Hollywood had to look lived in, capable of handling traffic, work, and leisure. That requirement made its reconstruction more complex than simply reproducing facades.
Barbara Ling was the production designer for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. She shared the 2020 Academy Award for production design for the film with set decorator Nancy Haigh. The recognition reflects two complementary responsibilities: conceiving and organizing the story’s spaces, and making its material life concrete through decor and objects. Presenting the work as a reconstruction carried out by a single person would erase a fundamental part of how it was made.
The film is set mainly in Los Angeles during 1969. Ling and her team were working on a contemporary city that had preserved some places and transformed many others. The challenge was to make existing buildings, visual restorations, and recreated spaces coexist within the same urban experience. Viewers needed to be able to move from a road to a restaurant or a house without feeling that each fragment belonged to a different movie.
A city in motion, not a motionless display
Hollywood Boulevard appears as a street used by characters who drive, walk, and make decisions. That mobility multiplies the demands of design. A background that works from a fixed position can reveal signs of another era when the camera changes location. Facades, signs, and storefronts need to respond to specific routes. Historical reconstruction has a spatial dimension that reference photographs alone cannot resolve.
In her interview with Awards Daily, Ling explained that contemporary construction and demolition made it difficult to recover that urban landscape. The detail helps explain the nature of the work: it was not enough to find an old location and film it. They had to study what remained, what needed to be changed, and which part of the city could only be recovered through deeper intervention. Research continually ran up against the material conditions of the present.
Movie theaters occupy a particularly important place. Their marquees announce showtimes and turn films into public events. For Sharon, entering a theater showing a work she is part of links professional image and personal experience. For the viewer, the building situates that experience within a specific exhibition culture. The city shows cinema as work, as business, and as a way to spend the afternoon.
There are also signs and businesses that appear during brief drives. Their short screen time does not make them irrelevant: they help build continuity between longer scenes. An urban journey needs signs that show life exists beyond the places where the action pauses. The guide to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood makes it possible to follow how those movements connect characters who rarely share the same knowledge of the city.
Rick, Cliff, and Sharon live in different worlds
Rick Dalton’s house expresses a particular relationship to success. It offers comfort and reminders of a career he fears losing. His home makes it possible to imagine a material stability that contrasts with his professional insecurity. The objects tied to his public image do not have to function as automatic signs of vanity: they can also work as proof of continuity for someone who needs to convince himself he still belongs in the industry.
Cliff lives in a much more modest space. The difference between the two places makes visible an inequality that friendship does not erase. Rick has a house tied to his social position; Cliff organizes his life around more limited resources and an uncertain working relationship. The design makes that difference understandable without a financial breakdown of their income. Scale, location, and the use of objects already convey the information.
Sharon’s surroundings suggest a different energy: a life that seems to be moving toward new possibilities. Geographic proximity to Rick does not create equivalence. Two neighbors can inhabit the same residential landscape from opposite professional moments. The film uses that closeness to connect expectations, and the spaces help sustain it without turning the characters into overly simple illustrations of success or decline.
Spahn Ranch radically changes the perception of the world. Its structures tied to Western spectacle are presented as a threatening place of coexistence. What could once function as a fictional set now contains a community whose rules Cliff does not know. The design preserves the site’s material condition and lets its current use alter its meaning. Cinema’s industrial past remains, but it no longer guarantees familiarity or safety.
Historical research and the needs of fiction
Ling had previously worked on films with period reconstructions, among them The Doors. That experience does not make the two visions of Los Angeles interchangeable. Each story selects different areas, activities, and details. Hollywood needs a city compatible with the viewer’s cultural memory and with the specific experience of its characters. Fidelity to a reference does not by itself solve a space’s dramatic function.
The cinematography of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood then transforms those spaces through light, lenses, and framing. A restored facade can receive a warm light that suggests a comforting memory or be integrated into a more unsettling sequence. Ling’s design and Haigh’s decoration provide a material foundation for those choices. Their contribution is recognized in a city where the history of cinema seems to continue into the streets, while different lives still try to find a place within it.
More information: Tarantino's technical crew.