Blaze of glory
Rosemary Brandenburg '79 has worked with Paul Newman twice. The first time was in 1978, when Newman returned to Kenyon to direct C.C. Pyle and the Bunion Derby. Brandenburg was a senior drama major and landed the stage manager job for the world premiere.The second go-round with Newman was equally memorable but for different reasons. Brandenburg was in her early thirties and working to establish herself in Hollywood. She was hired as the set decorator on Blaze, the 1989 film starring Newman as Louisiana Governor Earl K. Long. She admits she was "a little underqualified" and the job was not exactly a success.
"I got canned," she says without sugarcoating it. "It was sort of tragic for me. I was thinking, 'Oh my God, I'm never going to work again.'"
As it turns out, tragedy was averted. Brandenburg has gone on to earn credits as the set decorator on more than two dozen films, including Amistad, Cast Away, The Flintstones, Planet of the Apes, and The Rock. She has worked with directors like Tim Burton, Wolfgang Peterson, and Stephen Spielberg in the process. She edits Set Décor, a magazine published by the Set Decorators' Society of America. And as a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Brandenburg helps select the Oscar winners each year.
"Well, they say unless you've been fired, you're not seasoned," says Brandenburg, who is forty-six and lives with her husband in Beverly Hills.
Paul Newman certainly played a memorable part in Brandenburg's career, but Kenyon's Ted Walch '63 was probably more influential. While working at the Kenyon Festival Theater that Walch helped to create in the early eighties, Brandenburg made the connections that ultimately led her to Hollywood. And Walch played a role long before that. He ran the theater program at St. Albans, an all-boys high school in Washington, D.C., when Brandenburg attended its sister institution, the National Cathedral School.
"I was always a tomboy and enjoyed working with tools," Brandenburg explains with a laugh. "But I was a tomboy who liked boys, so the theater was one of the only ways to be around guys. So that's the real secret of why I started hanging out in the theater when I was fifteen."
As a set decorator, Brandenburg now works as part of the collaborative design team headed by the production designer. She is responsible for creating the environments that will help tell the story and support the production designer's overall vision. That means breaking down the script, analyzing characters, researching the period and style, haggling over the budget, and shopping for materials before overseeing the design and construction of a set that must be seamless and convincing.
Films like The Flintstones and Planet of the Apes require the design team to create every object on the set, from Fred's Bark-O-Lounger recliner to venetian blinds made of dinosaur bones. On a period film like Amistad, the challenge is finding objects to fit the era, and Brandenburg looks to primary source material, paintings, and photographs for inspiration. The fact that her father was an historian at American University in Washington, D.C., helped prepare her for the task.
"My father certainly had a big influence on my interest in period research, but equally important was my mother's example," Brandenburg says. "She was a painter and had a wonderful art history background, so she exposed me to all that. She dragged me to a lot of museums kicking and screaming, but it all sinks in anyway."
The frequent family migrations to France for historical research also helped prep the young Brandenburg for her life in the film industry. "Being uprooted out of my environment as a kid set the stage for that sort of ability to jump in and out of cultures, which is what I have to do all the time. I have to dive into whatever culture it is I'm supposed to be recreating."
--Gordon Young
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