One day, during the first season of the Aaron Spelling television series “Savannah“, we found ourselves faced with shooting a scene between the characters Dean (David Gail) and Lane (Robyn Lively). The scene was set at night and featured our two actors sitting in a parked pickup truck beside a moderately busy highway. The problem was, it was in the middle of the day and we were inside the old lumber warehouse that had been converted into our ersatz stage.

We were going to have to fake it.

To simulate a busy highway in the out-of-focus background, it was decided that we’d use a clumsy bastardized offshoot of the time-honored film technique called Poor Man’s Process.

Now, by “we” I of course mean “they”, and by “they” I mean “the electric department”, because it’s always the grips and electrics who control this funny bit of magic. Being a prop guy I was not normally involved in these sorts of things, but in this case they needed some extra hands to make the trick work.

The electrics turned the lights off in the stage and began lighting the actors inside the truck while our Dolly Grip Scotty Leftridge wheeled the dolly up beside the driver’s window of the truck. Our camera operator, Ed Meyers lined up on the actors sitting on the truck – the background of his shot was the shadowy depths of our darkened stage…. exactly the place where they wanted to have car headlights passing in the background.

Meanwhile, the grips and electrics had been busy rigging some headlight rigs into the beds of a couple of empty sandbag carts. The idea being that they would wheel the carts through the background of the shot, parallel to the truck, moving from the right to the left (from Point A to Point B as shown on the diagram above).

So you’ll know what a sandbag cart looks like, here’s a photo of one which was sent to me by Propmaster Elliott Boswell, straight from the set of a film currently in production in the Atlanta area.

Now, the real trick to making these carts look like an endless stream of cars was to keep them moving constantly through the background from right to left with their lights on, then moving them back to their original positions (from the left to the right) while completely blacked out, starting the process all over again once they’d returned to Point A.

Sounds easy, right?

To make this bit of theatre work, each of the two carts needed a Cart Pusher and a Cable Wrangler. Meanwhile, there would be a Light Operator stationed at Point A, ready to control each of the carts’ lights. That’s five people.

I definitely remember Dale Fowler and Dan Cornwall being involved with this silliness because they laughed the loudest. Besides myself, the other people who played a part in this were either Gary Oldknow, Stephen Crowley and/or Joe Connolly… maybe Dale and Dan can remember the other guys for me.

As each cart would roll away from Point A its Cable Wrangler would pay out enough line to let the Cart Pusher get all the way over to Point B, at which point the Light Operator would switch the lamp OFF, allowing the Cart Pusher to begin rolling silently backwards in the dark, headed back to Point A to begin the entire routine all over again… which meant that (in an ideal world) the cable had to be taken back up, hand over hand, into a coil.

The problem was, we weren’t in an ideal world, and we Cable Wranglers (meaning myself) were having a hard time keeping up with the pace. I mean, it was hard to coil those big fat power cables quickly… and they kept wanting us to go faster and faster, to simulate a higher volume of traffic on the road.

About every third pass I would miss taking up one or two loops of cable and my Cart Pusher, Dale Fowler, would end up dragging the wheels of his cart over those missed coils of cable, causing his cart emit a thunderous metallic roar… which was incredibly embarrassing for film techs who are trained to be silent around set, yet this whole situation was so bizarre that we began giggling as the guys ran their fake cars back and forth in the background of the scene.

And it only got funnier…  it was like a 2nd Grade school dance recital gone hysterically wrong.

Our Light Operator, Dan Cornwall, was controlling the lights for both cart teams and at some point, in the midst of all the giggling, he began to get confused about which cart was which and suddenly Dale found himself pulling his cart backwards from Point B to Point A with the lights on… meaning that to the camera our simulated car was going backwards down the highway, from left to right….

…and of course this made us giggle even more, meaning that I would miss the loops in my cable take-up, meaning that Dale would run the cart of the cable yet again (BA-BLAM!!). We were hissing and pointing and hunching over and giggling and kicking cable and it was one of the funniest things I ever did on a show.

Somewhere, in a box, I have a stack of VHS tapes I recorded of almost every episode of Savannah. Maybe one day I’ll pull them out and watch them to see if I can spot Dale Fowler driving his sandbag cart backwards through that scene.

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Okay, in the first part of that video you saw a chair’s upholstery being sucked up into a vacuum cleaner, right? Well here’s how it worked….

The engineering for this setup involved finding an existing chair and stripping the upholstery from its frame. The next step required us to fabricate an upholstered “breakaway skin” that wrapped around the chair’s frame, however, we couldn’t use velcro to secure the skin in place because we needed to be able to YANK the skin down through a hole in the floor as the set for both of these chair commercials were built on an elevated stage so that the chair wranglers could be poised underneath to yank the upholstered skin through a small hole cut in the deck of the stage (for the first commercial) and to spin & flip the “bucking” chair (in the second commercial).

To make the “breakaway skin” fit the chair properly required endless adjustments to the way the flaps were sewn, adjustments to where bits of padding were added, consideration given to the resistance of the fabric on the texture of the padding… just a jillion little never ending adjustments. Even though I felt like the only person working on this gizmo there were actually a number of guys who had a hand in it and I just realized after watching this video that Michael Benedict (now with the Atlanta Opera) had worked on this gag as well!!

On the day of the shoot there were three of us below the deck for the vacuum commercial.
There was a hole cut into the floor directly in front of the chair and a vacuum cleaner was pushed up to the hole. A balloon was fitted inside the vacuum’s fabric bag and an air hose snaked out of the vacuum’s beater bar area down into the hole and up to an air compressor. A thick rope of cords and strings went from underneath the chair down that same hole.

Now, remember when I said that we couldn’t use velcro?
Well we couldn’t. However, we could (and did) use T-pins to hold certain bits of the skin in place.

Everything else depended on timing.

When the cameras rolled and the director called “action” it was my job to pull strings connected to the pins, releasing the skin from its hold on the wooden frame. The man operating the air tank (Paul Huggins, co-owner of Scenario Custom Scenery) would begin inflating the vacuum cleaner’s bag while the “Yank Guy” (Jesse) frenetically pulled the cords connected to the bulk of the breakaway upholstered skin.

We must’ve done the gag a dozen times or more and the final product looked great on camera.

Have you seen the commercial?

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Hardly into my fourth year of working in the business, I can look back and realize how utterly green I surely was and how patient and allowing Richard was with me during the times that he dropped into Atlanta to shoot an episode. Never more patient was Richard the day we arrived at the airport. My recollection is that we were running behind schedule that day, and getting a convoy of production vehicles onto the airport was never fast, even in the terror-free 20th century.

The scene featured the four girls (in the pre-pilot there were four girls) at an air terminal, waiting for their plane to New York. As it turns out all of our trucks were in Richard’s shot and even though they were going to be out of focus he wanted them to look like airline service trucks so he asked us to put some graphics on the outside of the truck. I can’t remember if we had pre-cut vinyl letters that were big enough to see from camera or if we had to make the letters out of paper tape, I just remember that I thought it would be funny to have the tagline be: “We Fly Real Fast”.

I don’t think we pitched it to Richard, and I’m not sure if Joe was there as we were putting it up, I just remember being back in the terminal when Richard saw it for the first time and for just a split second looked as if he’d swallowed a frog.

Somewhere in all my stuff I have a copy of that pre-pilot… hmmmm…..

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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.

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You may not be aware of this but television in the United States is going to be changing in a big way in the next few years: if you rely on over-the-air transmissions (rabbit ears) to receive television signals your television is going to stop working on or before February 17, 2009. The FCC is requiring that all full-power stations move to digital transmission by next year which means that unless your television is equipped to decode and process digital signals you may begin to experience the “blackout” before the 2009 deadline.

But, there’s no need to panic.

The changeover is dependant on 85% of the receivers in your area being capable of receiving digital transmission, so the deadline could slip by months or years, but it’s an eventuality so be ready.

Now, if you have cable television or use some sort of satellite receiver you have less to worry about because your television will still work just fine. Whenever analog television really does go away you’re going to need to buy some sort of digital receiver to hook up to your old television(s) to get them to pull down signals out of the air.

The thing that I’m less sure about for the future is what’s going to happen when stations broadcast High Definition (HD) programs. Since the dimensions of HD screens are wider than old-fashioned “square” television screens I’m not sure what you’ll get.

Fortunately, I’m led to believe that if you buy a widescreen HD television today you’ll be just fine since they’re already engineered to meet all the requirements for the “television of the future”. But, they’re not all outfitted for the approach of our new television system so don’t be snookered by low prices and don’t be afraid to ask questions!

Just imagine how curious people will be thirty years from now when they’re told that we watched television on little square screens. Don’t even try to explain black & white…

Now I’m sure that I’ve left something important out, so do your own research. Here are a couple of good links to get you started:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-definition_television_in_the_United_States

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDTV

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcast_Flag

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