From ‘Safeway Architecture Student’ to Oscar-Nominated Production Designer: New Scholarship Honors Lawrence G. Paull ’64 B.Arch
Lawrence G. Paull '64 B Arch enjoys his retirement. Photo courtesy Marcy Bolotin.
Acclaimed film production designer and teacher Lawrence G. Paull graduated from the University of Arizona Bachelor of Architecture program in 1964. As an architecture student, he learned early on the essential elements of good design.
Marcy Bolotin and Larry Paull on Larry's 80th birthday. Photo courtesy Mary Bolotin.
“Larry was committed to detail and nuance and an insistence upon creative excellence,” says Marcy Bolotin, Paull’s wife from 1983 until his death in November 2019.
Though he didn’t plan on working in the movie business following graduation, his hands-on educational experience prepared him for a career that eventually led to creating award-winning sets for such films as Blade Runner, Back to the Future, City Slickers and Romancing the Stone.
While Paull was “one of the most prolific and celebrated production designers in film,” according to the movie review site Rotten Tomatoes, it was his dedication to craft as an architecture student—and sharing those memories with his wife—that brought Bolotin and the College of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture together again. Recently she announced a planned scholarship in Paull’s name for CAPLA students.
“Larry lived in a Quonset hut when he was a student,” she says. “He knew how tough it was to work while in the program, and would have wanted to support students this way.”
Guy Weinzapfel ’66 B.Arch remembers Paull well, as their paths as architecture students crossed throughout the day. “Because studios were in the close quarters of the old Safeway building, our cohorts became tight,” he says. “Larry was intensely committed to his ideas. Indeed, at our 20th class reunion, he was still annoyed about a critique on one of his student projects.”
After graduation, Paull moved to Los Angeles, where a friend helped him land a job as a draftsman at Paramount Studios. He worked there on several films, his career progressing into art design and production.
Lawrence G. Paull and Director Ron Underwood on the set of City Slickers, circa 1989. Photo courtesy Marcy Bolotin.
“As production designer, his job was to oversee everything people would see on the screen,” says Bolotin.
Paull approached set design as only someone trained in architecture could: considering infrastructure and designing from there.
“Part of Paull’s frugal brilliance was to dress old-school crime sets, including ones used on The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep, in a gritty sci-fi coat,” writes Inverse magazine. “The future might pop with new tech, but infrastructure is always infrastructure, which means if you go down deep enough, you’re gonna find some grime.”
Though Paull had nearly 20 years of experience by the time he worked with director Ridley Scott on 1982’s Blade Runner, it was the “aesthetic distinctiveness Paull achieved on the film [that] proved to be career-making,” notes Rotten Tomatoes. With David Snyder and Linda DeScenna, Paull was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Art Direction for his work on the film, and he won the BAFTA Film Award for Best Production Design/Art Direction.
Lawrence G. Paull on set with architectural drawings. Photo courtesy Marcy Bolotin.
Paull’s life shifted not only professionally then, but personally, as well. One of his first dates with Bolotin was to see Blade Runner, which was so popular they couldn’t get in until the midnight showing.
“I remember thinking to myself, ‘Wow, this guy is something else!’” recalls Bolotin. They were married a year later.
Bolotin, who like Paull is originally from Chicago, was Paramount’s director of West Coast publicity when they met. Soon after, however, she resigned and became a freelance/unit publicist in the film industry so she could spend more time with her husband. “Larry and I traveled all over,” she says. “We both loved architecture and had the opportunity to see so much of the world.”
Paull’s rich exposure to different locales and histories may explain in part why he was “extremely adept with historical design elements,” says Rotten Tomatoes—a skillset that proved essential in films ranging from Back to the Future to Escape from Los Angeles. Still, it is Blade Runner’s “dystopian Los Angeles aesthetic he helped actualize [that] continues to inspire and influence how creators tackle the genre today,” writes Gizmodo.
In Los Angeles, Paull served as senior filmmaker-in-residence for the American Film Institute, creating its production design program. After retiring from film and television production, he and Bolotin moved to La Jolla, California, where he joined Chapman University as the head of production design, creating and teaching a new curriculum that is now an integral part of the university’s Master of Fine Arts in Production Design. Paull also took time to give guest lectures the University of Southern California, University of California, Los Angeles, Harvard University and of course his alma mater, UArizona.
Lawrence G. Paull (left) with Blade Runner Art Director David Snyder at an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences exhibit featuring artwork from the movie. Photo courtesy Marcy Bolotin.
In an interview with Inverse a few years before his death, Paull looked back on his career, to that pivotal set design experience for Blade Runner and to yet another parallel to his time crafting models in architecture school. “If you build it, I’ll shoot it,” he recalled Scott saying when they discussed the design of the set.
“And who couldn’t resist the temptation of that?” says Paull in the 2015 interview. “Because we’ve all suffered, making films with gigantic sets, beautiful sets, and all that is shown are talking heads…. But because [Ridley Scott] was an art director, he knew he could hook us with that bait. And he did it—if we built it, he shot it.”
Paull and Bolotin have built much more than brilliant, genre-defining productions. By endowing new scholarships at CAPLA, they’ve also ensured his legacy will help define the future careers of other architecture, landscape architecture and urban planning students—some of whom, thanks to the couple’s generosity, may go on to be as inspirational and influential as Paull himself.
For additional information about supporting College of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture students with scholarships, please contact Angie Smith, director of development, at angiesmith@arizona.edu or 520-621-2608.
