No related posts.

Annoyingly, the stunt guys all seemed to know the different rigs by sight (since they drove and developed them) but it wasn’t quite as easy for me and Joe and it seemed like we were always running back and forth between Trans-ams trying to figure out which one was “number 3″ so we could jam the single bloody CB radio unit onto the hump in the floorboard in the front seat, then run around to the back and bolt on a license plate. For reasons that continue to baffle me, Raffaella De Laurentiis spent incalculable sums of money on that cursed project trying to buy her way back into Hollywood, but the art department wouldn’t buy us six more freaking CB radios to put into the other cars.

It’s as if they wanted to ensure there’d be continuity errors in the picture.

Which brings me back to those skid marks.

Imagine, if you will, a long straight stretch of county road thirty miles east of Atlanta. A blue Trans-Am hauls ass , leaving distinct black curlicues on the pavement. The 2nd Unit Director calls “Cut!” and the 1st AD calls the on-set painter. A minute later an old white Surburban rolls up to the trail of rubber, a slight man in his 50’s climbs out, opens up the back doors and pulls out a can of latex house paint. He pries open the can and begins pouring a puddle of paint directly onto the road like it was something that he does all the time. After a few seconds he stops pouring and begins diligently rolling the puddle along the 30 foot long skid mark. It was really unbelievable.

Beside me, Joe muttered something under his breath and looked away in frustration.

Time seemed to stop.

Jaws hung agape.

The only noise in the world was the high pitched “scriitch, scriitch” of a paint roller echoing across the asphalt as sixty people stood watching one little man slowly pushing a stick down the street.

The expression on everyone’s face framed the same question: “This was a big budget stunts movie? This was the height of our technological sophistication? A little man with a little paint roller???”

Every person watching had already formulated the plans for creating a spray rig hooked up to a truck bumper and was wondering why the thought hadn’t occurred to the little painter, rolling his grey little heart out on the asphalt as dollars with little wings danced in the air around the head of the UPM.

Unable to watch any more of this, Joe sighed and invited me to join him in action, saying “I know I’ll be sorry for saying this but come on, let’s go help him.”

And so, for the next 2 or three months, in between the requirements of our own job, we ended up helping the painter paint out skid marks. I probably ruined 6 pairs of jeans, a dozen shirts and at least one good jacket to that messy chore and the funny thing was, the color of the paint was just as obvious as the skid marks… we were just swapping the dark grey color of the rubber for the really light grey of the latex house paint.

By the end of the mountain sequence we were into true winter temperatures and half the production crew had been employed as skidmark painters, but it didn’t matter because the paint was freezing on the road instead of drying, creating greater hazards for the stunt guys on the twisty mountain roads north of Helen, Georgia. I developed a really nasty cold and can’t remember the last time we helped paint the highway, which suits me just fine.

To this day I still look for skidmarks in movies but I find them less and less because they can now pay a perky computer artist to paint them out with her stylus while she drinks a latte and thinks about what color she’s going to paint her bedroom.

You know, with a roller.

No related posts.

The show was really, really hard. It seemed that all our time was spent on frigid, windswept football fields in the wee hours of the morning. No wonder that two of our 3-person prop crew (and the Director) came down with especially nasty cases of the flu. Meanwhile, our Production Designer was a friend of Mr. Bruckheimer’s wife and madly in love with the color blue. The never-ending hordes of extras were stressful and by the time the show had been going for awhile there wasn’t a whole lot of love going around (at least in our department).

And then there was Scene 144 (night).

In the early 1970’s, high school game footage was shot on 16mm film, which means that football coaches had to slog through a big stack of 16mm film reels when doing analysis and research on team performance. Locating the canisters to use as props wasn’t a problem: we could get most anything we needed at ISS if we couldn’t turn them up locally. The real problem is how the canisters were used the very first time we saw them, in Scene 144 (night), when Denzel, as Coach Boone, gets out of his car with the film reels and is greeted by his wife and daughters.

Now, I didn’t work any of the props in Scene 144 (night). That would be my friend and Propmaster, Dwight Benjamin-Creel.

Dwight is always thinking about realism when he props a show and in this case he knew that a cardboard box or a paper grocery bag would have been a logical way for a guy to tote around film canisters. So he pulled a selection of paper bags off the proptruck to show to Boaz, who wasn’t thinking of reality, he was thinking like a storyteller. Between them they realized that the audience wouldn’t be able to see the film canisters if they were in a paper bag, and they were forever trying to work in elements that sold the idea that this story was happening in the early 1970’s and needed to see the cans.

Boaz was thinking along the lines of a net bag, or better yet, a bunch of string wrapped around the film cans.

Super.

Dwight went to the truck and grabbed our roll of string and began making a haphazard net around the film canisters and we shot the scene with the thing before it fell apart.

Just like any other night, at wrap we loaded all our stuff back into the proptruck and went home for the night.

For more than a week (maybe weeks) our truck lurched and rolled around the periphery of Atlanta, bouncing from location to location. Tubs were slammed onto and off of shelves. Our rolling carts came and went. We climbed up and down shelves, strapping and unstrapping all the rolling stock and digging out things on high shelves. When we finally found ourselves at Druid Hills High School we were worn to a frazzle and the strings around the film canisters had fallen down into a tangled mess.

Our shooting schedule placed us at Druid Hills High on multiple weekends, while school was out, and became an ersatz homebase for us. One of those weekends found my co-Assistant Propmaster, Megan Graham, sick and tired of working on set. Megan usually loved working set, and I was all too happy to play Truck Bitch, but on this day she let me know that she needed some time out on the truck to organize her stuff so she asked me to stay inside and work the set.

It was October, deep into baseball season, and the Braves were in the playoffs with the Yankees. Spike Lee was in town for the playoffs and decided to drop by to see his boy Denzel – both of them are huge Yankees fans. While he may be a big sports fan, Spike was dwarfed by the puffy Yanks jacket he wore to set – he looked like a kid sitting next to Denzel. Our Executive Producer, Jerry Bruckheimer, was there as well. Rhea Lowenthal and I were standing behind Jerry at monitor and Rhea, being Rhea, sweet-talked the man into getting one of the lesser Producers to put up a two hundred dollar prize for a pumpkin carving contest for the crew (which Rhea, unsuprisingly, proceeded to win – hmmmmmm, how’d you do that Rhea?).

The next scene up was set on the morning after Scene 144 (night): Denzel gets into work, carrying those damned film canisters.

We ran the rehearsal. Space was tight and Boaz preferred to do his first rehearsals with the talent only, allowing the departments to watch the rehearsal after the actors had set their scene. So I handed off the film canisters to Denzel and went around the corner to stand with the crew while the actors worked out the scene, desperately hoping that there wouldn’t be a problem with the…. I heard a metallic clang followed by the sound of a bunch of empty tins hitting the ground. Those stupid strings had finally fallen apart.

Our 1st AD, Randy Fletcher, gave everyone notice that we only needed some camera and lighting adjustments and we’d be ready to shoot.

I only had a few minutes to fix some string around those cans so I ran to the truck, dug out the string, some double-stick foam tape and ran to sit down in a stairwell a few doors down from set. With far less time and far more adrenaline than Dwight had on the night of Scene 144 (night), I began trying to make a replica of his string arrangement. Yes, I cussed Dwight, but I cussed Boaz even more for thinking this was a good idea. I cussed the people who invented 16mm film and our far distant ancestors who gave us the gift of textiles.

Those string-inventing bastards.

“We’ll be ready to go in eight minutes,” came a voice over the radio.

Spiffing.

It was time to shoot and I knew that I needed more time to rig the cans up. Randy thought we were fine and that we should go ahead and shoot the scene. The cameras were ready, lights in place, actors on set, Director in his chair.

“Fine,” I thought. Let’s just see what happens.

So I turned to Denzel and extended the cans and strings to him like I was handing him a hand-grenade.

“Be careful,” I quietly said to him, “they’re a little unstable.”

“What’s that?” he replied.

“The strings, they could come apart if you’re not careful. Just sit it down carefully when you get to the table.”

“Well I can’t be thinking about these things while I’m acting,” he scolded. “Fix it! Just make it right!”

Well that’s exactly what I’d wanted to do all along. Now I had Denzel on my side, sort of, in a pissed off kind of way.

So, with all the crew tapping their toes and looking at their watches, and Jerry Bruckheimer, Spike Lee, Denzel Washington and Will Patton cooling their heels, I shakily began tying more knots and double-sticking more tape. Somebody, several somebodies, jumped in to help me… I can’t remember who they were… it was just one of those times when you have to live with egg on your face, even when it’s not really your fault.

Looking back, I’ve been in much bigger pickles. But for some strange reason I’ll never forget Scene 144 (night).

No related posts.

Now it was at the aforementioned location of Ponce and Peachtree, under blue skies and wispy white clouds, that Propmaster Joe Connolly and I were paddled sworn into the Atlanta chapter (479) of the IATSE; the day we finally became “real” crewmembers, indoctrinated to all of the marvelous behind-the-scenes secrets of filmmaking that most people never even imagine.

But it was a busy show and the signifcance of that moment was overshadowed by many, many factors. First of all, we had begun to realize that Daniel Baldwin was (as he openly explained) “very, very medicated”, ostensibly for a bad back.

Apparently a very naughty back indeed.

The signs of future 12-Step meetings abounded for Mr. Baldwin: the way he yelled nonsense at the Director and the Producers on set (during filming, with crew watching). His gift for showing up on set acting really twitchy, rolling around in dirt to look especially disheveled after a grenade blast (which I still think was a good idea, even if it did scare the shit out of those of us standing near him when he dropped into a squat and began rubbing dirt and crap from the ground into his hair and clothes like a chimpanzee). The way he showed up on the prop truck looking for silverware, eventually borrowing Joe’s Gerber tool, which Joe would eventually have to fetch out of the star trailer, finding it covered in sticky brown stuff. Maybe it was maple syrup. But whatever contractual and substance abuse problems Danny might have been fighting, he never, while he was in Atlanta, to the best of my knowledge, was involved in any sort of robbery event.

No, that was all mine.

While the grips and the camera guys were rigging up the “leg cam” (shown in the photo for this article), Joe asked me to run across Peachtree and around the corner into a convenience store and buy some nudie magazines to dress into the interior of the bad guys’ car. I trotted into the store and asked the short Chinese man behind the counter if he had adult magazines for sale. He confirmed that he did and directed me down one of the aisles and began to follow me to show me his selection when he suddenly began yelling “No rob! No rob!!”

Holy Shit!! Somebody had come into the store to rob the place!! I hadn’t heard the door open but I whirled around to look toward the door to see what was happening but the little man wasn’t looking at the door, he was looking at me!!!!

I was dumbfounded. What was he talking about?

He pointed at my beltline and gestured toward the small of his own back and about that time my stomach lurched because I suddenly remembered that I had a pretty good foam replica of an enormous Desert Eagle crammed into my belt. With my mouth agape I started saying “No, no, it’s not real, it’s not real!!!”

The man’s hands were up like he was being robbed, and mine were up in the air like I was being robbed. I had no idea what to do. I sure didn’t want to make the man think that I was reaching for a gun so I half-turned my butt around so he could see what I was doing and slowly lifted it out between two fingers until he could see how light the thing was. I then carefully, holding the rubber by the barrel, knocked it against my head several times using the same visual shorthand that I’d seen Joe use with 1st ADs to let them know when he was giving an actor a rubber instead of a real gun – usually during a stunt or in the event the camera was far enough away to use the foam knockoff.

And then I handed it to the little man at which point he finally realized that I wasn’t there to rob him and that the gun was fake. He started laughing and running up and down the aisle waving the thing above his head like John Wayne (John Wayne with a Desert Eagle), which was just as much a violation of the Propman’s Prime Directive as my previous gaffe. He was giddy with excitement, and I with relief.

I’m lucky the guy didn’t have a shotgun and a “no questions” policy. I’m lucky he didn’t trigger a silent alarm. I’m lucky he didn’t have a heart attack or a seizure of some description. But more than anything, I’m lucky he gave me the gun back because we needed it in the next scene up.

No related posts.