Setting the mood with guts or glitz

As a movie set decorator, Jay Hart has to be part scavenger hunter, part Sherlock Holmes. And if that means scouring dumpsters to find the perfect dressing for a set, Hart doesn’t mind getting his hands dirty.

“I was at Paramount one day walking across the lot and I looked into a dumpster,” says Hart, an Oscar nominee for “L.A. Confidential” and “Pleasantville.” “There were 40 of these white enamel light fixtures that I pulled out and used in a warehouse scene in ‘Coneheads.’ ”

And for “Terminator 3,” he and his crew ventured to metal salvage yards in Long Beach. “We also shop a lot, like at antique shops,” says Hart, who began his career as an interior designer. “Every movie has a different flavor, so it dictates where you are going to shop.”

Hart describes set decorators as the “unsung heroes” of movies because few outside the industry really understand the craft.

“The Secret Life of Sets: Set Decorators at Work,” a new exhibit at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, spotlights the diversity and skill behind the craft.

Organized in association with the Set Decorators’ Society of America, the exhibition in the Academy’s Fourth Floor Gallery features movie sets, behind-the-scenes artwork, photos and film clips from “The Cat in the Hat,” “Van Helsing,” “Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle,” “The Haunted Mansion,” “Down With Love” and the coming “Spider-Man 2.” The Academy’s Grand Lobby Gallery is home to photographs, production drawings, set designs and materials from 14 films, including the coming “Anchorman.”

“The set decorator is much more than a buyer or a shopper or someone who carries out the wishes of the production designer,” says show coordinator Ellen Harrington. “They work with the production designer, but they have a huge array of responsibilities. So much you see [on screen] is really their aesthetic decision.”

“The production designer comes up with the architecture of the space,” Hart explains. “If you are doing an upscale house, they will pick the style of the architecture and we will go out and find everything else. When it works best, it is definitely a collaborative effort.”

For the 1995 film “The Bridges of Madison County,” production designer Jeannine Oppewall first found a farmhouse that had been abandoned for 20 years. Then as set decorator, Hart “basically rebuilt it” with his crew. Because the film took place over several decades, Hart had to rebuild and redress the farmhouse for each era change.

He also attends to much smaller details. For “Spider-Man 2,” he even bought pastries from Canter’s for a delicatessen set.

On a recent morning in the Fourth Floor Gallery, Hart and fellow set decorator Don Diers were busy putting the finishing touches on their installations.

Hart has chosen portions of a bank set from “Spider-Man 2,” including a vibrantly colored painted wall mural and the brass teller lights, as well as mock-ups of newspaper front pages, photos of various sets and the desk from Dr. Octopus’ office. “The sets were really large, so it was hard for us to pick,” he says.

“The bank was kind of this neutral environment and we wanted to create some kind of visual interest,” he says, which led him to add the mural, based on some he found in a lecture hall at the University of West Virginia.

Hart had a $2-million budget on “Spider-Man 2,” a far cry from his first movie job as a production assistant in the art department of the George Romero zombie film, “Day of the Dead.”

“One of my jobs was to go out and get the blood and guts for the zombies to eat,” he says. “We were in a little town [in Pennsylvania] called Beaver Falls. I made friends with a lot of butchers.”

Diers’ installation reflects the distinct styles of the apartments of the two main characters of “Down With Love,” the 2003 spoof of Doris Day-Rock Hudson comedies. He’s showcasing the pink, perky, virginal living room of the equally perky and virginal writer Barbara, and the lair-esque living room of Catcher, a bachelor magazine reporter. “There was a whole universe we were creating,” says Diers, who graduated from UCLA’s film school looking to direct.

Besides illustrating the film’s kitschy design scheme through photographs of the sets, Diers has brought props including a teardrop hanging lamp decorated in pink silk, a vintage Smith Corona typewriter and a boxy, dark turquoise leather chair from Catcher’s den of iniquity.

Anything in the apartments “had to be like a theatrical device that would say something about the period or how Hollywood made the movies then,” Diers says. “We had a very designed film. It was production designer Andrew Laws’ decision that her apartment was pink and white and then Catcher’s universe was a little more mysterious and darker. He had more gadgets.”

Diers, who was an art director for a decade before he became a set decorator, finds set decorating to be the more personal of the two skill sets. Architecture and construction, he says, have less appeal for him than the humans who inhabit them. “I am much more into who are the people, what is the character like and what kind of things do they have,” he says. Spoken like a true set decorator.

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‘The Secret Life of Sets: Set Decorators at Work’

Where: Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 8949 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills

When: Tuesdays through Fridays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; weekends, noon to 6 p.m.

Ends: Aug. 15

Price: Free

Contact: (310) 247-3600 or go to www.oscars.org