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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