‘Marty Supreme’: How Production Designer Jack Fisk Worked With Josh Safdie to Recreate 1950s New York: ‘He Was Always Ahead of Me’
Jack Fisk is behind the looks of some of the most distinctive films of the past 30-plus years, from David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive” to Paul Thomas Anderson’s “There Will Be Blood.” For Josh Safdie’s “Marty Supreme,” Fisk brought his long experience working with auteurs to create the expansive world of 1950s New York that Timothée Chalamet inhabits as scheming ping pong champ Marty Mauser.
The three-time Oscar-nominated production designer, who just turned 80, is likely the only one on the crew who remembers what the city looked like back then. But Safdie was just as obsessed with getting things right, Fisk says — even down to searching for the right size ping pong balls, since balls were slightly smaller in the 1950s than today’s version.
“Josh has got so much energy and is such a lover of New York, and I was always trying to find things that I could tell him that were a little different. But he was ahead of me,” says Fisk.
Working with the likes Terrence Malick, Brian De Palma and Martin Scorsese, Fisk says, “was exciting times — we thought, like, we’re taking over the film business. And so now this was exciting for me, because there’s a whole new wave of young filmmakers that are brilliant,” he says.
“Marty Supreme” takes place over numerous settings, from the atmospheric Lower East Side of 1950s New York, with its street vendors and small shops, to Japan, where the crew prepped and filmed for two weeks.
Locations included New York’s Plaza Hotel and Indonesian Embassy, which stood in for swanky London hotels, and the Woolworth mansion on East 80th Street, where Gwyneth Paltrow and Kevin O’Leary’s wealthy characters lived. “I couldn’t believe they let us shoot there. It was over the top,” Fisk recalls. International table tennis tournaments were recreated at Meadowlands Arena in New Jersey.
Fisk worked closely with Safdie to envision some of the film’s biggest set pieces, including the table tennis parlor Marty Mauser frequents that is based on Lawrence’s Broadway Table Tennis Club.
Chalamet, too, was involved in the production design, Fisk says. “His enthusiasm and his dedication to acting, and what he was doing was inspirational. I’m married to an actress (Fisk is married to Sissy Spacek), so I’m always building sets for the actors to help them, and he just took advantage of all of it. He knew what kind of research we were doing. He would come in all the time and look at drawings and models, and show up at locations. His excitement about the film made you excited to be a part of it.”
Fisk details what went into creating some of the film’s most important settings.
Lawrence’s Broadway Table Tennis Club
When Fisk read “The Money Player,” written by Marty Reisman, the 1950s ping pong champ who loosely inspired the story, he realized that Lawrence’s Broadway Table Tennis Club, where Marty hangs out, would be a central location. Though the building no longer exists, Fisk found vintage photos taken by the city.
He then asked Safdie’s wife, executive producer Sara Rossein, who was working on research for the film, to see if she could find the blueprints. “Not only did she find the blueprints, but she found an article from Look magazine or one of those magazines that had beautiful black and white photos of the place. We were able to see exactly how it was set up,” he says.
The art department even added the hand-painted landscape murals that were created when the space housed an indoor miniature golf course, though they aren’t very visible in the final cut.
Why was this level of detail so important?
“You like to start somewhere, and you think that if it’s closer to authenticity, it might help the actors understand their character,” says Fisk. “We start with the most accurate representation we can find, and then we alter it to work for the film.”
“I think in my heart, I approach a lot of these films that I do as documentaries. So research is fun, exciting, and it gives you a starting point,” Fisk says.
Fisk lived in New York in the early 1960s, so he had a fairly good idea of the right look. In addition, the crew studied N.Y. experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs’ short film “Orchard Street,” which shows the crowds and streetscape of the Lower East Side neighborhood in color.
“We actually shot Orchard Street on Orchard Street,” Fisk says. “We found a store there that we wanted to make the Northridge shoe store, and right next to it was a brand-new hotel. So we had a problem up and down the street. Everybody had modernized their buildings and put in tall plate glass,” he recalls. Plus, the street signs were different, and there was graffiti everywhere, which wasn’t there in the 1950s. Fisk explains that set designers built a modular system of tenement fronts that covered the ground-level building fronts.
“Then Adam Willis, our decorator, started doing layers from the awnings over these modular fronts to the tables with all the things they were selling, and the storefronts, the windows we kept working on layers right out into the middle of the street. And it started to look very real.”
“The graphic artist created signs for us, and then the scenic artist aged them beautifully, and we used those to hide a lot of the modern signs underneath and anything else that was offensive.”
“It was fun to be on the street at that time, because you could kind of lose yourself and think you’re in the 1950s,” Fisk remembers.
While the tenement interiors were shot on a stage, the shoe store was shot in an actual store that was rebuilt because the ceiling was falling down and the floor was unsafe, Fisk recalls. It was important to him to communicate a 1950s feeling through the colors of the interiors.
“Whenever I go into an old place, I start peeling away paint or moving light switches to see what was under it, trying to get back in time,” he says. “We use a lot of colors from the ’50s, because they were just beautiful. Looking at period color charts, there’s very little white, but a lot of really rich colors. In my career, I’ve tried to always bring that color back in and avoid white like the plague. White just seems more contemporary to me, but it also just burns a hole in the film. If you look at white on a piece of celluloid, it’s just clear there’s nothing there.”
In a climactic scene, Marty heads to Japan for a championship game. Fisk exchanged drawings and photographs with the Japanese art department for a month before the crew traveled to Tokyo, and they had already pulled together most of the graphics.
“We had a plan on how to design the stage where they were going to have the tournament. We just didn’t know which stage it was,” Fisk says. After touring locations, they found a concert shell in a park outside Tokyo. “It was perfect. It was close to the period and it looked like you were in another country. Our crew put together some towers out of bamboo that we then covered with Japanese graphics.”
“We found photographs of some artwork from the World Tournament in Tokyo, just a year or two after our film, and we were able to borrow from that,” says Fisk.
Safdie, who speaks Japanese, was thrilled with how the scene came together, Fisk says. “It was such an easy place to work, and the people were so kind, and the art department was so talented. You would just kind of wish something and it would show up. The ping pong table was based on an old Japanese table. I sent them a picture of it, and next thing I knew, we had one.”
The three-time Oscar-nominated production designer, who just turned 80, is likely the only one on the crew who remembers what the city looked like back then. But Safdie was just as obsessed with getting things right, Fisk says — even down to searching for the right size ping pong balls, since balls were slightly smaller in the 1950s than today’s version.
“Josh has got so much energy and is such a lover of New York, and I was always trying to find things that I could tell him that were a little different. But he was ahead of me,” says Fisk.
Working with the likes Terrence Malick, Brian De Palma and Martin Scorsese, Fisk says, “was exciting times — we thought, like, we’re taking over the film business. And so now this was exciting for me, because there’s a whole new wave of young filmmakers that are brilliant,” he says.
“Marty Supreme” takes place over numerous settings, from the atmospheric Lower East Side of 1950s New York, with its street vendors and small shops, to Japan, where the crew prepped and filmed for two weeks.
Locations included New York’s Plaza Hotel and Indonesian Embassy, which stood in for swanky London hotels, and the Woolworth mansion on East 80th Street, where Gwyneth Paltrow and Kevin O’Leary’s wealthy characters lived. “I couldn’t believe they let us shoot there. It was over the top,” Fisk recalls. International table tennis tournaments were recreated at Meadowlands Arena in New Jersey.
Fisk worked closely with Safdie to envision some of the film’s biggest set pieces, including the table tennis parlor Marty Mauser frequents that is based on Lawrence’s Broadway Table Tennis Club.
Chalamet, too, was involved in the production design, Fisk says. “His enthusiasm and his dedication to acting, and what he was doing was inspirational. I’m married to an actress (Fisk is married to Sissy Spacek), so I’m always building sets for the actors to help them, and he just took advantage of all of it. He knew what kind of research we were doing. He would come in all the time and look at drawings and models, and show up at locations. His excitement about the film made you excited to be a part of it.”
Fisk details what went into creating some of the film’s most important settings.
Lawrence’s Broadway Table Tennis Club
When Fisk read “The Money Player,” written by Marty Reisman, the 1950s ping pong champ who loosely inspired the story, he realized that Lawrence’s Broadway Table Tennis Club, where Marty hangs out, would be a central location. Though the building no longer exists, Fisk found vintage photos taken by the city.
He then asked Safdie’s wife, executive producer Sara Rossein, who was working on research for the film, to see if she could find the blueprints. “Not only did she find the blueprints, but she found an article from Look magazine or one of those magazines that had beautiful black and white photos of the place. We were able to see exactly how it was set up,” he says.
The art department even added the hand-painted landscape murals that were created when the space housed an indoor miniature golf course, though they aren’t very visible in the final cut.
Why was this level of detail so important?
“You like to start somewhere, and you think that if it’s closer to authenticity, it might help the actors understand their character,” says Fisk. “We start with the most accurate representation we can find, and then we alter it to work for the film.”
“I think in my heart, I approach a lot of these films that I do as documentaries. So research is fun, exciting, and it gives you a starting point,” Fisk says.
Fisk lived in New York in the early 1960s, so he had a fairly good idea of the right look. In addition, the crew studied N.Y. experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs’ short film “Orchard Street,” which shows the crowds and streetscape of the Lower East Side neighborhood in color.
“We actually shot Orchard Street on Orchard Street,” Fisk says. “We found a store there that we wanted to make the Northridge shoe store, and right next to it was a brand-new hotel. So we had a problem up and down the street. Everybody had modernized their buildings and put in tall plate glass,” he recalls. Plus, the street signs were different, and there was graffiti everywhere, which wasn’t there in the 1950s. Fisk explains that set designers built a modular system of tenement fronts that covered the ground-level building fronts.
“Then Adam Willis, our decorator, started doing layers from the awnings over these modular fronts to the tables with all the things they were selling, and the storefronts, the windows we kept working on layers right out into the middle of the street. And it started to look very real.”
“The graphic artist created signs for us, and then the scenic artist aged them beautifully, and we used those to hide a lot of the modern signs underneath and anything else that was offensive.”
“It was fun to be on the street at that time, because you could kind of lose yourself and think you’re in the 1950s,” Fisk remembers.
While the tenement interiors were shot on a stage, the shoe store was shot in an actual store that was rebuilt because the ceiling was falling down and the floor was unsafe, Fisk recalls. It was important to him to communicate a 1950s feeling through the colors of the interiors.
“Whenever I go into an old place, I start peeling away paint or moving light switches to see what was under it, trying to get back in time,” he says. “We use a lot of colors from the ’50s, because they were just beautiful. Looking at period color charts, there’s very little white, but a lot of really rich colors. In my career, I’ve tried to always bring that color back in and avoid white like the plague. White just seems more contemporary to me, but it also just burns a hole in the film. If you look at white on a piece of celluloid, it’s just clear there’s nothing there.”
In a climactic scene, Marty heads to Japan for a championship game. Fisk exchanged drawings and photographs with the Japanese art department for a month before the crew traveled to Tokyo, and they had already pulled together most of the graphics.
“We had a plan on how to design the stage where they were going to have the tournament. We just didn’t know which stage it was,” Fisk says. After touring locations, they found a concert shell in a park outside Tokyo. “It was perfect. It was close to the period and it looked like you were in another country. Our crew put together some towers out of bamboo that we then covered with Japanese graphics.”
“We found photographs of some artwork from the World Tournament in Tokyo, just a year or two after our film, and we were able to borrow from that,” says Fisk.
Safdie, who speaks Japanese, was thrilled with how the scene came together, Fisk says. “It was such an easy place to work, and the people were so kind, and the art department was so talented. You would just kind of wish something and it would show up. The ping pong table was based on an old Japanese table. I sent them a picture of it, and next thing I knew, we had one.”