''Cinefantastique'' Vol. 12, #5 & 6, July & August, 1982 This entry into the production design for 'Blade Runner' crafted by the artist Tom Southwell is the kind of thing I've always loved. It's all about the background minutia that makes a fictional world feel grounded and lived in but often goes overlooked and underappreciated. It's also a reminder of just how much work goes into making a movie and how much of that effort is just passed by from scene to scene. There's also the little fact mentioned here that there was $10,000 worth of neon used which sounds crazy to me. "Southwell's most interesting assignment—certainly the one that gets the most attention—was designing 2019's magazine covers—a last minute job that produced some of the most humorous examples of what life might be life in 2019. Given just four days to come up with covers suitable for a Ridleyville newsstand, Southwell created a number of startling titles (going for $29 a copy); Moni, with a cover story about "illegal aliens'' by R. Scott; Kill, whose motto is "All the News That's Fit to Kill"; Fash, a large-format fashion magazine featuring an article on "Spray-on Swimwear"; Creative Evolution; and Horn, the skin mag of the future, with an article "Hot Lust in Space." Southwell's original designs were reproduced with a Xerox color copier, cut to size and glued directly to the covers of existing magazines, such as OMNI and Playboy. Although the Xerox process was relatively crude, it was the only reproduction method fast enough to meet the deadline. Delivered to the set, the 2019 magazines were mixed in with a number of contemporary magazines titles, including Scott's favorite Heavy Metal, and the punkish Wet-The Magazine for Gourmet Bathers. Like most of his other work, the magazines can barely be glimpsed on camera, becoming just another component of in Scott's so-called "700-layer cake." "I was always aware that my designs were a small tile in the overall mosaic," Southwell said. "In the case of the magazine covers—which were intentionally raw and unfinished—Ridley had simply wanted a fuzzy visual backdrop for the newsstand. It might have been nice to have gotten a closer view of those magazines, though. I'd put the names of all the top production crew right there on the covers."
