Barbara Ling, the production designer who went back in time and won an Oscar to recreate 1969 Los Angeles in Quentin Tarantino’s iconic film. Once upon a time in HollywoodHe died. She was 73 years old.
A WME spokesperson announced that Ling died Thursday in Santa Barbara after a battle with cancer.
Ling, a Los Angeles native, is traveling around her hometown for her current starring role in Michael Douglas Falling (1993), then reunited with director Joel Schumacher to create the fictional Gotham City Batman forever (1995) and Batman and Robin (1997).
In a career spanning more than four decades, Ling has served as production designer on two 1991 classics, Oliver Stone’s The One. Doors And John Avnet Fried green tomatoeson which she was also an associate producer.
She also collaborated with director Scott Hicks Hearts in Atlantis (2001), No reservations (2007), The lucky one (2012) and He fell (2016).
Recently, I worked on Marc Forster A man named Otto (2022), starring Tom Hanks, and in the blockbuster biopic Michael (2026) Directed by Antoine Fuqua.
on Once upon a time in Hollywood (2019), Ling shared the Academy Award for Best Production Design with set designer Nancy Hay; The two worked together once before in the 1988 film Log out.
“Tarantino’s main thing from the moment we sat down was: ‘I want this to be real.’ I want to see. I want to smell and feel Hollywood. I don’t want to do a green screen here or have a digital interpretation. “Let’s really change the billboards, let’s bring back the real facades,” Ling said in a 2019 interview.
“That’s very exciting to me. It’s something we don’t do a lot of anymore. I knew what he wanted was to include himself and the actors in an environment that could feel real. You’re not just staring at something that’s a piece of green screen that we put together later. That was the starting point for this.”
“I had to go out and figure out where I could hang real things on them. It was an incredible feat of engineering, especially on Hollywood Boulevard, to say, ‘I want to restore the Pussycat Theater.’ To build those tents, it’s extra weight. These are old, fragile buildings we were working with. We also had to work with engineers to make sure we wouldn’t remove the facade once we rebuilt the old signage. It was daunting but worth it.”
“The first night of filming is when all the neon lights came on and the cars came out at that point [Arianne Phillips’] The costumes were there, and you would totally believe it was 1969 because everything was real. It was a movie depicting a real street. We’ve pretty much carried this theme through Westwood [to re-create the Bruin Theater] And everywhere we shot.
After winning the Oscar, Ling lamented to reporters backstage: “Los Angeles is not a sanctuary city, and never has been. And now there’s this constant movement of apartment buildings and glass towers… What we did will be impossible to do next year. It’s unfortunate. Hopefully this will bring back some nostalgia and prevent things from being torn down.”
Born Barbara Clare Laing in August 1952, she began her career designing lighting sets for more than 200 theatrical, opera and musical productions. Among her early efforts was a 1981 HBO special Pee Wee Herman Showregistered at the Roxy in West Hollywood.
She made the leap into filmmaking when David Byrne commissioned her to design his directorial debut, True stories (1986).
Her credits are also included sky (1987), Less than zero (1987), VI Warshofsky (1991), With honors (1994) and Sydney Pollack Random hearts (1999), among the films that showed she was equally comfortable with period authenticity, contemporary realism, and stylized fantasy.
Survivors include her wife, Lindsay, and their sons, Clay and Will.
