Hollywood Sketchbook: A Century of Costume Illustration Hardcover – November 13, 2012

Found this book to be even better than l even expected. Excellant source of referance. Incrediably beautiful sketches of designs from hollywood era. Great read. Beautiful coffee table book for gift for anyone. I absolutley loved the book. Interesting how the sketches were so abundant, not cared for and thrown out in those days. Now they are so valuable and a great source of our recording history. Highly recommend the book and well worth the money.

I bouth this as a birthday gift for my sister and had it shipped to me to check the quality of the item first. I LOVED IT!!! After looking at it I quickly sent it to her so not to be tempted to keep it for myself. However I am now ordering another for me. Alot of the sketches are full page with beautiful color backgrounds. Many of the I my opinion a suitable for framing.

This book is a veritable treasure trove of movie costume design sketches from the best Hollywood designers and illustrators of the past hundred years. Deborah Nadoolman Landis, herself a highly accomplished costume designer (Animal House, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Coming to America, etc.). Deborah Landis pursued thorough research into a subject known for its lack of historical records. In this book Landis covers the history, purpose, and eventual scattering to the winds of the Hollywood studios' once large inventories of film costume design sketches. The illustrators of those sketches( they are traditionally known as sketches although they are usually water colors) are given a near-encyclopedic treatment, each arranged alphabetically including some 600 costume sketch illustrations as examples of their work. Included will be many well-known film-favorites and iconic star wardrobe items but also complete surprises and unknown and under-appreciated contributors to Hollywood's heritage. Tracking down these sketches, once just tools of the trade in Hollywood film-production, but now highly prized collectors' items, was a labor of love for Dr. Landis. She is currently a professor and Chair of the Center for Costume Design at UCLA. This is a great book to own or to offer.

This book by far exceeds my expectations. Knowing how to sketch is a talent you are born with and a book such as this deserved to be published. This book presents hundreds of sketches of the best of Hollywood designers. Accolades to Deborah Landis for this beautiful collection of art and history.

This book was a gift to my mother for her birthday. As both a great movie buff and a disigner for thirty year in the fashion buisness, my mom loved the book, I sent it to her and have gotten various phone calls from her telling me about the book's insights into the costume. I get calls from her, to turn on Turner Classic movies, when something is on that has great designs. I must admit that my I idea of great costumes is Marilyn in the "Prince and the Showgirl", and the fur bikini in "One million years BC". But its a book that has given great joy and so its a terrific book in my opinion.

The person this gift was for really liked it. One tip: If you purchase this book as a gift be sure to have it shipped directly to the recipient because it is large and heavy. I had it shipped to me because I wanted to add a special card and it cost me $20 to send it. Anyone who loves the movies, especially the golden age of Hollywood will like this book. Would be great for anyone interested in fashions of the movies.

We gave this to a friend who majored in costuming in college, although she eventually got an MBA to make a living. She loves the book, has it on her coffee table by her favorite chair, and says she often just picks it up and carefully looks at a few pages to marvel at the talent and imagination on display in these sketches.

First, let me say that anyone interested in film costume should buy this book. It is a wonderful reference source for the work of sketch artists and designs from the earliest years of the industry to current films. The sketches are stupendous, raging from rough sketch styles of Harold Grieve for "Ben-Hur" to the perfectly finished drawings of Anthea Sylbert and Theodora Van Runkle. It suffers however, from a dependence on earlier reference works that are incomplete, and provides little or no context for the illustrations so gloriously included. For instance, in the section on Adrian, it is claimed that the designer and the studio head ( it does not say whether that head is Thalberg or Mayer) each made $75,000 a year. Although simple logic will tell you that you never get to make as much money as your boss, before 1936 Thalberg made $500,000 a year and after 1936 Mayer made a million a year. Adrian never had anything more than a year's contract with a year's option until 1938 when he was signed to a 3 year contract and made under $400 when he started with M-G-M in July of 1928 and at the most made $1000 a week when he left the company in December of 1941. Although rare sketches from "Two Faced Woman" are published here for the first time (with the exception of the Greek-inspired gown which has been in several publications since FIDM's "American Fashion" in 1974) it is not pointed out that the black satin quilted costume from "Two-Faced Woman" is that of Constance Bennett and the Greek design for Garbo. Given that the wardrobe problems of this film led to Adrian's departure from the studio after 13 years, this is unfortunate. The context there is everything. M-G-M's other leading designer, Dolly Tree, who created Myrna Loy's "Thin Man" costumes as well as almost all of Jean Harlow's costumes of 1936 and 1937, gets no written information at all. Sometimes the information is just inaccurate, such as when it is stated that Charles LeMaire didn't design for Ziegfeld until the "Midnight Frolic" when he had designed the Ziegfeld-produced "Elsie Janis and Friends" the year before. The writing on LeMaire gives the illusion that he was the main designer for Ziegfeld in the 1920s (that would be Erte) and Irving Berlin's "Music Box" reviews, in which out of the four, LeMaire did one musical numer in the 1923-24 edition to Ralph Mulligan's three and Adrian's seven, including the opening and finale. It also neglects to mention that LeMaire had designed films including Barbara LaMarr's "Heart of a Siren" in 1924. These are easily researched items and given the author's eminence as a film fashion historian, it is hard to overlook these and other errors and omissions. One of the great disappoinments of this book is that it will be cited as a reference source in the future. I appreciate the enthusiasm the author and the researchers had for the topic and they have no doubt brought to the public's awareness the names and tremendous talents of many designers, but it would have been more responsible to have been more thorough in research so that the book would not only be eye candy, but accurate film documentation as well.