William Cameron Menzies: The Shape of Films to Come by James Curtis
Showbiz biographies tend to be written about a limited number of the same famous names and—in the case of names associated with Hollywood—the same two jobs, namely movie star and director. James Curtis has written about both (Spencer Tracy and James Whale, respectively) but in his latest biography, published last year by Pantheon Books, he focuses on somebody whose name may never have appeared above a title, but made just as sizable a contribution to much-loved movies—if not more so—as his celebrity coworkers.
As alluded to by Curtis’s subtitle, The Shape of Films to Come, William Cameron Menzies did direct some movies, including the sci-fi classics Things to Come and Invaders from Mars. He’s best known, however, as a production designer—a job description that Curtis reports was first coined expressly for Menzies, by super-producer David O. Selznick. It was for the sake of the project both of them went down in the proverbial history books for—Gone with the Wind—and Curtis amply documents the stylistic fingerprints Menzies left all over it, and plenty of other well-loved titles (The Thief of Baghdad, The Pride of the Yankees, Around the World in 80 Days.) To this end, the book contains plenty of handsome reproductions of Menzies’s production sketches. It also has a refreshing sense of the unglamorous hard work that went into them.
