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What you start to realize is: This is a pop-culture company.” “When our toys connect to what’s happening in the world, you see significant growth in the company,” he said. As the cultural conception of women’s roles had changed, so had Barbie: stewardess outfits had been supplanted by lab coats and plastic safety goggles. (The year 1961 was marked by both the Bay of Pigs invasion and the creation of Ken, Barbie’s boyfriend.) The display, he explained, served as a reminder to Mattel designers to aim for relevance. Dickson was embarrassed by the “unsatisfactory play experience,” but he rebounded as he guided me along a wall-mounted time line that juxtaposed major political and cultural events with seminal Mattel releases. At the start of my visit, he suggested that we race miniature Hot Wheels cars on a sloping, multistory orange track with six successive loop-the-loops. I met Dickson at the Design Center last November. Strangelove”-style war room-with a heart-shaped table.) “I thought, This is so cinematic.” (In the film, Mattel execs huddle in a “Dr. “It was a combination of, like, ‘Oh, this is a corporation, and it’s all very official’ and ‘It’s bright pink,’ ” Gerwig told me. The colorful conference room where she and Dickson chatted after her tour informed the look of the fictional Mattel’s inner sanctum. Gerwig would go on to write and direct “Barbie,” and her brand immersion left some visual imprints. Just like the Design Center exhibition, the film could bring together Barbies from across the decades: Robbie could be one of many. “Barbie” could be a meta-comedy that moved between the idealized, plastic realm of the dolls and the human world of the company that had created them. “We’ve had a Barbie President, I see.” A Mattel employee proudly replied that Barbie had been to space before most earthly women had a credit card.Īs Gerwig peppered Dickson with questions, a concept began to take shape.

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Gerwig was shown a display called the Barbie Wall of Fame, whose entryway was emblazoned with the brand’s mission statement: “ to inspire & nurture the limitless potential in every girl.” Framed photographs captured Barbie posing with everyone from Diahann Carroll to Dean Martin, but Gerwig was most struck by a series of shots of historical models, including an all-Barbie Presidential ticket, from 1992. It’s demarcated by a signature pink: Pantone 219 C. The Design Center is divided into such sectors as Girls, Wheels, and Action Play, but Barbie is a realm unto itself-the largest in the building. It was sweet.” She finally agreed to come to El Segundo. “I don’t have a ton of friends in corporate America,” she told me, over Zoom. At one point, Dickson called her when she was mixing “Little Women” in New York. She saw in Gerwig’s filmography the right combination of intelligence and heart: “You watch something like ‘Little Women,’ and the dialogue is very, very clever-it’s talking about some big things-but it’s also extremely emotional.” The project wasn’t an obvious fit for someone whose screenplays included the subtle dramas “ Lady Bird” and “ Frances Ha,” and Gerwig wavered for more than a year. She’d signed up for a Barbie movie, and had approached Gerwig about writing the script. The actress Margot Robbie, who had toured the center in 2018, wanted to continue playing. And, if you don’t walk out drinking the Kool-Aid, then it was a great playdate, but maybe we don’t continue playing.”

“I have met with some of the greatest artists, truly, in the world. . . . “The brand immersion is the everything moment,” Dickson told me. The center even boasts a giant rendering of Castle Grayskull, the fearsome ancestral home of He-Man. He’ll show off the sixty-five-year-old machines that are still used to affix fake hair to Barbies he’ll invite you to inspect life-size, road-ready replicas of Hot Wheels cars. visits, Richard Dickson, a tall, bespectacled man who is the company’s chief operating officer, plays the role of Willy Wonka. These displays can help a toy designer find inspiration they can also offer a “brand immersion”-a crash course in a Mattel property slated for adaptation. The building has hundreds of workspaces for artists, model-makers, and project managers, and it houses elaborate museum-style exhibitions that document the company’s history and core products. Abrams (Hot Wheels) and Vin Diesel (Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots). Touring the facility, the Mattel Design Center, has become a rite of passage for Hollywood types who are considering transforming one of the company’s products into a movie-a list that now includes such names as J. J. In 2019, Greta Gerwig became the latest in a line of writers, directors, and producers to make a pilgrimage to a toy workshop in El Segundo, California.

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