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P E R S P E C T I V E | M AY / J U N E 2 0 1 6 37 Excerpt reprinted courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences ® Opposite page: Mr. Allen in the upstairs reading room at the Margaret Herrick Library with various items from his personal papers, recently donated to the Academy ® . Below: The 37th Academy Award ® for Art Direction (Color) was given to MY FAIR LADY (1964). Here are presenter Macdonald Carey, Gene Allen, set decorator George James Hopkins and presenter Elizabeth Ashley. Mr. Allen was interviewed between 2007–2013 by Douglas Bell for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Oral History Program. The following is an excerpt from Bell's introduction to the 1,424-page oral history. Eugene "Gene" Allen was born in 1918, in what was then the Eastlake Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, today known as Lincoln Park. Gene was the son of one of the top policemen in the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), W.C. "Butch" Allen. His father was a particular inspiration for the Warner Bros. film, Bureau of Missing Persons, even to the extent that the character played by Pat O'Brien was given the moniker "Butch." Thus did Gene spend his youth, during the 1920s, from a special vantage point amid the small privileges, sizable tensions and pride of an LA policeman's family. Yet, after moving from Eastlake to newer suburbs near Wilshire and Fairfax, and even subsequent to his father's retirement from the LAPD, Gene remained interested in police work. Before embarking on his own police career, Gene attended John Burroughs Junior High School, and graduated from Fairfax High School in 1936. His elder brother, Donald, had already caught on at Warner Bros., in Burbank, as a construction hand. Donald helped young Gene land some odd jobs on this lot, including a stint as an extra, circa 1933, in William Wellman's Wild Boys of the Road. Gene also worked on construction and maintenance crews, and was a member of the labor gang that helped to save Warner Bros. Studio from rising Los Angeles River floodwaters in 1934. He also attended Santa Monica Junior College for a semester, prior to returning to motion pictures in a new capacity. It was his circa 1937 job as an Art Department "blueprint boy" which served as the true starting point of Mr. Allen's illustrious film career. In the Warner Bros. Art Department—supervised by Anton Grot during this era— were some of the top Production Designers in US films, exemplified by such artists as Robert Haas and Carl Weyl. Mr. Allen befriended a number of the fine sketch artists in the department, such as Fritz Willis and Joseph Demers. In the course of doing so, talented young Mr. Allen had suddenly defined a new ambition: he had always liked to draw pictures, but he now planned to become a sketch artist for the cinema. Among the initial Warner Bros. productions in which Mr. Allen was involved as a blueprint boy were The Adventures of Robin Hood, Juarez and The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex. The Academy Oral History Program was established in 1989 to document the lives and careers of individuals who have made significant contributions to the history of motion pictures. More information about these interviews and Academy Oral History Projects can be found at Oscars .org/Oral-History Photograph © A.M.P. A.S.