It’s Been His Look, No Matter Who’s Directing

In an industry in which people routinely scramble for work, movie production designer Henry Bumstead has never had to worry about his next paycheck. In fact, during his 63-year career, Bumstead has never been laid off. “I have never been fired,” he says matter-of-factly. “I attribute it all to the fact that I have worked with good scripts and good directors and good actors and actresses. I have been lucky.”

“Bummy,” as he is known in Hollywood, is still going strong at 87, thanks in no small part to his ongoing relationship with actor-director-producer Clint Eastwood. Bumstead first met Eastwood on the 1972 western “Joe Kidd,” directed by John Sturges. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship and prolific working relationship.

They have collaborated on “High Plains Drifter” (1972); “Unforgiven” (1992), for which he received an Oscar nomination; “A Perfect World” (1993); “The Stars Fell on Henrietta” (1995), which Eastwood produced but didn’t direct; “Absolute Power” (1997); “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” (1997); “True Crime” (1999); “Space Cowboys” (2000); and Eastwood’s latest film, “Blood Work,” which opens today.

Eastwood says there was a near 20-year span between “High Plains Drifter” and “Unforgiven” because Bumstead was tied up working with directors Alfred Hitchcock and George Roy Hill on various projects. “Finally, when those guys all retired, I got him back,” Eastwood says. “I love to see a guy his age having so much fun working.”

Bumstead returns the compliment--in his own no-frills way.

“I have worked with Hitchcock, George Roy Hill, [Martin] Scorsese and Billy Wilder, but Clint has taken the bull out of making films,” says Bumstead, relaxing recently in the living room of his comfortable home in San Marino. “He could keep doing Dirty Harry and westerns and just go right along, but he tries everything.”

“I tell him how I kind of see things,” Eastwood explains. “But I tell him go ahead and he will show me things along the way. In fact, he’ll want to show me more things than I want to see. But when you have good people like that, you can trust them to deliver. ‘Unforgiven’ was fun because he got to build a town from scratch. We scouted it together from a helicopter and found a place in Alberta [Canada] that we liked and he just built it.”

Considering his stature in the business, Bumstead is remarkably down-to-earth and unpretentious. A tall bear of a man, he has been slowed down a bit by having both knees replaced with metal implants, but he doesn’t call attention to it. According to Eastwood, he is easily embarrassed when any fuss is made about him on the set. “When I say things like, ‘Bumstead, will you just tell me where you want the camera and I’ll just go ahead and do it?’ He’ll go, ‘Aw, all right.’ He gets all bashful and red.”

Bumstead has a cameo of sorts in “Blood Work” that will no doubt make him cringe. It’s in the form of a painting of Bumstead that adorns the wall of a police station. “That wasn’t his idea,” Eastwood says. “The art department did it as a joke but I went ahead and used it.”

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Pleased With Ship Set

In “Blood Work,” based on the thriller by former Los Angeles Times reporter Michael Connelly, Eastwood plays an FBI agent forced into retirement after suffering a heart attack while pursuing a serial killer. Two months after he gets a heart transplant, though, he’s back on the trail.

“Blood Work” was shot in and around Los Angeles and Long Beach. Bumstead is especially proud of the elaborate interior he built for an old ship at Long Beach Harbor that is the setting for the movie’s action-packed finale.

“We built this fantastic interior set of the boat with the engine room flooded with water,” he says enthusiastically. “That was a big set and I got to do some wonderful aging. I love aging. I am a stickler for aging--the rust and the dirt. It was just a beautiful set.”

Bumstead’s work isn’t flashy and never intrudes on a story. But his designs are such an integral part of a film, they become characters in and of themselves. For example, would “Unforgiven” have been as effective without Bumstead’s spare but evocative designs of Eastwood’s desolate, claustrophobic house or the rough-and-tumble frontier town?

Nominated for four Academy Awards, Bumstead has won Oscars for his haunting depiction of 1930s rural Alabama in “To Kill a Mockingbird” (1962) and for bringing to vibrant life the colorful underbelly of Depression-era Chicago in “The Sting” (1973).

Jack De Govia, president of the Art Directors Guild--the terms art director and production designer are essentially interchangeable and often the two will work together on a project--praises the “marvelous ease” of Bumstead’s designs.

“I can’t tell you how splendid and how simple ‘Unforgiven’ was. It was not flashy. It was very strong and very real. There wasn’t a thing there that didn’t serve the story. Even in richer films like ‘The Sting,’ there was something that was soaked in about it. It has real depth. He doesn’t put the curlicues on it. He doesn’t need to make a display. He does what is needful, but he does it completely. There is a wonderful solidity to his images.”

In a youth-obsessed industry, De Govia praises Eastwood for using Bumstead in his films. “Congratulations to Eastwood for seeing what we know--there is absolutely no reason why a talent as broad and capable as his should be wasted at his age.”

“He has a quick mind,” Eastwood says. “When you’ve got someone who is classic like that, why let them go to waste?”

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‘Best Decision of My Life’

Born in Ontario, Bumstead was a high school football player and valedictorian who had a choice of a number of colleges. “I made the best decision of my life. I chose USC because they had an architecture and fine arts course there, and that is what I really wanted to do--draw.”

He began interning at the RKO art department during the summer between his sophomore and junior year. He also landed summer work at Universal with an interior decorator who worked with the studios. The decorator introduced him to art director Hans Dreier (“Sunset Boulevard”), who was one of the top designers at Paramount.

“He was absolutely fantastic,” Bumstead says of Dreier. “He hired me and, boy, I learned so much from him. And then his assistant, Roland Anderson, was Cecil B. DeMille’s art director, and he took me under his wing and I worked for him seven years before I became an art director. Nowadays, people start out as an art director after two or three months, but the thing is, after seven years, I knew my job very well. My first picture was ‘Saigon’ [1948] with Alan Ladd. He was a big star, and from there I was off.”

At Paramount, Bumstead worked almost exclusively for producer Hal Wallis, designing the Jerry Lewis-Dean Martin comedies “My Friend Irma” (1949), “Sailor Beware” (1952) and “Jumping Jacks” (1953) as well as such acclaimed dramas as “Come Back Little Sheba” (1952), “The Bridges at Toko-Ri” (1954) and “Run for Cover” (1955), directed by Nicholas Ray.

Bumstead got his next big break while working on the forgettable 1956 costume drama “The Vagabond King,” directed by Michael Curtiz.

“The cameraman on the picture was Bob Burks, who was Hitch’s cameraman,” he says. “Hitch said to Bob Burks, ‘Do you know any young art directors?’ ” And it just so happened he did. “I went up to see Hitch and he hired me for ‘The Man Who Knew Too Much.’ ”

Bumstead worked with Hitchcock on three more films: “Vertigo” (1958), for which he received an Oscar nomination; “Topaz” (1969); and the director’s last movie, “Family Plot” (1976).

“I had a great relationship with Hitch,” says Bumstead. “Hitch liked the comfort of the stages and that is why he liked the rear-projection process. I think a young art director today who looked at ‘Vertigo’ would ask me what did I do. Because nowadays they would shoot all of those actual locations. But everything was a set.”

Bumstead recalls picking an actual location off the Universal lot for “Family Plot.”

The script called for a night scene at a house that had an attached garage. “I looked for two days for that location,” he says. “The set was all lit and there were 120 people standing around. It was a cool night and Hitchcock’s car pulled up--he always rode in the front seat--and the window went down just so far and he said, ‘What are we doing here? How do you expect me to get a performance out of my actors on a cold night like this?’

“ ‘I think we should do it back in the studio.’ And the limo pulled off.”

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Too Late for Computers

Bumstead isn’t thrilled with the extensive use of computers to create designs and special effects. “I don’t have a computer,” he says. “I don’t have e-mail. It is too late for me. The first time I was really involved in that was on ‘Space Cowboys.’ I worked with ILM [Industrial Light & Magic] on that, so I was able to get through that. I did the designing and then they did all the special effects. Digitally, the things they can do now are unbelievable, but as far as to my liking, they have gone overboard--but that’s just an old man’s opinion.”

Bumstead, who’s married and the father of four grown children, is in pre-production on Eastwood’s next picture, “Mystic River,” a mystery set in Boston. Filming is set to start at the end of September. And Eastwood is planning on keeping Bumstead gainfully employed as long as he wants to work. “I may retire before he does,” 72-year-old Eastwood says with a hearty laugh.