Edward Carrere

American art director, born in Mexico City and educated at Polytechnic High School in Los Angeles. Ed Carrere spent the bulk of his career at Warner Brothers (1932-57, 1962-70), where he worked on several films for the directors Raoul Walsh and Michael Curtiz. He initially joined Warners as a draftsman in 1932, thereafter undergoing a long apprenticeship before graduating to full art director in 1947. His best work encompasses lavishly produced period dramas, (Adventures of Don Juan (1948) and The Flame and the Arrow (1950)), or gritty, realistic melodramas and crime thrillers featuring New York architecture and jazz club settings (Young Man with a Horn (1950), Sweet Smell of Success (1957)). For his most famous assignment, Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead (1949), Carrere created modernistic Bauhaus-style skyscrapers using matte paintings, models and miniatures and incorporating designs by the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. He again demonstrated his sense of visual style in his final work on Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969), effectively juxtaposing two socio-economically different townships on either side of the border, equally caught up in the violence of the Mexican Revolution.