Carl Anderson(1903-1989)
- Art Director
- Production Designer
- Art Department
Carl Anderson was born in 1903 in Dover, New Jersey - coincidentally,
in the same year and in the same town where the pioneering film
The Great Train Robbery (1903), generally considered to be the first "narrative" film in
cinema history, was shot. His family eventually moved to Los Angeles,
where he attended high school, and after graduation went to work for an
interior design business. In the early 1930s he was hired as a
draftsman at MGM Studios, but by 1936 he was working at Columbia
Pictures, where he spent the next quarter-century. It didn't take long
before Anderson worked his way up to art director, and after gaining
experience in short subjects, he began work on feature films in the
early 1940s. He worked on such films as Miss Sadie Thompson (1953), Hatari! (1962) and Chisum (1970),
and was twice nominated for an Academy Award in Art Direction, once for
The Last Angry Man (1959) and again for Lady Sings the Blues (1972). Starting in the 1970s he worked mainly
in television, and mostly on made-for-TV movies. He retired from
features in 1981, and died in 1989.