AT HOME WITH: Jeannine Oppewall; Thoroughbred Modern
FOR 10 years Jeannine Oppewall lived in a dark one-bedroom bungalow built here during World War II for aircraft workers at McDonnell Douglas. And, she said, for those 10 years, she never invited anyone over. Nor did she consider this behavior odd. Ms. Oppewall, who designed the sets for 'Seabiscuit,' was raised a Calvinist and accepted a certain level of austerity in life. 'Jeannine and I both came from a background where our churches looked like courtrooms,' said the director Paul Schrader, her former husband.
It was only three years ago, after she had received Academy Award nominations for the movies 'L.A. Confidential' and 'Pleasantville,' that she decided to tear the bungalow down and build a bigger place. But she had one requirement. 'I did not want my house to conflict with my furniture,' she said.
The furniture, bought when she was in her early 20's and worked for Charles and Ray Eames, is in vogue all over again, and her house was designed to complement it. A few weeks before the opening of 'Seabiscuit,' Ms. Oppewall, with her Dutch-girl haircut, was seated in an Eames chair at her Eames dining-room table, dressed in a black top, khaki pants and black thick-soled sandals.
One suspects that her closet would reveal a rainbow of colors from black to white and beige. She enunciates words so exactly you might think she was getting paid by the syllable.
'Nothing here was meant to be exotic,' she said, referring to her house, a simple, three-bedroom Neutra-inspired split-level that she designed with the help of Scott Prentice, an architect friend. It has lots of windows, pale walls and both cork and concrete floors. The grounds are landscaped with dusky-green plants (no flowers, please), and the backyard holds a vegetable garden and a studio full of research materials that Ms. Oppewall used on films like 'Catch Me if You Can,' 'Wonder Boys' and 'The Bridges of Madison County.'
Since 1981 ('Blow Out') Ms. Oppewall, who appears to be comfortably in her 50's, has given texture and realism to more than 30 films, moving from set decorator to art director to production designer. A production designer, she said, is responsible for everything an actor walks in front of, sits on, drives through or picks up. She oversees the finding of locations and the design and construction of sets and interiors, from curtains and carpets to chairs and lamps.
In one sense she operates as a detective, extrapolating from the dialogue in the script and then creating, in excruciating era-specific detail, everything around the characters, including the period-appropriate off-white color of the bandages on Seabiscuit's wounded leg. 'What I do for a living is not dissimilar from what an actor does,' Ms. Oppewall said. 'I have a different set of tools, but it's the same process. The reason that it's fun to design sets is that it allows you to try on personalities that you'd never otherwise experience.'
It seemed fair to ask Ms. Oppewall what she thinks someone looking at her house might deduce about the person who resides there. 'Someone might say the person who lives here is cold and hard,' she said evenly. 'And I do have a minimal personality. I am not warm and fuzzy. I need aesthetic stimulation, not physical comfort.'
She gestured toward one of her many hardwood chairs. 'Friends say, 'Jeannine, you sure have a big collection of uncomfortable furniture.' But they think that furniture is to flop on or bounce on or put your feet on, and that's not my feeling.'
Gary Ross, the director of both 'Pleasantville' and 'Seabiscuit,' sees Ms. Oppewall as a dichotomy. 'Jeannine doesn't suffer fools gladly, and she hasn't suffered me gladly when I've been a fool,' he said. 'She's fastidious, restrained and refined, and yet she has this impulsive side where she just takes off and chases butterflies.' (He means it literally: she is a world-traveled amateur lepidopterist.)
Ms. Oppewall was raised in Uxbridge, Mass.; her mother was from French-speaking Canada, and her father, who worked in a textile factory, was from the Netherlands. Ms. Oppewall set out to be the family intellectual. After she graduated from Calvin College, a liberal Christian school in Grand Rapids, Mich., she studied medieval history at Bryn Mawr. While there, in a class on the history of modern art, she saw Charles Eames's furniture for the first time and abandoned the 14th century for the 20th. 'I was so attracted by the contemporary feeling, the shapely sexy lines -- totally different from the Sears, Roebuck middle-class stuff I'd grown up with,' she said. 'I looked at it and said, 'This is me.' '
Master's degree in hand, she moved to Los Angeles with her husband, Mr. Schrader, whom she had met at Calvin College. He, fascinated by Eames films like 'Powers of 10,' was writing a magazine article about the Eameses and arranged a job interview for her. 'I was 22,' Ms. Oppewall said. She started by answering phones at the Eames studio in Venice, and in seven years she was helping design and organize Eames museum exhibits. Charles Eames 'saw something in me I didn't know was there,' she said. She was also able to buy Eames furniture at cost.
'One of the reasons I was so comfortable working with Charles Eames,' she said, 'was that Charles was comfortable working for the Herman Miller furniture company, and that company was owned by a bunch of people from the Christian Reformed Church whose philosophy is that less is more, simple is better and cleanliness is next to godliness, and that, as it applies to the design world, was very appealing.'
Mr. Schrader wrote 'Taxi Driver,' and eventually directed his first film, 'Hardcore,' in 1979, after they divorced. He gave Ms. Oppewall credit as a 'project consultant,' and her film career began. She has worked on films set in the present like 'The Big Easy' as well as films like 'Catch Me if You Can,' which covers the 1960's, and 'Seabiscuit,' which takes place in the 1930's. But she has never done production design that has allowed her to put an Eames chair in the frame.
Greg Hoblit, director of 'Primal Fear,' which she also designed, appreciates her flexibility. 'While she may prefer a world in which less is more,' he said, 'she can still create an opulent and gooey world that is appropriate for someone unlike her.'
She considers period films particularly difficult. Rather than put things in, she said, you spend a great deal of time taking things out -- air-conditioners, reflectors that run down the middle of the street, cars of the wrong vintage and satellite dishes.
Period movies also require research. For instance, part of 'Seabiscuit' is set in Tijuana during Prohibition. 'A Tijuana Historical Society didn't exactly exist back then,' she said. She and her staff had to consult vintage postcards.
So convincing are her sets that occasionally they supersede reality. At the Santa Anita racetrack, the owners liked her design for the tote board so much that they wanted to keep it. 'I have to explain, we do scenery,' she said. 'You don't want to be here six months from now, because it won't last that long.'
Even Hollywood stars sometimes forget that. For 'Seabiscuit,' she built the rustic Howard ranch in California out of fir planks in a style the crew labeled 'parkitecture.' When Jeff Bridges, who plays Charles Howard, Seabiscuit's owner, walked in and looked around, he told her, 'I want to buy the whole thing and ship it to my property in Montana.' She said, 'Come around the back.'
'Look at it,' she said. 'It's just a set. It's not meant to last.'
He did not care, but the set could not be disassembled. 'It was built as a one-time shot,' she said. 'Bring in the bulldozers.'
Ms. Oppewall typically works on a film project for nine months: nine months of 14-hour days examining every speck of visual nuance. When she comes home, she wants to be surrounded by unclutter. 'I had all these built-ins made so I could hide my clutter,' she said. 'I didn't want to see my radio or albums or DVD player or CD's. And I especially didn't want a giant Cyclops of a television dominating the room.'
From her upstairs windows she can look across the street to a public golf course, where she thinks it is a safe bet that she will 'always be able to see green leafy things.' For the woman who designed a movie meant to provide heart-pounding thrills on the racetrack, a big thrill at home is picking fresh green beans from her backyard garden and steaming them. 'I put in just a little, tiny, weeny amount of butter so you can hardly taste it,' she said. 'I like things pretty plain.'
The Rewards Of Vigilance
During the filming of 'Catch Me if You Can,' Jeannine Oppewall was trying to make a warehouse in Pomona, Calif., look like a print shop in northern France when she decided to break for lunch. And there, in a store window, was a rare cowhide-covered Eames chair, below, that she determined would do well in her own living room. 'I sped through the door, I knew right away what it was,' she said, adding that she got a good price (less than $1,000). Finding a prized chair at a Pomona store, Futures Collide (909-865-2705), was a reward for keeping her antennas out at all times. When in Los Angeles, Ms. Oppewall scouts Skank World (323-939-7858), Fat Chance (323-930-1960) and Modernica (323-933-0383). And when a midcentury piece needs, say, new upholstery, Ms. Oppewall turns to Hume Modern Furniture Restoration in Venice, Calif. (www.humemodern.com). For stained fiberglass chairs, she advises using fiberglass cleaner from a boat-supply store. Ms. Oppewall has reached a point where she passes on even the best stuff. 'If I came home with another piece, I don't know what I'd do with it,' she said. 'Hang it from the ceiling?'
JAMIE DIAMOND
At Home With Jeannine Oppewall