Barbara Ling, the production designer who turned back time and won an Oscar for re-creating 1969 Los Angeles for Quentin Tarantino’s acclaimed Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, has died. She was 73.
Ling died Thursday in Santa Barbara after a battle with cancer, a spokesperson for WME announced.
A Los Angeles native, Ling also tooled around her hometown for the present-day, Michael Douglas-starring Falling Down (1993), then reteamed with director Joel Schumacher to set up the fictional Gotham City for Batman Forever (1995) and Batman & Robin (1997).
In a career that spanned more than four decades, Ling served as the production designer on two 1991 classics, Oliver Stone’s The Doors and Jon Avnet’s Fried Green Tomatoes, on which she also was an associate producer.
She also teamed with director Scott Hicks on Hearts in Atlantis (2001), No Reservations (2007), The Lucky One (2012) and Fallen (2016).
Most recently, she worked on Marc Forster’s A Man Called Otto (2022), starring Tom Hanks, and on the blockbuster biopic Michael (2026), directed by Antoine Fuqua.
On Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019), Ling shared the Oscar for best production design with set decorator Nancy Haigh; the two had worked together once before, on the 1988 film Checking 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 I feel that Hollywood. I don’t want to do green screen over here or have the digital interpretation. Let’s really change the billboards, and let’s put the real facades back on,’” Ling said in a 2019 interview.
“That is, to me, very exciting. It’s something we don’t do much of anymore. I knew that what he wanted was to encompass himself and the actors into an environment that you could feel is real. You’re not just staring at something that’s a piece of green screen where we piece together later. That was the starting ground of this.
“I had to go out and figure out where I could attach real things to. It was quite an engineering feat to do, particularly on Hollywood Boulevard, to say, ‘I want the Pussycat Theater back.’ To build those marquees, it’s added weight. These are old and fragile buildings that we were working with. We had to also work with engineers to make sure we weren’t going to pull the facade off once we rebuilt the old signs. It was laborious but well worth it.
“The night of the first shoot when all the neon lit up and the period cars came out and [Arianne Phillips’] costumes were out there, you absolutely believed you were in 1969 because everything was real. It was a movie filming a real street. We pretty much carried that theme through Westwood [to re-create the Bruin Theater] and everywhere we shot.”
After winning her Oscar, Ling lamented to reporters backstage that “L.A. is not a preservation city, never has been. Now there’s been a nonstop movement of apartment building and glass towers. … What we did will be impossible to do next year. It’s unfortunate. We hope this will bring some nostalgia back and stop things from being torn down.”
Born in August 1952, Barbara Claire Ling began her career designing sets and lighting for more than 200 theater, opera and musical productions. Among her early efforts was the 1981 HBO special The Pee-Wee Herman Show, taped at the Roxy in West Hollywood.
She made the leap to filmmaking when David Byrne enlisted her to design his directorial debut, True Stories (1986).
Her credits also included Heaven (1987), Less Than Zero (1987), V.I. Warshawski (1991), With Honors (1994) and Sydney Pollack’s Random Hearts (1999), among the films that demonstrated she was equally comfortable with period authenticity, contemporary realism and stylized fantasy.
Survivors include her wife, Lindsay, and their sons, Clay and Will.
