Hollywood had to look inhabited, able to receive traffic, work and leisure. That requirement made its reconstruction something more complex than reproducing facades.
Barbara Ling was the production designer for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. She shared the production design Oscar awarded in 2020 for this film with set decorator Nancy Haigh. The recognition distinguishes two complementary responsibilities: conceiving and organising the story’s spaces, and making their material life concrete through decoration and objects. Presenting the work as a reconstruction carried out by one person would erase a fundamental part of how it was made.
The film is set mainly in Los Angeles in 1969. Ling and her team were working on a contemporary city that still preserved some places and had transformed many others. The difficulty lay in making existing buildings, visual restorations and recreated spaces coexist within the same urban experience. The viewer had to be able to move from a road to a restaurant or a house without feeling that each fragment belonged to a different film.
A city in motion, not a static showpiece
Hollywood Boulevard appears as a street used by characters who drive, walk and make decisions. That mobility multiplies the demands of design. A backdrop that works from a fixed position can reveal traces of another era when the camera changes position. Frontages, signs and shop windows 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 recovering that urban landscape more complicated. The point helps to explain the nature of the work: it was not enough to find an old location and film it. It was necessary to study what remained, what had to be transformed and which part of the city could only be recovered through a deeper intervention. Research was continually running up against the material conditions of the present.
The cinemas occupy a particularly important place. Their marquees announce programmes and turn films into public events. For Sharon, entering a cinema showing a work she has a part in links professional image and personal experience. For the viewer, the building places that experience within a particular exhibition culture. The city shows cinema as a job, a business and a way of spending the afternoon.
There are also signs and businesses that appear during brief journeys. Their short duration does not make them irrelevant: they help build continuity between longer scenes. An urban journey needs signs that indicate there is life 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 inhabit different worlds
Rick Dalton’s house expresses a particular relationship with success. It has the comfort and memories of a career he fears losing. His home makes it possible to imagine a material stability that contrasts with his professional insecurity. The objects associated with his public image do not automatically have to signify vanity: they can also act as proof of continuity for someone who needs to persuade himself that 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 organises his life around more limited resources and an uncertain working relationship. The design allows that difference to be understood without a financial breakdown of their incomes. Scale, location and the use of objects already convey information.
Sharon’s surroundings suggest a different energy: a life that seems to be moving towards new possibilities. Geographic proximity to Rick does not produce equivalence. Two neighbours 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 triumph or decline.
Spahn Ranch radically changes the perception of the world. Its western spectacle-related structures are presented as a threatening place of cohabitation. What may once have functioned as a fiction set now contains a community whose rules Cliff does not know. The design preserves the site’s material condition and allows its current use to alter its meaning. The film industry’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 recreations, including 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 particular experience of its characters. Fidelity to a reference does not by itself resolve the dramatic function of a space.
The cinematography of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood then transforms those spaces through light, lenses and framing. A restored frontage can receive a warm light that suggests a comforting memory, or it can be incorporated into a more unsettling journey. Ling’s design and Haigh’s decoration provide a material basis for those decisions. Their contribution is recognised in a city where the history of cinema seems to continue in the streets, while different lives still try to find a place within it.
More information: Tarantino technical crew.