Barbara Ling, who won an Oscar for rebuilding 1969 Hollywood Boulevard for Tarantino, has died at 73

Barbara Ling, the production designer who rebuilt 1969 Los Angeles street by street for Quentin Tarantino's "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" and won an Academy Award for it, died Thursday in Santa Barbara after a battle with cancer. She was 73. A spokesperson for WME confirmed her death.

Her last credit is one that is still in theaters: Antoine Fuqua's Michael Jackson biopic "Michael," which is currently on its way past $1 billion worldwide.

The job she is best known for was mostly carpentry and neon

The version of Hollywood Boulevard that Tarantino wanted for "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" did not exist anymore, and he did not want it faked in post. Ling's team put the old marquees back on real buildings, which turned out to be a structural problem as much as a design one.

"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."

That is what the Oscar was actually for. She shared it with set decorator Nancy Haigh in 2020, and when reporters got to her backstage she used the moment to complain about her own city.

"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."

Six years on, that reads less like an acceptance-speech flourish and more like a work order nobody picked up.

A career that refused to specialize

Ling was born in Los Angeles in August 1952 and came up in theater, designing sets and lighting for what she put at more than 200 stage, opera and musical productions. One of the early ones was the 1981 HBO taping of "The Pee-Wee Herman Show" at the Roxy. David Byrne hired her to design "True Stories" (1986), and film had her after that.

The credits that followed do not sit in one lane:

The Schumacher Gotham is the outlier people like to laugh at, and it is worth saying plainly that the neon-drenched, over-lit city of "Batman Forever" and "Batman & Robin" is doing exactly what those movies asked of it. She could build a heat-warped Los Angeles for "Falling Down," a Deep South kitchen for "Fried Green Tomatoes," and a comic-book fever dream, and the reason you cannot see her hand in all three is that she was good.

She also worked four times with Scott Hicks, on "Hearts in Atlantis," "No Reservations," "The Lucky One" and "Fallen." Her other credits include "Heaven," "Less Than Zero," "V.I. Warshawski" and "With Honors."

Ling is survived by her wife, Lindsay, and their sons, Clay and Will.