Ferdinando Scarfiotti II: "Toys"

[ED: This is the second in a series of posts on the work of Ferdinando Scarfiotti, this post focusing on his work for the 1992 film Toys. Youtube has disallowed embedding, but you can view the music video sequence from the film (referenced in the text below), featuring the song "The Mirror" by Thomas Dolby here.]

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"By 1987 Scarfiotti was firmly ensconced in Los Angeles, but he returned briefly to Italy for a terrific little picture called Mamba. The plot is a vicious treat: Gregg Henry plays a sneering, self-contained software magnate who elects to punish his ex-lover (Trudi Styler) by penning her within her apartment in the company of a drug-crazed snake. The mamba has the luxurious advantage of an hour in which to puncture its prey before overdosing on venom, but it finds in Styler a resourceful opponent. The loft which Scarfiotti designed for Styler is a riot of postmodern design flourishes in the seriously playful style of Ettore Sottsass, accordingly making merry with conventional notions of architectural syntax. It is a kind of erotic fantasy for subscribers to Blueprint, so much so that, when in the course of her frenetic flight from the mamba, Styler scatters her furniture and tarnishes her pristine floors, the viewer feels a sharp and unexpected pang of sorrow.

In 1989 Scarfiotti was all too briefly reunited with Bertolucci on The Sheltering Sky, a project of which he had schemed and dreamed. Nicolas Valle had recommended Paul Bowles’s novel to Scarfiotti who, his partner remembers, ’fell totally in love with the book and gave it to Bernardo saying, “If ever I direct a movie, this is what it would be”’. Scarfiotti’s notion, tellingly, was to film The Sheltering Sky entirely on stage, gradually descending into surrealism. But Bertolucci was the man who got the money to make the film, and was determined to go forth into the desert. Scarfiotti gamely set about the location-hunt, but contracted hepatitis deep in the Sahara and was forced to retire from the film." [1]

"Scarfiotti returned to work in 1990 on Barry Levinson’s Toys. This project dated from 1978, its fanciful story (of a bombastic general and his holy fool of a nephew who feud over the family toy factory) having found little favour or funding before Levinson’s later triumphs. Toys plainly required a strong and guiding design concept, and Levinson went after the best man: what he got in return, over their first breakfast meeting, was Dada. ’When I read the script,’ Scarfiotti claimed, ‘I told Barry I would do it if he’d allow me to stay away from traditional American fantasy - such as the Disneyland themes - and instead go back to the European modernist movement of the early century which included surrealism, dadaism and futurism’.

This was no idle threat, so to speak. Scarfiotti’s touchstone for Toys would be the Italian Futurist Fortunato Depero, a crackerjack of all trades whose inventions included patterned waistcoats, bolted books, sets for Diaghilev, and covers for Vanity Fair. The choice was inspired. Depero had also been a compulsive maker and illustrator of figurines, and, with Giacomo Balla, penned in 1915 Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe, hymning a new world order ’run according to the principles of the Futurist toy’. M Depero’s joyful paeans to fighting dolls (not nearly so grimace-worthy as Marinetti’s conviction that war was a form of hygiene for civilisation) gave Scarfiotti a line straight into the highly coloured whimsy Toys required.

Scarfiotti was by now much perturbed by the industry’s changing perception of ‘visual style’. ’If you look at what commercials and MTV are doing now, they’re so technologically advanced that it‘s scary,’ he confessed. ‘But at one point all these new technologies become very unimaginative, and it gets very tiring for the eye and the mind to be bombarded with an enormous amount of images in a very short time’. Toys is therefore a clarion-call for the hand-made magnificence of which Scarfiotti was the master: the film came before its audience unarmed, with a child-like ingenuousness. ‘We have a tradition of whimsy here at Zevo Toys’, Leslie Zevo (Robin Williams) cautions his uncle Leland, sounding the keynote of the picture. In search of a unified concept for the Zevo Toys, Scarfiotti elected to shun the mass-produced and seek out the rare. ‘I decided that the old-fashioned wind-up toys . . . had a common look. They are very innocent and have a fantasy element to them, unlike the modern toys of today’. Thus Scarfiotti found himself realising what Depero only dreamed of, building a number of adorable toys with concealed war-waging capabilities." [1]

"Scarfiotti conjures the innocence of the Zevo operation, and the subsequent threat to its purity, through boldly contrasting strokes. Initially Kenneth Zevo’s office is littered with wind-up toys, the walls awash in Depero‘s carefree colourful frescoes; but upon his demise and the installation of brother Leland, military murals in gross parody of Russian Constructivism are painted over, and towering, threatening robots line the walls. As influential as Depero upon Scarfiotti’s internal logic was Magritte, who provided inspiration for mechanical wheezes (a pop-up house) and colour-schemes (several Zevo interiors are daubed after his inimitable skies). When required, somewhat to his distaste, to design a pop-video sequence, Scarfiotti appropriated Magritte’s enigmatic bowler-hatted mannequins, and in a barrage of cuts Robin Williams and Joan Cusack bring to life Golconda, Le Faux Miroir, and Le Mois des Vendunges, amongst others. There is even a canny homage to De Stijl, the design movement which gave a rational order to Futurism’s romantic, anarchic ’machine aesthetic’. The Zevo factory‘s canteen is a loving recreation of the classic Cine-Dancing room created by The Van Doesburg in 1928 for the Aubette entertainment complex in Strasbourg; coloured squares on stucco panels climb the walls in Van Doesburg’s dynamic, diagonal style of ’Counter-Composition’." [1]

"Scarfiotti celebrated his experiences on the film in terms which, for him, signified the highest praise: ’Toys was the closest thing to theatre you can imagine. You start from a blank page and make a drawing, then a painting, and you have it reproduced on stage exactly the way you want’. His adventures in the cinema almost at an end, Scarfiotti had emphatically achieved something he had always sought. Paul Schrader, however, feels that Scarfiotti‘s work on Toys was overshadowed by graver matters. ’I think Scarfiotti was approaching an aesthetic crisis at the end of his career,’ Schrader reflects. ’It’s a crisis not uncommon to exploratory, hugely influential artists. Nando had become so imitated towards the end of his life that it was harder and harder to work in his style without seeming to be derivative of the films which were derivative of him. I think if his health had been better, he could have attacked this dilemma frontally, gone back to work in Europe or done something more experimental. After The Sheltering Sky, health became an overriding concern. He didn’t want to be too far away from medical help and his friends. This meant maintaining a relatively expensive lifestyle, which meant big budget studio films. Toys can beseen as his attempt to reinvent himself: new palate, new tone, new shapes. A big budget Hollywood comedy is not the ideal place, to my mind, to reinvent yourself'." [1]

"As Nicolas Valle confirms, ’Nando was constantly approached with all the top films being made (or not) in Hollywood’. Ill health and the toil of Toys compelled him to pass on several cherished projects. Finally, he committed to Love Affair, a vehicle for Warren Beatty and wife Annette Bening. The picture was a pleasant piece of romantic pabulum for which Scarfiotti provided warm, subtle interiors indicative of his personal taste. One of these is a tropical retreat designed for a character played by Katherine Hepburn. ’If Nando could have designed a ”dream home” for himself,’ Valle laughs fondly, ’that set was very much how it would have looked’. Scarfiotti passed away on April 30, 1994, and Love Affair salutes him In Memoriam." [1]

ALL IMAGES AND ANIMATIONS TAKEN FROM THE BARRY LEVINSON FILM TOYS, 1992; ALL TEXT [1] BY RICHARD KELLY, TAKEN FROM "FERDINANDO SCARFIOTTI 1941-1994: EXCURSIONS INTO STYLE" AS IT ORIGINALLY APPEARED IN CRITICAL QUARTERLY, VOL. 38, ISSUE 2, JUNE 1996

Ferdinando Scarfiotti & "American Gigolo"

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"There is a simple sense in which set design engages first and foremost with the (generally rather vague) expectations of the audience. Ferdinando Scarfiotti was acutely conscious of this, as the inventor of a Forbidden City which audiences may still imagine to be the authentic dwelling of The Last Emperor of China. Just as we might say that the essence of dramatic form is to engineer a sequence of outlandish events in such a way as to make them seem retrospectively inevitable, so it might also be contended that the essence of ’art direction’ is to choose and construct places and spaces which seem finally and obviously to be the only possible sites for such drama to be enacted. We respond perfunctorily and immediately to the decor of Death in Venice (one of Scarfiotti’s most renowned efforts, if not his happiest), because the Venice Lido is indeed a beautiful place for sad happenings to befall beautiful people. But supreme design is not merely concerned with what the viewer finds pretty or plausible. Rather it is intimately linked at the highest level of conception with the sum of complex meanings which is the internal logic of a film.

’What interests me, ’ Scarfiotti once declared, ’is taking everyday reality and making it my ownl. The greatest test of a designer’s gift is not in the scouring of museum and source-book which underpins the recreation of period styles. It comes at that imaginative point of departure where ’visual literacy’ must progress to a creative vision of how decor denotes character, how settings enhance dramatic conflict. It is, in truth, when the designer starts to build. The greatest designers are master-builders, even though their sound-stage constructions are doomed to demolition. Celluloid survives, and at its best embodies the dur desir de durer (’the harsh, demanding desire for durance’) common to any serious form of art-making." [1]

"Boris Leven once anatomised the designer as a fusion of architect, artist, designer, illustrator and draughtsman - with the overarching perspectives of ’a dreamer, a businessman, a diplomat’. He stressed the designer’s financial devotion to ’visual continuity’ and ‘the final look’; he counselled the merits of deep research, and the value of a steeping in culture (’I think a creative person should see and feel as much as possible’); and he emphasised the rapport between designer and director (‘There must exist between them a complete trust and understanding’) In considering Ferdinando Scarfiotti, it is crucial to keep every last one of Leven’s criteria in mind. When Paul Schrader asked Scarfiotti to perform a Milanese makeover on Los Angeles for American Gigolo, he found a collaborator minutely preoccupied ’with the look of things: locales, building of sets, colour schemes, clothing schemes, lighting schemes - everything‘. Perfectionism in matters of detail cannot guarantee perfection of the whole, but every director who procured Scarfiotti’s gifts was taxed to measure up to his brilliance, for he was an artist to the very tips of his fingers."

"Similarly chi-chi is the apartment of Marcello’s skittish fiancee Giulia [ED: this passage references Bertolucci’s 1970 film The Conformist], where louvres on the windows refract the light, and shades of the prison- house roll over the embracing couple. This is a touch of Vittorio Storaro’s brilliance, but the slim dress in monochrome stripe worn by Giulia shows the impact of total design. Scarfiotti was instrumental in creating this look (evoking both the glamour of 1930s MGM and the neurosis of 1940s noir) and he would use it again in American Gigolo. ‘When you have an idea,’ Scarfiotti later explained, ’you really have to follow it through, exaggerating a little bit so it has a visual impact. Otherwise it only becomes the usual venetian blinds which you see in every office...‘

In the wake of American Gigolo’s role in launching Giorgio Armani’s couture in America, Scarfiotti would argue that ’good design has to pick up a trend before it becomes recognisable - while it’s there as a seed’. The Conformist certainly exhumed Art Deco furnishings, architecture and movies in the seventies. More crucially, it acquired iconic status among American cineastes. Francis Coppola was moved to purchase the production’s original clapperboard for his office, and also acquired a print of the picture which he viewed repeatedly and urged upon every member of his circle. (To a Conformist aficionado, Dean Tavoularis’s funereal stylings for The Godfather (1971) came as little surprise.) The long shadow cast by the film deepened in years to come." [1]

"Scarfiotti’s film work in the mid-seventies was sporadic. He helped Derek Jarman to find a location to make his low-budget labour of love Sebastiane; enjoyed a sojourn in Amsterdam designing the modish Burocco for Andre Techine and Marilyn Goldin; and laboured lucklessly on Nicolas Roeg’s unrealised Flash Gordon for Dino de Laurentiis. In the late seventies, weary of the Italian film industry, he settled in America. For some years, he had rented a small house in Bolinas, Marin County, favoured enclave of well-heeled hippies where, as Treviglio remembers, ‘you could look all around and see nothing but country‘. Initially Scarfiotti pursued a quiet professional path, designing several stage productions for his friend, director Kelly English, in neighbouring Sonoma. When he was finally lured to Hollywood, the enduring legacy of The Conformist, unsurprisingly, had much to account for.

Preparing to direct his screenplay American Gigolo in 1978, Paul Schrader was conscious of the need for ’high style’. The script told an improbable tale of a high-priced, socially aspirant male escort, Julian Kay, who faces retribution for his sins in a murder-frame, but is finally delivered from despond by a Bressonian intervention of grace. Schrader wanted to swathe this character (a walking commodity, a man of manicured surfaces) in a suitably tailored universe. Moreover, like any filmmaker in a city plagued by camera crews, Schrader sought a fresh perception of Los Angeles. His epiphany came when cinematographer John Bailey screened The Conformist for their mutual reference: ’I sent Nando the script and explained what I wanted and he rose to the bait. I think the whole sexual chic of the film appealed to him’.

As novelist Edmund White decreed whilst dallying in Los Angeles, ’in gay life the body as well as the soul is elected’, and Julian Kay, a sexually ambiguous creature, embodied this dualism. Schrader admitted to the influence upon his script of moving in modish gay circles, and Scarfiotti supplied the appropriately seductive surfaces. ‘In 1978 Los Angeles was on the verge of a big change,’ he recalled. ’So it was a big playground to rediscover and to reinvent’. Superficially, American Gigolo evokes Los Angeles in the fashion of Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man or David Hockney’s A Bigger Splash: ‘bright, clean, bland and permissive’. A gay ambience pervades the film, not least because its protagonist is conspicuously groomed, there to be gazed at and to give pleasure. ’It was a very pro-gay time in the arts in general,’ Schrader recalls. ’The homosexual sensibility was dictating music, clubs, fashion, dance, design. There was a feeling in the gay community that whatever we’re doing today, everybody else will be doing next year - and they were right’. Ironically, while the style of Gigolo titillated gay viewers, the content appeared to disapprove of them entirely. This was somewhat to the eventual embarrassment of Schrader, who considered his influential designer ’militantly gay‘." [1]

"The film necessitated copious construction on Paramount’s stages, and Scarfiotti achieved a uniformly spare elegance. ’All of these sets, these spaces were built by Scarfiotti for an overall look and feeling’, confirms Schrader. Julian’s apartment is a monastic gymnasium shaded in ash-grey and sea-breeze blue, devoid of anything but structural decoration (’the on-going motif is whether to hang a painting’, Schrader joked). The achievement of American Gigolo in rendering plausible its gossamer-thin dramatic conceit owes much to the gorgeous solidity of that apartment, sealed by its hard ceiling specified by Scarfiotti, which in turn dictated the use of augmented source-light. Such was the discipline Scarfiotti had learned from Visconti and admired in Orson Welles (witness those low angles in The Trial and Touch of Evil).

Scarfiotti’s most severe set simulates a Palm Springs apartment wherein Julian turns an especially sordid, sado-masochistic trick. Neutral colours, pre-Columbian art behind glass, a free-standing black marble wall and furnishings in the precise and comfort-threatening manner of Mies van der Rohe create a profoundly cold and ominous ambience (’I mean, no-one could live in a place like that, it was so bizarre’, Schrader remarked). Even the choice of exterior for this sinister dwelling (a white facade against black mountains and dark blue sky) was dictated by the finical Scarfiotti. Schrader treasured his designer’s perfectionism (‘If he comes to the set and something has been moved, he gets very upset’) his severe eye for the expression of ideas through decor. ’Schrader’s crazy,’ laughs Nicolas Valle, ’but he worshipped Nando, and he always really stood up for what Nando wanted to do on a film’." [1]

ALL STILLS TAKEN FROM THE PAUL SCHRADER FILM AMERICAN GIGOLO, 1980, PRODUCTION DESIGN BY FERDINANDO SCARFIOTTI; ALL TEXT [1] BY RICHARD KELLY, TAKEN FROM "FERDINANDO SCARFIOTTI 1941-1994: EXCURSIONS INTO STYLE" AS IT ORIGINALLY APPEARED IN CRITICAL QUARTERLY, VOL. 38, ISSUE 2, JUNE 1996