Polly Platt / Progress in Mathematics (PDF)

This book examines the career and creative labour of production designer Polly Platt. It focuses mainly on her contributions to 1970s Hollywood, but also considers her later work. Considering films such as The Last Picture Show, Paper Moon, The Bad News Bears, and The Witches of Eastwick, it argues that Platt's construction of their visual palette and mise-en-scène was so creative and so comprehensive that it can be considered authorial. Chapters discuss Platt's life and its influence on her work, her attention to detail, her role in location decisions and costume design, and her use of colour. An epilogue discusses her later career as a producer and her mentorship to young filmmakers like Cameron Crowe and Wes Anderson. This is the first full-length examination of the career of one of the women practitioners whose work was so important to 1970s cinema, and provides an alternative methodology to the auteur-driven framing thatso regularly defines the era.

Aaron Hunter lectures in the department of film at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. His monograph Authoring Hal Ashby: The Myth of the New Hollywood Auteur (2016) constructs an alternative, multiple-authorship framework for understanding New Hollywood, an approach he continues in this work on Polly Platt. His collection Women and New Hollywood, co-edited with Martha Shearer, will be published in 2022.