‘The Holdovers’: How Dirty Socks, Preparation H and Books Provide Insight into Paul Giamatti’s Grumpy Professor

“The Holdovers” production designer Ryan Warren Smith pieced together five school locations for Alexander Payne’s latest.

In the retro movie, set in the early 1970s at the fictional prep school Barton Academy, Paul Giamatti’s grumpy teacher Paul Hunham is left to look after students who have no place to go over the Christmas break.

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Smith studied Hal Ashby’s “The Landlord” and “The Last Detail,” both released around that period, while creating the production design for “The Holdovers.” He observed everything in those films were stripped down, at least when it came to production design.

The same rang true when location scouting. “Everything was brown and made of wood,” Smith says. “We built off of that, and what goes with that and what doesn’t.”

His challenge: finding a cohesive way to stitch together elements from the five Massachusetts locations (Groton, Northfield Mount Hermon, Deerfield Academy, St. Mark’s School and Fairhaven High School) that would serve as the fictious Barton Academy. That meant stripping back anything that looked modern — taking a library from one place, searching for a basketball court that might have had a wooden ring instead of metal and even piecing together old dorms to establish the correct era for Barton.

The goal was not to go for 1970s on the nose, but to date things a few years prior to make the world feel believable. “I used a lot of color, paint, tones and set decorating,” he says of his solution.

Giamatti’s character is the beating, or rather, curmudgeonly, heart of the film, and his environment showed a lot of neglect. “We see that before he even speaks.

There are dishes, and socks over the radiator — he’s not a clean guy. I don’t think he has many guests,” Smith says. “Paul is also a bookworm, so in his office and home, there are stacks of books.”

And what about the vintage tube of Preparation H seen in the opening credits?

“That came up the day before shooting,” Smith says. “Those little details were fun to play with.”

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