Dennis M. Size is a lighting designer and the Senior Vice President at The Lighting Design Group, Inc. He has over 30 years of experience as a lighting designer, and, before working at The Lighting Design Group, Inc., worked at ABC Studios and in many regional theaters. He has been nominated for the prestigious Emmy Awards ten times and won four. In June 2012, he received the Frank J. O’Hara Alumni Award in Arts & Letters from the University of Scranton, from which he graduated with two B.A.s.

Can you tell me about yourself? What made you you?

I grew up in Scranton, Pennsylvania, which was at one time the anthracite coal capital of the world. My father ran a bar, my mother was a nurse, and I think that shaped a lot of where I was going in life.

Growing up in a bar, you have a lot of electricians and carpenters and tradesmen coming for drinks. My father, who wanted to keep me out of trouble, would say, “Take my kid with you on the job.” So I would go out and help build houses and wire houses and all this sort of manual labor stuff that my father felt that if I ever flunked out of pre-med, that at least I’d have a trade.

That being said, when you’re doing shows, you have to build scenery, you have to hang lights, you have to make costumes, you have to do a lot of what’s considered “manual work.” While I was in college, I was directing the local high school’s dramatic productions, and all of a sudden, I had a background at 19, 20 years old, that most people strive to get when they’re in their 20s. But I didn’t really know anything, I was kind of learning by doing. So I decided that I either wanted to direct or I wanted to do design.

As I was doing more and more of these shows, I became aware that there’s a designer. There’s somebody who’s creating that look. When you’re sitting in a theater and the curtain opens, the audience will very often go, [whispers] “Wow.” And I thought, I wanna be the guy that makes that “wow.” I realized that I had an affinity for creating a look, an environment, something that made the audience go “wow.” I had a hard time rationalizing that, because it wasn’t the upbringing I had. I think my father figures that I’m just kind of a high-class electrician or carpenter because he didn’t understand the art of design.

So then I went to grad school, pursuing my Master of Fine Arts degree at Penn State. And so that’s where I developed the craft and as a scene designer, which is what I was studying, learned about the elements to make a visual picture on a stage, but also what goes into the overall production, that enhances it—such as the lighting and the costuming. Once I graduated from grad school as a scenery and lighting designer, I found myself plugging away in regional theaters, and I started marketing myself as a scenery and lighting designer.

The problem with scene designers is, when you design a show, you’re there forever. Whereas the lighting designer comes in when the scenery’s done, hangs the lights, focuses the show, queues the show—he’s there a couple of days, the curtain goes up, the audience goes “ooh, ah, wow,” and you’re in and out of town! I thought, this is better. Instead of spending two or three weeks in a town, I could spend one week and do more shows. So I started marketing myself strictly as a lighting designer.

If you had to explain your profession to someone in five to ten sentences, how would you explain it to someone who’s never heard of it?

In the world of television, if I didn’t exist, it would be called radio. Because without a lighting designer in television, that’s what you see right there [gestures to a black screen].

There’s a wonderful scene in Lawrence of Arabia where Lawrence is in the desert, and Stanley Cooper, who directs the movie, starts it like that—it’s just a black screen and then all of a sudden, Lawrence lights his cigarette, and in a 50-foot screen, you see a match flame light up. It’s just so incredible, what lighting can do in creating an emotional response in an audience. And essentially, that’s what we do. We use that ephemeral thing called light to create an emotional response in an audience.

Do you find that there’s a certain science you employ to achieve a certain effect—is it more technical than it is art?

There’s a great deal of science, and certainly a modicum of art. I tell people, and oftentimes students, that the one thing that you need to remember at all times is that the angle of incidence equals the angle of reflection. Angle of incidence is basically where the light bounces off a surface, so I have to put that light so that the incident light isn’t reflected into the camera, otherwise you see all the lights. If we’re trying to create the illusion of reality, and we see the studio lights hanging there, what kind of reality is that? The lighting cannot distract.

What was your favorite project you worked on?

The Oprah Winfrey Show.

Why?

[sighs] I hate when people pay their good money to hire me to do a job, and then when I do the job, they ask a lot of dumb, stupid questions. They hired me to do the job. They have to assume that I’m doing the job to the best of my ability for their needs. Why are they questioning all this? “Is this the way this is supposed to look?” What, are you kidding me? I spent all night doing this, do you think I came in to make it look like shit? No, this is the way it’s supposed to look. Oprah is one of the few people I’ve ever worked with in my career that respects the work that her people do, and she respects her own confidence that she has hired the right people. I worked with her for twenty years. Never, ever, was anything I ever did questioned. You want to work with people that trust you so much, that put their complete faith in you, that you’re gonna do the best you possibly can, and it’s gonna be what you say it is. Harpo Productions, because of her, is the only company I’ve ever worked for that does that.

Does it matter more that people know you as a lighting designer in the field or that the common man knows you?

Oh, I think it matters in the field. Those people who are at my level in the industry can talk amongst ourselves and recognize what’s good and what’s bad. A group of five or six lighting designers sitting down, having supper—we could rip things apart like nobody, because we understand where we come from and what we do. The common man, as you say, doesn’t understand that. So it’s very hard for me to take platitudes from someone who doesn’t know. It means more coming from someone who really knows what it took.

Thank you very much for your time.