~Somthing's Gotta Give House

I'm a movie set junkie sooo...

Set Design: Something’s Gotta Give
Setting the Scene for Romance in the Hamptons
Production Design by Jon Hutman/Set Decoration by Beth Rubino
Text by Nancy Collins
Published July 2007

For Something’s Gotta Give, director Nancy Meyers asked set decorator Beth Rubino to create a substantial Hamptons house for Diane Keaton, who plays a substantial Manhattan playwright whose daughter is having an affair with Jack Nicholson—until chest pains turn his heart up-side down in more ways than one. Forced to recuperate in the guest room of his girlfriend’s mother’s beach retreat, Nicholson finds that his unexpected infirmary is as big a player as those who inhabit it.

“The house had to reflect Diane’s character, who is a very successful, accomplished New York playwright in her mid-50s,” says Meyers. She is also a divorcée, following a 20-year marriage, who built her Hamptons house as “a gift to herself—no compromises—just her total vision of a peaceful life. Naturally, it’s a different mind-set than that of a woman who has been single or is part of a couple. There was no chance, for instance,” she chuckles, “that she was going to put a double sink in the bathroom.” Nor, for that matter, include an office. “The desk in her bedroom signifies she’s romantically shut down, in a stage of life where nothing’s going to be going on in the bedroom, so why not have a desk?”

The enthusiasm that went into the building of Diane Keaton’s unlikely love nest was matched only by the melancholy that came with tearing it down.In other words, she is exactly the kind of dame primed for a romantic upset—who arrives in the form of music mogul Nicholson—“a chronic dater of young women,” says Meyers—who, upon showing up with Keaton’s daughter, Amanda Peet, for a Hamptons weekend, proceeds to collapse and get rushed by his hostess to the hospital, where his doctor happens to be Keanu Reeves. “It’s about people who know what the future holds—then find out it doesn’t, like Jack and Diane, who are falling in love late in life. This house is their desert island. If he hadn’t been stranded, he would never have noticed her.”

Though their five-room “island”—living room, dining room, two bedrooms and kitchen—originally called for a beach cottage, Meyers ended up “doing an elegant house, where I would like to live, with the feeling of ocean everywhere.” As a result, the interiors are awash in sea colors and blues. “They wanted me to go with white slipcovers,” says Meyers, “but this woman would say, ‘I don’t want slipcovers like everybody else.’ She was determined to be at the beach.”

Nancy Meyers’s most pressing conundrum was how to keep her film, an hour of which takes place in five rooms, from feeling like a stage play. “It’s about depth of field, constantly looking from room to room, out a window, believing the beach is beyond,” Meyers explains. “In one scene, where Jack is in the bedroom and Diane stands in the doorway, you see past her into the living room and kitchen. You shouldn’t feel claustrophobic.”

“Hamptons houses that size have space, simplicity and a certain austerity,” adds set decorator Beth Rubino, who, along with Meyers and production designer Jon Hutman, scouted hundreds of Long Island homes before settling on a Southampton beachfront (used for exterior shots only) that Rubino calls their “visual barometer.” “Nancy wanted a house that looked decorated,” she continues, “so we created something wonderful and homey, but chilling”—a feeling Nicholson picked up on when he first visited the set. “During wardrobe fittings,” re-calls Meyers, “I could see Jack was going toward shorts and polo shirts. So I said, ‘Let’s take a look at the house where you’ll be spending time,’ and as soon as we got there, he said, ‘Oh, I get it. No shorts.’”

It wasn’t Nicholson’s only melding with his make-believe environment. “Jack is a great art collector,” says Meyers, “and when he saw the original piece over the living room fireplace, he said, ‘You don’t have any of the great beach art,’ and turned us on to Edward Henry Potthast,” whose whimsical sand-and-umbrella landscape “is the centerpiece of the room. You don’t see it much, but its presence is felt.”

Presence is all when moviemakers are trying to make what is not real—seem so. For starters, movie homes automatically feature the permanent accoutrements of a camera and crew, whose accommodations require space and mobility, like the kitchen’s islands, easily zoomed around on casters. During her survey, Meyers noticed that all fabulous Hamptons houses had “blowout kitchens”— as does the director herself. “There’s a lot of action in the kitchen because lots of scenes in my life take place in mine, which, like the movie’s, is a little too big.”

“Diane’s character loves to cook, so we had to have a practical, functional kitchen,” says Rubino, “that could also hold a lot of people.” Even so, Meyers preferred to keep her walls right where they were. “I don’t like to take down walls because you always think, Where did that wall go? How did that camera get inside the refrigerator? I like to keep things real-looking.”

Which was no problem for the self-admitted perfectionist Rubino, an Academy Award nominee for The Cider House Rules. “In a movie set, as opposed to a residence, you have to intrinsically build the entire lives of the characters,” she explains. “In a regular residence, you’re creating the top layer of their environment; in a movie we do that but create subtext as well.”

Take, for instance, the 3,000 books that Rubino shipped out from New York’s Strand Book Store. “Writers are passionate about books, so you don’t just get a collection of spines, you arrange them as an evolution of what Diane was reading: Is she interested in perennials, native beach plants, self- help? In the bedroom, where she’s working on a play, it’s all reference books. Though you only see books shot by shot”—indeed, a mezzanine loaded with tomes, categorized foot by foot, goes virtually unnoticed—“it builds depth for the set, making a very rounded environment for the actors.”

For her part, Meyers called friend and playwright Donald Margulies, demanding: “Tell me what’s on your desk,” a request that elicited a “highly detailed e-mail.” As a result, when the cast took their initial walk-through of their new “home,” “we had Diane’s plays, hardbound, sitting on her desk, along with scrapbooks filled with her clippings. Beth even sprayed suntan lotion around so they’d feel they’d just come in from the beach.”

When it came to the dining room, Rubino and Meyers reserved the place of honor for the 70-inch round table designed to adapt to a specific 360-degree shot. Nearby is a wall of plates, “beautiful but absolutely colorless except for one that has a little color, as Beth pointed out to me one day,” recalls Meyers. “Well, in the movie, Diane’s character collects beach stones, and there’s a scene where Jack indicates that they’re all white. She says, ‘I don’t collect only white. Oh, God, I didn’t know. Does that mean I’m controlling? Not adventurous?’ So he hands her a big, dark brown stone, saying, ‘Here’s something to remember me by.’” Art imitating art, perhaps? “Well, it made us laugh.”

The women’s collective sensibility was not lost on Diane Keaton. “Diane has a brilliant eye,” says Meyers. “I showed her the house empty, then with furniture, and both times she went crazy, which was great for me because it wasn’t really her taste.”

Clearly, Meyers and Rubino were exquisitely in sync. “Nancy is very involved in the visual process,” says Rubino. “She approved every fabric, every shape.” Upon hearing this compliment, Meyers laughs. “That’s code for ‘She’s a pain in the butt.’ But if you’ve spent a chunk of your life writing a character and someone puts them in the wrong clothes, or in a bed with sheets you know she would never own, it’s as if someone’s written dialogue. Sometimes you pick up more from what you’re seeing than hearing.”

The enthusiasm that went into the building of Diane Keaton’s unlikely love nest was matched only by the melancholy that came with tearing down fully appointed rooms where, for two and a half months, people lived and worked. “It’s horrible,” admits Meyers. “People say, ‘Go watch them tear it down,’ but I can’t. It’s simply too sad.”

Unlike Something’s Gotta Give, which is a funny, truthful, charming movie about grown-ups. “Jack and Diane are such icons,” says Meyers. “And to see them at this age, still smart and good-looking, finding each other in this movie—when we all know their personal journeys—is great fun. After all, people don’t stop falling in love just because they get older.”