• View Point, By David Thompson - (Excerpt from article published in Movieline, January 2003)
  
• All the house is a stage for sales appeal
  
• Homes on Stage, By Rachel F. Elson - (Excerpt from article published in San Francisco Examiner)
  
• Motivational film producer applies her secrets to selling homes, By Barbara Hertenstein - (Excerpt from article published in St. Louis Post-Dispatch)
  
• On The Move, By Eileen Mitchell - (Excerpt from article published in The San Francisco Chronicle)
  
• Pre-sale renovations well worth the cost, By Pamela Reeves - (Excerpt from article published in Scripps Howard News Service)
  
• Setting the Stage, By Stacey Moncrieff - (Excerpt from article published in Realtor Magazine)
  
• Unclutter, clean, repair, neutralize and dynamize - (Excerpt from article published in St. Louis Post - Dispatch)
  
• When it’s time to sell, all the house is a stage, By Dian Hymer - (Excerpt from article published in The San Francisco Chronicle)
  

View Point, By David Thompson - (Excerpt from article published in Movieline, January 2003):

If you haven’t had a reason to sell a property lately, then you will need some explanation of the term. It begins thus. The property-owner wishing to sell his house calls in a realtor, who inspects the property, suggests an asking price and then raises the matter of “staging”. “Staging?” the resident asks. This is selling a house, not putting on a play. That’s when the realtor puts you straight. First, he or she points out that those colors you painted the walls are really “too personal” and suggests that, really, the way you live in your house, well, it’s “unappealing”. Then the realtor proposes brining in a “stager”, a person who will go through the house with some off-white paint and dispense with much of the furniture you’re foolishly fond of. Don’t worry, the funky stuff goes safely into storage. In its place are just one or two choice pieces - an adorable Ethiopian palm in an ocher urn, perhaps. What the stager wants is space, light and emptiness; you can’t underestimate how sellable those things - the essentials of McMansions large and small - are.

What exactly is this “staging” you’re paying for? It’s production design. This is no longer your house that is being sold; it’s a movie set, a dream house, an interior expanse where future fictional beings might live. The potential buyers who visit this “set” will have their own store of remembered movies from which they’ll hopefully be inspired to conjure stories that play well here.

What I’m getting at here is that there is no luxury greater in American film than that of space, the kind of desirable emptiness in which ardent imagination may find itself. The luminous space evoked by Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story when she shows just how dance-like, beautiful and fulfilling an ordinary walk can be when it’s the 20-yard journey from the sofa to the cocktail cabinet is not really different from the miracle of discovery promised as John Wayne contemplates the land where he will create a great cattle ranch in Red River.

At a more profound level, though, nothing was more inviting about America than its prospect of actual space. Rooms and apartments in Europe have always tended to be more cramped than in America. Poverty, and its lack of privacy (and privacy is surely vital to the expansiveness of the American imagination), can be measured in square footage.

So much of the glory in American architecture - just feel the airiness in so many Frank Lloyd Wright buildings - is the boldness that can wall in such great space and make it rhyme with far larger space beyond the space we call nature, or the frontier.

Far more often, just as a matter of course, the spaces in American movies are larger than they would be in life, but large enough for the rhetoric and music of dream and advertisement. The question is, can we ever truly be large enough to command those spaces, or are we lost there, not quite at home?