CMU School of Drama


Monday, April 05, 2021

Beechview's Jan Pascale's set decoration on 'Mank' captures '30s Hollywood glamour

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: Jan Pascale seems to find her greatest success when working in black and white. The Beechview native has been a set decorator for major Hollywood projects since the 1980s, but didn’t pick up her first Oscar nomination until 2005’s “Good Night, and Good Luck,” a black-and-white film directed by George Clooney. She wound up losing out to “Memoirs of a Geisha” at the 2006 Academy Awards.

2 comments:

Rhiannnon said...

I have never hear of Jan Pascale but she is very talented. From the picture of Mank and her previous work, I can tell that she is very detail oriented. She started out as a set painter and moved to props master, which is what I am probably going to end up doing. I especially loved what she said about how she supports the story: “I’m here to support the story. If you don’t notice [us], we’ve done our job. ... We get to be part-time anthropologists and archaeologists and dig into history to tell that story. It’s just an honor to be a part of that.” That's why I love design as well. good scenography can make the movie look authentic or it can add nothing or even distract from the story

Jonas Harrison said...

This article is so interesting to me because it lines up with what I would want to do- I want to bring historic accuracy into the projects that I take on and learn about time periods while doing so. The part of the article where they talk about finding a very specific light fixture and dinner set from the time is something that I find so fun and engaging. I also appreciate how the article touches on complications in black and white filming, because in taking a film history class at CMU it made me wonder about the art of black and white filming and the silent film, which require completely different skill sets than modern day filming. I love how this practice perseveres in projects like this and I hope to be involved in something of the like sometime in my life. I always find myself intrigued by the tiny details about how people used to live so this article really caught my eye, and now I have something to add to my watchlist.