I
did think that getting health insurance, I was probably around 47 years old. 46 or 47. I
thought, ok, that’s a good idea to get health insurance now I’m getting to the age, I’m
officially middle aged, I’m not a kid. So, she said – I said, “well how do I do that?” It
seemed so hard to get on a film that went union. And she said, “well I’m pretty good
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friends with Eddie Marks, why don’t I call him and see if he can put you on at Western to
get your hours.” So I came out and met Eddie. And went up to the library and just
couldn’t believe how great the library was. So, they brought me in at a ridiculously low
rate of pay, that I can’t, fortunately for me I could survive on it, but I can’t believe we do.
I believe that Jim Tyson addressed that better than anyone could. So I came in and
immediately just would find every minute to get up into the library. And I was really
lucky working here because they had a great person here named Donna Roberts at the
time. And Donna and I became really friendly and she made it fun. It was hot, it was
August. It’s really hot down there in August. And you’d be up on the ladder and get all
faint from the heat. It was pretty intense…
CT: So what were you doing at that time when you first came in?
BG: I worked on the floor. I was a costumer on the floor. So when you first come
you have to put things away. They like you to work on the desk and do write ups. I
purposely didn’t learn how to use the American Express, the credit card machine, which
is a joke because all you have to do is -- but I’d say, “oh I do this wrong every time.”
Cause I hated sitting at the desk. If I had a minute, I wanted to be up in the library. And I
made a really great research book for the costumers to use to help them with their
periods. And you work with, you do a lot of privates when you work down there. Private
people who come in to rent clothes. That was really boring. They’re doing a wedding and
they want to be in the 20s, they want to look like The Great Gatsby. So we’d do that
which was sorta fun, but I really liked, there was a designer named Gloria Gresham and
she was doing a Bruce Willis movie and she asked me if I could pull the slips for the
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movie, and for the underwear for the film and then we started talking about the character
and I was like, oh I can do that. I can pull character slips, but I can’t just pull some slips.
So that, I met Julie. I met a lot of the designers walking through during that time. But, I
was always in the library.
CT: SO what year was that that you first came to Western?
BG: I think it’s 13 years ago. So is that 2000? It was like 1999. It was like 1999. I
was here – I was going to leave to do a film. And they bought the Dorothy Weaver
collection from New York and that came in. And it was all these amazingly beautiful
clothes. It was the most exciting thing to unpack those boxes and see what she, what one
person had collected. So, I was ready to leave to do the film but then I thought I would
like to see this, I would like to unpack these boxes, so I decided to stay and see what a
real costume collection and was. And that was worth it. That was a fortuitous decision on
my part. But again it wasn’t because they were beautiful objects, it was because I felt that
all those pieces of clothing had stories to tell.
CT: And who was the research librarian?
BG: Sally Nelson Hart. And she had been here for 18 years when I came. And the
library in this building isn’t the way you see it now. It was really dark and damp and
Sally was close to retiring which I didn’t know. I had never -- I talked to her all the time.
But I didn’t know that she was thinking of retiring. So I left finally to do a film and Eddie
called me and said -- I left, I think I was gone for about a year, and one day I was doing
props for a project, for a television project, and Eddie called and said, “Sally’s retiring.
Do you think you could come in and run the library for us?” And I said, “well I’ll come
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in for 3 months and we can change things around and then you should find somebody
who wants to be there a long time which I don’t think I want to do.” So I came in and we
put in windows and we started to change the way it was organized. We started to change
it to reflect… Sally was a librarian, and it was organized the way a library was organized.
And because this isn’t used by the public, this is a specific clientele that thinks a specific
way, so I started to reorganize it to reflect what the costume designers would do. So that
instead of having to ask the librarian where is this, where is that. That they could on their
own go in and work according to decades, so everything was designed to for them. So
that – as a researcher I know that you find what you need while you’re looking for what
you want. And I wanted for them to have that pleasure. So we started reorganizing the
library and I’m still here. We have plans for the continued reorganization of the library,
so it’s twelve years later I’m still reorganizing the library and trying to make it so they
can find whatever they need.
CT: When Sally was here, I mean was the library used a lot. Was it used as much
as it is now?
BG: I think… I don’t know how to answer that.
[laughter]
BG: No. I think that Sally had reached her burnout stage. I think it was just used
less and less. I don’t think she was vital. She was getting close to retirement. Not
meaning to be disrespectful to her, I’m uncomfortable speaking that way because I don’t
want her to… But when I first came in no one came in.
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CT: Right. And do you think that your background and your experience you know
working on shows and things like that helped?
BG: Absolutely
CT: To make it…
BG: I think that no one should be in any job without having to do other jobs that
relate to it. I think that what served me --- has served me the best in this job was my first
job working for a studio head because then I dealt with producers everyday, I dealt with
directors everyday, I dealt with budgets everyday. So I really understood the urgency of
film. And I really understand the personalities that the designers have to contend with.
Not just the personalities of their crew and that issue. Which I also was a part of, I also
was a crew member, so I know what that family is. I know the forces on the outside of
their immediate world and what pressure they put on them. And I had, you know, I dealt
with Ridley Scott so when I’m working with a designer who is doing a movie with Ridley
I can go to her and say, “you know what, I think, I don’t want to step on any toes, but my
past experience with him he might be interested in this.” And I can show her images that
I had a feeling from 1992 that he would relate to, and he did. So I think that, they always
say that your past is really your present, and in this case it truly is. Having – I can hear
people start to talk about a director, and I immediately know who that director is. Even if
it’s some young 28 year old that I’ve never crossed paths with. They all – directors sort of
go in categories; writer director, actor directors, you have a feeling for who they are. So, I
can help the designers prepare their research for that audience.
CT: How important do you think customer service is to your job?
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BG: It is the job. It’s one hundred percent the job. That’s not to discredit myself
or my love for research, or the kind of research that I’m able to help them to put together.
But, it’s really about them. It’s not about, I’ll read a script and I’ll have a vision of how
I’d like to do that project, but I can’t think of a single instance where I’ve pulled research
for what I want. I pretty much try to suit it to what I know of the designer, what I know of
the actor, what I know of the director, what I know of the story. I try to keep it out of my
own personal preferences and make it 100% the customer. I think that I’ve said to people
that I’ve dealt with in business more than once, “look I work in a business and we’re
customer service oriented, why aren’t you?” I will credit Eddie 100% that he’s really
made this to make these people happy. If there is a problem and the designer’s not happy
with something, and you hear of it, the first thing you do is go tell Eddie so that it can be
rectified and they can be happy. We don’t want them to be unhappy – they have enough
to worry about that Western Costume shouldn’t be a source of distraction for them. So I
think it’s all customer service.
CT: Do you want to stop there for today?
BG: No let’s go 10 more minutes if you can. Do you need to start?
CT: Umm. So, when you came back to work in the library. What year was that?
BG: 9/11 had happened.
CT: mh hm.
BG: So, it was really like 2000 – 2001. I had gotten married in 2000, so it was
right around the time I was getting married, I came back. I can tell you it was after 9/11
because the first projects I worked on were uniform, research uniform projects and after
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9/11 things changed dramatically because homeland security came in. So all of a sudden
nobody wanted to talk about their uniforms. And I also was my first projects questions
was about New York City police and I spoke to a police man and they said, “oh you need
to speak to this guy.” And I spoke to him and he was at the site. And so he’s talking to
me, and I kept hearing all this noise in the background and he said, “I have to go back to
work I’m down at the site.” Which at that time everyone knew what the site was. And I
burst into tears, and I was like “oh my god I’m so sorry that I’m talking about something
so irrelevant, like where do your Sargent stripes go.” And that was probably my first day
of work as a researcher, maybe the second. And that continues, I mean, do you want to
talk about – is that changing the subject too much? That’s the most interesting part of the
job is that events are always contemporary to you in research so there is all this stuff
going on that is continuing in your face. Whether it’s when we were doing flags of our
fathers that we had all these amazing research images that we put together and then when
I went to see the film, Clint Eastwood took those images and they became film. And so
all of a sudden it was, it was real when you’re looking at the images and you get really
chocked up thinking of those soldiers, and then when you see it on film and it comes
alive at another level you – it’s painful. And same, I think that people forget about what’s
going on in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan. Well I have just been working on a film about
Pakistan so it’s really real to me. And you talk to people, you talk to returning soldiers,
you talk to police. When we did “World Trade Center” I spoke to all those guys. I spoke
to the guys from Wisconsin. I speak to wives to find out what you were wearing. It
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always is not something in the background it’s something that is happening to your now.
That’s the good news about the job.
CT: And is that a large part of your job, kind of calling people and talking to
people and doing that kind of research?
BG: It’s my favorite part of it.
CT: Yeah.
BG: It jus depends on the project. If it’s a project where people are alive that
participated you’ll be sure I’m going to call them, if it’s proper, I’m not going to make it
out of the blue. But if it’s proper I make those calls and I love that part. I love it. And I
love it – it’s funny to – usually I talk to them about their involvement at the time in a very
general way and they talk about what they wear and men you would never think in a
million years would remember the ties that they wore it would be like a really fun project
for Steven Spielberg that didn’t get made on the Chicago Seven trial. And I spoke to the
district attorney for that trial. And, it was when President Obama was running for office
and it was an amazing conversation from somebody in politics in Chicago who had been
through all of that. Hearing him talk about the trial, and Obama. It was a really exciting
moment for me. And then I say to him, “so when you went to trial I assume you wore a
white shirt.” He says, “of course, every day, starched white shirt and a countess mara tie.”
Like you wouldn’t expect a guy like that to remember that detail. It’s fun when they do,
and it’s fun when they want to share that with you. And it’s fun when they talk about –
when we did Nixon it was hilarious to call the guys around Nixon because a lot of them
were still alive, a few of them had died, and hear their what they had to say about Nixon’s
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grey suits. Or, people make, men make really funny comments about clothes that you
don’t expect. Then you have things like we were doing a Tony Scott film in New Orleans
when the hurricane happened, Déjà vu and I had worked with the police department there
really closely because it was about the police and then we had the hurricane came. And II
had to leave town, and when I came back, the public information office I had dealt with
had committed suicide. It’s a funny way of looking at life and using clothes as a means to
look at life.
CT: Can you talk a little bit about the process that the designer goes through and
kind of where you fit into that process?
BG: The, well, I like to say that I, the library is the honeymoon hotel. And I also
say that we work in a fantasy business but I really work in the fantasy. When a costume
designer gets the script and the job, which is the best day of the movie. They usually
come in, often they send me the script. Sometimes they just send me, you know the
scripts are becoming more and more confidential so they have to go in and sign lots of
papers and then they sit in a room with I don’t think they’re handcuffed, but they can’t
use their cell phones to take any pictures of the pages, and then they make a list. So
they’ll send me a list of, upstairs maid 1880 – 1895, downstairs maid, 3 ushers, waiters,
you know whatever the background people will be and then they have descriptions of
what the lead characters will be. So we’ll break it up into what we’re going to focus on
first which is usually the heroes, the lead characters. And then I’m more or less, we then
start breaking it up to who, what the rest of the population is going to be. But it’s really
fun because they are telling the story. Everybody that is involved is focused on the
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designers story, the narrative that he or she is developing for that character. You can see
it, Albert Wolsky he just has to have a driver in a car and he’s thinking about what kind
of a day that driver would have, you know Albert, there’s not a character on a screen that
Albert hasn’t built a wonderful back story for. And most of the designers do that. So it’s
really, it’s like seeing lingerie you’re getting a private view of something that not very
many people get to see. They’re looking at images and one image will open up to them
learning about how they’re going to take that character to the next level to become real.
It’s, it’s the process where they look at images and start to develop their character to the –
that they use those blocks to support their view of their character is thrilling. And then
they make either, well now we do power points or we’ll make big boards or notebooks
that they’ll take to the meeting to get everybody on the same page that this is what it’s
going to be, it’s a pretty great…. [cell phone ringing].
[end of interview]
TRANSCRIPT – BOBI GARLAND
(compiled March 1, 2012)
Interviewee: BOBI GARLAND
Interviewers: Claire Tynan
Interview Date: February 9, 2012
Location: Western Costume Company
Length: 36:47
START OF INTERVIEW
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Claire Tynan: Today is February 9th, 2012 and we are at Western Costume
Company and we are interviewing Bobi Garland and this is Claire Tynan. So, ok, so, part
of your job is working with the Star Collection. Can you talk a little bit about that and
what it is?
Bobi Garland: The Star Collection is Western’s archive of costumes that have
been worn by known actors. It’s always been an annex to the library and, for a long long
time, which I would say almost 90 years, Western didn’t really archive many of its
costumes. When the company was sold, they sold off some of their more famous “Gone
with the Wind” costumes and Charlie Chaplin but they still didn’t have an archive per se.
There’s a famous story that when Marilyn Monroe died someone went through and found
all of the Marilyn costumes and stole them. But they were hanging downstairs to be
rented. And everything that is in the Star Collection was rented. We didn’t make things
and then pull them upstairs and archive them. The business is rentals. So, there’s many
famous stories and coming into Western and seeing all the Munchkin clothes, or all the
clothes from Laurel and Hardy. And unfortunately a lot of those have – they were worn
out, they were stolen, they have disappeared with time. We have about now about 6,000
pieces and I would say probably half of those are really truly of value the rest we’re
trying to go through and make decisions about whether they are that valuable. They are
actors who aren’t that well known at all, maybe they were in just a few movies but their
names haven’t really stood the test of time to take up the space. We went to – I took
classes through Cal State Long Beach Continuing Education Program on learning to be a
Collection’s Manager and to start to care for these clothes, so in the past two years
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Western has really started to make the commitment to turn the archive into a proper
collection – or the collection into a proper archive I should say.
CT: And if you had any say in it, what would you do with the collection?
BG: Well, it’s an asset to the company, and it’s also a source of pride for the
designers that those clothes are there. It helps them to feel that what they do is lasting.
It’s very difficult to work so hard on a film, and then when you see the film, they’ve, the
focus of it is the face and you don’t get to see any of the co – what they’ve worked so
hard to do. And then they go on Ebay and there’s all the clothes on Ebay being sold. It’s a
pretty disappointing result. That’s why films like Hugo and this year’s Wallis’ Simpson’s
story that Madonna directed are so important because those directors give costumes their
due. Scorsese also, they, in those cases the costumes are being archived on the film, but
in most cases sadly they’re not.
CT: Do people know about the Star Collection?
BG: It wasn’t – the company didn’t really talk about it. They became, they came
under so much criticism when they had the auction, the Butterfield auction when the
company was brought out here. They’ve been very quiet about it. And they’ve slowly
been, as I’ve said it’s not really been an archive until I inherited it. Because of its location
it became a part of the library, it became a library and archive instead of a library. So, no
it’s not well known. It’s getting more – because of the centennial it’s getting a lot more
publicity and so the value of the collection will increase simply because of, I’m hoping
people will say “I have this, I have that,” and donate pieces back.
CT: Can you talk a little bit about the auction that you just referred to?
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BG: Well, people don’t remember, when Western Costume, Western Costume
was part of the studios. And it had gotten pretty run down, nobody wanted to take
responsibility for it. It was at Paramount, it wasn’t really Paramount’s, Paramount didn’t
care because they wanted the building. They purely wanted the building for the parking
lot. Which is also when we acquired the Dorothy Weaver collection, that was the
deciding factor, it was much more profitable to turn that building into a parking lot than a
costume rental house. So, Paramount wanted that parking lot. And the company was
pretty down on it’s luck when Mr. Haber bought it, he felt that he wanted, he felt that
Western Costume was an institution and wanted to preserve a Hollywood institution. So
when he moved it to this warehouse they didn’t have any money. They needed to sell
those clothes to pay for the move and to pay – and we were pretty, when we first came
out here, things were pretty dowdy. It wasn’t nearly as exciting as it is today.
CT: And so what was, I mean was anything really famous sold?
BG: Everything really famous was sold. Everything. I have the catalogues we
should -- you know lots of Gone With The Wind clothes, all the clothes from Desiree with
Marlon Brando. Sound of Music clothes, it was funny. Recently Debbie Reynolds had
two auctions of her things and I can’t even describe how many Marilyn Monroe items
were here, and we went through Debbie’s catalogue before they had the first sale, it was
done by Profiles in History and Eddie and I are marking oh well we’ll bring this dress
back, and lets repurchase this dress. Well all those things that we thought, oh how nice, I
think the least expensive of the ones we thought, oh we’ll just buy this, the least
expensive was $65,000 and of course the most expensive was the Marilyn Some Like it
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Hot dress which I believe went for what, $5.9 million. And then on top of that you have
your Profiles in History … so it’s almost $6.9, so we didn’t bring it back, we brought
back one little outfit that we paid $1,000 for because it was head to toe made by Western,
but it’s not a very important piece, it’s only important to us.
CT: So on the last twenty years, has it been that there’s more of an interest in
people buying that kind of thing. I mean have the prices for…
BG: Astronomical.
CT: Really?
BG: It’s become astronomical. It’s really funny how it works. When there is used
clothing stores all over town that buy from like TV shows or leftover from contemporary
clothes that’s everywhere in town there are about 6 quote thrift stores that are really just
movie recycling. And then, we, all the studios, everyone buys like when cowboys and
Aliens was made, Western made a lot of clothes for us, but they went to the studio, they
weren’t owned by us. And then we bought a lot of it back for stock for us, a lot of
Western stuff from that movie. And everybody, because you’re rebuilding your stock.
That’s how you rebuild your costume house stock. But, also famous people, I mean look,
if they blow their nose on a handkerchief, the handkerchief is worth money. And that
with Ebay and Antiques Roadshow, all those things have made the prices silly. It’s silly
business now. The Elizabeth Taylor collection, there was stuff in there that nobody in
their right mind should purchase. And they did. We laughed, a friend of mine is a jeweler,
and she had a necklace that she sells for, I can’t remember the price but we’ll say $500
and it was a Jackie, she had sold one to Jackie Onassis and that was in her auction, and I
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forget what it brought, but it was silly. And my girlfriend said that she wanted to call the
auction house and say, who was that, I’ll sell it to you for a sixteenth of the price. It
doesn’t make sense and I think that eventually that there is so much counterfeiting going
on, especially online. I probably get six calls a week asking me to authenticate pieces for
people. Which I never do, or never will do because it’s not our business, our business is
rentals.
CT: Western obviously has a huge stock of costumes and is the biggest, but has
there been much competition over the years from other costume houses?
CT: It’s very competitive. It’s very, very competitive. And there’s loyalties from
other costume houses, some people only use one costume house unless they have to.
Others come only to Western, they are loyal to Western first. But yes, there are several
costume houses in Los Angles that are competitive and then in Europe. People often say
Angels, but there are houses, there are other houses in Europe also. Angels is in London
as well as Cos Props which is a big, a pretty good house. They are much more famous for
period, same as Italy and of course the famous Tirelli’s in Italy. They are more famous
for period, like period period. Like Elizabethan. We’re doing something right now with
1895, and a lot of the women’s clothes are coming out of Europe. Conversely, Downton
Abbey was just here last week pulling clothes. So they had exhausted what they had in
London and Italy and they were here now trying to find new pieces. So it goes both ways.
Really we have a lot of Hugo Cabret which was shot in London. We have a lot of clothes
in that and then they also have a lot from London too. And a lot of our research.
CT: Do the other costume houses have research libraries like western does?
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BG: There is nothing like this research library. Nothing. Everybody has
something. But no one has quite a, quite what they’ve put together here. First of all, it’s
100 years old, it was invented with the costume house. It has thing, it has files that you’ll
not find anywhere. Even police departments when I speak to them about a period film,
will say, “oh my gosh, could you send us those images,” for their historians. And they
can’t believe the images we have from the 30s. It’s pretty, it’s a pretty exciting place if
you have the time to dig. You have to have time, it’s a commitment. Producers don’t feel
an interest in that commitment, they think that everything is online. So we’re going
through quite a little revolution, and I don’t know quite how it’s going to end out. But
when I first started here the budget for research was really realistic, it was realistic. Now
it’s not realistic at all, nor is the time. For Seabiscuit I think I had six weeks to research
that. Today if Seabiscuit came in, I would be luck to have a week. And then as the film
went on, they would just keep calling and say, “what about this, what about that,” so it
would be an ongoing project but small. The bulk of the work would be done in three days
to a week. And the designers who used to be able to spend 3 weeks up here working,
they’re up for a day or two and gone. I don’t see them again, I just start bringing it to
them.
CT: Can you talk a little bit about how you maintain your files and how you keep
them updated and how you add to them?
BG: I rarely add to the files anymore. I scan things in and keep it on the internet.
Because the files are really old. Paper is unreliable. It’s my fantasy that some magical
person is going to come in here with lots of money and scan all the files. But when there
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are pictures in the newspaper that I don’t see online then I’ll keep them. Especially, we
have a real active military and police department so those images, the sartorialist and all
those wonderful blogs, I have three pages I think of blogs that I can’t keep up with, but
nobody does a nice policemen from around the United States, so I spend a lot of time – I
have a commitment to that. I keep all the websites I like, and the blogs I like to go
through. But, I – everybody has their favorite and I happen to spend a lot of time on
Flicker and have a lot of luck, that’s probably my go to is Flicker. Ancestry. There’s so
many, I can’t even think to name any of them. There’s so many, but, for me just trying to
get character things I can usually work pretty well through flicker that will lead me to
other sites.
CT: Have you noticed designers or producers being more interested in historical
accuracy in terms of costumes, or less so?
BG: It’s really interesting what’s happened. We’ve gone through a dramatic
transition where they’ve been, the costume people, have become really commitment to
the time. It was that there were people, I know I’ve mentioned Albert Wolsky before but
Albert is just such a consummate professional and represents, as he said, the silver age of
Hollywood. But I feel he represents – he is the gold standard of Historical accuracy.
[background noise] and we’ve, in the 60s and the 80s, especially the 80s, I was just
watching some 80s films the other day and I couldn’t stop laughing, how they had no
interest in – or look at The Great Gatsby it has, it doesn’t look like – the Mia Farrow
Robert Redford one – that has nothing to do with the 20s. It’s so silly looking. And they
now are trying really hard to – you know we did so much research for Hugo Cabret and
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all these films. The western’s that we’ve been doing, Deadwood which is television. Mad
Men all of them, they’ve really worked hard on historical accuracy. And then the
particularly brilliant ones, the designers, take that history and then they do what they need
to do to fit the story. Like Janie Bryant for mad men she really, really worked hard on
being historically accurate to the 60s. And then she just exaggerates it so it’s everybody’s
memories in Technicolor. Those women are padded like crazy so that their behinds are
even more heard shaped than you remember. Not everyone looked like Marilyn Monroe,
or their derrieres. She really studied the under pinning’s and then took it to the next level
and the same with the men. It’s so precise the lines, and it wasn’t quite as nice as she
makes it. So she, she took what the story needed and exaggerates it so that it fits the
imagination. And it works there, it works beautifully. And, there are so many of them that
do that. They’ll take what’s real and just add a sheen to it so it looks like a movie star is
supposed to look. Movie stars don’t look like you, no offence [laughter] Claire. Actually,
they look just like you, Claire. But they don’t look like real people. Everybody says,
“make her real, make her real,” well guess what, when you make her real they look silly,
so you’ve always got to – they have such a, good costume designers have such a gift to
take that reality and make it a dream reality, it’s really something. It’s really gifted what
they do.
CT: What is it like to work at Western with all the different personalities who
come in here ?
BG: It’s hell. [laughter]
CT: Are there any conflicts?
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BG: There are conflicts constantly. There’s – and there’s -- it’s clash of the titans.
There’s a lot of egos to deal with. And there are a lot of egos we deal with in the library.
Sometimes we’ve had two Academy Award winners in there with other designers. And
who do you pay attention to first? And how do you get everybody’s needs met when they
need to be met? Filmmaking is an urgent business, it’s not like tomorrow, everybody
needs to get their work done right away. And everybody’s important and everybody’s
egos are bruised because they are getting bruised and their (). So you have to constantly
be able to have their horoscopes at their ready to show them that you care that you’re a
certain side and that their horoscope is a certain way. It’s really difficult. And then I’m
lucky I have a big family so I learned how to jostle that from pretty -- from birth. But
there are 55 to 58 people here at one time on staff, so that’s a lot of navigation. It’s a lot
of important people.
CT: What’s your favorite part about working here?
BG: Oh. That is depends – my favorite part is what I’m doing. Whatever I’m
doing is my favorite part. The looking at images and the way that we get to look at them
in this job which is always about character and story, would this person have killed his
brother. Would this person marry such a beautiful girl. Would this person, would the
person who wears these clothes do what they need to do in the film. Looking at images
like that is a privilege. It’s like being in a photography museum everyday. So that part’s
really great. Thinking about story is really great. Everyday I have to learn about a new
period. I have to learn, what was mourning like. What did it look like to mourn in 1895,
how did you dress? So I’m constantly learning about history, and then the people that
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come in are very entertaining. In order to do the work that they do at the level that
supports hiring a researcher, they have to be very good at their jobs, which generally
means that they’re very imaginative. And so it’s a lot of fun to try to guess what they are
thinking and help them get those – get that out of their mind and onto a page and find the
clues that will help them get that on the page. Although, I heard a story about a designer
the other day who was sending someone out shopping and they – for fabric - -and he
explained the fabric and they said, “ok. That’s the texture, but what color do you want?”
and he said, “it’s in my mind, I’ll know it when I see it.” [laughter] So it’s pretty
challenging, they are pretty creative but sometimes you have to reach very far to translate
what they’re saying.
CT: Who do you admire the most in the field?
BG: Well, I have to say Albert Wolsky because he’s worked with many, many
great people and doesn’t matter, he’ll do anything because he loves costume. He’s
certainly willing to die with his boots on. He loves the work. He’ll do anything that you
ask him to do, and do it in an exceptional way. I mean he did Jarhead which is a military
movie with very few civilian clothes in it. But he still, he still did it for a love of the
work. So Albert would probably be my number one. Of course there’s so many good
designers, and assistant designers. And supervisors that I get to work with. Like of course
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Jim Tyson. Like he’s the king of the supervisor world.
But then there’s also great supervisors to work with who care so much about what they
do. And there’s, I mean I can’t, it’s hard. Daniel Orlandi has been a wonderful designer
for me to work with because he’s so enthusiastic about the images. He just, every image
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is like a new discovery of what the people what his characters are going to be. Obviously
you learn from seeing what Colleen Atwood wants to look at, you learn Sandy Powell.
Arianne Phillips is a dream. She’s so generous. Marlene Stewart, I feel terrible I feel like
I should name all these… [laughter]
CT: They are all great.
BG: Names. But they are all really. Mary Zophres is really, I’ve done a lot of
work with Mary and it’s a tremendous, she’s so smart. And there is an assistant designer
– Deborah Hopper, who’s done 28 years of work with Clint Eastwood and watching her
satisfy a director that she’s had such a long relationship with is interesting. And there’s
Terry Anderson who is an Assistant Designer who’s dedication to his job is pretty –
that’s pretty impactful for me. He, he look, he’s maybe he’ll become a designer or maybe
he’ll stay an assistant designer but he’s pretty committed to whatever film he works on
will be that designer’s best film. So being around somebody that has that kind of
commitment to what they’re doing in such an egoless way… I mean it’s his ego because
he wants it to be his best work, but it’s not his name going on it, it’s another designer’s
name. So I get to be around lots of people like that. But if I had to chose one person who
I, my heart always leap when they come in the room it’s Albert.
CT: How have you seen the costume industry change over the years, and how do
you think it’s going to change more in the future.
BG: Well, we are in a tragic time because they don’t want to spend the money on
it. They are cutting the budgets for costumes so dramatically and they are working so
hard, the costumers and the designers are really, it’s become they are much more
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interested in what they think little boys are interested in, which are video games. The last
couple of years have been devoted for women being either Daisy Duke or a Ninja girl
from Japanese anime. And it used to be that I didn’t have what I called the strip shelf. But
now, every movie, I know what they’re going to ask for. So I just walk over to the strip
shelf and stack up the books because every movie has to have a girl who looks like
hooker whether she’s a scientist or a brain surgeon, it doesn’t matter, they – there’s some
sort of sad thing going on there. And there’s just not the money for costume that there
once was. I’ve used this example a million times, but it’s really, it really illustrates what’s
happened. A movie that’s a really famous movie like Indiana Jones and the Skull or
Crystal or whatever it was called. The credits go on forever in that film. In Los Angeles
they had over 50 costumers, and 2 assistants, and the designer. They also shot in New
Haven and they also shot in Hawaii and they added more costumers at those two
locations. When they did the credits there were 12 costumers were credited, and at least 2
of those were PA’s it might have even been 4 PA’s. So that’s Steven Spielberg, the
costume designer, or excuse me the director that everybody’s like the King of
Hollywood. That’s the choice he made, so I think that bodes very, that’s terrible for
costume design. There not on the one sheets very often, they have to fight for that. Very
often they’re not above the title credits when you see the film it comes later on, costume
design. So they are losing grown as far as respect goes. So as their product becomes a
bigger and bigger asset their actual respect within the industry is losing ground because
they are much more interested in toys than clothes and they don’t. When I talk about the
guys that do those really digital films and I say well how did you figure out this, how did
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you figure that out. And they just said, oh we looked in a book oh we looked here. But
they don’t even care what book they looked at, or what magazine was there. One guy told
me he walked out on the street and then walked back and did it. So I think that the
producers and the studios respect for the craft is depreciating. While the designers are
respecting it more, and trying to be more truthful, the money people are becoming more
careless.
CT: Do you have any favorite stories about working at Western.
BG: I do, and I’ve been thinking about this and of course I’m coming to a
complete blank at the moment. Do I get to have a [laughter] second chance to tell a funny
story? It’s a pretty hysterical place and we spend a lot of time laughing. It’s full of real
characters. There’s time that you’ll find people in corners or hiding behind racks just
filled with, and laughing so hard they can’t even walk because it’s so much comedy goes
on here. But of course, I can’t think of anything very funny although yesterday when I
needed to have a meeting with Eddie, cause we have so many things to deal with that I
went with him to get a haircut, sat in the salon while his hair was cut, which is a pretty
funny thing to do for somebody as busy as I am. But, we got our meeting accomplished.
So can I have a reprieve to come back with a funny story, because there are lots of them.
Or maybe we should do comic relief day.
CT: Yeah, everybody needs to come on and do their funny stories.
BG: Has everybody having a problem remembering one comic?
CT: And then they’ll come later and say, “I have a funny story”
BG: Yeah, I understand that.
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CT: Um. How do you think Western’s reputation has changed?
BG: I can tell you, it’s gone through ebbs and flows.
CT: Mh Hm.
BG: It’s a name that still is greatly respected, even when it was down on its luck,
it still had tremendous respect, because it’s so old. It’s lasted. But in the eleven years that
I’ve been here, it’s had a tremendous change happen. And when I came here, Colleen
Atwood barely came here. We did Aviator out of here and I worked a lot, Judy Allen and
Makovsky – I didn’t mention Judy or Ellen Mirojnick. I can’t believe all the people I
didn’t mention. Ellen, that’s a -- I can’t believe I didn’t mention Ellen. But anyways, the
A+ list of designers wasn’t really working out of here, Penny Rose, none of them. And
now we can’t find office space to satisfy everybody. I almost feel like we have to take the
building and turn it into one big office so that everybody can be happy, because there are
all these big tussles over who gets the biggest office, who gets this office, who takes out.
You said you’d be out in 6 weeks, it’s this constant jostling. And it’s made more
complicated because so few, such little amount of production is being done here. They’re
doing it – so they’re just here for a short time and then we just have to ship everything by
stock and Federal Express. The reputation is great.
CT: Yeah.
BG: It deserves to be great.
CT: What advice would you give to a young costumer?
BG: Go into the art department.
CT: [laughter] Where they have money?
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BG: Where they have money. I think that everyone who isn’t really capable on a
computer of sketching of doing everything that you possibly can do on a computer is at a
loss. I’ll tell you, about 5 years ago or probably longer but I’m embarrassed to say how
long ago. There’s a company that is affiliated with the film industry that teaches
computer classes to the industry and it’s subsisted by the film industry, not by our little
union but by the overall motion picture. And when I took a class from him he was
teaching a class of Photoshop for costume. And the minimum number of people that Eric
has to have to do a class is 4. He could only get 4 people out of all the costume designers
in all of 705 only 4 people signed up. When I would go to lunch, there would be people
from the props department, there would be people from every department taking classes
in everything that had to do with computer animation, everything. And I was with, I was
having lunch with the prop guy and I said “why are you taking that,” and he said
“because I don’t know what’s going to happen next.” And costume has particularly
hidden its head and I think they’ve done – I think it’s one of the reasons that they’re
losing grown it’s that they can’t compete. They are going to the art department to have
their work done. You can’t do that. There’s only a few people who can really work –
Michael Wilkinson, look I didn’t mention Michael. Michael is one of the few who is
really computer literate and it’s almost like they think it’s a badge to be computer
illiterate, and it’s not a badge, it a terrible embarrassing situation that’s happened to us.
And as the teacher of that school, the director of that school said to me. Costume thinks
that they’re waiting for the bomb to hit, the bomb, the computer bomb has already hit.
You’re in the winter. You’re in a napalm winter and you don’t even know it. He said,
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he’s called me several times the last few years, cant you get these people in here. Not, I
mean obviously he would like to make money but he feels as I do that costume is
harming itself by being computer illiterate. Some of them, it’s awful. It’s really awful.
And for me too, I’m not as good as I should be. I get distracted too…
CT: What are you most proud of?
BG: I’m proud of the atmosphere in the library. Contently the designers say it’s
the one place they can relax. It’s the one place they like to come to find things out. Or,
they, I feel that the library has a it was really important to me, that the library have the
feeling of safety. That it’s the one place that they can be that they aren’t threatened or
challenged, or talked about, which – there’s a lot of gossip that goes on in there, but it’s
not – I don’t feel like they feel like they’re threated there. Anybody can go up there.
Anybody’s welcome. So I think that’s been communicated.
CT: What does Western mean to you?
BG; Well. I wanted that there so that everybody could say that Western is my
family. So I’m saying it, Western Costume is my family. I’m also saying it’s my great big
dysfunctional family [laughter]. But everybody – when recently Bill Burchette retired and
every time Bill’s name came up the people who know him go, “oh Bill.” Or Donna
Roberts who I worked with when I first came here, every time someone says, “oh do you
ever hear from Donna>” The people who leave this nest are really truly missed. So I
think that it represents lasting. Not just that the company has lasted for 100 years, but the
memories of the people who are here have lasted.
CT: One last question. If you had one word to describe Western…
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BG: Family [laughter]
CT: Family. Ok thank you.
BG: Alright.
[End of Interview]
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APPENDIX H
TRANSCRIPT – HARRY ROTZ
(compiled April 15, 2012)
Interviewee: HARRY ROTZ
Interviewers: Claire Tynan
Interview Date: February 8, 2012
Location: Western Costume Company
Length: 42:36
START OF INTERVIEW
Claire Tynan: Today is February 8th, 2012 and we’re at Western Costume
Company and we are doing an interview with Harry Rotz and this is Claire Tynan
interviewing. So, Harry where did you grow up?
Harry Rotz: I grew up in Miami, Florida. I was born in Key West, Florida.
CT: Key West? Great. And as a child did you have any idea of what you wanted
to be when you grew up?
HR: I absolutely did. I saw a live play when I was about 14 years old – maybe 12
and I couldn’t wait to be in 9th grade to take a drama class. And that was it, I’ve been
doing it ever since.
CT: So you wanted to be an actor?
HR: I wanted to be an actor. I was in a lot of shows, for a long time and got
involved in costuming because in community theater you have to do everything. The
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same thing in college, my degree is in theater but we were made to study costuming, and
lighting, scenic properties, everything.
CT: And so, did you have any other hobbies when, you were a kid or were you
just all about the theater?
HR: I always made things. My mom was a big crafts person and I sort of inherited
that interest in making things, which was why it was a really good fit for me to, once I
got into costuming, to not just do flat patterning for garments, but more sculptural work
like hats and armor, which are more three dimensional.
CT: And so in high school you started acting in plays and you continued that
through college?
HR: I did, yeah.
CT: What was your favorite show that you were in?
HR: Well I did a lot of musicals when I was younger. I did How To Succeed in
Business, I was Bud Frump, I was a character actor. And I did Hero and A Funny Thing
Happened on the Way to the Forum but I think really one of my favorite memories there
is touring. When I was in college we toured children’s theater to the local Indian
reservations around South Florida, and the elementary schools, but our focus was in
under privileged places. And we would tour a five person cast of The Man of La Mancha
or The Wizard of Oz with just the bare minimum of sets and costumes. And I stage
managed, I did costumes, I acted in some of them. And that just is a great memory for
me.
CT: So you went to school – you went to college in Florida?
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HR: In Boca Raton.
CT: And what did you think that you would do when you graduated college?
HR: I thought I would – I really wanted to be an actor, but I also had an interest in
directing. And I -- with several of my friends went to New York, and we were getting
jobs acting, but I really needed a job. [laughter]. I needed money in New York City, and I
ended up getting a job in the costume shop at Julliard School. And that really was the
start of my professional costume career. Though I had done costuming in summer stock. I
think my first professional money paying job was as a wardrobe person in summer stock.
CT: And how long were you at Julliard for?
HR: I was at Julliard for 2 years.
CT: And then what did you do next?
HR: I [pause] came out to San Francisco to visit a friend of mine and I never left
California. [laughter]. I couldn’t imagine going back to Manhattan. It just didn’t make
any sense at all. And got a job at ACT in San Francisco. I did rep theater for years.
American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, and I worked at the Ashland
Shakespeare Festival for a while, and Santa Fe Opera in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the
Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. I made the rounds of the repertory theaters.
CT: And then when did you come to LA?
HR: I came to Los Angeles in 1981. To work at the Mark Taper Forum with the
summer theater -- they used to have a summer Shakespeare festival at the Taper, and
that’s what brought me here.
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CT: Um, where did you learn your skills? Do you think you learned them in
college or on the job, or was there anyone you can point to that was a mentor to you?
HR: Absolutely. The very first job I got out of college in costuming was at
Julliard School as I mentioned. My boss there was John David Ridge who ended up
owning a major costume house in Los Angeles. John David ran Halston’s fashion line for
seven or eight years. He’s somebody I’m still in contact with all these years later. He is
the one who really allowed me to be creative and placed me in the crafts and millinery
department at Julliard to apprentice with this master milliner who taught me millinery
skills. I had done costuming. I had made some things, but I never had anybody to show
me how. And that was the start of – that apprenticeship, was the start of my career really
as a hat maker and a milliner. My interest always was in theater, but this gave me a good
foot into period theater, period drama. And, and they had a lot of money. Julliard was
really affiliated with Lincoln Center. They had money. And so there was a staff, when we
had a big millinery show, we had 6 people in our department, that had never happened for
me. So definitely John David Ridge became a mentor, and has always been somebody
I’ve looked up to, I think he’s a phenomenal artist and an amazing mind, one of the
smartest people I know.
CT: So you came to LA, and you were working in theater here? And was the next
step your hat company?
HR: No, my next step was to get into the local 705 motion picture costumers. I
got my union hours at MGM, which at the time was MGM on a movie starring Luciano
Pavarotti. So it was kind of a perfect fit, they heard that I was in town and that I had done
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opera costumes and hats in San Francisco and Santa Fe so it was a good fit for me to be
working on that film particularly. And I stayed a couple of years at MGM. And then just
started freelancing. Warner Brothers, Paramount, NBC for quite a while.
CT: And were you working on shows?
HR: I was working on TV – oh yeah at the studios. All the studios. TV shows, a
lot of films. We did The Color Purple a lot of Warner Brothers when I was there. The
North and South TV series when I was there.
CT: And were you working as a costumer?
HR: No at that time I was already working on millinery full time.
CT: Ok, so they would hire someone just to do the hats for a show?
HR: Yes. Yeah. And then one show leads to another show. So I often was hired
for one particular project, but as they saw that I could get the job done, more shows came
in and they kept feeding me work and or hiring staff to fill in with me.
CT: Would you talk a little bit about what goes into millinery? What your process
is for creating?
HR: I think for the purposes for a film it starts with talking to the designer, the
costume designer, who has a very specific idea hopefully of what they want and what the
character should look like. I always think that the designer has the big picture, I’m just
working in a bubble, it’s my job to give them what they need for that scene, but that
process starts with the designers concept of what they need. And then oftentimes they
give me the materials as well, because the hat has to match the dress. It’s an accessory in
the end. So, I’m usually brought materials that work within the framework of the scene.
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That isn’t always true. A lot of times, particularly with hats, designers aren’t always used
to working on hats. They don’t always know what they want, or they don’t know exactly
what’s possible and they do rely on me for that kind of input. And I think at this stage in
my career, designers trust my input, knowing that I’ve worked a lot [laughter].
CT: How long does it take to create a hat? Obviously there’s extremes on both
sides, but…
HR: Well if you have a big show come in you can guestimate eight hours per hat.
If you have ten hats to make they will probably average about eight hours a hat. Varying
wildly depending on what it is. But that’s really the -- that’s the estimate.
CT: Ok so you were working kind of independently, and is that when you created
your…
HR: Oh, when I started my business, yes, I was in 705 freelancing, working at the
studios, and people started to ask me to do a lot of work at home that I really didn’t have
time to do if I was working full time during the day, I didn’t have time to do it at night.
But I ended up having a few friends of mine who needed work, who I would leave at my
house all day while I went off to Warner Brothers [laughter]. I left them at my house
working on this project. And I thought, this is you know -- it’s time now. And that’s
when I started my business called Harry Hatz, and had a business for ten years. Yeah. It
was sort of -- It’s a natural end of things because it was the early 90s, that business
started to falter. The economy tanked a little bit. Computers were coming in, everything
exploded in the computer world faster than anybody expected. And I would have had to
spend a lot of capital to get that back up to speed and I just didn’t want to have a small
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business anymore. So I just got back in 705 and started freelancing again. My first movie
back was Batman and Robin. And freelanced for about five years before I came here to
Western about ten years ago.
CT: So you came to Western around 2002?
HR: Mh hm.
CT: And what brought you to Western?
HR: The movies got longer and harder. Really. I did a couple of eighty hour
weeks. And didn’t want to do that anymore [laughter]. Two full time jobs is not a good
idea for anybody. Unless you really, really, for whatever reason need to. It was just too
much, too much. I worked with Eddie for many years when he was a supervisor in the
field, and I knew that their milliner had retired about a year previous. And I just decided
it was time to sort of settle in someplace. And find a niche for myself rather than having
to pack up my kit every couple of months and schlep it somewhere else. It just became
difficult to go from project to project to project. And it was a good move for me, it really
was.
CT: And had you -- I mean what did you know about Western before you came?
And about their reputation?
HR: I had worked at Western in the mid 80s when it was in the old building on
Melrose. And it’s one of the places that when you’re first trying to get into the union -because Western is one of the largest employers in the city, in costuming certainly, that’s
where you go. You try to get a job at Western. You put in as many hours as you can. And
so everybody knows about Western. I did my first costume job, I had mentioned was in
166
summer stock. In the 60s, cause I’m old, we did a production of Lion in Winter that we
rented from Western Costume. And I also did a college production of My Fair Lady in
the 60s the costumes came from Western Costumes. So if you’re in costuming, if you’re
serious about your career, you know about Western Costumes.
CT: So what had you done in the 80s? Did you just come in for a short time to get
in the union, or?
HR: At Western?
CT: Yeah.
HR: I did. It was specific -- I don’t know if it was a show. Their milliner at the
time was Patty Mueur. Patty was here for years and years. Has anybody mentioned Patty
at all? I will give you her number. Yeah, she was the milliner at Western and at that time,
they had a women’s milliner, they had a mans hat maker, and they had a full time cap
maker. Those three positions were full time all the time and they were always slammed
for work. So Patty brought me in to help her out for a couple of months because she had
some extra work. Eddie Baron was the men’s hat maker. He retired from Western
Costumes and opened Baron California Hats. Have you heard of that? Which is still there
-- Eddie’s not there anymore because he retired, but what’s now called Baron’s California
Hats is on Burbank Boulevard and is still one of the few specifically men’s hat
manufacturers around in LA. But that was always an interesting relationship to me, that
people left Western, but went on in their careers burgeoned, whatever that word is,
burgeoned after because they blossomed in some way. Western was always a training
ground and it’s been – I think it’s a very important part of the costume world in Los
167
Angeles. I really do. By the shear breadth of experience of who comes through here and
who started their careers here. The friendships and the relationships that you form when
you’re young, like you were working with Bobi, you know people who you meet just
working in the library. And I tell this to the young people in back, they’ll become close
friends for life. They don’t know it yet, you know, and those are really really important
relationships aside from what you learn about costumes. So that’s how I feel about it.
CT: Can you tell me a little bit about the old building and what the atmosphere
was like there?
HR: It was thrilling. It was a thrilling place to be because there was a huge entry
with a grand stairway smack in front of you. And you never knew who was going to
come down that stairway. I remember walking into that building one afternoon and
coming from one of the fitting rooms was Dolly Parton, looking absolutely glorious.
She’s stunningly beautiful and so sweet, she glows, she honestly glows. And she was
being followed by Tzetzi Ganev who -- they were going into the fitting room. I don’t
know if they were going out or coming in but they were definitely together because at
that time Tzetzi made Dolly Parton’s clothes. And it was true about that building, you
just never knew who was going to be there. And because there was so many cubby holes
– you know they had the metal artist then, studio art metal. They had () who has a dying
shop. [noise in background]. They had a prop shop, they had a leather shop, they had a
laundry facility. It just went on and on. They had a research library, which I didn’t know
at the time. And it was a big building, but none of the rooms were that big, so it was a
warren of smaller rooms, you could get lost easily. It was also unbelievably filthy. Truly.
168
[laughter] Unbelievably filthy. It could not be cleaned. I thought they ought to take a
firehouse to it. And it was an old building, I don’t know this for a fact, I think they closed
it down because a code thing, they had too many code violations.
CT: Mh hm.
HR: I don’t know that. You can’t even repeat that. But, there were places you
would walk and the floor was kind of soft, and I’m like I’m going to put my foot through
here. But there was a mystique to it.
CT: Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about the people who worked with back in
those days, especially the other milliners?
HR: At Western?
CT: There was only one milliner that was Patty Muer. Patty had worked an
apprentice named Suzanne. Suzanne Bushnell? Or Suzanne… it started with a B. I never
knew Suzanne, but Patty learned her craft from Suzanne. So you always heard stories
about… One of --- one of my memories isn’t about a milliner, but is of a cutter fitter
whose name was [pause] I can’t remember what her name was. I’ll have to ask Eddie.
Cause there used to be like six or eight cutter fitters. And her name escapes me I haven’t
heard it for so many years, but I’d know it if I heard it. And I think she was really
extraordinary. I loved just to be at her table, she was the star cutter, she made a lot of
clothes for the star ladies. And her work was so clean, they were like little sculptures and
that really appealed to me.
CT: So was the atmosphere a lot different --
169
HR: Lily Fonda. Her name was Lily Fonda. And you could still smoke in those
days. [laughter]. I have this image of Lily, fabric everywhere, thread everywhere, she’s
hanging over her table smoking her cigarette [laughter].
CT: Oh my gosh.
HR: And on the form would be the most exquisite little skirt you’ve ever seen,
just every stich perfect.
CT: Was it a lot different back then because there were so many more people
working for Western? I imagine the atmosphere would be very different.
HR: The atmosphere was different. They, everybody had their niche. Like one
woman had -- her forte was period clothes, because she had a theater background –
Vicky Dennison was her name. Vicky and I had worked together at the Guthrie Theater,
we worked together -- she was on Star Trek forever. She loved period costuming though,
and so they let her just make stock dresses forever, when they didn’t have something very
specific for her to do. So I think that people just had their niche in what they did best.
And pretty much there was always work. It was insane.
CT: It was busy?
HR: Yeah, people were busy all the time.
CT: So, did you hear anything when Western was moving? Did you hear about
the move when it was going on?
HR: I did hear about the move. I wasn’t involved in it in anyways. That was a
period of time when I had my own business in Atwater Village, and I pretty much stayed
in my shop. I didn’t have a need to go there.
170
CT: Right, do you… do you think that it was good that Western moved to the new
location?
HR: Absolutely. Absolutely.
CT: Why is that?
HR: I think this building feels more centralized, in terms of the interior operation
of it. There’s a flow to this building that did not exist in the old building. This is only two
stories, the other building had I don’t know how many stories, but that elevator was, it
was difficult. Just the flow of the shops now and this building has improved
immeasurably since I’ve been here for the last ten years. A lot of work has been put into
reconfiguring this building as we have acquired the different clothing collections. The
Helen Larson Collection, the Private Collection. As we’ve acquired them and had to
make room for them, the building has been reconfigured. And that has all been a plus. It
really has.
CT: So you came back in 2002. And what is your job like here? What does an
average day look like for you?
HR: An average day. I have two full time women in my staff now. We stay busy
all day everyday. We usually have orders to work on. Either from films, commercials,
and also from Disneyland and Disney World. Really the mainstay of my business, our
bread and butter is our Disney work. They always order multiples, they never order one
of everything. We do a lot of work that comes to us from the Disney costume house in
Orlando. They’re sort of the clearing house for the Disney’s all over the world. We only
today delivered a dozen Marry Poppins hats for the Jolly Holiday number, which is a
171
stage show. The Disney’s – the Disney theme parks order the merchandise from Disney
World and Disney World gives us the order to make them. We – when we don’t have
orders, have the option of doing anything we want to about stock. We love working on
stock. Finding old hats in the rental boxes that need repair or need to be recovered. And I
really enjoy that. It’s – it’s like excavating all the layers that people have put on it for one
thing, for each individual show they needed purple, and then the next show they needed
orange, and then the next show god knows what. And you – once you peel all that way
you’re down to the original hat and then you can start over and make it pretty again. And
that’s kind of interesting to me. We like doing that, and it – we also make new hats for
stock. For the collection, like men’s civilian hats in larger sizes because a lot of the
original period caps are very small. As are the women’s clothes – you get that with the
women’s clothes. They are beautiful pieces but nobody’s that small anymore. So we
make period hats and period caps that will go into stock for rentals but in a more
contemporary scale and size.
CT: Do you every make uniform hats, or is that…
HR: We do. Absolutely. In fact, we made for the Lone Ranger, in January we
delivered railroad worker caps. They had three different samples. And they needed
multiples of six for each sample. For the railroad workers.
CT: Is there much competition from other costume houses today? Or do you think
Western is kind of the more popular or most important?
HR: There’s always competition. Somebody’s always nipping at your heels. But, I
think – I feel, and I’ve heard from designers that Western Costumes is one stop shopping.
172
We have a dress making shop, a tailor shop, a shoe maker, and a hat maker. Nobody else
has that. I think that in the way that Western has improved in the last ten years, the last
ten to twenty years, more and more people are catching on that Western is the place they
want to be. Even if maybe twenty years ago they didn’t have such a good experience here
and it was a little messy and it was a little dusty, and they though no, don’t want to go
there. Those people are coming back and taking a second look. And I think the – some of
the higher echelon designers who have never worked through here, but only sent their
assistants are now coming here themselves and realize the value of being here in house.
CT: How concerned with historical accuracy are you in making a hat? Is it more
about the design or is it more about if it’s a period piece if it looks right for the period?
HR: That depends on the designer.
CT: Mh hm.
HR: My job is to give the designer what they want and what they need. Some
designers, and depending on what the project they are working on, have to have a period
hat made exactly as it would have been, fabrics that it would have been, in a scale that it
would have been. Another designer will come in the next day and have a totally different
take on it. Oh no, it doesn’t have to be …. They say oh it isn’t exactly 1894, something
from the 1880s would do. Particularly because fashion may or may not change that much
and an older woman may have had an older bonnet on. So it really changes also with the
actress. You may have an actress who just can’t carry a very big bonnet. The period
dictates that it should be a larger brim. But the actress has a tiny little face, and she’ll be
swallowed up by it and you have to knock it down. Like it or not. Winona Ryder in
173
Dracula, Bram Stoker’s Dracula. We made a lot of hats for her and every hat we made
had to be knocked down a peg, because she’s so tiny.
CT: Have you ever worked the Halloween sale or the spring cleaning sale at
Western? Have you been ever been involved in those?
HR: I have not worked the Halloween sale. It’s usually a good way for the
younger people coming in to the entry level to get their hours. And that’s good for them. I
have – I did work the first two years of the spring sale to kind of get them on their feet.
Because I have sold at a lot of flea market. I had a business for a while. I used to sell at
the vintage fashion expo in Santa Monica, so I had some experience in selling. And so I
did the first two years.
CT: And what was that like?
HR: It was wild. It was absolutely wild. People start lining up like 45 minutes
before the gates open and when they know they can come in the let out a big whoop
[laughter]. And people running around with giant shopping carts just piling stuff in. It’s
kind of a party atmosphere, it really is. If you’ve never been, you’ve got to come. You
can’t believe the things that people find. One fellow had a big shopping cart full of really
torn blown out flock coats and he was doing a vampire video. He was ecstatic. He said he
could have shopped for a month and not found this stuff. And he found it all here.
CT: How is Western different from other places you’ve worked?
HR: It’s a larger organization in that this entire building is devoted to costuming.
Other places that I’ve worked have been large organizations but smaller departments. The
costume department wasn’t that big. The other adjustment to me is the constancy of being
174
here full time all the time. When I free lanced, I got time off in between, I had week, I
had a month to catch up. And here it just never stops coming. And you never know when
it’s going to change. You can be not very busy the beginning of the week and then the
phone rings Wednesday afternoon and its over for the next month, you’re going to be
busy. So that changes all the time. And I always tell people – you know when I was
freelancing, anyone who is freelancing on a film you’re hired for that movie. I’m working
on five movies, and that’s very different for me. Very different for all of us. We don’t
have one master, we have five masters and they all want it now.
CT: Who do you admire the most in your field?
HR: Persons?
CT: Mh hm.
HR: [Pause]. Well I think I have to say John David Ridge was my first mentor in
the industry. John David is a good businessman, he’s one of the best cutter fitters I’ve
ever worked with, he’s an excellent designer, and he’s got a great sense of humor and
he’s a wonderful man. I have the utmost respect for John David.
CT: How do you think the industry has changed over the course of your career? Is
there anything you can say is really different than when you started.
HR: Oh absolutely. There’s no time anymore. There’s no time and there’s no
money. There used to be time to develop a project, to develop prototypes for garments or
crafts pieces that were needed. They would hire a crew. Now your – now they don’t even
cast till the last minute, so there’s nothing for you to do until the last minute, and they
really try to kick you out as soon as they can. That has changed in my career.
175
CT: And you think its because the money isn’t there? Or things have just changed
and people work differently?
HR: I think that where the money comes from has changed. Thirty years ago there
was – it’s my understanding that the projects were funded more in Hollywood or in
California or in America. Now those projects are funded from so many different sources
within one project – within one film, the money comes from all over the world.
Everybody has to sniff it. By the time that happens, there’s no time left to make the
movie. And everybody gets a piece of the pie, and so there’s not much time left to
actually make the product.
CT: Do you have any favorite stories about working at Western? Is there anything
that comes to mind that…
HR: [Pause] Well I think that our favorite projects are always one of our last
projects. And we’re very lucky to have in house the film of Oz: The Great and Powerful
last year. And getting to work with the designer, Gary Jones, who I’ve known for many
years. And getting to create, really on a massive scale, it is a huge movie was really fun.
And Gary is so upbeat. He’s so – his energy is so positive. He likes what he sees. Nothing
is a problem, it’s always how can we solve it. And that was just great fun to have them
here, it really was. Working – and having people like Mila Kunis and James Franco come
to Western for their fittings as opposed to having the crew going to Beverly Hills to fit
them in their home because they won’t deem to leave their home was really nice, it really
was. We really enjoyed that.
176
CT: What advice would you give to young costumers trying to come into the
field?
HR: I think it’s very important to get as much experience as you can in theater, in
regional theater, if you’re interested in ballet or opera. You – don’t be afraid to work for
very little money at the beginning because that’s where you’re going to learn. If you want
too much money too soon, you don’t have enough experience to back it up and people are
going to know that. I think it’s very important to show up on time, and do whatever they
ask you to do, and do it well. And then you will be asked to do something better. My first
job at Julliard I was an apprentice at Julliard School. They hired three apprentices at the
same time, and I was asked to sweep the floor in the morning and to make the coffee.
And the other two apprentices were very insulted and thought that I should refuse to do
that. And I’m thinking, I’m working at Lincoln Center. Are you nuts? And it was a great
experience because I got to know everybody in the room. And it really was humbling but
that’s the name of the game. You do what they ask you to do and you do it well.
CT: What are you most proud of in your career?
HR: What am I most proud of in my career? I have to say that I’ve had the honor
really of working with really the highest caliber of designers. Academy Award winning
designers and nominees who really know their craft. And that -- people like Albert
Wolsky, Joanna Johnston have come back to me. To work with me again. And that says
to me that I did my job. And to me that is a great achievement.
CT: Is there anything about your job that you’d say is the most challenging thing
about your job or the hardest thing about your job?
177
HR: [Pause]. The hardest thing about my job probably is running a crew. Because
I can’t do everything myself. I couldn’t’ possibly do everything myself nor would I want
to. So not only do I have to know how to sculpt and pattern and make things. But I have
to be able to teach that to some people who have never made a hat in their lives and
probably aren’t going to make a lot of hats after they leave my shop. But they’re -- what
they do in my shop has to be of the same caliber and quality as if I’d done it. And that
isn’t always easy.
CT: What does Western mean to you?
HR: What does Western Costumes mean to me?
CT: Yeah.
HR: It means getting to work with my friends all day. It does. I’ve known these
people for years, for decades. And to finish out my career, which I surely will do, means
a great deal to me. To be around the people that I’ve basically come up with and worked
around, and like, means a lot to me.
CT: So I have one more question for you. If you had one word to describe
Western what would it be?
HR: Massive.
CT: Massive. Perfect, thank you so much.
HR: Thank you.
[end of interview]
178
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