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64 P E R S P E C T I V E | M A R C H / A P R I L 2 0 1 6 reshoots "Many film designers begin their training in live theater, and no single theater designer had more influence on the birth and early growth of motion picture design than Robert Edmond Jones. Every early Art Director, from Wilfred Buckland to Natacha Rambova, studied his work and emulated it to greater and lesser degrees. Born in Milton, New Hampshire, "Bobby" Jones attended Harvard University and in 1913, sailed with several friends to Europe to study the new stagecraft with Edward Gordon Craig in Florence. The school in Florence would not accept Jones so he went to Berlin instead, and spent a year in informal study with Max Reinhardt's Deutsches Theater. There he developed his personal expressionistic visual style, often referred to as simplified realism, which combined bold vivid use of color and simple, yet dramatic, lighting. Mr. Jones brought this style to many live productions and his innovative Broadway designs for THE PHILADELPHIA STORY (1937), OTHELLO (1943) and THE ICEMAN COMETH (1946) were closely echoed when each of those stories were reconceived on film by other designers. Mr. Jones was also the Production Designer himself for some early three-color Technicolor films, such as LA CUCARACHA (1934) and BECKY SHARP (1935), for which he also designed the costumes. Jones published many books and articles on theater design in the course of his career including DRAWINGS FOR THE THEATRE (1925) and THE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION (1941), considered the definitive work on modern stage design in the first half of the twentieth century (see In Print on page 58). He died in the house he was born in on Thanksgiving Day, 1954. "We must seek not for self-expression or for performance for its own sake, but only to establish the dramatist's intention, knowing that when we have succeeded in doing so, audiences will say to themselves, not, This is beautiful, This is charming, This is splendid, but—This is true." —Robert Edmond Jones