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40 P E R S P E C T I V E | S E P T E M B E R / O C TO B E R 2 0 1 7 For Henry Bumstead, I wanted to run a nearly forgotten anti-war (another one?) science fiction film, Slaughterhouse-Five (1972) from the novel by Kurt Vonnegut. Bummy (as he preferred to be called) was probably most famous for his Oscar-winning films To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) and The Sting (1973). When I told him what film I wanted to run, he got so choked up on the phone that it scared me. He loved the film, thought it might have been his best, felt very emotional about it and was sure everyone had forgotten it. It was a perfect "one that got away" and a great evening. Bill Creber is best known for muscular action pictures, like Planet of the Apes (1968) and The Towering Inferno (1974). For him, I wanted to run a real outlier, Justine (1969), from Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, a sordid tale of adultery, cross-dressing and all the rest in exotic/erotic 1930s Alexandria, Egypt. After the appropriate astonishment, Bill, always a good sport, played along. The movie looked magnificent and proved what a versatile designer Bill could be. Another interesting screening was Das Boot (1981), designed by Rolf Zehetbauer with an all-German Art Department. Our guest was Dan Webster, who had worked on The Abyss (1989) and was the Art Director on Down Periscope (1996). A second guest was a retired submarine chief, T. Michael Bircumshaw, USN, who called the film the best and most accurate submarine movie ever made, and went on to regale us with tales of missions off the coast of Vietnam and lurking on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, sweating out the Cuban missile crisis. Land of the Pharaohs (1955) was directed by Howard Hawks, written by William Faulkner, designed by Alexandre Trauner and starred Joan Collins. It was the only time these four giants of the cinema ever worked together (Google them all). The Film Society just missed getting Miss Collins as a guest, but did have Guild Set Designer James Hewitt, who had just published an indispensable book on Egyptian ornament. I also contacted Kara Cooney, a professor of Egyptology at UCLA and a sort of real-life Lara Croft, Tomb Raider. She was a fascinating guest, and couldn't have been more graceful in her evaluation of the Hollywood Egyptian movie genre. I scheduled a favorite Indian film, Devdas (2002), a loose but spectacular rendition of Romeo and Juliet. It was my intention to show Hollywood how well shot, cut, scored, danced, costumed, acted and especially designed a first-class Indian film could be. Knowing we couldn't afford to bring the designer over from India, I assembled two Indian choreographers, an Indian Right: The 2002 Hindi version of DEVDAS was screened for the Society in August of 2010. One of Mr. Muto's personal favorite films, it was chosen by TIME magazine as the best film of 2002 and one of the ten best films of the millennium worldwide. Production Designer Nitin Chandrakant Desai was so honored that the Guild chose to screen his film that he flew from India to be present. Below: Robert Boyle was the first designer given the ADG Lifetime Achievement Award, and is now in the Guild's Hall of Fame. WINTER KILLS (1979) was one of his favorite films and it was screened for the Society in October of 2010 as a memorial to Mr. Boyle who had died that August at the age of 100.