Today we’d like to introduce you to Marjorie McCown
Hi Marjorie, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
I am a former costume designer for theater, opera, and film — a job I thoroughly enjoyed! I started my career in New York City and spent 13 years designing costumes for theater and opera companies all over the country, including the NYC Opera at Lincoln Center. In 1990, I moved to Los Angeles because I wanted to concentrate on working in film. I spent the next 27 years in Hollywood working as both a costume designer and key costumer on movies including Forrest Gump, Apollo 13, A Bronx Tale, Hairspray, Angels & Demons, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, X-Men Days of Future Past and The Hateful Eight. I have been an avid reader all my life and have always written for my own creative fulfillment, so when I retired from film, I decided to seriously focus on the craft of writing. And because I love to read murder mysteries for my own entertainment, that’s what I chose to write. My literary agent advised me to “write what I know,” and she convinced me to set my books in the world where I’d spent so much of my costume career, behind the scenes of big budget movies in production. FINAL CUT, featuring movie key costumer Joey Jessop as the main character, was the first book in my Hollywood Mystery Series, published by Crooked Lane Books on June 6, 2023. STAR STRUCK, Hollywood Mystery Book #2, was published May 7, 2024.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Every profession presents its own set of challenges (I prefer that word to “struggles”) especially to anyone who is embarking on a new path. That was certainly true for me when I began my costume design career in New York City as a student right out of college. I started by working as an assistant to several Broadway costume designers and learned so much from that experience about professional theater. Eventually, those designers began recommending me for design jobs and I was able to start building my own career.
When I decided to move to Los Angeles to concentrate on film rather than stage design, I found a different set of challenges. Stage and film are very different industries. In large part, they are separate communities of people, so there was the challenge of introducing myself to a whole new group of colleagues. Stage and film are also different in terms of work process and scheduling. For stage, all the costumes must be ready on opening night. After that performance, there won’t be significant changes to the script or the physical production, no matter how long the show runs. On a film, costume preparation often continues for months because new costumes can appear on camera for the first time at any point during the shoot, depending on the schedule. I think I should add here that I enjoyed my work in both theater and film very much, and I enjoyed learning about the differences between them.
Then, when I retired from film and decided to focus on the craft of writing, I needed to learn about a whole new industry. Publishing is a unique business with its own set of practices and challenges — for example the challenge to gain attention for a new book in an extremely busy, noisy marketplace flooded with millions of books. It’s a task that’s both exciting and a bit daunting. What can you do to help set your book apart, to gain attention? For me, one of the most surprising things I learned is that authors — debut authors in particular — should be prepared to spend as much time and energy marketing their books as they did writing them.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
My career in costume design combined so many of my interests — particularly theater, history, and art. I loved my work in theater and opera — especially opera! Beverly Sills was one of my early mentors and she hired me to design costumes for several productions for the NYC Opera at Lincoln Center when she was artistic director for the company. But I was always curious about working in film and after I decided to concentrate on movies, I spent the rest of my career in Hollywood. I was best known for working on big period and fantasy films and for overseeing all the made to order costumes for big movies. That is, any item of clothing, whether that was an 18th century ballgown or superhero sculpted armor would be in my purview. I was not only part of the design team, I helped source and choose all the materials, oversaw the construction process in the workrooms, fit the actors, and was always on set whenever new costumes were established (appeared on film for the first time.) I was honored to belong to the extraordinary community of creative artists behind the scenes in film. Movies are by necessity collaborative endeavors because when you have over 100 speaking parts and over 10,000 background players, all of whom have to be fit in period costumes (as we did for Forrest Gump) it takes a large team of highly skilled and talented people to coordinate and accomplish that amount of work. I took pride in having high standards for the quality of our work, but I also valued the commitment and contributions of all the people I worked with.
And my work in film provided the inspiration for my Hollywood Mystery books, which feature movie key costumer Joey Jessop as the main character. In FINAL CUT (Hollywood Mystery Book #1) Joey stumbles over the body of a murdered coworker on the beach in Malibu where they’re shooting a movie, and she immediately becomes a suspect — not only because she found the body, but also because the victim was seeing Joey’s ex. FINAL CUT was published by Crooked Lane Books June 6, 2023 and was chosen as an Amazon Editors Pick in the Best Mystery, Thriller, and Suspense category. FINAL CUT was also named one of the best cozy mysteries of 2023 by Deadly Pleasures Magazine and was chosen as a Top Pick in the cozy mystery category for the Silver Falchion Award by Killer Nashville. In STAR STRUCK (Hollywood Mystery Book #2, published May 7, 2024) Joey is working on a movie with two of the biggest box office stars in the world, although the leading lady, Gillian Best, is known more for her lifestyle brand than her acting. After a fatal hit and run accident near the movie set, Joey figures out the car involved belongs to Gillian, and she begins to wonder if the actress has more to hide than her Botox appointments.
Alright, so to wrap up, is there anything else you’d like to share with us?
I’m often asked how I made the transition from costume design to writing, but that’s not as big a leap as you might imagine. Story-telling is at the heart of both occupations. That’s what makes costume design different from fashion design. Fashion is about satisfying the tastes of the marketplace. But the purpose of costume design is to use clothing to help tell a story about a particular set of characters in a particular situation at a particular point in time. I’m sure that’s one of the reasons I was drawn to the profession in the first place, the story-telling piece that’s job number one in costume design. Every choice you make, whether it’s about color or fabric or clothing style, it’s always in service of a story. Looking at it from that perspective, writing novels and designing costumes are very similar — either way, the goal is story-telling — just using different sets of tools.
Pricing:
- Final Cut (Hardcover) $22.78 (Amazon)
- Final Cut (Paperback) $19.99 (Amazon)
- Final Cut (Kindle) $1.99 (Amazon)
- Star Struck (Hardcover) $29.75 (Amazon)
- Star Struck (Kindle) $19.99 (Amazon)
Contact Info:
- Website: https://marjoriemccown.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marjoriemccownbooks/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarjorieMcCownBooks
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/eastlamm
