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132 P E R S P E C T I V E | J A N UA RY / F E B R UA RY 2 0 1 7 milestones Below: Paul Sylbert received the Oscar ® in 1978 for Warren Beatty's HEAVEN CAN WAIT, in part because of this memorable image of God's cloudy waiting room where Beatty sees passengers board a Concorde jet bound for heaven. Paul arrived in Hollywood at a time when the look of studio films was becoming predictable and tired, many of the movies retreating to soundstages. "Hollywood fell asleep; the vessel was empty," he told the Times in 1990. "They were doing things by rote." Paul and Richard were among the most sought-after Production Designers in the business from the late 1950s through the '90s, when directors like Warren Beatty, Roman Polanski, Robert Benton and John Frankenheimer went looking for someone to capture the visual core of a movie. An interest in directing, writing and participation in the Actors Studio led to Mr. Sylbert living and working in Athens, Greece, where he directed and designed sets, costumes and lighting. During and after this three-year period, he designed, costumed and directed operas for the New York City Opera Company and the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy, was the NBC color consultant, designed four features and directed his first feature film, Pao de Asucar, in Brasil. "Putting a film together is like composing music or painting on a white canvas," Mr. Sylbert told the Times. "Every addition affects the whole." Which would explain why he went to the trouble to track down furniture covered with cigarette burns for the apartment of the chain-smoking police inspector in Gorky Park or why his brother purchased three hundred books—handpicked Hemingway novels, Harvard classics, feminist Georgian poets—for a single shot of the bookshelves in a home library in Without a Trace. Paul would go on to design Robert Benton's Bad Company (1972), Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) and Nadine (1987); Milos Forman's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975); Mike Nichols' Biloxi Blues (1988); and two films helmed by Nichols' former comedy partner Elaine May: Mikey & Nicky (1976) and Ishtar (1987). When he was working on Rush, the story of two desperate cops hopelessly chasing after an elusive drug dealer, Sylbert spent weeks searching for a neighborhood—preferably on the outskirts of Houston—that would capture the dark edges of the moody 1991 film. He settled on a badly rutted road with ditch water rolling over the curbs and rusted barbed wire in front of the homes. A petroleum plant blotted out the skyline, belching out steam and smoke. "There's nothing that looks more like the mouth of hell than a cracking plant when the gas flames are shooting into the air," he explained to Smithsonian Magazine in a 2008 interview. He wrote several scripts for Paramount that were not made, and one, on spec, that was The Steagle (1971) for Avco-Embassy Pictures, the story of a college professor during the Cuban missile crisis trying to live out all of his dreams, which he also directed. When The Steagle was re-cut, Mr. Sylbert wrote a book called Final Cut about the experience. He continued to write, was co-credited with the film Nighthawks (1981), designed the opera LuLu for director Roman Polanski at the Spoleto Festival, and began designing films again. "He was as smart and well-read as anyone I have ever come in contact with, and all who knew him respected him," said producer Hawk Koch, past president of the Motion Picture Academy. At the time of his death, Paul was writing a book on the craft of Production Design, and teaching film courses as an adjunct professor in the Film & Media Arts Department of his alma mater Temple University in Philadelphia, and the University of Pennsylvania. "He was a wonderful man who believed in fair play, civility and courage," his wife Jenny said, "and was unafraid to say it like it was." In addition to his wife, he is survived by two children, Olivia and Christian. He was preceded in death by another child, Christopher. Richard died in 2002.