Ideas Festival: Ann Roth

Hollywood costume designer

The Ideas Festival celebrates the talent and creativity of our community.

Ann Roth’s amazing, award-winning career in Hollywood costume design spans decades, from Midnight Cowboy and Hair, to Mama Mia and Barbie. She will be in conversation with Jane Musky.
Musky, a Maplewood native, is a production designer and art director.

Jane and Ann have collaborated on Gus Van Sandt's Finding Forrester, Michael Mayer's The Seagull, and, most recently, Michael Hoffman's American Classic, filed right here in Maplewood.

ANN ROTH
One of the most prolific Costume Designers in the film industry, Ann Roth began her career at the age of nineteen painting scenery for The Pittsburgh Opera while attending what was then Carnegie Tech. After assisting Irene Sharaff and Miles White in Hollywood and in New York, Ms. Roth began designing on her own in the theatre and, for her first picture, designed George Roy Hill's The World of Henry Orient. Since then she has designed over one hundred forty pictures working as much as she can with friends such as Mike Nichols, John Schlessinger, Anthony Minghella, Hal Ashby, Sidney Lumet, Stephen Daldry, Alan Pakula, Noah Baumbach, and Nora Ephron. Ms. Roth has over 100 Broadway design credits and countless credits in regional theatre and stock companies.

For those of us keeping score, she has two Academy Awards, two BAFTAs, a TONY, just last month was awarded the Premio Zeffirelli in Florence. 

JANE MUSKY
One of the most prolific Production Designers in the film industry, Jane Musky began her career at the age of fourteen painting scenery for The Strollers in her native Maplewood. She went on to design in the New York theatre.  After a fateful meeting with Joel and Ethan Coen her professional career took a major shift away from theatre and she designed her first feature, Blood Simple.

Jane Musky’s body of film and television work encompasses many styles and periods and rich collaborations with directors such as Alan Pakula (The Devil's Own), Rob Reiner (When Harry Met Sally), Gus Van Sant, Mike Newell (Mona Lisa Smile), Peter Bogdanovich, Jerry Zucker (Ghost), Joel and Ethan Coen (Blood Simple, Raising Arizona),  Diane English, Ivan Reitman, Janusz Kaminski, Paul Schrader, Nick Hytner, and Zack Braff. Jane believes a Production Designer must put story and character first-expressing each character’s emotional life through their personal environments, creating richly textured visual style for a film as a whole.

Photos

Photos courtesy Tracy Sham Photography

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