When Alfred Hitchcock’s beguiling spy caper “North by Northwest” debuted in the summer of 1959, audiences and critics alike marveled at its risky scamper by stars Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint across the massive stone faces of Mount Rushmore.
New York Times film critic A.H. Weiler called the film “the year’s most scenic, intriguing and merriest chase” through “some of the more photogenic spots in these United States.”
But Hitchcock’s still-iconic pursuit scene was not filmed at the soaring presidential memorial in South Dakota’s Black Hills, but instead on a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer sound stage in front of a massive painting of Mount Rushmore painstakingly re-created by MGM studio artists.
“Everyone thought it was real,” says Thomas A. Walsh, an award-winning Hollywood production designer and art director.
That painting — on canvas, 90 feet long and 30 feet tall — is now displayed just off the lobby at the Boca Raton Museum of Art, a bold introductory statement to “Art of the Hollywood Backdrop,” a fascinating world-premiere exhibition of scene-setting paintings used in some of cinema’s most beloved titles.
Among the 20 backdrops in the show are scenes from “The Sound of Music,” “Singin’ in the Rain,” “National Velvet,” “Marie Antoinette” and “Ben Hur,” as well as a few contemporary movies, including the Coen Brothers’ offbeat 2016 comedy “Hail Caesar!”
Flowing through multiple high-ceilinged rooms on the first floor of the museum, “Art of the Hollywood Backdrop” is a celebration of the pre-digital achievement represented by these paintings, their warmth and depth, scale and detail. But it is especially interested in honoring the unsung, typically uncredited artists who brought such mastery of color, light and shadow to their work.
Positioned among the canvases are video monitors showing scenes from the films that feature the paintings before you, as well as displays dedicated to the artists, including video interviews and photography showing how they worked.
There is plenty of room to Instagram yourself on Mount Rushmore in “North by Northwest,” though the scale of the painting may be too large to put yourself exactly in Cary Grant’s place (tip: go to the second-floor overlook for another angle on the painting). But there are other opportunities set up for that kind of thing.
A depiction of a hallway from the Pentagon originally used in a 1947 docudrama about the atomic bomb, “The Beginning of the End,” was repurposed five years later for a classic scene by song-and-dance man Donald O’Connor in “Singin’ in the Rain.” If you’re interested in re-creating O’Connor’s gymnastic dance with a hat, a dummy and a sofa, the museum has installed a sofa, a dummy and a very similar hat in front of the backdrop.
If you’re more the posing type, a large painting used in scenes of the von Trapp family terrace overlooking the Danube is the perfect scale to insert yourself into “The Sound of Music.”
“It’s a show for anyone who loves movies,” says the museum’s executive director, Irvin Lippman.
The exhibit is also a reminder of the dramatic backstory to these backdrops, drawn from more than 2,000 paintings that sat folded up in storage at MGM for decades, before being rescued in the 1970s by J.C. Backings Corp. The company is run by Lynne Coakley, part of a family of backdrop artists that goes back four generations.
“Art of the Hollywood Backdrop” was co-curated by Walsh, who founded the Backdrop Recovery Project a decade ago in partnership with J.C. Backings, and Karen L. Maness, an artist and art professor at the University of Texas.
The university has dozens of J.C. Backings canvases at the Texas Performing Arts Hollywood Backdrop Collection, which provided the paintings seen in the Boca Raton exhibit.
Maness also is a co-author of “The Art of the Hollywood Backdrop,” an appreciation of the history of Hollywood scenic art and the artists who created these paintings.
The idea to gather the backdrops in a formal museum exhibit and have that exhibit make its world premiere in Boca Raton began when Lippman saw a 2020 broadcast of “CBS Sunday Morning,” with host Jane Pauley interviewing Coakley, Walsh and Maness.
Lippman is a University of Texas alumnus and got in touch with Maness about the school’s collection.
The backdrops acquired by J.C. Backings Corp. were the lucky ones — tens of thousands of paintings were repurposed, the canvases painted over, while others were simply thrown away. Walsh points out that no backdrops from “The Wizard of Oz” are known to exist.
“Everything was used repeatedly. We started as a green industry and then became brown,” Walsh says, citing the decline of film studios in the 1970s and their indiscriminate disposal of assets. Backdrops often went first.
“They got rid of them in auctions or just threw them out. We don’t know how many were lost. Thousands,” he says.
“The Art of the Hollywood Backdrop” opens Wednesday, April 20, at the Boca Raton Museum of Art, 501 Plaza Real. Hours: 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Wednesday, Friday, Saturday-Sunday; 11 a.m.-8 p.m. Thursday; closed Monday-Tuesday. Admission: $12, seniors $10, students free. Visit BocaMuseum.org.
Staff writer Ben Crandell can be reached at bcrandell@sunsentinel.com.