Las Vegas, my kind of town!

It's hard to believe that when I first stayed at Caesar's Palace (working with Ann-Margret), it looked pretty much like this! Well, in 1974, there had been one extension of the original tower, but I stayed in the round building in the center.

My connection with Las Vegas started in 1961, with a 30-minute stopover in the downtown train station on Main Street at 2 am. I was a very young dancer with the "My Fair Lady" National Company, and we were traveling from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles. The 1970s, when I frequently visited for work with Ann-Margret, Raquel Welch, and Diana Ross, introduced me to the then-small town of Las Vegas in a proper fashion, and in 1980 and 1981, I spent a great deal of time here preparing the costumes for "Jubilee."

At that time, Las Vegas was still small. You could cross Las Vegas Boulevard directly; there were no overpasses. There was no 10 lane freeway running by it. The desert was a few blocks away. The airport was small. I don't even remember noticing the mountains all around...the focus was all on The Strip.

I wasn't prepared for the change when I returned in the late '80s. The airport had exploded! By this time, I was working full time as a costume designer for TV series and films in Hollywood and occasionally came up to Las Vegas to shoot on location. Las Vegas already felt somewhat like home.

And now it is home! As I was driving to the airport early this morning to drop off some friends, I admired the clear blue skies and the mountains on all four sides again. Do I pine for the old days? Absolutely not! So, there may be more cars. Still, my city is continually re-inventing itself with new hotels, stadiums, entertainment venues, and university buildings. And as I chronicle in my upcoming book, I too have had to re-invent myself several times….from ballet dancer to Broadway dancer to actress to costume designer. And now, author. Please watch for my book, coming out in the spring.

Women in TV, Film, and (why not) everywhere!

As I work on my book (and yes, I have only 7 more chapters on which to do a substantial re-write and edit!), I think how lucky I have been to be able to pursue a career that I wanted. It wasn’t always so easy for women to choose anything that excited them and go for it.

I have been lucky in my life that I was born into a family where I had many strong women as role models. My paternal step-grandmother was a judge, a mayor, and was, in general, a no-nonsense kind of woman! My great aunt was an obstetrician, one of the first females to graduate in the early 1900’s with a medical degree. There was also a distant cousin who was an Arctic explorer in the early 1900s! So it never occurred to me that I couldn’t do whatever I wanted because I was a woman. It just never entered my mind.

 In high school, most of my classmates were going on to be either nurses or teachers. It seemed a pretty limited selection to me, but I already knew I was going to be a dancer, so what did I care?

 By the early 1970’s I was living in Los Angeles, and it’s not to say that there weren’t obstacles to overcome as a woman. It was difficult at that time, if not downright impossible, for a woman to buy a house without a father or husband to co-sign. Can you imagine! Do you remember Edith Bunker trying to get a loan at the bank? The 1970s were a tumultuous time with all sorts of reexamination of women’s rights going on, and women such as Gertrude Stein, and Erica Jong and Germaine Greer drawing attention. And of course, the demand for equal rights and the sexual revolution changed so much in how we could lead our lives. It was an intoxicating period, with the promise of greater freedom and power!

 And as I started my transition to my career in costume design, many of the top television producers, stars, designers were women. Think Murphy Brown, Designing Women, and Gilmore Girls. The very first producer who took a chance on me, hiring me for The Facts of Life, was a woman, and many of the producers (and a few directors) I worked for in television subsequently were women, including Penny Marshall, Yvette Lee Bowser, Irma Kalish, and Lisa De Cazotte.

 I still believe that it’s important not to feel that you are coming from behind, but that you are starting from the same start line, and that excellence in what you do is the thing that will propel you forward. Not nepotism, not cronyism, not anything but commitment and talent and passion. Call me naive or an optimist, but I’d like to think even men wouldn’t be dumb enough to ignore someone who is really really really good at what they do!

A SALUTE TO FILM COSTUMERS!

For thirty plus years I have been a costume designer for TV and film, and have loved every minute of it. It has been hard work, demanding work, requiring interacting with producers and their budgets, crews large and small, and actors with all their needs. 

But recently I returned to the trenches! I went to work as a set costumer on a feature film that has been designed by a former colleague Salvador Pérez, and has been filming here in Las Vegas for 5 weeks. What an education! I now have an even greater admiration for how hard the set costumers work, how long they work, and how physically demanding the job is. The job is neither glamorous or for the faint of heart!

On one hand, the Costume Designers are “on call” which means they are wherever they need to be, whenever they need to be, and do not clock in and out. Often they work very long hours too, and work weekends if they need to. They are responsible for not only the creative aspect of the costumes on film, but the budget, and the operation of their costume department throughout the process. They are at the head of the department and get the credit or the blame for how the film’s costumes look. 

However, the set costumers are among the first to arrive, even before “crew call”. Their call might be at 2 in the morning or 5 am in the morning, or 7 pm at night. They need to get to the wardrobe trailer, set up and be ready to set the costumes in each actors’s dressing room before the actors arrive. They check the background actors’ wardrobe, getting them dressed as cops, waiters, club patrons, sometimes hundreds of them. Then they go to set, lugging their set racks and kits. If location is outdoors, they work in whatever conditions exist, which in the case of the recent feature, was over 100 degree temperature, day after day (record breaking heat waves for Las Vegas!). Umbrellas, fans, portable a/c is provided for princple actors and the director and DP, but the set costumers sweat it out. They are there every moment to keep the actors comfortable, dressed correctly, holding their set slippers and robes for them, or their cell phones and other paraphernalia. They must stay focused through hours and tedious hours of shooting, watching their actors to make sure a collar doesn’t flip up or a bra strap show.  Often there is nowhere for them to sit.

At the end of 12 hours of filming, everyone is exhausted and rushing to go home. The transportation department picks up the actors and takes them back to their dressing room and/or their hotels. The background actors are in a rush to check out and go home too. After most performers are headed “home”, the set costumers THEN have to pick up all the actors clothes, often strewn on the floor in a hurry, pick up the damp socks and under shirts, and get everything back to the trailer. Then they sort and organize. Put things away. Write up the dry cleaning or do a laundry in the portable washing machine on board. Set up tomorrow’s costumes so that 10 hours later when they return for the next day’s shooting, everything is ready to go.

So my hat is off to set costumers! One week I did five 14 hour days in a row, and was happy that I survived! Yes, the money is excellent, and I am glad of the paycheck. But as I approach teaching my classes  to film costumers of the future I now have a much greater insight into what they need to know.... from my view from the trenches!