Carl Anderson

Carl Anderson was born in 1903 in Dover, New Jersey - coincidentally, in the same year and in the same town where the pioneering film The Great Train Robbery (1903), generally considered to be the first "narrative" film in cinema history, was shot. His family eventually moved to Los Angeles, where he attended high school, and after graduation went to work for an interior design business. In the early 1930s he was hired as a draftsman at MGM Studios, but by 1936 he was working at Columbia Pictures, where he spent the next quarter-century. It didn't take long before Anderson worked his way up to art director, and after gaining experience in short subjects, he began work on feature films in the early 1940s. He worked on such films as Miss Sadie Thompson (1953), Hatari! (1962) and Chisum (1970), and was twice nominated for an Academy Award in Art Direction, once for The Last Angry Man (1959) and again for Lady Sings the Blues (1972). Starting in the 1970s he worked mainly in television, and mostly on made-for-TV movies. He retired from features in 1981, and died in 1989.