This retrospective on the career of Academy Award-winning production designer Richard Sylbert takes readers behind the scenes of some of the most influential films of the past fifty years. The Manchurian Candidate, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, The Graduate, Rosemary's Baby, Chinatown, Dick Tracy. The common factor behind these diverse, visually ground-breaking cinematic masterpieces is the work of legendary production designer Richard Sylbert. Basing the book in part on the late designer's Hollywood memoirs, writer Sylvia Townsend, with the participation of Sylbert's widow, screenwriter Sharmagne Sylbert, has enhanced the production designer's original manuscript with candid interviews from some of his most famous collaborators, including Warren Beatty, Roman Polanski, and Francis Ford Coppola. The result is a book that takes readers behind the scenes of some of the most influential and highly acclaimed films of the past fifty years. This is a portrait of a highly driven, sometimes tempestuous visionary who wasn't afraid to fight for the artistic integrity of the worlds he created on screen. Movie lovers will find in-depth discussions of the making of such modern classics as Reds, Carnal Knowledge, Shampoo, and The Cotton Club. More than thirty illustrations capture Sylbert's creative process from early sketches to completed sets and locations.

One of the seminal American films of the 1970s, Roman Polanski's detective yarn sees murder and scandal emerge from the drought of 1930s Southern California. Private eye Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) is hired to follow water commissioner Hollis Mulwray (Darrell Zwerling), only to see him turn up dead at the bottom of a reservoir. Realising he has been used, Gittes confronts Mulwray's widow, Evelyn (Faye Dunaway), a woman who seems to have plenty of secrets of her own, not least her ambiguous relationship with her father, Noah Cross (John Huston).

Warren Beatty's adaptation of the detective comic strip displays a big-screen comic book look of its own. In a 1930s American city, Big Boy Caprice (Al Pacino) takes a stranglehold on all underworld activities, disposing of his main rival Lips Manlis (Paul Sorvino) and nabbing his girlfriend Breathless Mahoney (Madonna). Dick Tracy (Beatty) is entrusted with the task of cleaning up the city, but problems on the home front, with the adoption of a young orphan, and the seductive come-ons of Breathless threaten to ruffle his composure.