“When we send our pros out on these kinds of things, there’s due diligence. You don’t just walk in ready to get sandbagged. For all you know, this Hawley person is a raging loon. And, ya know, just showing up with an outstretched hand might not be the happy surprise of his day. Oh shoot—judge is here, gotta go.”
She hung up and I stared at my phone in sudden disbelief—the grand master of getting my goat got it once again. Leave it to Maya to hand me a performance improvement plan before I even started a job I didn’t want in the first place.
But—she had a point.
Before I knew it, I was parking in the underground lot of the downtown public library and crashing through the swinging doors. Up the escalators I rode, into the giant belly of paper knowledge. I pulled out my phone and googled Hawley movie sets. An IMDb list came up first, thirty-eight credits under “Art Department.” I recognized a few of the flicks. One was a Hugh Jackman thing, Tokyo Nights. A few re-posts of the Downtown Courier article, and under images a handful of press shots of Hawley Junior posing with his crazy city models. But there was very little about the man himself—no Wiki, no website, no bio, no socials. On the very last search page, there was a reference to the March 2014 issue of PERSPECTIVE: The Journal of the Art Directors Guild—“Gulliver in Wonderland: The Set Designs of Devon Hawley Jr.”
A cute blonde with red glasses held down the desk at Collections. She looked up from some giant yellowing tome. “Can I help you?”
“I’m looking to pull some old mags and newspapers,” I said.
“Some of our resources are online, some of it’s bound, some of it’s in the process of being converted from microfiche.”
“Wow,” I said. “Microfiche—keeping it real.”
She tried to hold back a smile as she closed her book and slipped me a stack of mini-forms and a three-inch pencil.
I filled out my orders—the issue of PERSPECTIVE and LA Herald-Examiner, Local News January 1983 through December 1988. I was just about to hand them over when I said, “Do you have a system for tracking obituaries?”
“I can search on a name,” she said, “but if it’s common, you might get back a whole database.”
“Let’s try.” I scribbled Reynaldo Durazo on another slip of paper and slid it across the table.
She said, “Give me a few minutes,” spun her chair, and walked away nice and smooth. I envied her peace in this high-ceilinged room. All around, across the giant windows, the falling rain made dramatic trails of silver.
Minutes later she came back with a great big bound black book. The word PERSPECTIVE 2014 was embossed on the cover. I thanked her and shlepped it over to a reader’s table, thumbed to March. Page thirty-two, a six-page photo spread of some of the incredible, elaborate city miniatures I’d seen, so vivid they looked realer than real. There he was standing among them, the bald, affable creator in another Hawaiian shirt—this one orange—hovering over his mini-world like the sun, holding up a tiny milk truck in a pair of tweezers.
Alongside the photos, they ran a Q and A column.
Hawley: It’s more than a work style, really. It’s a philosophy…miniaturism.
Perspective: You got a taste for set building very young, apprenticing with your father.
Hawley: I wouldn’t call it an apprenticeship, ’cause he wasn’t bossy. And he wasn’t exactly a teacher. He was more of a jack-of-all-trades, my dad.
Perspective: But he worked in the art department at several major studios.
Hawley: Sometimes. But when his contracts for Globus and Paramount ran out, he would do anything. He sometimes conducted the Steamer trains in Griffith Park.
Perspective: The kiddie train?
Hawley: Yup—he wore the hat and everything. Anyway, they had a mini-town there at the entrance, no bigger than a baseball mound, but that little town became my obsession. Then when he saw I dug it, he took me to Disneyland—we studied the Moby Dick ride, the Storybook Land canal boats. We rode it over and over.
Perspective: Today, with CGI, so many directors are opting for real-time urban footage. But in addition to the work you’ve done for Sam Raimi and Michael Bay, you still build miniature cities for pleasure.
Hawley: That’s right. I have a series I’m working on. I call it The Spirit of Los Angeles 1943 to 1979. It’s kind of a labor of love.
Perspective: And it’s Hollywood?
Hawley: Well, it started as just Hollywood but it’s grown—Chatsworth to Dana Point, Santa Monica to Palm Springs. And I’m working on adding Pedro, the bay.
Perspective: Wow. But this isn’t for a shoot?
Hawley [Laughs]: Not that I know of. I just wanted to capture…not just the design aspects but the…the quietness of city life back then. It was a more serene time, even when we all thought it was full of noise and action.
Perspective: Interesting. Can you say more on that?
Hawley: Well, there used to be this wonderful sense, even in the big city, that life had its moments of solitude. I’m trying to make a model that captures that feeling.
Perspective: Beautiful. Everybody needs to see these!
Hawley: Thanks. We aren’t exhibiting The Spirit of Los Angeles just yet…but I’ve been talking to MOCA. My dream is to expand it into a walk-through installation that fills a whole museum wing. Like, the greatest model train you ever saw.
I closed the big book and stared out at the reading room. Two tables down, a homeless junkie in five layers of dirty black was nodding off into a copy of Bon Appétit, mesmerized by the food porn. The world’s greatest model train—it all seemed so painfully innocent, from this man I’d just seen weeping in his car. He was sentimental. Deeply.
And maybe he did know something about Emil Elkaim.
I went back to the desk and gave the librarian back her book.
“Nothing too exciting?” she said.
“You said it.”
She reached under the desk and brought out a square blue bucket with twelve small plastic-lidded film cannisters. “You know how to work the machine?”
“Better if you show me,” I said. “I’d hate to mess one of these things up.”
She took me to the far end of the room with six old-fashioned-looking blue microfiche gizmos, each with their own private station. I took a seat and fumbled with the spool. She leaned in to help, close enough for us to exchange awkward smiles.
