Richard Sylbert - Highlights, Recognition and Awards

Highlights, Recognition and Awards

He won Oscars for his production design on Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966) and Dick Tracy (1990) and was nominated four other times for his work on Chinatown (1974), Shampoo (1975), Reds (1981) and The Cotton Club (1984).

Over his course of his career, Mr. Sylbert worked with many of the major directors of the post-World War II period, including Elia Kazan, Mike Nichols, Sydney Lumet, John Frankenheimer, Brian De Palma and Francis Ford Coppola.

His résumé is filled with credits from some of the best-known titles of the 1960s and 70's, including Long Day's Journey Into Night, The Graduate, The Manchurian Candidate, Rosemary's Baby, Carnal Knowledge and Catch-22. Along the way, he forged close friendships with many of that era's Hollywood elite, including Jack Nicholson, Roman Polanski and Warren Beatty, for whom he designed Reds and Dick Tracy.

A self-described perfectionist, Mr. Sylbert's designs usually provided an instantaneous sense of mood and atmosphere, from his vision of marital claustrophobia (in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf) to the bleached facades of a drought-stricken Los Angeles (Chinatown) to an oversaturated comic book landscape (Dick Tracy).

His work was also notable for its keen detail, like a copy of a child-rearing guide on a bedroom bookshelf in Virginia Woolf, as well as its ingenuity, as when he re-created Tiananmen Square for the 1997 film Red Corner using a 200-foot-wide blue screen and thousands of 20-inch concrete slabs cemented to a parking lot in Playa del Rey, Calif.

Sylbert was born in Brooklyn, moments before his identical twin, Paul, with whom he shared a profession—Paul is also an Oscar-winning production designer, for Heaven Can Wait (1978) -- as well as a taste for fly-fishing and pipe smoking. The brothers also served in the Army together and later both studied painting at the Tyler School of Art at Temple University.

After school, the Sylbert brothers moved back to New York, where they found work painting sets and scenery. In the mid-1950s, Mr. Sylbert moved to Los Angeles to work as an art director on the television show The Inner Sanctum. During this period, Mr. Sylbert met William Cameron Menzies, the designer who burned Atlanta in Gone With the Wind. Mr. Menzies became his mentor.

His first film work as production designer came in 1956, for Baby Doll, directed by Elia Kazan, for whom he later designed A Face in the Crowd, and Splendor in the Grass. The approval of Mr. Kazan and appreciation of his work opened other director's eyes. Mr. Sylbert was in constant demand, working as an art director or production designer on more than two dozen films from 1956 to 1975.

In 1975 Mr. Sylbert jumped from the creative to the executive branch of Hollywood, becoming vice president in charge of production at Paramount Pictures. He approved the productions of several unlikely hits, including Looking for Mr. Goodbar and The Bad News Bears.

After three years at Paramount, he returned to design and remained active throughout the 1980s and 90's, working with directors like Francis Ford Coppola on The Cotton Club and Brian De Palma on The Bonfire of the Vanities and Carlito's Way. Tall and charismatic, he even acted a bit, appearing in a bit role in the 1996 film Mulholland Falls, a film he also, of course, designed.

In addition to his brother Paul, Mr. Sylbert is survived by his three sons, Douglas, Jon and Mark, by his first wife, Carol Gottschalk; and two daughters: Lulu, with second wife Susanna Moore, and Daisy, with third wife and widow Sharmagne Leland-St. John.

While Mr. Sylbert marveled at the magic of the movies, he was in many ways a traditionalist, preferring to build sets rather than create images with a computer and rallying against the suffusion of digital effects and runaway budgets. "It's cheaper to go to Venice than to put Venice in a computer," he said in a 1997 interview. "If we start making $200 million movies, the whole thing is going to go down the tubes."