By NOLA L. SARKISIAN

Staff Reporter

Even as she rigidly stood on stage at the Metropolitan Opera School of Ballet, Judianna Makovsky knew she was on the wrong side of the proscenium arch.

“I was more intrigued about finding the right tutu than being a ballerina,” she said.

So Makovsky gracefully bid adieu to the ballet and went to art school to study costume design. Since then, her eye for detail has been a major factor in her success as a costume designer. Her most recent accolades came for the film “Pleasantville” including being nominated for the Costume Designers Guild Awards Gala.

As the fashion architect behind other films like “Great Expectations,” “Devil’s Advocate,” “Practical Magic,” “Lolita” and “Six Degrees of Separation,” Makovsky has made a name for herself in a world that rarely gets a second look from the media.

“She’s fiercely dedicated to making it happen for the director, down to the very last element. She has almost an obsession with detail,” said Luke Reichle, a member of the 470-member guild who co-produced the awards show.

“She lives and breathes the movie, including the hair, makeup and costumes,” added Gary Ross, who wrote, directed and co-produced “Pleasantville.”

“It’s the kind of attention you need to really make a movie work,” he said. “Somebody who has a flight of fancy and reality at the same time. It’s a difficult balance to maintain.”

But when you do, it can be very profitable. Makovsky declined to comment on her earnings, but top costume designers can command as much as $40,000 a month.

“No one works for scale because you always try to negotiate and get a better rate,” Reichle said. “It’s as rare that someone works for scale as someone working for $7,000 to $10,000 a week.”

While preparing for a movie, Makovsky is a fanatic, right down to the underwear that a character should wear. Her comprehensive approach can be seen in “Pleasantville,” the story of a teen-age geek and his lusty sister who are zapped into the sanitized world of a 1950s black-and-white television show.

Usually, Makovsky is hired before the actors, so she has time to plan and assemble wardrobes. Ideally, she likes to have about four months of preparation time, but often she has to juggle her schedule when actors are cast just days before shooting. She met with Gene Hackman just once while preparing costumes for “The Quick and the Dead.”

With about two months of prep time before shooting “Pleasantville,” her first order of business was dealing with a relatively small budget of $750,000. (The film’s total budget was $40 million.)

“It was one of the lowest I had to work with. It becomes a series of negotiations and trades,” she said.

Once Makovsky had a final figure to outfit the 150-member cast, she and her small staff went on a shopping spree at flea markets and rental stores such as Palace Costume on Fairfax Avenue and local vintage outlets such as Golyester in Los Angeles. She searched for cardigan sweaters, saddle shoes, poodle and sheath skirts.

“Fortunately, this wasn’t a big movie, wardrobe-wise. We had a smaller (cast) compared to ‘Lolita,’ for instance, which had 2,000 extras alone,” she said. “Doing this kind of period piece is a lot easier than something from the 1860s because the materials are available, but it’s also a challenge to do it exactly right.”

She drew much of her inspiration from old magazines and newspapers found in libraries, as well as watching vintage sitcoms like “Father Knows Best,” “Leave It To Beaver” and “The Donna Reed Show.”

About one-third of the costumes were custom-made mostly by designer John David Ridge in West Hollywood and a tailor at Universal Studios with the help of Makovsky’s rough sketches. The rest were bought, but that posed a challenge of its own.

“One of the big problems with the movie is that it portrays an idealized world, so everything has to be perfect, which means the clothing had to be in immaculate, flawless condition,” she said.

Although some stars both men and women can balk at wearing certain outfits, Makovsky said she often wins out when it comes to period films.

“In the beginning, Reese Witherspoon (the teen-age female lead) didn’t want to wear the (1950s) underwear. She didn’t find it very flattering, but eventually she realized it was worth it,” Makovsky said. “When it comes to modern films, the stars usually win out, because there really are a lot of options out there. There isn’t one way to do something.”

Because “Pleasantville” moves from black and white to color, finding fabrics and hues that read well in both formats required extra time.

“We tested everything in front of the cameras before we went into production. Even if you use red lipstick, lips look black in black and white so we used a light orange,” Makovsky said. “Color contrast was critical. Blues and greens close together would just blend into black.”

Makovsky traces this attention to detail back to her schooling. She studied drawing and painting at the Art Institute of Chicago, which was then associated with the Goodman School of Drama. After that, she entered the highly competitive graduate drama program at Yale University in the late 1970s and pursued costume, set and lighting design.

After graduation, Jane Greenwood, one of her professors who worked in Broadway musicals, took her under her wing. She eventually met Milena Canonero, the designer for the film “Out of Africa,” and worked as an assistant on “Cotton Club.”

She met “Pleasantville” co-producer Ross while working on “Big,” which starred Tom Hanks.

Her most recent assignment?

Spending seven months on the set of “For Love of the Game,” an upcoming baseball movie starring Kevin Costner that required making 300 baseball uniforms. “It wasn’t bad. Kevin’s a nice man,” she said.