The movie Oppenheimer, which won the Oscar on Sunday night, was touted as the secret of the hat. The special felt and special leather band were on the screen with the design of the original.
To create the Oscar-winning screen image of the famous physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, his distinctive hat had to be just right.
When Mark Mejia, owner of longtime Hollywood hat maker Baron Hats, went to a Hollywood studio to try on the scientist’s hat, a key part of the movie “Oppenheimer,” on actor Cillian Murphy, he was able to replicate the scientist’s unique style. Director Christopher Nolan attended the rehearsal and gave his approval.
The hat helped define the silhouette of Oppenheimer, the brilliant scientist who led the race to build the first atomic bomb in the 1940s, in the movie that won best picture at Sunday’s Academy Awards.
At Baron Hats, leather hats became famous with Hollywood stars.
Mejia has three decades of experience making hats by hand for A-list movie stars from Clint Eastwood to Leonardo DiCaprio and musicians from Bob Dylan to Beyonce.
His workshop is located on the third floor of a century-old building in downtown Los Angeles. On the first floor is B. Black & Sons, a family-run woolen house that has provided fabric for costumes since “Gone with the Wind.”
A manually operated elevator transports visitors to the Baron Hats exhibition hall and workshop. The doors open to what looks like a museum of unforgettable Hollywood moments.
Among the dozens of hats on display is a cowboy hat from Eastwood’s Cry Macho. On the opposite side of the room is a straw boatman worn by Johnny Depp as gangster John Dillinger in “Public Enemies.” Above a green-faced bust is a replica of Jim Carrey’s yellow, feather-adorned fedora from the movie “The Mask”.
“It’s a long list,” Mejia says when asked to name the projects he has worked on, which over the years have included thousands of hats.
He talks about Russell Crowe’s drama “3:10 to Yuma”, the TV series “Justified” and Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained”, as well as his work for bands like AC/DC and Cheap Trick.
Rows of shelves feature reproductions of famous movie hats, such as the Dick Tracy and Indiana Jones fedoras that Baron sells to the public. Baron uses the original wooden blocks used in the productions to recreate the shapes.
“To really capture the silhouette of the costume and the movie itself, it takes a lot of manipulation of the felt to create exactly the iconic style you want,” he said, finding the right combination of fit and feel with unpainted South American felt and a custom leather hat band.
The Oppenheimer hat had an unusual shape. Costume designer Ellen Mirojnick describes it as a pork pie crown combined with something between a fedora and a cowboy visor.
Mirojnick, who was nominated for best costume design at Sunday’s Oscars, worked on black and white images and had to guess the color of the hat and settle on taupe. The designs were sent to hat makers in Italy and New York, but neither was successful.
Much closer to Hollywood, he found Mejia, who he said “hit it out of the park right now.”
Mirojnick said it was important to get it right because he deliberately created the appearance of the real-life Oppenheimer.
The hat, he said, was “part of the image Oppenheimer created when he used his power to open Los Alamos, the New Mexico laboratory where the bomb was made.” “He wore it all the time.”
The fact that Murphy wears only one hat in the movie reflects the fact that Oppenheimer maintained the same look throughout his life. Most of the other characters in the movie do not wear hats, as instructed by Nolan.
Mejia said he was never looking for a career working with celebrities, but he enjoyed seeing their hats in the movie.
“There is a lot of satisfaction and fulfillment when you build something from scratch with your hands and see it on the big screen,” he said.
