From a hotel in Marrakech in The Man Who Knew Too Much, to small-town Alabama in To Kill a Mockingbird, to Mission Control in Space Cowboys, creating a fictional, yet wholly believable world in which to film a movie has been the passion and life's work of Henry Bumstead, one of Hollywood's most celebrated production designers. In a career that has spanned nearly seventy years, Bumstead has worked on more than one hundred movies and television films. His many honors include Academy Awards for Art Direction for To Kill a Mockingbird and The Sting, as well as nominations for Vertigo and The Unforgiven.

This popularly written and extensively illustrated book tells the intertwining stories of Henry Bumstead's career and the evolution of Hollywood art direction. Andrew Horton combines his analysis of Bumstead's design work with wide-ranging interviews in which Bumstead talks about working with top directors, including Alfred Hitchcock, George Roy Hill, Robert Mulligan, and Clint Eastwood, as well as such stars as Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Doris Day, Jimmy Stewart, Sidney Poitier, Bill Cosby, Jerry Lewis, and James Cagney. Numerous production drawings, storyboards, and film stills illustrate how Bumstead's designs translated to film. This portrait of Bumstead's career underscores an art director's crucial role in shaping the look of a film and also tracks the changes in production design from the studio era through location shooting to today's use of high-tech special effects.

Theories of film have traditionally dealt with either narrative or industrial issues, with the consequence that the physical content of the graphic frame has often been ignored or relegated to the sidelines. By contrast, C. S. Tashiro foregrounds the visual aspect of cinema in this book, drawing on his experiences as a designer and filmmaker, as well as on contemporary theory, to show how production design can support or contradict narrative structure, or exist in an entirely parallel realm of meaning.

Tashiro looks at cinematic production design from a broadly interdisciplinary perspective, encompassing art and architecture theory, audience reception, narrative theory, and phenomenology, to arrive at a more encompassing definition of the process. He builds his argument around studies of several prominent history films, since design is central to historical representation, and explores the most pertinent issues raised by the topic, particularly commodity consumption. In his conclusion, he also offers possible solutions to some of the social problems raised by design.