The art of movies, TV
The conversation moves — on foot, since Sandy Dvore doesn’t sit down for long — to a small room in the back of this West Hollywood apartment, where the resident reaches into a pile of old artifacts and holds up an old black-and-white photograph in a plastic frame.
The picture shows a barren highway, with the hood of a 1957 Chevrolet convertible visible at the bottom. For Dvore, that snapshot captured a key moment in his life: the day he left his Chicago home to seek opportunities in Hollywood more than half a continent away.
“I took a picture as soon as I turned onto Route 66,” Dvore explains.
What happened between the start of that journey and the present day has graced more than one gallery wall. Dvore, who showed his work earlier this year at the Hollywood Museum and in 2010 at the Paley Center for Media in Beverly Hills, became a premiere artist and title designer for film and television.
The opening credits of “The Partridge Family” and “The Waltons”? Him. The illustrations at the beginning of “James Dean,” the 1976 TV movie? Him. The United Artists logo? Him — with a paper clip, which Dvore bent to form a conjoined “U” and “A,” serving as inspiration.
Now the Emmy winner has a new show summarizing his entertainment career, Route 66 photo and all. “The Art and Illustration of Sandy Dvore,” which encompasses his film work as well as advertisements and fine art, opens Nov. 6 at the Forest & Ocean Gallery in Laguna Beach and runs through Dec. 19.
It’s quite a career to summarize, as Dvore’s packed apartment demonstrates. On a small table by the kitchen, his Emmy resides next to a framed, handwritten letter from Frank Sinatra, thanking the artist for a copper etching. Illustrations of Steve McQueen, James Stewart, Shirley MacLaine and others occupy most of the wall space.
It was a visit to this home that convinced Michael Savas, the chair of illustration for Laguna College of Art + Design and the show’s official curator, to set up a Dvore show. Savas hadn’t heard of Dvore when a friend suggested him for a retrospective, but he soon realized that he had known his craft for decades.
“As a kid, I grew up watching all that — ‘The Partridge Family’ and the UA logo,” Savas says. “I was just blown away by the skill level this guy has.”
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Dvore’s apartment has enough memorabilia to qualify as a museum in its own right, and its resident could pass for a curator. When asked to give a tour, he begins in the entryway, where a half dozen or so framed ads dot the wall.
“These were my first clients,” Dvore says. “I’d been here [in my hometown] for three or four years, and I originally left Chicago to come here because I didn’t think that I was going to enjoy spending the rest of my life trying to work the advertising industry in Chicago. Plus, the fact that it was a big-city environment where you had to sort of wait your turn to move up the ladder.
“And I sort of became interested in what I saw in the new movies, the Deans and the Brandos and people coming in and changing those old classical Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart, William Powell films that I grew up watching.”
From there, the tour advances to the living room, where Dvore sits on the couch and leafs, page by page, through a binder of his advertising work: images of Liza Minnelli, “MASH,” “The Elephant Man.” A framed ad for Judy Garland’s “Judy at Carnegie Hall” album leans against a piece of furniture nearby.
In between pages, Dvore tells the story of his journey out West. When he arrived in Los Angeles, he fell in with a crowd of Hollywood hopefuls — actors, agents, industry professionals — and played baseball with them in a league on weekends. He lost interest in the commercial art jobs he managed to get, but one day, a fellow Chicagoan recognized him on the diamond and introduced him to a press agent she knew.
Dvore’s first assignment was the Garland ad, and he soon found himself designing regularly for Variety and the Hollywood Reporter. It was a generation or two before the digital revolution, and Dvore notes it as he pauses on a page in his binder.
“There is nothing here that anybody else did,” he says. “And there’s nothing done by computer. And there’s nothing done by machine or Photoshop.”
When Dvore finally closes the binder, it’s time for a screening. On his television, which connects to both a DVD player and a VCR, he plays the opening credits of “James Dean,” the 1980s TV series “Skag” and “Carol, Carl, Whoopi and Robin,” the 1987 comedy special — a showcase for Burnett, Reiner, Goldberg and Williams — for which he won his Emmy.
Dvore knew many of the stars whose images grace his apartment, and he tosses out anecdotes about them: McQueen flashing an item of women’s clothing after a romantic encounter, Bobby Darin posing for sketches on the set of “Captain Newman, M.D.” As a behind-the-scenes artist, Dvore wasn’t a star on their level, but he didn’t hold them in awe.
“I never saw them as anything,” he says. “I knew them all. I met them all. I worked with them all, because I could do something for them they couldn’t do for themselves. But I never thought of them in any kind of a star-struck way. That just was never part of my personality.”
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Whatever his personality, Dvore’s work has charmed the gallery scene in recent years. David Bushman, the television curator for the Paley Center, says he had never featured a title designer before getting a pitch for a Dvore show, but it proved a perfect fit for the museum’s theme of celebrating media’s cultural impact.
The exhibit, titled “Sandy Dvore: The Guy Who Did ‘New’,” featured video monitors playing some of the artist’s famous credit sequences. Evidently, the show resonated with at least some visitors — Bushman still has an email from a woman who asked if the museum had a companion book of Dvore’s work for purchase.
“I think these opening sequences, these title sequences, resonate with people particularly in combination with the theme songs, which is often where you see them,” he says. “I think the combination of the two together just evokes such powerful memories for people who experienced them at particular stages of their lives.”
Anyone who wants to thank Dvore in person can do so on Dec. 4, when the artist will visit the Forest & Ocean Gallery from 6 to 9 p.m. during the First Thursday Art Walk. Even in his absence, though, the exhibit will have a homey touch: According to Savas, the gallery will be designed to mirror the confines of Dvore’s home studio, with his desk set up and sketchbook out.
“It’s going to be a wonderful show,” Savas says. “I think people will get a sense of who he really is.”
If You Go
What: “The Art and Illustration of Sandy Dvore”
Where: Forest & Ocean Gallery, 480 Ocean Ave., Laguna Beach
When: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays; 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturdays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sundays, Nov. 6 through Dec. 19
Cost: Free
Information: (949) 371-3313 or https://www.lcad.edu