y now all of you have read William Gibson's Neuromancer, the most acclaimed sci-fi novel of the last generation. (If not, go to the store or online, buy, read: We'll wait.)
In 1982, when Gibson was a young writer living in Vancouver, hard at work on the novel, he went to see the newly released Ridley Scott movie Blade Runner.
After only a few minutes, Gibson had to flee the theater.
What was he reacting against? Surely not the characters—you might be intrigued by Harrison Ford's detective, or Sean Young at the height of her considerable allure, but you won't actually know them—much less be repelled by them—in the space of a few minutes.
The plot of Blade Runner doesn't unfold that quickly, either.
What Gibson was reacting to was the look and feel of the world of Blade Runner—its wet streets, eternally dark skies, screaming Japanese adware—the work of production designer Laurence G. Paull, with help from Syd Mead.
It was a world uncomfortably close to the one he was designing in his head.
The world is also a character
The common wisdom is this: For a sci-fi series or movie to work, you've got to have interesting characters, and it never hurts to have an engaging story. No argument.
But that's true of any series or movie. For a sci-fi series, you've also got to have a world.
And to have a world, you've got to have a designer—a production designer.
The role of every production designer is slightly different, mediating as she does between the style of the director, the visionary palette created by the cinematographer, the look of the set, the texture of the costumes, the realism of the effects, the score, the sound, the alien appliances—
But it is becoming clear that the production designer can make or break your sci-fi project.
The simplest test is to look at what happens when things go bad: Baby boomers think back to the sci-fi of our youth, mercifully overlooking the drawbacks of our classic black-and-white anthology shows—which were severely limited by budget and the need for innovation on a weekly schedule—to concentrate on such oddities as the California beachwear of Logan's Run ... the astonishingly roomy and unfurnished interior of the Jupiter 2 (Lost in Space) ... the annoying robot and white-white costumes of Buck Rogers, a series that seemed torn between Saturday-morning cartoons and outright camp ... silver jumpsuits too many to mention.
Closer to the present, you have Star Trek: Enterprise, which has managed to confuse dull with real. Yes, having space travelers in the relatively near future wearing uniform bluish overalls might be realistic. (Any glance at a Mir or international space station crew will show that multicolored uniforms were being used by space travelers as long ago as the 20th century. ...)
But what form of human being inhabits a vessel for months or years without personalizing it?
Where are the school flags? Gag photos? Family mementos? Graffiti? I know Roddenberry's universes assume good behavior by enlightened humans, but Enterprise is supposed to be a bridge from our messy era to a better one ... it needs more clutter.
Designers save sorry scripts
A good production designer can almost rescue an indifferent project. Look at Chronicles of Riddick, last summer's Vin Diesel epic, which had a fairly convoluted yet uninvolving storyline, but somehow managed to keep me watching to the end, thanks to the production design by Holger Gross. The blend of city and planetary 'scapes, costumes, ships and effects created a world that felt multidimensional. I may not have entirely believed Riddick's world, but I couldn't dismiss it.
The production design of the original Trek was bare bones, but Matt Jeffries and his team made startling innovations within some severe budgetary limits: Look at the bridge, sick bay. What about tricorders? All of those designs have taken on a kind of sci-fi immortality—no one who designs a starship interior or tool can entirely escape them.
2001 had famously functional production design (by Ernst Archer, with considerable input from Mr. Kubrick). It was taking NASA's style from the 1960s and distilling it so it hurt: smooth white surfaces, no clutter. Utterly right for that particular project.
Star Wars (designed by John Barry) took a different route, deliberately recalling the styles of earlier movie serials—not just Flash Gordon, but also jungle tales and adventures. A different design, but just as helpful in shaping a world.
Lord of the Rings and other epic fantasies speak for themselves.
The ultimate example of the important of production design is Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. In fact, the production design seems to be the film's core concept. (It's certainly not the mad-scientist and the robot-army plotline, or the alternate-world setting.) The fact that director Kerry Conran's brother, Kevin, was the production designer only reinforces this impression.
Sci-fi illustrators have demonstrated "production design" for 80 years. Think back to the images of such artists as Frank R. Paul (guest of honor at the very first World Science Fiction Convention for his Amazing Stories covers), Hubert Rogers (Astounding Science Fiction), John Schoenherr (the original Dune magazine serial and hardcover book) and the late Kelly Freas.
Production design on a television schedule can be killing, but I've had wonderful experiences with Richard B. Lewis, who did Max Headroom. (We spent hours debating what a telephone would look like "20 minutes into the future.")
Then there was Michael Corenblith, whose work you will know from Apollo 13 and other features, who did a tour on Eerie, Indiana and indulged my writerly desire to have just the right style of trailer to be sucked into the sky by a sentient tornado ...
Which gets to the heart of the matter: production design is a tool for sci-fi storytelling. Putting your human colonists in medieval robes is a way of showing the world they inhabit. Shaving their heads and making them walk naked through silvery streets says something else. Next time you see a sci-fi movie or series, and react with joy (or flee like William Gibson), remember the designer.
Michael Cassutt is currently designing scripts for Promark and the SCI FI Channel. His newest novel, an aerospace thriller titled Tango Midnight, has just been published in paperback by Tor.
