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The Alamo Drafthouse Cinema will be screening a restored version of The Red Shoes (1948) on Thursday, August 5. Through August 1, visitors to the Making Movies exhibition can view Hein Heckroth’s storyboards for The Red Shoes and a “picture script” from the movie.

Hein Heckroth was a Surrealist painter and set designer who lived and worked in Germany in the years after World War I.  Building on the then-radical theories of Edward Gordon Craig and Adolphe Appia, he earned an international reputation working with the Kurt Jooss dance company creating avant-garde sets and costumes for their productions.

In 1933, Heckroth left Germany when he was blacklisted by the Nazis for refusing to leave his Jewish wife, the artist Ada Maier.  They moved to England where Heckroth designed operas for Kurt Weill, Carl Ebert, and others, and continued working with the Jooss dance company, which had also moved to England.  In 1943, production designer Vincent Korda saw Heckroth’s design work in a stage production of War and Peace and hired him to work on Gabriel Pascal’s film Caesar and Cleopatra (1945).  Soon he was recruited by Alfred Junge, the head designer for The Archers, the production unit founded by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.  There he designed costumes for A Matter of Life and Death (1947) and Black Narcissus (1949). 

Given his experience with avant-garde theater and designing for dance, he was the natural choice for production designer for The Red Shoes. Powell and Pressburger gave him enormous freedom to experiment, and he created beautiful surreal sets and costumes with materials such as chiffon, gauze, and cellophane.  His stunning designs for The Red Shoes won him an Oscar for color art direction in 1948.

These two designs and the “picture script” for the dance sequence in The Red Shoes come from the collection of Heckroth’s colleague Edward Carrick, another important production designer in England at the time.

Storyboard of dancer in 'The Red Shoes.'

‘Arthur Miller’ by Christopher Bigsby

Christopher Bigsby, a professor of American Studies and the Director of the Arthur Miller Centre at the University of East Anglia, has written extensively about Arthur Miller. He recently published a biography on the playwright, Arthur Miller (Harvard University Press, 2009), and he writes here about working at the Ransom Center.

I have been visiting the Harry Ransom Center for more than 30 years, most recently working on Arthur Miller’s papers, though the staff there must have been somewhat irritated when Miller held back boxes of materials so that I could work through them to write his biography. It delayed their arrival in Austin by nearly two years. You will even find among them a page bearing a…

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A recent project to reorganize some materials in the papers of British author Compton Mackenzie (1883–1972) brought to light specimens of traditional Nepalese handmade paper serving in a most prosaic capacity.

During the late 1920s and early 1930s, Mackenzie travelled widely and at one point was contacted while in the remote Himalayan kingdom of Nepal by a London publisher. The message from London arrived via New Delhi, India, in the form of a telegram and asked if Mackenzie would consider a “biography of Churchill” upon completion of his present commitment. Unless the biography sought was to be a brief piece for a newspaper or periodical, it would appear it was never written by Mackenzie.

So, in a sense, the telegram was just one more of those numberless pieces of paper that the active life of a published author produces, and a creative dead end at that. But this telegram was very different from most others in that it was written out on paper unlike any I have ever seen.

The form was printed in Devanagari script on two sheets and was accompanied by three more unused blanks. The paper is called lokta and is prepared by hand from fibers obtained from the bark of the Nepalese lokta tree (Daphne cannabina). While lokta paper manufacture requires much the same general techniques as traditional Western handmade paper, the present specimens exhibit a faint but uniform criss-cross design when held up to the light rather than the distinct chain-and-wire lines of their Western equivalents. The finished product is said to be durable and resistant to insect damage.

The sheets in the Mackenzie papers are remarkable for their texture and appearance, exhibiting bits of bark and small twigs worked into the fabric of the paper, dramatic whorls of lokta fiber here and there, and even occasional voids in the paper’s surface. The paper is a mottled pale tan in color and more nearly translucent than opaque. It seems to have been lightly treated during manufacture with sizing, so has a feel more like cloth than traditional paper. The effect is at once one of extreme primitiveness of technique, and yet, at the same time, one of remarkable beauty.

A web search provided several brief histories of lokta paper, which indicate that it was employed by the Nepalese government until the 1950s for its official correspondence and that it continues to find a role there in the preparation of certain classes of documents. Use of the paper is on the decline in Nepal as it is being displaced by conventional machine-made papers, but there is a substantial international market for it among those attracted by its remarkable texture and appearance.

This telegram to Compton Mackenzie was written out in an English hand on two sheets of a paper known as lokta, which is prepared by hand from fibers obtained from the bark of the Nepalese lokta tree.

Costumes in the Ransom Center’s ‘Making Movies’ exhibition. Photo by Anthony Maddaloni.

The Harry Ransom Center’s exhibitions Making Movies and ¡Viva! Mexico’s Independence close Sunday, August 1.

Featuring items from the Ransom Center’s extensive film collections, Making Movies reveals the collaborative nature of the filmmaking process and focuses on how the artists involved—from writers to directors, actors to cinematographers—transform the written word into moving image.

If you can’t visit the exhibition before it closes, view a video interview with Associate Curator of Film Steve Wilson discussing how the Ransom Center’s holdings document the history of the motion picture industry.

¡Viva! Mexico’s Independence showcases materials from the Ransom Center’s collections including the 1529 document appointing Hernán Cortés Captain General of New Spain; unpublished letters exchanged between Ferdinand Maximilian, Emperor…

Costume worn by Robert De Niro in ‘Casino.’ Photo by Anthony Maddaloni.

The Making Movies Film Series runs throughout the summer and features films that are highlighted in the Making Movies exhibition. Tonight, the Ransom Center will screen Martin Scorsese’s Casino (1995), starring Robert De Niro, Sharon Stone, and Joe Pesci. Throughout the series, Cultural Compass will highlight an exhibition item related to each film.

A story of greed, violence, deception, money, and power, Casino is set amid the world of gangsters in 1970s Las Vegas. It is the eighth film of a remarkable series of collaborations between actor Robert De Niro and director Martin Scorsese.

A film based on true events, Casino stars De Niro as Sam “Ace” Rothstein, a character based on…

Photographic Archivist Mary Alice Harper works with the Magnum Photos Collection. Photo by Linda Briscoe Myers.

As is the case with any incoming collection, the Magnum Photos collection came with its own unique set of challenges. Ransom Center Curator of Photography David Coleman and I have worked to develop and implement a strategy for making the collection accessible to researchers in a timely and organized manner.

Creating the preliminary inventory
The agreement between MSD Capital, the owner of the collection, and the Ransom Center places the Magnum collection at the Center for at least five years and stipulates the photographs be made available. Desiring to open the collection as quickly as possible, the curator and I devised a two-phase approach for cataloging it.

The…

Page 1 of Ernest Lehman’s notes about a meeting with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton about ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ Click image to enlarge.

The Making Movies Film Series runs throughout the summer and features films that are highlighted in the Making Movies exhibition. Tonight, the Ransom Center will screen Mike Nichols’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Throughout the series, Cultural Compass will highlight an exhibition item related to each film.

Edward Albee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? opened on Broadway in 1962 and gained notoriety for its profanity and sexual themes. It was selected for the 1963 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, but the trustees of Columbia University overruled the advisory committee and awarded no prize…

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The Ransom Center’s exhibition Making Movies explores the collaborative processes that take place behind the scenes in filmmaking.  For another two weeks, visitors have the opportunity to see original materials from the Center’s film collections in the exhibition, which demonstrates the responsibilities of those involved in films, ranging from the producer to the special effects designer.

One portion of the special effects section highlights special effects techniques devised by Norman Dawn (1886–1975) in cinema’s earliest years. Dawn was a little-known yet historically significant early special effects cinematographer, inventor, artist, and motion picture director, writer, and producer. He worked with several important film pioneers, including Mack Sennett, Carl Laemmle, Irving Thalberg, and Erich von Stroheim.

The Dawn collection at the Ransom Center consists of 164 display cards that illustrate over 230 of the 861 special effects that Dawn created in more than 80 movies.  Each display card documents one of his special effects, most often a refinement or improvement of a matte shot process. Information about Dawn’s experiences working with various studios and managers such as Universal’s William Sistrom and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s (MGM) Louis B. Mayer are also noted.

The display cards could easily be interpreted and viewed as pieces of art, assembled and constructed personally from Dawn’s own field notebooks and methodical records.

The cards contain original oil, watercolor, pencil, and ink sketches used to sell the effects to skeptical film executives and directors; production and personal photographs; detailed camera records; film clips and frame enlargements; movie reviews, advertisements, and other trade press clippings; explanatory texts and recent sketches to illustrate his methods; and pages from an unpublished autobiography.

Norman Dawn's special effect card for 'Master of Women'

Publicity poster for 'Detour'

The Making Movies Film Series runs throughout the summer and features films that are highlighted in the Making Movies exhibition. Tonight, the Ransom Center will screen Edgar G. Ulmer’s Detour

Kent Adamson, who has written a biography on Ann Savage, writes about Savage’s connections to Texas and why Detour is still loved by critics.

Since its original release in 1945, Detour has become possibly the most famous and critically examined B-film of all time. In the Los Angeles Times, Kevin Thomas called Detour “one of the most relentlessly intense psychological thrillers anyone has ever filmed.” Roger Ebert in his “Great Films” series says, “It lives on, an…

A selection of discs from Denis Johnson’s collection. The handwritten note points out that ‘These discs are the only copies of any drafts from before 1992.’ Photo by Anthony Maddaloni.

As an avid reader of Denis Johnson’s work (I bought my first Playboy magazine to read Nobody Move in serial form), I was thrilled to have the opportunity to go through his papers. Seeing Johnson speak at the 2008 Flair Symposium, “Creating a Usable Past: Writers, Archives, & Institutions,” had amplified, for me at least, the desire to know as much as one can about a favorite author. Flair’s intimate venue and Johnson’s candidness about his own archive gave mystique to his lost work and to what he has decided to…