With voting open for this year’s Oscars, we’re taking a closer look at some of the craftspeople nominated for the year’s best films—from the people who recreated the Golden Age of Hollywood for the Coen Brothers to the makeup artist who redefined a pop culture icon. Check VanityFair.com every day this week for another close-up look at 2017’s Oscar nominees.

Last year, Joel and Ethan Coen transported audiences back to Hollywood’s Golden Age with Hail, Caesar!, a quirky period drama about a studio fixer (Josh Brolin) tasked with keeping movie-star scandals out of the tabloids. One of those scandal-plagued stars is DeeAnna Moran (played by Scarlett Johansson), an actress loosely patterned on Esther Williams, the compeтιтive swimmer snapped up by MGM in the 1940s and reinvented as the star of movies and “aquamusicals” like Bathing Beauty, Million Dollar Mermaid, Neptune’s Daughter,, and Jupiter’s Darling.

Oscar-nominated production designer Jess Gonchor was responsible for creating Hail, Caesar!’s lavish period sets—which he opted to make by hand, to honor (and authenticate) the 50s moviemaking process. So he and his team meticulously hand-plastered, sculpted, molded, and painted—even recovering one antique from the era for Johansson’s musical sequences: the old MGM tank originally built for Williams. Making the discovery even more special was the fact that Johansson’s sequence would be the first time the tank had been used for aquamusical purposes since Williams’s day.

Before designing the set around the pool, Gonchor watched 1949’s Neptune’s Daughter for inspiration, noticing that Williams was often lifted by a rope so that she could dive dramatically into the pool. To recreate this effect, Gonchor and his team designed a device resembling “an ice-cream sundae cup” for DeeAnna, and they finished the aquatic set by building a seashell-inspired orchestra pit nearby. Although the pool was the same one that Williams used, Gonchor revealed that Hollywood moviemaking has evolved so much that the crew had to treat the tank much differently than they would have some 65-plus years ago.

“There’s a lot of maintenance rules required for using the tank these days—cleaning it and filtering the water,” explained Gonchor. “There are a lot of restrictions I’m sure weren’t around when Esther Williams was doing it. Water has to be heated to a certain temperature. You have to have a lifeguard for every five people. You can’t put any foreign objects in the water that are metal or will contaminate the water. . . so when [Johansson] dives in and swims up to that treasure chest in the water, it had to be made out of special material—a certain acrylic.”

It’s easy to see, even from Williams’s own career, how similar regulations would have helped her. The actress famously broke her neck while shooting a 35-meter dive for Million Dollar Mermaid. (While this accident was not included in Hail, Caesar!, another career detail was—her becoming pregnant during the filming.) Williams wrote about the near-fatal accident in her memoir, describing how her biggest fear, immediately after hurting herself, was that the story would leak to press—a situation Brolin’s real-life MGM proxy presumably fixed for her.

I forced a smile for the camera and swan-dived from that tiny platform. Hurtling down, I muttered a silent, ‘Oh, sнιт.’ I suddenly realized what was going to happen next. The gold crown on my head. Instead of being made with something pliable like cardboard, it was lightweight aluminum, a lot stronger and less flexible than my neck.

I hit the water with tremendous force. The impact snapped my head back. I heard something pop in my neck. I knew instantly that I was in big trouble.

I could kick my legs, so I desperately treaded water; but my arms and shoulders were virtually paralyzed. The back of my neck was in screaming pain. In my mind’s eye I saw the headlines: “Esther Williams Drowns in MGM Studio Pool.”
One of the perks of Gonchor’s production-design gig on Hail, Caesar!, his sixth collaboration with the Coen brothers, was that he was able to create sets for all different genres from the 50s, and looked to the Technicolor canon for inspiration. While creating the set for the Roman epic George Clooney’s character stars in, for example, Gonchor looked to 1951’s Quo Vadis, the 1953 Richard Burton тιтle The Robe, and Ben-Hur. For the musical starring Channing Tatum’s song-and-dance man, Gonchor looked to Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire classics.

When it came time to shoot scenes that would, in today’s Hollywood, be sH๏τ on location, Gonchor—in his quest for period production-design authenticity—opted for sets, like the one he created for the Malibu home where Clooney’s character is held captive.

“Today, you would just go find a house in Malibu and make it work with the sophisticated lenses and lighting setups,” said Gonchor. “But I really had Hitchcock and North by Northwest in my mind for this set . . . We knew we wanted to put the ocean outside the house [set] on a green screen. We really tapped into that old style of making movie scenes with rear projections and hand-painted backings.”

“I loved the way all those came out,” Gonchor continued. “The most amazing thing for me was to shoot the Hollywood sets like they did back at that time . . . and walk around on set, feeling like an art director from the 50s.”