The Art Directors Guild has announced the honorees for its 11th annual awards event to be held February 17, 2007.Production designer Dean Tavoularis, who won an Oscar for his work on Godfather II, will receive ADG’s Lifetime Achievement Award.Director Terry Gilliam, known for his elaborate visual style in films like Monty Python and the Holy Grail and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, will get ADG’s award for Outstanding Contribution to Cinematic Imagery.Tavoularis has designed over 30 features and worked with directors like Michelangelo Antonioni (Zabriskie Point), Arthur Penn (Bonnie and Clyde, Little Big Man), William Friedkin (The Brink’s Job), Wim Wenders (Hammett), Warren Beatty (Bulworth) and Roman Polanski (The Ninth Gate).But his most notable and longest collaboration has been with director Francis Ford Coppola. Tavoularis was production designer on 13 Coppola films including all three Godfather movies, Apocalypse Now, One from the Heart and the Conversation.On top of his Oscar for Godfather II, Tavoularis received Academy Award nominations for four other films.Past recipients of the ADG’s Life Achievement Award include production designers Ken Adam, Robert Boyle, Henry Bumstead and John Mainsbridge.Gilliam, who started out as an animator and comic strip cartoonist, first came to prominence as a member of the Monty Python Flying Circus. He was the only American in the otherwise all-British comedy troupe. Since then he has collaborated with production designers Roy Smith (Monty Pyton and the Holy Grail), Dante Ferretti (The Adventures of Baron Munchausen), Alex McDowell (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas), Jeffrey Beecroft (The Twelve Monkeys), Norman Garwood (Brazil), Mel Bourne (The Fisher King) and Guy Dyas (The Brothers Grimm).Previous recipients of the ADG accolade for contributions to cinematic imagery include Steven Spielberg, Clint Eastwood, Zhang Yimou, Robert Wise, Frank Oz and John Lasseter.The ADG also announced that another five production designers of years past will be inducted into the guild’s Hall of Fame. They are: Hilyard Brown (1910-1981), who won an Oscar for his opulent production design for Cleopatra; Henry “Bummy” Bumstead (1915-2006), whose 70-year career which started at Paramount during Hollywood’s golden age and ended when he passed away earlier this year, having finished production design on Eastwood’s Flags of our Fathers; Carroll Clark (1894-1968), whose career included 1930s musicals and Alfred Hitchcock suspense films; Stephen Goosson (1889-1973), who started in the silent era and won an Oscar for his work on Frank Capra’s Lost Horizon; and Harry Horner (1910-1994), who won Oscars for art direction on The Heiress and The Hustler.
Written by Jack Egan
