the clothing originally created for movie stars. Yet
Hollywood has tended to regard costume design
less seriously than some of the other design areas
in film. From its establishment in 1928, the Acad-
emy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gave
awards for art direction, but it did not establish
awards for costume design until 1948.
Makeup Traditionally, whether films took place
in modern or historical settings, stars’ makeup
invariably had a contemporary look. This approach
to makeup preserved the stars’ images and also led
to new beauty products being developed that
actors could advertise, enabling female consumers
to use the makeup worn by their favorite stars. In
fact, the history of the commercial makeup indus-
try roughly parallels the history of the movies. The
single most important person in the manufacture
of movie makeup was Max Factor. In 1908, he began
supplying wigs and makeup to the small movie stu-
dios cropping up around Los Angeles. In the early
1920s, makeup was usually the responsibility of
the actors, but Factor standardized makeup proce-
dures and thus created the position of makeup
designer. His products became the industry stan-
dard. Through research, Max Factor & Company
continued to provide new forms of makeup to meet
the challenges created by new camera lenses, light-
ing, and film stocks, especially color film, which
required a very different approach to makeup than
that required by black-and-white film. The most
important names in the history of makeup design192 CHAPTER 5 MISE-EN-SCÈNE
Design of historical dramas In W. S. Van Dyke’s Marie
Antoinette(1938; costume designer: Adrian), one of the most
lavish costume epics ever made, the French queen (Norma
Shearer) looks as glamourous as a movie star; Adrian, the
designer, did everything within his power to embellish
Shearer’s screen image rather than make her resemble the
queen, whose comparatively plain face is familiar from many
paintings and other representations.
The expressive power of makeupFor Christopher
Nolan’s The Dark Knight(2008), a large team of makeup
artists and hairstylists created the look of two remarkable
characters. [1] The Joker (Heath Ledger) is a psychopathic
criminal with a sick sense of humor, green hair and a purple
suit. But it’s his face makeup that is most remarkable——that
great, gashed red mouth, created through facial painting and
prosthetics——a darkly comic deformation and a visual parallel
to the character’s dual traits of sadistic humor and true evil.
In contrast, [2] Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) appears normal
in the first part of the movie as the handsome district
attorney who attempts to eliminate organized crime from
Gotham City. But toward the end, in a climactic struggle,
Dent’s face is badly burned by an explosion rigged by the
Joker, and he is then known as “Two-Face.” This horrifying
face was created by a digital makeup process, which
essentially allowed the designers to remove half of Eckhart’s
face from a digital image and replace it with their creation.12