Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/859699
For the San Diego motel room (nicknamed the Romance Motel) where Marilyn first seduces Billie Jean (or vice versa), the exterior at the SeaPort Marina Motel in Long Beach stood in. It is a very large and flexible location that was also used for many other scenes in the movie. The interior was built onstage, adhering to the flesh-toned sensual palette. Although there is some blue in the wallpaper, pink is emphasized, which created a beautiful glow with its night lighting on the women's skin. But the most fun designing the six different motel/hotel sets (one, based on the New York Hilton, did not make it into the final film) was designing the bathrooms. My frequent collaborator, Art Director Alex Wei, had really interesting suggestions for a variety of materials used in real-life motels and hotels and it was really fun to try them out, matching them to the style of the set. For example, we made a plastic injection-molded sink/ vanity for the Bonaventure bathroom, a process that was very much of that era. For the slightly more mid- century Hilton, a beautiful black and gold (real) marble was used for the vanity. Some of the Los Angeles locations are used frequently (for example, the ballroom in the opening scene was shot at the Biltmore Hotel), but they are so generic that it didn't matter. But while scouting a Holiday Inn outside of Los Angeles, I spotted a period-looking diner and went into investigate. Although part of a franchise chain, it had never been filmed before, and the girls' diner scene ended up shooting there. The Hawaii arrival scene was shot at Ontario International Airport––basically now a film airport backlot. Certain angles of the airport have distinctive Left: Yet another view of the model for the 1973 Battle of the Sexes, a nationally televised match between 55-year- old Bobby Riggs and 29-year-old Billie Jean King, that is considered a milestone in the public acceptance of women's tennis. Below, left and right: Two production photographs from the Battle of the Sexes sequence, shot on location at the Los Angeles Sports Arena. Note how the historically accurate bright Sugar Daddy colors overtake the palette. Riggs was given $50,000 to wear a yellow Sugar Daddy jacket during the match. He presented Ms. King with a giant Sugar Daddy lollipop, and she responded by giving him a squealing piglet, symbolic of male chauvinism. To this day, with an audience of 30,472, it remains the largest audience to see a tennis match in the United States.