DRESSING FOR A WAR: REMEMBERING 1941 WITH DEBORAH NADOOLMAN-LANDIS

One of the film world's greatest costume designers, in Australia for the launch of her exhibition Hollywood Costumes, recalls her first big-budget studio feature - Steven Spielberg's grand folly, 1941.

Steven Spielberg’s 1941 holds a very special place in film history as one of Hollywood’s most grand follies. The 1979 production, which comedically chronicled one night of mayhem when Los Angelinos were convinced Japanese forces were launching an attack on Hollywood, ran way over budget and opened to scathing reviews, leaving co-financiers Columbia Pictures and Universal Studios in the red on a film that was greenlit to give the super-hot director total creative control on a scale he had never known.

It was to be the third feature for a young costume designer named Deborah Nadoolman (pictured; right), who had honed her craft on the low-budget comedy The Kentucky Fried Movie and the surprise smash hit, Animal House (both directed by her future husband, John Landis). Now one of Hollywood’s most revered costume designers with credits that include Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Blues Brothers, An American Werewolf in London, Trading Places and Michael Jackson’s Thriller video, the two-term President of the Costume Designers Guild spoke to SCREEN-SPACE of her experience on Spielberg’s enormous spectacle.

“The first thing I should say is that Steven really gave me carte blanche,” Nadoolman-Landis says from her West Coast home, prior for leaving for Melbourne to oversee the launch of Hollywood Costume, a collection of iconic outfits that she has spent five ears curating. “He had come to a screening of Animal House and had fallen in love with the film. So he called me to come in and talk about designing on 1941. I had never designed on a movie of that size. My entire CV at that time was Kentucky Fried Movie and Animal House.”

Spielberg has since admitted that his self-belief was running rampant at the time, after the one-two box office punch of Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Clearly taking its inspiration from Stanley Kramer’s frantic 1963 farce, It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, the director was in charge of a cast that included Hollywood bad boys John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd (both pictured; right) and Treat Williams, veterans Toshiro Mifune, Warren Oates and Slim Pickens and wide-eyed stars-in-the-making Bobby Di Cicco and Dianne Kay. For Nadoolman-Landis, it was clear her director was going to need all the help even her limited experience could offer.

“He was a still very young,” she remembers. “He had Jaws and Close Encounters, both of which I had adored, but he had not had a lot of experience with costuming or with costume designers. In fact, on those films, I don’t think he had even had a costume designer!” Conversely, 1941 would use 100’s of extras, all of who required fitting for a very specific time in American history; the key characters include a troop of USO girls, a tank crew, some zoot-suiters and a Japanese submarine crew. “He was going to be making a period film and he had no idea what to do,” she says with a laugh, tempered somewhat by hindsight.

“He and I sat together, and got on very well at that first meeting. He told me that the film was going to be as Spielberg/Nadoolman co-production,” she says. Thrilled to be offered a gig on a major studio production, the breadth of her task soon dawned upon Nadoolman-Landis. “I had read the script and, at that time, I was like ‘Oh, my goodness!’, this is going to cost a fortune. At the time, the budget was like $22million, but…well you know, right. A huge film.” (pictured left; Spielberg on-set with actor Ned Beatty, centre).

“After the meeting, I was walking to my car and it just struck me, ‘How am I going to do this?’,” she recalls of a moment when the pressure to make real a vast directorial vision consumed her. “My last costume budget, on Animal House, was $50,000 out of a $2million budget. On 1941, my budget was going to be $250,000! I ran to a payphone and called my boyfriend, John Landis, and cried ‘John, this is going to be such a huge movie and I’m in way over my head’ and I really did start spinning out. And John said, ‘Just realax. It is the same job.’”

Thirty-four years later, Deborah Nadoolman-Landis would recognise it as a defining moment in her career perspective. “Costume design, whether its on Kentucky Fried Movie with $15,000 or 1941 with $250,000, is exactly the same job. And that’s what I took away from 1941. Steven and I had a fabulous time working on the movie, as we did on Raiders of the Lost Ark,” she says.

Spielberg’s costly flop went through a number of re-edits and has emerged as cult favourite for many, though still carries the stigma of being associated with a flagrant period of excess in Hollywood history (it is often spoken of in company with infamous bombs Inchon, Heaven’s Gate and Ishtar). However, Nadoolman-Landis has no regrets, emerging from the production with the utmost respect for her colleague. “I just think he is terrific and adore him as the captain of the ship,” she says, fondly recalling the production and its director. 

Deborah Nadoolman-Landis has curated Hollywood Costume, which begins a 4 month season in Melbourne on April 24 at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image.