Chapter 18 - Oliver!

Summary

In 1966, when I was nine years old, my father began work, as Art Director to John Box (his friend and mentor), as Production Designer, on the film that would win them a second Oscar, Columbia Pictures’ spectacular screen adaptation of Oliver! This thumpingly popular musical is not a work many people would associate with “vision,” but the film and its creation, though I did not realize it for many years, inspired my life and my life's work.

My father, Terence Marsh, born 1931, the only child of a printer's journeyman and his pretty Irish wife, an occasional stand-in for film stars, was a natural-born artist, a film fan, and a young man set on his future the moment he saw the title “art director” in the credits on a cinema screen. He studied art and architecture and, after surviving National Service, spent six years as a draughtsman at Pinewood Studios, learning his craft, “everything from blueprints and budgets to storyboarding, and from scenic painting and set dressing to mastering special effects.” He went freelance in 1960 and joined the team that made David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia (1962) as one of four assistant art directors to John Box. His primary mission on the film was to build, in Spain, a simulacrum of the Red Sea port city of Aqaba, a triumphant piece of ingenious design. (Tall, blonde, handsome, and handy on a motorbike, he also doubled for Peter O’Toole in the opening sequence.) Box took father with him to the challenges of Doctor Zhivago (1965), recreating Moscow on the hard standing of an unbuilt housing estate near Madrid; the film earned the two their first Oscar together. Father made, eventually, five Dickens films, many comedies (which he also wrote and produced), and several films which have become classics by popular acclamation, partly because of the power and suggestiveness of their design, including The Shawshank Redemption (1994) and The Green Mile (1999).

My career looks, at first sight, nothing like my glamorous father’s. Born 1957, as I grew up, I gravitated away from “the business” and film toward literature and academia, despite the dead end it presented at the time in Britain.