Cedric Gibbons
Hollywood
Art Director

Throughout film history there have been many men and women who have toiled in the Hollywood vineyards as art directors, but none have ever matched the level of high productivity as Cedric Gibbons (1893 – 1960). Indeed, he is remembered as the “dean” of art directors who stood head and shoulders above all others during Hollywood’s Golden Age; between 1912 and 1956 there were hundreds movies that bore his thumbprint – winning Oscars for 39 of them (he was also one of the aesthetes who designed that award).

Illustrated by four photographs of his sets from the early Thirties, the attached article appeared mid-way through his career:

“At the Metro-Goldwyn studios in Culver City, just a few short miles from Hollywood, Mr. Gibbons rules supreme as art director. He is at the head of an intricately organized group of technical experts and artisans, numbering nearly two thousand individuals, and is responsible for the artistic investiture and pattern of some fifty or more feature films per annum… Mr. Gibbons knows the problems of designing for the camera from the ground up – a wholly different problem from that of the theater, since all effects have to considered from the point of view of the one-eyed camera…”