Alfred Sole, the prolific television production designer of Veronica Mars, Castle and MacGyver who had achieved cult-horror status with his 1976 film Alice, Sweet Alice featuring a 10-year-old Brooke Shields in a supporting role, died Feb. 14 at his home in Salt Lake City. He was 78.
His death was announced in a Facebook post by his cousin, filmmaker Dante Tomaselli. A cause of death was not specified.
Sole had already written and directed the 1972 sexually explicit, low-budget film Deep Sleep when several years later – and after the first film had been pulled from theaters on charges of obscenity – he turned to the horror genre. Originally titled Communion, Sole’s second movie premiered at the Chicago Film Festival in 1976 and was released by Allied Artists the following year as Alice, Sweet Alice, a name change disliked by Sole.
Inspired in part by Nicolas Roeg’s 1973 moody thriller Don’t Look Now, Sole’s Alice, Sweet Alice (which he co-wrote with Rosemary Ritvo) starred Linda Miller, Paula Sheppard and Shields in a twisted tale of child murder at a Catholic girls school. The film, which, like the earlier Roeg movie featured the image of a person in a yellow raincoat, would be re-titled yet again as Holy Terror for its 1981 re-release following Shields’ rise to international stardom.
Sole’s next film was 1980’s Tanya’s Island, a horror-fantasy starring Denise “D.D.” Williams, who would go on to wider fame as the singer and Prince protege Vanity.
The final feature directorial effort from Sole was the 1982 horror comedy Pandemonium featuring Tom Smothers, Eileen Brennan, Phil Hartman, Tab Hunter, Carol Kane, David Lander, Paul Reubens and, in her final movie, Eve Arden.
The slasher satire was a critical and box office failure, and Sole pivoted to a career in production design. Beginning with TV movies in the early 1990s, by 1995 Sole was the production designer of such feature films as Glory Daze, starring Ben Affleck and Sam Rockwell, and Bodily Harm, starring Linda Fiorentino and Daniel Baldwin.
Returning to television, Sole was the production designer on such TV series as Veronica Mars, Moonlight, Castle and the 2017 reboot of MacGyver.
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