Jeannine Oppewall

Jeannine Claudia Oppewall (born November 28, 1946) is an American film art director. She has worked on more than 30 movies in such roles as production designer, set decorator and set designer, and has four Academy Award nominations for Best Art Direction for L.A. Confidential, Pleasantville, Seabiscuit and The Good Shepherd. Many of her film sets represented different time periods within the 20th century, including the 1930s (Seabiscuit), the 1950s (L.A. Confidential and Pleasantville), and from the 1960s (The Big Easy, The Bridges of Madison County and Catch Me If You Can).

Biography Early life Jeannine Oppewall was born on November 28, 1946, and was raised in Uxbridge, Massachusetts, with a Calvinist upbringing. Her father was a tool and die maker Garrett Oppewall and her mother was Eva Boutiler. According to The New York Times, Oppewall was determined to be "the family intellectual." There she discovered the furniture of designers and filmmakers Charles and Ray Eames, which inspired her to switch her focus to modern design. Oppewall said of the Eames designs, "I was so attracted by the contemporary feeling, the shapely sexy lines: totally different from the Sears, Roebuck middle-class stuff I'd grown up with. I looked at it and said, 'This is me.'" Upon taking the job, Charles Eames told Oppewall, "I can teach you how to draw, I cannot teach you how to think or see. If you can think and you can see, you can stay." A large portion of the movie was filmed in the home of Duvall's character, which Beresford created from an old house that had been sitting abandoned by a highway in Waxahachie, Texas, where the majority of the movie was filmed. and workplace issues committees. In 2000, Oppewall tore down the bungalow and built a larger modern house in the style of Charles and Ray Eames because she "did not want my house to conflict with my (Eames-designed) furniture," which she bought while working for the Eameses.

She was part of the team that won an Art Directors Guild Excellence in Production Design Award for the 2002 film Catch Me If You Can; Oppewall also received nominations for the same award for the films L.A. Confidential, Pleasantville, Wonder Boys, Seabiscuit and The Good Shepherd.