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"The Furniture" is our weekly series on Production Design. You can click on the images to see them in magnified detail.

by Daniel Walber

Location is everything. Daphne du Maurier’s My Cousin Rachel is so intimately associated with the Cornish landscape that you can go take a “My Cousin Rachel Walk” along the coast. Its cliffs and pastures feature prominently in the new adaptation of the book, starring Rachel Weisz, which was shot close to the novelist's home.

The 1952 version, meanwhile, was shot almost entirely inside an American film studio. The real Cornwall only makes a few brief appearances. But, despite the appeal of literary tourism, authenticity is not necessarily art. The location choice forces much of the plot indoors, taking full advantage of the complex and Oscar-nominated work of art directors Lyle R. Wheeler and John DeCuir and set decorator Walter M. Scott. It's more subtle, more effective.

Earlier today, the Academy sent an email to all members with the final list of Board of Governors candidates. Conspicuously absent is Netflix CEO and Ted Sarandos, who hosted a recent Academy museum fundraiser and was hoping to get a chance to run for the board.

Also absent is Cheryl Boone Isaacs, the current president of AMPAS, who’s stepping down this August and not seeking a third three-year term on the 54-member board. You have to be on the board in order to run for President. Others no longer in the running are Sony Pictures Classics and CBS Films executives Michael Barker and Terry Press, producer Paula Wagner, director Brett Ratner and actors Queen Latifah and Lou Diamond Phillips. Actress Laura Dern is one current board member who is backed by Academy CEO Dawn Hudson and gaining support.

The final election begins Monday, June 19 and closes on Friday, June...

Earlier today, the Academy sent an email to all members with the final list of Board of Governors candidates. Conspicuously absent is Netflix CEO and Ted Sarandos, who hosted a recent Academy museum fundraiser and was hoping to get a chance to run for the board.

Also absent is Cheryl Boone Isaacs, the current president of AMPAS, who’s stepping down this August and not seeking a third three-year term on the 54-member board. You have to be on the board in order to run for President. Others no longer in the running are Sony Pictures Classics and CBS Films executives Michael Barker and Terry Press, producer Paula Wagner, director Brett Ratner and actors Queen Latifah and Lou Diamond Phillips. Actress Laura Dern is one current board member who is backed by Academy CEO Dawn Hudson and gaining support.

The final election begins Monday, June 19 and closes on Friday, June...

When I first met Ivan Reitman, I was warned to be on my best behavior. I was an employee at Dave’s Video, a laserdisc retail store, and Reitman was one of the store’s most important customers. He, Steven Spielberg, and Danny DeVito all had a standing order. They wanted one of every title. Everything. If it came out, they owned it. Reitman’s assistants picked orders up frequently, but every now and then, he’d be the one that came in, sometimes with his teenage son Jason in tow. When he did come in, it was important that we keep him happy. He was one of the guys keeping the doors of that business open, and we absolutely went out of our way to make sure he got anything he wanted. He turned out to be far less scary than he'd been described when I finally helped him one afternoon,...

Comedy may be the most subjective of genres, but Ivan Reitman knows what the people want. Over the course of his 40-plus-year career as a director, producer, and writer, the Slovakia-born/Canada-bred filmmaker has been a key player in some of Hollywood's most iconic comedies — Animal House, Meatballs, and Stripes among them. But few films have amassed as passionate a following as one particular hit: Ghostbusters.

Originally conceived of as a space-set ensemble piece and starring vehicle for Dan Aykroyd (who wrote it) and John Belushi, the horror-comedy-sci-fi-family-film hybrid eventually...

All hail the Queen of Egypt a.k.a. the classic epic "Cleopatra," which was released 50 years ago today (on June 12, 1963). The controversial film is known not only for setting fire to the scandalous affair between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, but also for its monstrous budget, initial box office flop, and unending conflicts.

Last month the film's 50th anniversary was celebrated at the Cannes Film Festival with a special screening of the recently released Blu-ray restoration. To honor the classic, we're opening up the tomb of facts to reveal the juicy bits you may not have known about the film. From budget nightmares to comas and contracts, read on to find out why the Academy Award-winning "Cleopatra" was an epic of truly epic proportions.

1. "Cleopatra" is infamous for marking the beginning of the heated love affair between Burton and Taylor, which lasted until his death in 1984. However, Liz and Dick...

As a child of the 80s, to me there were two distinctive kinds of horror movies: the kind you watched if you really wanted to scare the crap out of yourself (A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Thing) and the kind that you enjoyed because they treaded on the lighter side of genre fare (The Monster Squad, Ghostbusters, Gremlins), and Fright Night definitely fell into the latter category, making it an almost instant classic for myself and worldwide fans alike when it hit VHS shelves everywhere in late spring 1986.

Even though most of us adore Fright Night for being the best vampire movie of the entire 1980s, what I've always thought made it even more entertaining than your average vampire film of that time was that the movie also had some incredible characters as well as a look and feel that demonstrated writer/director Tom Holland...

The Art Directors Guild has instituted an inaugural Hall of Fame to honor the contributions of legendary production designers and art directors. The first group of inductees includes Wilfred Buckland (1922's Robin Hood), Richard Day (1941's How Green Was My Valley), John DeCuir (1963's Cleopatra), Anton Grot (1937's Life of Emile Zola), Boris Leven (1965's The Sound of Music), William Cameron Menzies (1939's Gone With the Wind) and Van Nest Polglase (1941's Citizen Kane, co-credited with Perry Ferguson).