Staff photo / Andy Gray Howland native Linda DeScenna talks about her career as a set decorator or production designer on more than 40 films.

Howland native Linda DeScenna wasn’t a movie person.

“I didn’t grow up going to the movies,” the 1967 Howland High School graduate said, except for the occasional trip to the drive-in with her family.

By the time of her 25th high school reunion, DeScenna was a five-time Academy Award nominee as the set decorator on such films as “Star Trek: The Motion Picture,” “Blade Runner,” “The Color Purple,” ‘Rain Man” and “Toys.”

Later, as a production designer, DeScenna worked on such box-office hits as “Liar Liar,” “Bruce Almighty” and “Father of the Bride II.”

While back home last week to visit her brothers, DeScenna sat down for an interview about her career and her craft recorded on camera by Two Ticks & the Dog Productions. It will be used for future exhibitions at the science fiction and fantasy museum being developed by the Trumbull County Historical Society.

It’s a story filled with innate talent, ambition, a little luck by being in the right place at the right time, being a Scorpio and some generous tipping by Frank Sinatra.

A GOOD EYE

DeScenna, 74, realized she had a good eye — and strong opinions about what worked and what didn’t — at a young age.

“I must have this innate thing,” she said. “We didn’t have a lot of money growing up. I had to improvise things. I was always finding cheap shoes and then dying them and changing the buckles. I was always changing buttons on things.”

She remembers when she was a young girl her mother took her to buy a pair of gloves for Easter that had four buttons on them.

“I wouldn’t wear them because three were better,” she said.

It was a valuable talent as a set decorator and production designer as well as in real life. Every house she’s ever owned, DeScenna was able to walk in and immediately see what changes needed to be made to improve it.

“This piece of furniture I found in the junk and making it a cool thing in my bedroom, that’s just how I was,” she said.

She also credited George Breckner, her art teacher in Howland schools, with developing her talent.

“I learned more from Mr. Breckner than in four years as an art student in college,” DeScenna said. “He gave me such a great sense of color and a relationship with color.”

DeScenna studied painting at Kent State and decided to minor in film instead of art history because she thought it might be fun and liked the idea of learning how to operate a camera.

GOING TO CALIFORNIA

Despite her film minor, DeScenna didn’t have any aspirations for a film career beyond wanting to work in the arts. But she didn’t see herself being able to accomplish anything she wanted to do in Ohio, so she decided to move to California with $300 to her name.

Through a friend of a friend, she heard about a job as a secretary for a production executive at ABC Circle Films. DeScenna got a book on typing, taught herself how to type in two weeks and got the job.

There she observed how television shows were made and had her first interactions with art directors. DeScenna occasionally offered her opinions, and an art director offered to introduce her to Audrey Blasdell-Godard, who was the first woman to head a major studio property department. She also happened to be looking to add more women to the union crews that almost exclusively were staffed by men in the mid-’70s

“She liked me because I was a Scorpio and she was really into astrology,” DeScenna said.

Blasdell-Godard offered her an opportunity to observe the union crews on the job, but she wouldn’t get paid. Barely scraping by as a secretary, DeScenna couldn’t afford to leave that job for a non-paying opportunity.

Instead, she got a job as a cocktail waitress in the bar at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel.

“I made a ton of money. Frank Sinatra would give you $100 tips, which was a lot of money back then,” she said. “I saved for six months and then went back there, followed crews and just watched.

“One day I came in, my money was almost gone, and she said the unions are opening. Do you want to be a set dresser? You’re going to be one of the first women. There’s one at Paramount that’s coming in. There’s one at Fox that’s coming in, and you’ll be coming in.”

She quickly moved up from set dresser to lead man (the term used at the time for the person who worked directly under the set decorator, and she got her first job as a set decorator on the television series “The Fantastic Journey” and then worked on another sci-fi project, a TV adaptation of the film “Logan’s Run.”

LIVING LONG AND PROSPERING IN FILM

Neither show lasted a full season. However, Leonard Katzman, the producer on “Fantastic Journey” and “Logan’s Run” offered DeScenna a job on his next series, one that hung around a bit longer — the CBS hit “Dallas.” He was even willing to throw in a new Mercedes if she said yes.

DeScenna turned him down because she wanted to do movies.

“Because I had done two science fiction television series — this was serendipity, pure luck — ‘Star Trek: The Motion Picture’ was going into production, and the unions were cleared out. There was nobody to hire. I’d done two television series and they took a chance on me, and I got nominated for an Academy Award on my first movie.

“It was surreal. I had never watched the Academy Awards. I had no conception of it until somebody called me that morning — ‘Hey, you guys were nominated for an Academy Award.’ I had no idea. I was astounded.”

THE JOB

On a movie set, everyone has well-defined roles.

The production designer creates the whole look of the film and works closely with the director, the cinematographer and the wardrobe department.

“You set the palette,” DeScenna said.

Under the production designer is the art director, who works with the set designers who draw what’s needed and the construction department that builds it

The set decorator works with the production designer to put the needed objects in the room.

“He (the production designer) is like the architect, and the set decorator is more like the interior designer,” DeScenna said.

It’s a job that DeScenna described as “10% scene design and 90% politics,” and it is filled with technical challenges. But a set decorator and production designer studies, dissects and interprets a screenplay in the same way an actor does, only that interpretation is expressed visually instead of how the lines are delivered.

“A set is about personality,” she said, and crews do extensive research to make sure every element expresses that.

In “Rain Man,” Dustin Hoffman played an autistic adult. DeScenna researched autism, and the department heads visited autistic children and their environments.

When Hoffman first saw his character’s room on set, he told the entire crew that he thought DeScenna understood his character better than anyone.

DeScenna will add little details that the camera won’t see — dust bunnies under the bed, dead flies in the window sill — to create an environment that helps the actor bring the character to life.

BLADE RUNNER

DeScenna worked on more than 25 films as a set decorator and another 15 as a production designer, but she doesn’t hesitate in singling out “Blade Runner” as her favorite.

Not everyone felt that way. During filming that went months over schedule and millions over budget, crew members were wearing “I Survived Blade Runner” buttons and had T-shirts made that read, “Will Rogers never met Ridley Scott,” a reference to Rogers’ famous quote, “I never met a man I didn’t like.”

DeScenna had some of those experiences. Ideas would come to Scott in the middle of production and he would scribble them on napkins or a stray piece of paper. They called them “Ridleygrams,” and those notes often generated marathon work sessions to make those scribbles a reality.

“He would have cloned himself if he could have and been the cinematographer, the production designer and the director, but he was really, really good,” she said. “Every idea he had was just brilliant, I thought.”

After threatening to do so for months, the producers finally insisted he stop filming, requiring a 22-hour final day to get an important scene between Deckard (Harrison Ford) and the leader of the escaped replicants (Rutger Hauer). They had to move shooting for the rainy scene indoors because it ran long, and the rain caused permanent damage to the stage.

“Rutger and Harrison were drunk as skunks, passing a bottle of Johnny Walker back and forth and passing it to the crew,” she said. “Everyone was going, ‘Get me off this film’ … That was crazy, but I loved it.”

“Blade Runner” wasn’t a box office hit when it opened in 1982, but today it’s considered one of the most influential films of the last 50 years for the ways it changed and shaped the way the future is portrayed in cinema.

Several props featured in “Blade Runner,” the “Star Trek” franchise and “Toys” are part of the collection donated to the Trumbull County Historical Society by Warren native John Zabrucky, co-founder of Modern Props. That collection will be an integral part of the proposed museum.

RETIREMENT

DeScenna has countless stories about Oscar-winning directors and Hollywood’s biggest stars. More than 90 minutes on camera only covered a small fraction of them.

She found the work creatively satisfying, but she had no trouble retiring after completing her final film, Adam Sandler’s “Bedtime Stories,” in 2008.

She originally planned on retiring after “Evan Almighty,” but “Bedtime” director Adam Shankman (who she had worked with several times) and the film’s producer were insistent. DeScenna said her agent told her he would give them a ridiculously high asking price in order to chase them away. Instead, they accepted his offer.

She now lives in California with her husband, Mark Robinson, and while she sees all the movies because she is a voting member of the Academy, she described herself as a political junkie and a television fanatic.

“I didn’t live to work; I worked to live. I like to read and see my friends. The movie business wasn’t my life. That’s why I retired at 58. I just didn’t want to do it anymore.”

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