HOLLYWOOD — Emory Vance, a studio carpenter who spent forty-three years building the rooms, staircases and street-fronts that looked permanent on screen and came down by the weekend, died March 21 at his home in the Hollywood flats. He was 88.

The cause was heart failure, said his daughter, Louisa Vance-Boone.

Mr. Vance belonged to a trade that leaves little behind on purpose. The sets he framed were meant to be believed for the length of a scene and then dismantled, their lumber salvaged for the next build. He kept no monuments to the work, only a battered union card, a set of chisels his own father had owned, and an ability, family members said, to walk into any old movie and name the join that was holding a wall together.

“He’d watch a film and say, ‘See that banister? Somebody rushed that. It’ll read fine, but they rushed it,’” his daughter recalled. “He couldn’t turn it off. He watched movies with his hands.”

He was born in 1937 and came up through the studio carpentry shops when a picture might require a whole city block built from nothing on a backlot. He learned to make new pine look like old oak, to build a staircase a leading actor could run down in one take without a creak reaching the microphone, and to frame a two-story facade with nothing behind it but scaffolding and California sky.

Colleagues said his real gift was speed without sloppiness, a pairing that made him the man foremen called when a set had to be standing by a Monday call.

“Emory could frame a room faster than most people could measure it, and it would be square every time,” said Hollis Trapani, a retired set decorator who worked alongside him for years. “There’s an art to building something beautiful. There’s a harder art to building something beautiful that you know is going in a dumpster Friday, and doing it right anyway. He had that one.”

Mr. Vance treated the disposability of his craft as a principle rather than a disappointment. He told his family that a set was a promise to the people watching, and that a promise you break at the seams is no promise at all. When younger carpenters grumbled about pouring skill into work no one would keep, he would tell them the keeping was not the job. The convincing was.

He worked into his seventies, slowing only when his knees gave out on the ladders, and spent his last working years teaching apprentices which shortcuts were safe to take and which ones would show.

His wife of fifty-one years, Marguerite Vance, died in 2019. In addition to his daughter, he is survived by a son, Peter Vance, of Glendale; four grandchildren; and a workshop full of tools his family has not yet had the heart to sort.

A memorial gathering is planned for later this spring at the union hall. His daughter said the family intends to give his chisels to a young carpenter who will use them, which is, she said, the only fate he would have accepted for them.