film magic

I’m working as a scenic artist now on a film about lord-knows-what. I signed an agreement promising not to tell even if I find out, but they needn’t worry- I’m probably the least inquisitive employee on the books. I’ve been in the business long enough to know that the final release bears little resemblance to the film we all thought we might be working on. On ‘Unbreakable’ (2000) with Bruce Willis for instance, a crew of five or six of us spent several days carefully stuccoing a facade from scaffolding, under the blistering sun. A few feet away they had installed a built-in swimming pool, which of course we were banned from using. We were advised that this was for a climactic scene- all measure of vigilance should be taken with our trowel work, weathered age applied with studied care. You may know the scene from the film. The villain pushes Bruce off a balcony into the pool. You do see the back of the house- for a second, at night, during a thunderstorm, from underwater. Eh!, so long as the checks clear. I’m usually working on a set a few weeks before it's filmed. Only occasionally do I get a chance to see the Hollywood luminaries in person. They seem like regular people, only shorter. I saw Jean-Claude VanDamme throw a star fit because the snack table was out of peanut butter. Had a playful chat with a bath-robed Bryce Dallas (Ron Howard’s daughter) between takes of her ‘huddled in the shower’ scene in ‘Lady In The Water’ (2006). She was sick of showering and I really wanted one. Remember all the fantastic $250./roll wallpaper in that film?... all me. Again; blazing sun, dirty work, un-useable swimming pool yards off. There are just never enough reasons to make me regret my career choice. I did get to create a ‘star’ piece of scenery for ‘Fallen’ (1998) with Denzel Washington and Donald Sutherland. Denzel descends into a creepy, forgotten basement. Wiping away the [tempera paint] with a rag he uncovers the word "azazel", (rendered in my very best ‘culture-neutral, sans serif’ scrawl). I completely forget the significance of it, but it was probably an important enough scene to survive being cut from the television version. "And the Oscar goes to.." Film work is often like a lucid dream. Typically, after the last twelve hour day I show up in the morning feeling like I’ve been gone from the shop for all of twenty minutes. From there I might go out to paint walls in a convent or a penitentiary, eat lobster and clams in a tent in a parking lot for forty-five minutes, and spend the rest of the day in a [fictitious] twelve-year-old boys’[fake] bedroom, painting dust under his radiators and taking the just-out-of-the-package shine off of all his action figures. After five hours of sleep, the REM never really seems to stop. The trees, (sawed off and mounted to wagons, their leaves pulled off and replaced with silk replicas); a gentle breeze, (pushed through a fan the size of my first apartment); the rolling lawns, ( painted green); bracingly fresh drifts of snow, (a product resembling whipped lard, squirted from fire hoses and carefully raked into place). Nature doesn’t always get it quite right. That’s why we band of talented artisans stand at the ready to take the gloss off of ice or to paint rocks to look more like rocks. (I say 'paint' when I could mean floor wax, lye, or roof tar). I am reminded of the Hugo award winning sci-fi tingler ‘A Boy And His Dog’ (1975) starring a fresh-faced (and predictably shirt-less) Don Johnson who, wandering bomb-razed planet Earth with his matted and telepathic (yeah) Bearded Collie, stumble upon the entrance to an underground world of displaced Mid-Westerners. [Footnote: the role of the dog is supplied by the same actor who played 'Tiger' in the hit TV series "The Brady Bunch]'. Underground a cheezily costumed and made-up tribe of hayseeds (maybe robots or zombies, I forget), whose menfolk have lost the ability to procreate (that’s what they need Don Johnson for), live (and die) on what appears to be the set of ‘Picnic’(1955). I accept this world and these people as completely plausible. For months at a time I spend my days in a blacked-out warehouse painting ‘soot’ on the insides of fireplaces and hurricane lamps and eating my lunch next to a guy with a gigantic right arm who looks a lot like an embalmer I used to know... or saw on TV. 'Hardball with Chris Matthews' is my 'surreal'. I’m out of the shop next week, on location at a farmhouse where presumably I’ll be painting green weeds brown and making a hundred-year-old brown barn look like a hundred-year-old yellow barn. "I'll need twenty gallons of root killer and as much 'Aquanet' as you can find!" Enjoy the show, whatever it turns out to be, sorry about the harming of trees- it wasn't my call, and (if it wouldn't be giving too much away) keep an eye out for Mrs. Jones’ rain spouts, (they're plastic!).