William Cameron Menzies was a renowned film designer, director, and producer who made a lasting impact on the film industry. Born in 1896, Menzies was educated at Yale University, the University of Edinburgh, and the Art Students League in New York. He began his career in the film industry in 1919, serving as an assistant to Anton Grot at Famous Players-Lasky.
Menzies drew inspiration from German Expressionism and the work of D.W. Griffith, and his sense of visual style was quickly recognized, earning him a promotion to full art director after only three years. He worked for United Artists, Fox, and other major independent producers, designing for stars such as Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks, and Mary Pickford.
Menzies' flamboyant and exotic fairy-tale sets for The Thief of Bagdad (1924) are still regarded as a work of pure genius. He also directed and produced films during the 1940s, working frequently with director Sam Wood. Menzies acquired a reputation for his larger-than-life personality, visual flair, and love of adventure and fantasy in films.
He defined and solidified the role of the art director, having overall control over the look of the finished motion picture. Menzies was a tireless innovator, meticulously pre-planning the color and design of each film through a series of continuity sketches that outlined camera angles, lighting, and the position of actors in each scene.
For Gone with the Wind (1939),Menzies and J. McMillan Johnson drew some 2,000 detailed watercolor sketches, earning him an Honorary Academy Award in 1940 for "outstanding achievement in the use of color for the enhancement of dramatic mood." Menzies also directed the famous burning of Atlanta sequence and hospital sequence, including the famous long shot of wounded and dying Confederate soldiers, taken from a 90-foot crane.
As a director, Menzies was less effective, consistently displaying an inability to draw strong performances from his cast. As a result, others were often brought in as co-directors, forcing Menzies to share the credit. In the 1950s, he helmed several low-budget films, which stand out purely for their characteristically good visuals, such as Invaders from Mars (1953).
Menzies was inducted into the Art Directors Guild Hall of Fame in 2005, recognizing his contributions to the film industry as a pioneer in the field of art direction.
