During a two-week period in June-when the Cubs were putting together a road trip in California-Gary Baugh, a veteran set designer who was serving as art director on ”The Babe,” had his work cut out for him.
”The film moves through the `20s and terminates in the mid-`30s, and we were using Wrigley Field not only as the Wrigley of that time but as a substitute for Yankee Stadium and the Polo Grounds,” says Baugh. ”It was difficult because they would finish shooting the Polo Grounds one day, and the crew would come in that night and have 12 hours to change over to Yankee Stadium or Wrigley before the shooting started again. But we planned for that by putting together layers that were removed. We had a plank wall for the Polo Grounds, for instance, and pulled the planking off and there was a concrete wall for Yankee Stadium and then back to the brick wall for Wrigley.”
In making the conversions for ”The Babe,” the task of Baugh and his colleagues included installing vintage box seats, modifying the dugouts, hiding the fabled ivy with fences covered with ads, creating a scoreboard down near the ground and putting up signage to indicate the strangely elongated proportions of the Polo Grounds.
Baugh also worked on the modification of, surprisingly enough, Navy Pier, to duplicate the exterior of Boston`s Fenway Park. ”We put up signage and built turnstiles and gates down below. Here again, we worked from old photographs, and saw that the exterior of Fenway had an industrial look-a brick structure that you might think was a warehouse.
”There are always problems with doing a period piece, because of contemporary facades and things, but filmmakers like Chicago because the majority of the architecture is 50 years old and can be adapted fairly easily.”
On previous films Baugh has served as set designer, which deals more with creating the right architectural look than coordinating graphics and such. ”For `Backdraft,` we were out at Chicago Studio City, where I designed the high-rise floor, which included a bank of elevators and hallways where the firefighters search for the fire. That was interesting, because we had to dam up a nearby section of the set where water was held to represent flooding.
”On `Curly Sue,` we shot inside the old Rand McNally Building, which has beautifully ornate and elaborate interiors and which we used as an upscale restaurant. The place used to be an old shoe store, so we had to cover up things like the empty shoe stands that were built into the walls. They also built a huge apartment with marble floors out at the old New Trier West in Northfield.” Baugh laughs. ”While they were doing that, I got to build a beat-up trailer.”
