The Sunday Read: ‘The Genius Behind Hollywood’s Most Indelible Sets’

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 22 October 2023

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Kihekah Avenue cuts through the town of Pawhuska, Okla., roughly north to south, forming the only corridor you might call a “business district” in the town of 2,900. Standing in the middle is a small TV-and-appliance store called Hometown, which occupies a two-story brick building and hasn’t changed much in decades. Boards cover its second-story windows, and part of the sign above its awning is broken, leaving half the lettering intact, spelling “Home.” One winter day in February 2021, Jack Fisk stood before Hometown with Martin Scorsese, explaining how beautiful it could be. For much of the last week, he and Scorsese had been walking around Pawhuska, scouting set locations for the director’s 28th feature film, “Killers of the Flower Moon.” The film, which is based on David Grann’s best-selling book, chronicles the so-called 1920s Reign of Terror, when the Osage Nation’s discovery of oil made them some of the richest people in the world but also the target of a conspiracy among white people seeking to kill them for their shares of the mineral rights. To render the events as accurately as possible, Scorsese had decided to film the movie in Osage County. It would be a sprawling, technically complicated shoot, with much of the undertaking falling to Fisk. Unlike production designers who use soundstages or computer-generated imagery, he prefers to build from scratch or to remodel period buildings, and even more than most of his peers, he aspires to exacting historical detail. His task would be to create a full-scale replica of a 1920s boom town atop what remains of 2020s Pawhuska.

Transcript

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0:00.0	My name is Noah Gallagher Shannon, I'm a contributor to the New York Times magazine.
0:11.6	This week's Sunday read is a profile I wrote for the magazine about a guy named Jack
0:16.3	Fisk and his work on the new Martin Scorsese film, Killers of the Flower Moon.
0:23.7	Jack is the master production designer behind many of Hollywood's art tour directors, from
0:28.4	Paul Thomas Anderson and David Lynch to Terrence Malik, Alejandro Yneritu and Brian DePaul Ma.
0:37.2	Production designers are among the most important but often underappreciated people on a movie set.
0:44.0	Jack's job is to be the visual conduit for the director, to manifest the physical realities in which
0:50.0	these films exist. And so, Jack is responsible for finding locations for the film's backdrops,
0:57.2	building the sets, and populating those sets with furniture, props, and anything else that might
1:03.1	help kind of speak to the thematic elements of the movie. But what makes Jack such a legend
1:09.8	in Hollywood is how he's able to bring the American past back to us in such a fully immersive
1:15.5	and imaginative way. To him, too many period paces these days just feel kind of smoothed over.
1:24.5	Everyone's a little too clean, the buildings look a little too gleaming.
1:29.1	And so he tries to show how imperfect messy the world actually was back then, through unexpected
1:35.5	details. That could mean building a hundred-foot tall oil derrick for there will be blood,
1:41.9	or a Victorian mansion for days of heaven, or a 17th century fort in the new world.
1:48.8	And for Killers of the Flower Moon, which was shot on location in Oklahoma,
1:53.9	Jack basically built an entire replica of the town of Fairfax, atop the very real town of Pahuska.
2:03.4	Killers of the Flower Moon is the story of the Osage people who were forcibly removed to a
2:08.8	reservation. Around the turn of the century, oil was discovered on the reservation,
2:14.8	which made the Osage some of the richest per capita people in the world at the time.
2:20.7	But then, some of the Osage, one after another, began mysteriously dying.
	...

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