Mitch Glazer
Creative concept and on-set art direction for the Mr Porter The Journal. Read an abstract from the article, below:
Head northeast out of Los Angeles into a vast, dusty chaparral, the Mojave Desert, that windblown, sun-faded Hades. Beyond Pearblossom Highway, beyond Edwards Air Force Base, past the last of the In-N-Out Burgers, the hills to your left suddenly harden, sharpen into tectonic teeth and, to your right, the land slopes into an alluvial marsh, once the great Owens Lake – siphoned off long ago, to send water to the big city to the south. Now you are almost at the Glazer house.
Head northeast out of Los Angeles into a vast, dusty chaparral, the Mojave Desert, that windblown, sun-faded Hades. Beyond Pearblossom Highway, beyond Edwards Air Force Base, past the last of the In-N-Out Burgers, the hills to your left suddenly harden, sharpen into tectonic teeth and, to your right, the land slopes into an alluvial marsh, once the great Owens Lake – siphoned off long ago, to send water to the big city to the south. Now you are almost at the Glazer house.
“Being East Coast people, when I heard the word Mojave, I thought desert where I would die,” says Mr Mitch Glazer. “But psychologically, when you take that drive, and you hit Mojave, you’re somewhere else.” The city falls away and “everything after that feels like an adventure. And you end up somewhere lunar and extreme.” The Alabama Hills are a sensational geological anomaly which have been Hollywood’s stand-in for the exotic, from the Wild West of Mr John Wayne and Hopalong Cassidy to the Hindu Kush of Gunga Din and Tony Stark’s missile demonstration in Iron Man.
Just there, huddled inconspicuously into the foothills of the Sierra Nevada in the dramatic shadow of Mount Whitney, is a house designed and built by Mr Richard Neutra in 1959. “Neutra completely got how to maximise without dominating,” says Mr Glazer. “If you look back at the house from the rocks, it’s basically invisible. But the views, through these walls of glass...” Mr Glazer remembers that same journey in 1992, when he and his wife, Ms Kelly Lynch, first made the trip to see the house on the recommendation of an estate agent. At the time, the house was owned by Ms Ruth Schaffner, heiress to the American clothiers Hart Schaffner Marx. She had run the place as an artists’ retreat, inviting the likes of Mr Ed Moses and Mr Ed Ruscha to stay for long stretches.
It’s also present in Mr Dafoe’s two new – suitably weird – roles in movies that screened at the Toronto International Film Festival, which is where we meet. There is Mr Rob Eggers’ brilliant black-and-white two-character psychosexual movie The Lighthouse, in which Mr Robert Pattinson and Mr Dafoe portray lighthouse keepers who can’t decide if they want to kiss or kill each other.
And then there’s a supporting role in Motherless Brooklyn, Mr Edward Norton’s 20-years-in-the-making adaptation of the noir novel by Mr Jonathan Lethem. (Mr Norton optioned the novel before the release of his directorial debut, the 2000 romantic comedy Keeping The Faith, and began developing the film in 2014.)
Read the full article here.
Read the full article here.
