Hey, not to make too much out of this (in case it’s old news) but did any of you iPhone users out there on the Internet notice something strange this weekend? I personally felt a great disturbance in the ‘Net, as if millions of Facebook videos were suddenly viewable on my iPhone for the first time in EVAR. I fear something very interesting has happened in the Great War between Apple and Adobe over Flash video. So. Am I late to this party or have I actually discovered something new?

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Last week our friend Bob announced that he was going to sell a few old Star Wars toys he had laying around his house. This of course piqued my interest, as I’m one of those millions of children who were imprinted with the plans for the Death Star back in the summer of 1977. Like many of those kids, my formative years were spent poring over pre-production illustrations by Ralph McQuarrie and building my own models of the ships out of balsa wood and styrene. Looking back, I thought that I had a pretty great collection of lovingly-used, carefully-protected toys and memorabilia packed away into boxes and sent off for storage.

I was so wrong.

What I’m leaving out is that “our friend Bob” is better known in Star Wars fan circles as “VaderPainter“; one of the premiere Darth Vader costumers in the nation. His Darth Vader costume has its own custom-made road case… something you’d expect to see during a load-in for a KISS concert. It has custom-cut foam receivers for Vader’s helmet. It has casters. It has reinforced sides and custom silkscreened artwork on the outside. It’s totally Rock-n-Roll, and it’s totally ready for tour… which is exactly what Bob uses if for because he has appeared all over the place as Vader and has more Imperial Stormtrooper friends than you can shake a gaffi stick at.

Knowing how seriously he takes his costuming it should have come as no surprise that his Star Wars collection might be “above average”.

What it turned out to be though is “beyond imagination“.

Bob’s house is a realization of every Star Wars toy collector’s dream: shelves and shelves and shelves and shelves filled with figures and spaceships and books and models and replica costumes and helmets and…….. there were so many toys and figures on hand that I honestly had a difficult time focusing on any one item because there were five more things right beside it that I wanted to see. I kept finding myself staring with my mouth open at things I’d only ever seen in magazines, like an art student walking through the Louvre admiring the care given to each piece of art on display. Just incredible.

The video I’ve posted here is of Captain Matt of ThePirateShip.com being given a personal tour of the collection by VaderPainter himself. Enjoy!

After yesterday’s visit to Bob’s sale I have to tell you: my collection is a joke. And I’m okay with that. In fact, I’m more than a bit relieved because now I won’t have to build a Star Wars museum of my own. As we were driving away my 78 year old Dad said “That’s the first time I’ve ever seen a toy store in a house.”

Right on.

…

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I’m a huge Tongo Hiti nerd and can’t wait to stop typing this entry and drive down to the Atlanta Trader Vic’s to see them perform live and in person…. the video posted here is from last Thursday night and it’s *amazing*….. I’ve personally watched this thing 40 times and I’m sure I’ll watch it 40 more…. totally mesmerizing…. your journey begins with the powerful beauty of Celine Dion and ends in dark majesty. Sit back and enjoy Tongo Hiti at the Atlanta Trader Vic’s as they weave the most magical performance ever seen on YouTube at this particular time of the day (or night)….

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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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The year was 1995, the first season of filming on the Aaron Spelling series ‘Savannah’, and we were on our first set of “stages” (a defunct home repair/lumber center) in breathtaking Lilburn, Georgia. You might not be aware that episodic television is shot with multiple directors who rotate in and out. While one director films a show another director is prepping the next one so that he’ll be ready to shoot when his turn arrives.

I remember being mildly excited when I found out that our next director was going to be Parker Stevenson, one of the actors from the 1970’s television series ‘The Hardy Boys’. I’d grown up reading the books and then watching the show. As we started working with Parker the chances of my being starstruck rapidly faded as he simply became someone we worked with, just another director. And he did a good job. While he wasn’t as Hollywood-wise as Richard Lang, as enthusiastic as Harvey Laidman or as fart-joke happy as Stephen Scaini, Parker was professional, pleasant and it was very embarrassing for us when his Wizard went missing.

It was on a day when the prop department was spread thin, everyone was taking care of business. Joe Connolly, the Propmaster, was prepping the next episode. He was either out in the trailer that served as our office or in his truck driving around town to find the zany stuff the writers (the Stanleys) kept poking into their scripts. Kevin, our third, was outside straightening up the prop truck. And I, as second, was inside, supposedly working set.

Except I wasn’t.

We were nearing a scene that involved the popping of a bottle of champagne and as any filmmaker worth his salt knows, a scene that involves a “gag” like that is all about resets. A “reset” is exactly what it sounds like. It’s placing everything, props, special effects, wardrobe, camera, actors, cars, whatever, back to the beginning position to shoot another take. We’ve all heard AD’s yelling “Back to One!” so many times that it’s burned into our forebrains. You say it under your breath, unconsciously, autonomically, it’s part of filmmaking.

So I knew that we were going to be doing a lot of resets. Joe had made sure that I had enough Rolaids to get off a good number of takes – that’s how you get fake champagne, often just ginger ale, to really erupt from a bottle. You “juice” it with some Rolaids by crumbling up some of those antacid tablets and dropping them into the carbonated water. It’s entirely like the Mentos and Diet Coke reaction, just not as instantaneous. You have time to drop in the tablets, jam the cork back into the bottle, slip the pre-formed black wrapper around the neck of the bottle, set the metal bail and be prepared to shake the bottle up just before the cameras roll.

We used Perrier Jouet exclusively, and by the time the show had really been going we were receiving shipments all the time. Every time it showed up on camera we received another case like magic. Not exactly product placement, not really payola, it was just an understanding we had with the Perrier Jouet folks because their stuff was the best. Guys, if you’re not sure what kind of champagne to buy go with the Perrier Jouet (waiting for a case to show up at my house now). So, while the Perrier Jouet looked great onscreen we couldn’t use it because one of the rules of the road is that it’s a Very Bad Idea to have Real Alcohol onset while you’re shooting. Some productions don’t care, some do.

The next scene immediately up was in the set that we simply called Tom’s Office, a little side room at one end of the riverboat set. It was pretty bare, just a desk, an executive chair, a phone and some guest chairs. The scene was all about Tom (Paul Satterfield) being on the phone talking to someone. I can’t remember who it was because I was outside on the main riverboat set playing alchemist with the fake champagne to figure out the best ratio of ginger ale to antacid tablet.

Pour, pour, pour. Cork. Shake, shake, shake. Uncork. BLAM!!!!

Meanwhile, inside the little room about 25 feet away, Parker decided to play propguy by giving Paul his own personal Sharp Wizard, an electronic organizer, to use during the telephone shot… a bit of business to make things a little more interesting.

Twenty minutes later it’s cut, print, moving on, and everyone started rolling over to the riverboat cabin set. Joe showed up, I think that Kevin showed up too, and we began working that scene. From the rehearsals, moving into the actual shots. I remember we had a tub full of towels or diapers for cleanup and that our dolly grip showed Parker that he could use one of the pushbars from the dolly to make a cork-popping sound which he began doing.

At some point, I think it was after that scene was done and wrap was called, Parker came over and said “Oh hey, did you guys pick up my Wizard?”

We had no idea what he was talking about so he explained all that had transpired in Tom’s Office. Naturally we all went back over to that set to look but the Wizard wasn’t there. The search expanded to no avail. The Wizard was missing. I think that was a Friday.

The next Monday the folks in production had plastered signs all around the building offering a $500 reward for the safe return of “Parker’s Wizard”. They said that it had his credit card info, telephone numbers and the like on it… the 1995 equivalent to losing a laptop computer, and we felt responsible because it was lost in the propping of a scene (unsupervised of course).

To my knowledge that gizmo was never seen again, except in little inside jokes by the Set Decorators. I still remember seeing the sign they hung up in a deli set in the middle of Porterdale. It listed all sorts of delicatessen sandwiches and their prices. Buried in the middle of that menu sign was a listing for “Parker’s Wizard…… $500″.

Ouch.

So that same year Kirstie Alley and her husband Parker Stevenson announced that they were getting a divorce. Joe Connolly surmised that it was probably our fault, that once Kirstie found out that Parker had been so inept as to lose his Wizard that she had no other alternative that to toss him out on his ear. Of course Joe was joking, but the very next season when Parker returned to shoot another episode I was walking up to tentatively greet him when another Joe, Joe Thomas, our 1st AC, stepped up and loudly inquired “So Parker, didja ever find your Wizard?”

I remember standing there with my mouth open, cringing.

So, Kirstie, or fans of Kirstie, or people who found this page by accident but read all of this because you are incredibly bored, I would just like to say that I’m very happy that you’re getting trim again and would just liket to apologize for any problems that Parker’s Wizard might have played in that whole “Fat Actress” business and would be happy to take you out to lunch one day so long as you wear that bra and panty set. That’s hot.

Postscript: A couple of months ago I found my own little 32K digital organizer from that same time period and bought some batteries for it so I could go back and see if there was any old information that I mightn’t ought to move over to my laptop. Unfortunately the liquid crystal display has gone wonky on the thing and you can’t really read the information. I left a message saying as much on Joe Connolly’s voicemail but I must not have been especially clear with what I left him because the next time I checked my own voicemail I found a reply from him (a message that I’ve kept because it cracks me up every time I hear it) where he breathes dangerously into the phone and says “So help me Drew, if you have Parker’s Wizard I’m going to fly to Atlanta and KICK YOUR ASS.”

[tags]kirstie alley, kirstie, alley, oprah, winfrey, show, bikini, thighs, sexy, fat, parker, wizard, savannah, episodic, television, series, WB, warner brothers, warner, brothers, aaron, spelling, electronic, organizer, parker, stevenson, hardy boys, hardy, boys, bra, panties[/tags]

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Certainly, Microsoft is determined to be in the first car of the content delivery train that is set to roll out over the next three years and they see the necessity of controlling the content playback hardware, a full five years into Apple’s musical hegemony. Digital content providers like Apple, Amazon and even Wal-Mart are still being struck with studios, networks and content providers of all stripes. Microsoft is right in there with the best of them, trying to figure out what it all means.

But the rollout of the Zune represents a deeper strategy with payoffs that should appear within the next 18 months if I know my scheduling worth a lick… it’s the payoff that nobody is discussing: containing Apple’s marketshare.

Why is that important? We all know that Apple is contained to well under 10% of the installed user base… what’s the big deal?

As the world moves to what the wonks are calling the “Post Desktop” era, operating systems matter less and less. Look at the GUI at Flickr.com and YouTube.com and a hundred other “Web 2.0″ sites.

It’s happening, and it’s happening quickly. The light and nimble startups are there already, and we know from experience how quickly startups can become 8 Googlillion Pound Gorillas in the tech world. Microsoft’s strategists know that there could be sudden and rapid turnover in the market… no, that there will be sudden and rapid turnover in the market in the very near future. Their concept of .Net is already being executed all over the place by startups and even Apple Computer has been out dot-Netting Microsoft.

How do you staunch the loss of your existing customer base? Well the first thing you do is plug the hole.

You kill the bloody iPod.

If Microsoft can significantly erode the iPod’s marketshare on the MP3/Video hardware industry they’re ahead of the game and everything falls in their favor from that point forward. But they don’t even have to erode the market. If they can commoditize the market that’s just as good. Reducing Apple’s profit margin on the iPod and eroding their market share pushes that hardware player down the slope long enough for Microsoft to create their own market for the thin client computers that we’ll surely all be using by 2010.

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