[ Press Release ] [ Awards Gala ]

Harold Michelson, whose prolific career dates back to 1949, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Art Direction for his 1979 work on Star Trek: The Motion Picture. He was also honored in 1999 by the Art Directors Guild with its Lifetime Achievement Award. His other major credits as an art director and/or production designer include Dick Tracy, Terms of Endearment, Spaceballs, Planes, Trains & Automobiles, Mommie Dearest, Catch-22, History of the World, Part I, Johnny Got His Gun, The Outside Man, Hair, Mame, Pretty Poison, Can't Stop the Music, The Thousand Plane Raid and Two People. Mr. Michelson also worked as a continuity consultant on Throw Momma From the Train, Quicksilver, WarGames, and High Anxiety and as a visual consultant on Matilda and The Fly.

He is widely considered to be "the industry's greatest illustrator." Films he has illustrated include The Ten Commandments, Cleopatra, Ben Hur, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, The Graduate, Irma La Douce, West Side Story, The Apartment, The Birds, Fiddler on the Roof, A Star Is Born, From Here to Eternity, Ship of Fools and The Turning Point.

Harold Michelson was born in New York in 1920. His first job after graduating from high school was with the Bureau of Printing in Washington, D.C. During World War II, as a bombardier-navigator in the U.S. Air Force, he flew more than 40 missions over Germany. Following the war he became an illustrator for magazines while attending art school at New York's Arts Students League. He then worked in Chicago and Los Angeles illustrating movie posters.

Mr. Michelson's first studio job was as an apprentice illustrator for Columbia Pictures, which led to his being traded to Paramount Pictures to do illustrations and storyboards for The Ten Commandments. At Paramount he moved up the ranks to junior and then senior illustrator. He then moved on to MGM to work on Ben Hur and to Universal to illustrate for Spartacus. Mr. Michelson's career in art direction began with NBC's Matinee Theater and went on from there to CBS's The Andy Griffith Show and Gomer Pyle and then feature films. In recent years, he has been a consultant for Danny DeVito.

Mr. Michelson's wife, Lillian, is considered to be the dean of motion picture research. Thirty-three years ago she founded the Lillian Michelson Research Library, which contains 7,000 books, 100,000 periodicals and 1,500,000 clippings, stills and photographs. She was asked to join DreamWorks in 1995 and is presently located at its studio in Glendale.

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ABOUT RICHARD SYLBERT: The Hollywood Film Festival's annual Hollywood Outstanding Achievement in Production Design Award has been renamed as the Richard Sylbert Outstanding Achivement in Production Design Award to honor the career of the late Richard Sylbert, who died March 23, 2002, at the age of 73 after a distinguished 40-year career. Mr. Sylbert, a two-time Academy Award winner for Art Direction for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Dick Tracy, also is remembered for his work on Chinatown, The Graduate, The Manchurian Candidate, Carnal Knowledge, Rosemary's Baby, and Catch-22. It's most fitting that Harold Michelson should be the first recipient of this renamed award since Mr. Michelson was associated with Mr. Sylbert on Dick Tracy and Catch-22.