If we were introduced at a cocktail party, you would probably ask me, “So what do you do?” My answer—I’m a graphic designer for film and television—usually draws a blank look. It’s like I’m saying I’m a social worker for Chipotle or a dancer for the National Park Service.
This is where Mad Men comes in. I worked on two seasons of the retro TV show, so I’ll describe the items I created for it: the fictitious agency’s logo, stationery and business cards; its ad layouts for London Fog, Hilton and Hanes; store signs, traffic signs, subway signs and street signs for an all but vanished New York City; cereal boxes and milk cartons in Betty Draper’s kitchen; and the issues of the New York Daily News and Advertising Age that Don Draper reads at his desk. In short, everything with words on it, because nothing looks the same as it did in the 1960s, especially when you’re filming a show in L.A. that’s supposed to take place in NYC.
Thanks to the internet and people who post photos of stuff from their childhood, it’s really not that difficult to re-create the signs and graphics of New York in the ’60s, Hollywood in the ’40s or Boston in the ’70s. Of course, sometimes the design work has to be fictionalized: In Gangster Squad, a mob kingpin gets shot through the front page of a newspaper he’s reading—not surprisingly, the Los Angeles Times wouldn’t sign on for that. So I created a fake newspaper called the Los Angeles Chronicle, mimicking the layout, headlines and type styles of the late 1940s. This in addition to about a dozen issues of “real” newspapers like the Los Angeles Times and Los Angeles Examiner with attention-grabbing headlines and photos of Sean Penn in full makeup as gangster Mickey Cohen. If any of these look fake to you, the viewer, then I have failed in my job.
The challenge for Black Mass, the true story of mobster Whitey Bulger, was to re-create a slightly seedy neighborhood of South Boston circa 1980. These days, there’s a sushi place and a Starbucks where Bulger’s former hangout, the Triple O’s Lounge, used to be. Luckily, we found a suitable area in Cambridge, with a VFW hall about the right size and shape for Triple O’s. Even this location presented challenges: Across the street were trendy boutiques and frozen yogurt shops, the likes of which Whitey Bulger wouldn’t be caught dead in, and of course the streetlights and street signs didn’t look like they did in the ’80s.
BAR NONE: The mob haunt in Black Mass began as a VFW hall.
So we refinished and repainted the exterior of the VFW hall to look like Triple O’s. Our construction crew cut out crude wooden letters to match the original sign’s, and Coors Light and Rolling Rock logos were painted by hand. The stores across the street were converted into down-at-the-heels bakeries and hair salons circa 1986. Add a few rented neon signs, some old Chevrolets decked out as Boston police cars, and voilà!
In the film, other areas of Boston doubled for locations that no longer exist or have been yuppified beyond recognition. We even built a little stretch of “Miami Beach” close to the shore in nearby Revere. It was much cheaper than picking up the entire film company, including Johnny Depp, and moving to Miami. And, of course, even if we’d headed south, today’s Little Havana looks nothing like it did in the ’80s.
That’s a challenge you’ll face on just about any film or TV project: transforming a location or studio backlot into something it was never intended to be. For Mission: Impossible III, they needed a nighttime chase scene through the streets of Shanghai, and it was actually much easier (and cheaper) to get permission to close off a stretch of downtown L.A. and change all the billboards, street signs, neon signs, taxis and police cars to their Chinese equivalent. Visual effects added the Shanghai skyscrapers towering overhead.
On Star Trek: Voyager, we had the same crazy challenge almost every week: to transform a studio set or location into an alien world. And the writing and graphics on each planet had to be distinct and noticeably different from the previous week’s alien planet. Strangely enough, we never visited a world where graphic design hadn’t been invented, or I could have taken the week off.
If you haven’t moved on to another cocktail party guest, you might ask how I got started doing something so weirdly specialized. The answer: Letraset, those rub-on letters sold in art stores before desktop publishing became ubiquitous. As a teenager, I loved creating slick title pages for my homework assignments with just a dull pencil. A graduate school job designing flyers for Tresidder Student Union helped seal the deal: Graphic design could be my career, or at least a way to make money while I was waiting for my big break as a Hollywood writer/director.
MAKE-BELIEVE: Graphic design has a starring role in a show’s fantasy world. From left: Star Trek: Voyager, Wonder Woman, Parks and Recreation.
Which brings me to your final question of the cocktail party: Does watching the graphics in a movie ruin it for me? Only if the graphics are poorly done or inappropriate for the period. There was an episode of Downton Abbey with big Helvetica numbers on the horses running in a steeplechase, and as any type scholar will tell you, Helvetica didn’t exist until the 1950s. I teach a graphic design class at UCLA, and the first thing I tell my students is never to use Helvetica or Times New Roman. They are so omnipresent on the internet and in advertising that they no longer carry any emotional weight, even when they’re appropriate for a particular time and place.
All things considered, it’s been a really fun career, and I’ve been fortunate to work with talented and collaborative directors like Barry Levinson, Joss Whedon, Alexander Payne, ’83, Doug Liman and Steven Soderbergh. I’m still waiting for that big break, but in the meantime I get to hang out on movie sets, satisfy my inner fanboy by designing Star Trek spaceships and Wonder Woman lunch boxes, and occasionally chat with Patrick Stewart or Colin Firth or Amy Poehler at the craft services table. Not bad for a kid who started with Letraset.
So, what do you do?
Geoffrey Mandel, MA ’81, stumbled into a job as a production assistant on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in 1993 and has been working in Hollywood art departments ever since. His credits include Spider-Man 2, NCIS, Serenity, Mission: Impossible III, Dirt, Blades of Glory, Parks and Recreation, X-Men: First Class, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., The Muppets, and the upcoming La La Land and Downsizing. He lives in beautiful downtown Burbank.
