Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, June 15, 1990 TAG: 9006150108
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: HOLLYWOOD LENGTH: Medium
Besides being a nifty optical trick that gives us a quick reference to the scope of Crime Stopper Dick Tracy's urban beat, the shot is director Warren Beatty's way of announcing that this comic strip world has its own reality and that we'd better chuck our expectations before entering.
"Warren decided years ago that `Dick Tracy' had to break all the rules, that we were going to have to throw away everything we knew to make it work," said veteran art director Richard Sylbert. "He knew there was no way in the world you could take this man with a yellow hat and coat who's followed by a guy with a flat head and walk him around Chicago. We had to create a parallel world."
The high-profile cast of "Dick Tracy" includes Beatty, Madonna, Al Pacino and Dustin Hoffman, but the real star of the movie is The Look. Every scene in the film - whether it's all live action or live action combined with a matte painting - feels like a composition of a moving Sunday funny. It does not look like the comic strip, but you leave with that impression.
"It's impressionistic, but to use Warren's phrase, it's impressionistic apple pie, simple American values," Sylbert said. "This is not `Metropolis.' This is about a guy who has a girlfriend and hates lawbreakers."
"I wanted to do something that I could have the same fun looking at that I had looking at the Sunday comics when I was a small kid reading Dick Tracy," Beatty said.
"Dick Tracy" is a funhouse of visual gimmicks, not the least of them being the assortment of characters whose names match their looks - Pruneface, Flattop, Lips, Fat Head. But the original gimmick that became the only rule in the production was Beatty's decision to limit the film's designers to the seven colors cartoonist Chester Gould used in his original Dick Tracy drawings.
A single scene may include dozens of background objects, but every object is done up in one of the seven colors. The same is true for clothing, cars and buildings. Every square inch that appears on the screen was either freshly painted or freshly made.
So people like Sylbert, costume designer Milena Canonero and the visual effects team of Michael Lloyd and Harrison Ellenshaw found themselves doing the opposite of what they have done throughout their careers: Instead of working to blend their work into the reality of scenes, they had to strut their stuff out front.
"Doing work to be noticed goes against the grain of your work and it makes you very nervous," Sylbert said.
Because the objects were three-dimensional that were being filmed, lighting and shadows create the illusion of more colors than the seven actually being used, but through most of the film the colors are so saturated, it's startling. Cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, who (like Sylbert) worked with Beatty on "Reds," shot the whole movie without using the prop smoke that is used in most films to mute colors and contrasts and create a more realistic atmosphere.
"There is no atmosphere in that kind of cartoon," said Sylbert, "so Storaro didn't put a drop of smoke in it."
Sylbert said that in designing sets, he followed the example of Gould, who attempted to make panels of his strip more interesting by bouncing colors around the page. "When Dick Tracy walks into his office, there are other objects in the room the same color as his coat and hat. We'd try to make the scene more interesting by bouncing those colors around."
Beatty wouldn't discuss the budget on "Dick Tracy," but other sources put its cost at $28 million, which would make it one of the least expensive of the summer spectacles. In comparison, last summer's blockbuster, "Batman," cost $60 million to produce.
by CNB