Five Questions

The glittering legacy of Tony Duquette

Tony Duquette, the iconic decorator, artist, magical set designer, costumer and landscaper lived in a world of glamour and imagination. In a forward to a new book, More and More (Abrams, $75), that highlights Duquette's glittering legacy, Christian Dior designer John Galliano, writes: "If I could switch places with anyone for a day, it would be as the dashing Tony Duquette. We shared a mutual love of beauty and creating dreams."

Author Hutton Wilkinson began working for Duquette as a teenager and ultimately became his business partner. After Duquette died in 1999 at 85, Wilkinson carried on the legacy as president and artistic director for Tony Duquette Studios Inc. He lives in Dawnridge, the unique house Duquette created in Beverly Hills. In Houston to speak at the Greenwood-King design lecture series, Wilkinson took a few minutes to talk with CultureMap.

Q: What was special about Tony Duquette?

A: Tony Duquette is considered by museums to be an American design icon. He was the first American to have a one-man show at the Louvre in 1951. It included furniture, watercolors, jewelry, costumes, sets and sculpture. Everything he did was one of a kind. As a young man he was doing costumes and sets for Fred Astaire musicals at MGM, then in his 80s with me he was doing jewelry for Tom Ford at Gucci.

Q: What was the response to the Paris show?

A: It was so startling that the great French poetess Louise de Vilmorin wrote: "The works of Tony Duquette are no more preconceived than dreams. These works are dreams caught in the net of reality." That was the way he worked. He didn't make sketches, he would take the fabric and cut it. Sometimes it was a little maddening, because we were working with extremely expensive valuable things, like 18th century embroidered Mogul fabrics set with precious stones and he just cut them. I was a little bit of a curb on his enthusiasm, because I said: "We are going to measure before we cut them."

Q: How did you get to work with him?

A: I first read about him when I was in seventh grade. The Los Angeles Times had a wonderful home magazine and Tony and his wife Elizabeth lived in a former silent film studio. It had a ballroom that was 150 feet long, 28 feet tall and 28 feet wide (featured on the cover of More is More.) I said to my father, who was a very square architect in Los Angeles: "This is what I'm interested in." And he said, 'You are 100 percent crazy'." When I was 17, my art teacher said that Tony was looking for volunteers to do a big art installation. I knocked on his door and worked two years for free. We ended up working together for 30 years.

Q: Where did he get this talent and knowledge from?

A: His mother and her sisters were concert musicians and some of her family had been involved with the pre-Raphaelites in England. So he had these artistic genes from his mother's side, not his father's. They were a middle class family and lost all their money in the depression, so Tony realized at 18 that he would have to be the head of the family and make the money. He began by decorating store windows in a local department store. Eventually he worked with designers William Haines, James Pendleton and Adrian. But Tony always said that if it hadn't been for World War II, he would be nothing. Europeans came to Beverly Hills to sit out the war, like the Rothschilds, Baron de Rebay and Elsie de Wolf, whose home in Versailles was taken over by the Nazis for their headquarters. They wanted to meet the Hollywood stars and the stars wanted to be ladies and gentlemen. Through his work, he brought the two groups together.

Q: How do you carry on Tony Duquette's legacy?

A: I talked to a young designer in New York recently who was trying to break in to the business and I said, "Just be true to your vision...the only thing I can tell you from first hand experience is that you must never compromise." I'll never be the great artist that Tony was, but that's the message I learned from him.

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Movie Review

Big stars struggle for laughs in wedding film You're Cordially Invited

Photo by Glen Wilson

Will Ferrell and Reese Witherspoon in You're Cordially Invited

There’s something about weddings that comedy filmmakers love. From Four Weddings and a Funeral to The Wedding Singer to Wedding Crashers to Bridesmaids and beyond, the act of two people getting married provides plenty of opportunities for conflict, mixups, and mayhem on which comedies often thrive.

So the premise of You’re Cordially Invited, in which two weddings at a small island venue are accidentally booked on the same weekend, would seem to be rife with funny situations. Jim (Will Ferrell) is the single dad of Jenni (Geraldine Viswanathan), while Margot (Reese Witherspoon) is the high-powered sister of Neve (Meredith Hagner). Both have a connection to the Palmetto Hotel, and both think they have secured the first Saturday in June for the wedding of their family members.

The confusion over finding out the venue has been double-booked is initially met with reason and compromise. But as the two wedding parties butt heads jockeying for position among the island’s limited resources, tempers start to flare, and both Jim and Margot start to lean toward sabotage. What’s supposed to be the happiest day of their lives for the brides turns into a nightmare for both as their loved ones try to find ways to get back at one another.

Written and directed by Nicholas Stoller (Neighbors, Bros), the film is heavily dependent on the talents of its two stars. The scenes in which Ferrell and Witherspoon face off are the most enjoyable, as each uses skills they’ve learned over their long careers to elevate the film. Unfortunately, Stoller seemed to put most of his effort into their scenes, as anything involving their characters’ friends and families falls flat.

Stoller actually sets up the various quirks and tensions between the two groups well, but it's the execution of the subsequent scenes that is lacking. Whether it’s the fault of the editing team or Stoller himself, the pacing of the film is way off. Some scenes are cut short before they reach a good resolution, and others are extended well past the point of being funny.

The film mostly suffers from giving too much in certain situations and not enough in others. Jenni has a mostly anonymous group of female friends, portrayed by actors who all seem to have been given instructions to act over the top at all times, a trait that is more annoying than amusing. On the other hand, the craziness that the film seems to promise with its central premise never materializes. The acts of sabotage by Jim and Margot are so tame that they can’t even be called entertaining, much less hilarious.

The performances in the film face diminishing returns the further you go down the cast list. Both Ferrell and Witherspoon are talented enough to get by on charm alone, and even if these are far from their best roles, it’s still fun to see them. Viswanathan and Hagner are both fine, but the rest of the cast is uniformly uninteresting and occasionally off-putting.

You’re Cordially Invited is a great example of past results not equaling future success. Given the good films that Ferrell, Witherspoon, and Stoller have made in the past, it should have been relatively easy for them to make a pleasant if forgettable wedding movie. Instead, it’s a mostly unfunny affair with only a few moments that rise to their talents.

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You're Cordially Invited is now streaming on Prime Video.

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