Production designer Dean Tavoularis, who shared an Oscar for art direction on “The Godfather: Part II” and was long associated with director Francis Ford Coppola, died Wednesday in Paris. He was 93.
His death was reported to the Hollywood Reporter by critic Jordan Mintzer, who collaborated with him on the book “Conversations With Dean Tavoularis.” Cahiers du Cinema also posted about his death.
Tavoularis, who was noted for his 20th century period settings, was also Oscar nominated for “The Godfather: Part III,” but surprisingly, the original “Godfather” film, on which he also worked, was not nominated in the art direction category in 1973. He also drew noms for Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now” and “Tucker: The Man and His Dream” as well as for William Friedkin’s “The Brink’s Job.”
He also collaborated with Coppola on “The Conversation,” “One From the Heart,” “Rumble Fish,” “The Outsiders,” “Peggy Sue Got Married,” “Gardens of Stone,” the Coppola-directed segment in “New York Stories” and “Jack.”
Tavoularis was an uncredited assistant art director on Robert Mulligan’s “Inside Daisy Clover” and Stanley Kramer’s “Ship of Fools” in 1965 but earned his very first screen credit as art director of Arthur Penn’s stylishly influential “Bonnie and Clyde” (1967), with its visually romanticized, Depression-era Dust Bowl settings; the Motion Picture Academy clearly valued the film’s look, as the movie took an Oscar for cinematography and a nomination for costume design.
Though Antonioni’s 1970 film “Zabriskie Point” drew some derision from American critics, Tavoularis achieved a visually audacious juxtaposition between gritty and fantastical settings.
Tavoularis and Coppola began their decades-long partnership on “The Godfather.”
“As reflected in the sumptuousness of Gordon Willis’ cinematography and Dean Tavoularis’ art design,” the New York Times wrote of “The Godfather” and “The Godfather: Part II” in 1999, “the Corleone world had a glamour and a grandeur that generated enormous romanticism even as the films presented themselves as brutal, clear-eyed realism.”
Peter Cowie, in his book “Coppola: A Biography,” declared that Tavoularis’ production design in “Godfather II” illustrates “the contrast between the supremacy and the decline of the Corleone empire.”
“Very often with Dean,” Coppola remembered, “even early on, when I didn’t know if I agreed with him, I learned that his instincts were very good and that later on I would like very much his idea even if it wasn’t immediately something I liked.”
When Coppola purchased Hollywood General Studios in 1980 and renamed the facility Zoetrope, making a go of creating his own studio, he named Tavoularis the head of the outfit’s art department.
However, Coppola suffered a significant setback in 1982 with big-budget box office disaster “One From the Heart.”
“I didn’t work for almost two years,” Tavoularis told the New York Times in 2003. “The movie was considered a fiasco, and I was perceived as being irresponsible because it went over budget. So I was totally blackballed by Hollywood. I took it as a badge of honor.”
The production designer had a long working relationship with art director Angelo Graham, collaborating on films including Penn’s highly regarded Western “Little Big Man”; “Godfather II” and “Apocalypse Now” (for which they shared an Oscar and an Oscar nom, respectively); 1975 noir remake “Farewell My Lovely”; and later on the sleek near-future thriller “Rising Sun” (1993). He also worked closely on several films with cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, including “Apocalypse Now” and other Coppola films. On “Apocalypse Now” Tavoularis and Storaro teamed to use smoke of different colors to achieve a more atmospheric effect.
In 2001 Tavoularis was the production designer on “CQ,” the feature directorial debut of Francis Ford Coppola’s son Roman, and Luis Mandoki’s “Angel Eyes.” He returned to his craft after a 10-year absence for Roman Polanski’s 2011 adaptation of Yasmina Reza’s play “Carnage.” (He had spent that decade away from production designer focusing on his work as a painter and had a show of his paintings at a Paris gallery in early 2011.)
Tavoularis’ last bigscreen effort with Coppola was the New York-lensed “Megalopolis,” a project that was aborted in the wake of 9/11.
But the pair continued to collaborate, as Tavoularis contributed artwork for the labels of Coppola’s wines and helped design the director’s Sonoma County winery.
Born to Greek immigrant parents in Lowell, Mass., but raised in Los Angeles, Tavoularis got early peeks into the visual wonders contained behind studio gates when he assisted his father, who was in the coffee business, with deliveries to various Hollywood outposts. He studied architecture at the Otis Art Institute.
“When I was young,” he said, “I attended art school, (but) there were no film schools to speak of then, though this was L.A. I went to movies and lost myself in them. Their settings registered, but I was not aware of art direction in film, and I never said to myself, ‘This is what I want to do.’”
His first work in showbiz was at Disney. As an inbetweener — who creates the intermediate material between two images in the animation department, he worked on “Lady and the Tramp.” As a storyboard artist at the studio, he worked on films including “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,” “Pollyanna” and “The Parent Trap.”
Tavoularis’ work was the subject of a 2003 French documentary by Clara and Robert Kuperberg called “Dean Tavoularis, le magicien d’Hollywood.” He received a lifetime achievement award from the Art Directors Guild in 2007.
Tavoularis met his wife, actress Aurore Clement, on the set of “Apocalypse Now.” Her scenes portraying a French widow on a decaying plantation in the film were dropped but restored for Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now Redux” in 2001.
She survives him along with daughters Alison and Gina.
