Derek McLane, production designer on this year’s Academy Awards — which under pain of death he can’t discuss — on designing last year’s Academy Awards:
“I’ve done many Broadway shows. Those old, narrow theaters have small stages with limited ability to fly sets and cramped wing space. Front-row audiences can spot stagehands or actors awaiting a cue in the wings, scratching themselves. But the visual’s one way. People just sit in the seats. Also, no stairs.
“TV is different. Close-ups of scenery. Different angles. Cameras go tight. On paper you draw lines and map ways to conceal sightlines. I started sketching in May. Then a scale model’s put together. Early fall you hone in on the design and four shops build it.
“Oscar stars must enter easily. To not torture them, I avoid stage stairs. From the auditorium stars walk up to the stage — not down. Last year, Jennifer Lawrence took a tumble. No banisters. They’d be in the way.
“Things can always go wrong. Daniel Radcliffe, removing his harness coming up from our Broadway ‘How To Succeed in Business’ pit, dropped his book prop. A pro, never blinking an eye, he just kept going. We knew everything, having worked on this show nine months before it opened. My assistant ran out, glued together a book cover and pages and got it backstage within minutes.
“You try to reflect an actor’s personality. Casting changes, script rewrites or a replacement can’t climb steps, you work with the director or quick add an unseen chair lift. Listen, sometimes a piece of the set falls off or there’s an automation hang-up. Always some problem.”
And how did he nail the job to design the Academy Awards?
“Like actors, set designers have agents.”
Odds & ends
Waiting to occupy Ellen DeGeneres’ former house, Ryan Seacrest is living luxuriously in Beverly Hills’ Montage Hotel . . . Paramount, behind “Nebraska” and “The Wolf of Wall Street,” throwing its big hoo-hah party Thursday . . . Nigella Lawson’s divorcing, and temporary husband Charles Saatchi soldiers on. He’s buying up Oscar Murillo’s art. Not exactly Rembrandt, Murillo’s a new painter.
‘Just Jim Dale’ is just that
“Just Jim Dale” starts performances in May. Who’s in it? “Just Jim Dale — me,” said Jim Dale. “The Roundabout only seats 400. Perfect. I’ll get to know everybody and do it until August.
“It’s my life story. I’ve performed it outside New York. It’s only 90 minutes. After that you start wetting your knickers. I’ve done the material, polished, recorded and adjusted it. I’ll tell how I recorded 240 different voices in all the ‘Harry Potter’ books sitting hours on end in a recording studio that’s an upright glass coffin. If your leg itches, you can’t even scratch. Too much sound.
“I’d mark the script, like, ‘Dumbledore, No. 2.’ If in the margin I wrote ‘No. 38’ I’d switch to that voice.
“Listen, I live here 34 years, been a US citizen five years, but age 9 I started in small-town British music halls touring 52 weeks a year. I’ve done shows all my life.”
Pay attention
Jay Leno rolled up in a vintage hot rod to LA’s biker hangout Rock Store and chatted with Magic Bullet Media’s Nick Schyler. Nobody mentioned Fallon. They talked cars . . . I hope Oheka Castle’s Gary Melius, who’s big in politics, pals, poker and who-knows and suffered a shooting, is OK. It’s just that, after dinner there once, I thought maybe it was the chef they were gunning for.
A 90-year-old actual former Monuments Man, invited to a “Monuments Men” screening, met Tom Brokaw. Asked the gentleman: “Who are you?” Brokaw: “I wrote ‘The Greatest Generation,’ and it’s all about people like you.” The real MM: “Oh . . . yeah . . . aren’t you on television? I think I maybe saw you on TV.”
Only in New York, kids, only in New York.