Barbara Ling, the manufacturing designer who turned again time and received an Oscar for re-creating 1969 Los Angeles for Quentin Tarantino’s acclaimed As soon as Upon a Time in Hollywood, has died. She was 73.
Ling died Thursday in Santa Barbara after a battle with most cancers, a spokesperson for WME introduced.
A Los Angeles native, Ling additionally tooled round her hometown for the present-day, Michael Douglas-starring Falling Down (1993), then reteamed with director Joel Schumacher to arrange the fictional Gotham Metropolis for Batman Without end (1995) and Batman & Robin (1997).
In a profession that spanned greater than 4 a long time, Ling served because the manufacturing designer on two 1991 classics, Oliver Stone’s The Doorways and Jon Avnet’s Fried Inexperienced Tomatoes, on which she additionally was an affiliate producer.
She additionally teamed with director Scott Hicks on Hearts in Atlantis (2001), No Reservations (2007), The Fortunate One (2012) and Fallen (2016).
Most just lately, she labored on Marc Forster’s A Man Known as Otto (2022), starring Tom Hanks, and on the blockbuster biopic Michael (2026), directed by Antoine Fuqua.
On As soon as Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019), Ling shared the Oscar for finest manufacturing design with set decorator Nancy Haigh; the 2 had labored collectively as soon as earlier than, on the 1988 movie Checking Out.
Tarantino’s “principal factor from the second we sat down was, ‘I need this to be actual. I wish to see. I wish to scent and I really feel that Hollywood. I don’t wish to do inexperienced display screen over right here or have the digital interpretation. Let’s actually change the billboards, and let’s put the actual facades again on,’” Ling stated in a 2019 interview.
“That’s, to me, very thrilling. It’s one thing we don’t do a lot of anymore. I knew that what he needed was to embody himself and the actors into an atmosphere that you can really feel is actual. You’re not simply observing one thing that’s a chunk of inexperienced display screen the place we piece collectively later. That was the beginning floor of this.
“I needed to exit and work out the place I might connect actual issues to. It was fairly an engineering feat to do, significantly on Hollywood Boulevard, to say, ‘I need the Pussycat Theater again.’ To construct these marquees, it’s added weight. These are previous and fragile buildings that we had been working with. We needed to additionally work with engineers to ensure we weren’t going to drag the facade off as soon as we rebuilt the previous indicators. It was laborious however effectively price it.
“The evening of the primary shoot when all of the neon lit up and the interval automobiles got here out and [Arianne Phillips’] costumes had been on the market, you completely believed you had been in 1969 as a result of all the things was actual. It was a film filming an actual avenue. We just about carried that theme via Westwood [to re-create the Bruin Theater] and all over the place we shot.”
After successful her Oscar, Ling lamented to reporters backstage that “L.A. is just not a preservation metropolis, by no means has been. Now there’s been a nonstop motion of house constructing and glass towers. … What we did will likely be unimaginable to do subsequent yr. It’s unlucky. We hope this can deliver some nostalgia again and cease issues from being torn down.”
Born in August 1952, Barbara Claire Ling started her profession designing units and lighting for greater than 200 theater, opera and musical productions. Amongst her early efforts was the 1981 HBO particular The Pee-Wee Herman Present, taped on the Roxy in West Hollywood.
She made the leap to filmmaking when David Byrne enlisted her to design his directorial debut, True Tales (1986).
Her credit additionally included Heaven (1987), Much less Than Zero (1987), V.I. Warshawski (1991), With Honors (1994) and Sydney Pollack’s Random Hearts (1999), among the many movies that demonstrated she was equally snug with interval authenticity, modern realism and stylized fantasy.
Survivors embrace her spouse, Lindsay, and their sons, Clay and Will.
