Renee has worked on over 30 films and after many adventures she acquired the arcane knowledge of the Stand By Painter. She has worked with directors and DP’s on such films as Untraceable, The Burning Plain, and Twilight, among others.
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August 31, 2010
The cast of Invaders from Mars included Karen Black, Timothy Bottoms, Hunter Carson, and Lorraine Newman, and they all sat outside in the front garden in their canvas chairs talking and laughing and generally being famous, which impressed me to no end. Summer was just beginning and entire place was sunlight and green plants and blue sky.
It was absolute thrillville when Tim and Karen started talking to me a few days in. I felt like one of the guys, a member of the crew rather than a worker drone. We all had hours of time where we had nothing to do. On this show we waited for lighting for probably 80 % of the downtime. So we just learned to listen for the first AD to call us, but in the meantime, anything was a go, even loud laughter. Twelve hours and more we were going to be out there in the wilds of Malibu, every day.
But that was great! It was one long outdoor picnic. I had never even heard of something as fantastically decadent and luxurious as Craft Service, and couldn’t believe that all this wonderful food was free and was always there, always being replenished. I had never been exposed to Hansen’s sodas, or Evian, or even unlimited Starburst candies and Nacho Cheese Doritos.
So, in the boredom of doing nothing we all got to be friends, from the entire cast to the make up and wardrobe people, even to the lowliest of us, which would be the standby painter and carpenter. We told each other our dreams, played practical jokes on each other, amused each other and at the end of the show, we even went sailing together out of Marina del Rey.
But during many of the waiting hours I was stuck by myself at a small old building, a shack, really, across the side lawn, and buried behind some mesquite and flowering bushes. I was unable to leave it during long periods of takes and retakes. I would sit on the steps, after dealing with various odd paint and maintenance tasks inside of the shack, where all my touch up paint was stored. I would clean brushes, age wooden fence posts and the like, then run out of things to do. I couldn’t risk crossing through the scene being filmed just in front of my shack, so I would quiet myself and remain frozen, more or less.
As the hours passed, and I was forced to stay absolutely still and quiet, I began to look at all the tiny things around me. I noticed the never ending stream of ants first, and studied them, finding where they entered their holes, and how they passed information to each other by touching one another on their way past, one by one, antennae touching. Little aliens, they could just as well have been Martians themselves; they were such strange, busy, mysterious tiny tots. I grew to know the movements of the ants, to pick up on their rhythms of their day.
Then one morning I saw a small dark head peek out from around the corner of the bottom steps. A bright eye touched mine and I warmed up in pleased surprise. It was a lizard. I love lizards, and from childhood have always sought them out, sometimes catching them gently and turning them upside down to stroke their bellies and hypnotize them so they would lay in a trance, or cling to me for up to twenty minutes (although I wouldn’t presume to do it now or at the time of Invaders).
This lizard at first would just look at me, watching for my attention to turn toward something else. I would pretend to do so, but would sneak a peek to see what the lizard was doing. Eventually I saw the lizard make her move—a little tongue flicked out and one ant went missing from the column. She was hunting the ants. She reminded me of a miniature tiger, shadowing a herd of teensy prey animals.
She grew bolder over the days to follow, and soon she was creeping closer to my shoes, sometimes flicking up an ant, but really I could see she was curious—about my big feet, about me.
Now, before this, I am not sure I would have recognized that a lizard was being curious. I would have suspected it, perhaps, but I wouldn’t have really believed it. However, on the first day of work at Mr. Blandings’ ex-dream house, our gang boss showed us something amazing during one coffee break. He told us that he had realized two lizards lived in the front yard on a little hill. They were very protective of their hill, and could be seen looking around from the top, proudly surveying their domain throughout the day.
So at break, our boss put a small wood board on their hill. When he approached, both lizards whisked out of sight instantly. “Now just watch this,” he said. “Give ‘em a minute or two to work up the courage to check out the strange new thing in their home.”
Sure enough, a few minutes later, both lizards’ heads peeked over the top of the hill. They bellied down from the summit, then sidled over to the wood. They looked up and down at it; they cocked their little reptilian heads from side to side. You could see the wheels turning. Then one by one, they shimmied up to the board, and leapt up onto the top surface. Soon they were crawling all over the piece of lumber, checking every square inch, looking over the edges, pacing out the length. Curious lizards, right before our eyes.
Next time, more on our lizards, our actors and poetry from our fire marshal.
August 23, 2010
After two weeks of traveling and writing (stuff other than this blog) we’re back and ready to return to those days of yesteryear, remembering the first job we ever had on the set of a film as a standby painter. Enjoy these stories of a time when everything was new and fresh, and full of promise, like the first morning of the rest of your life.
I was still technically working for Cinnebangs when Invaders from Mars started pre-production, and a small contingent of us were sent out to restore, paint and wallpaper a mysterious old house located inside Malibu Creek State Park, a 7,000 acre piece of wilderness once owned by Ronald Reagan, Bob Hope, and Twentieth Century Fox.
As I crawled west in the sparkling early morning traffic on the Ventura freeway, I realized that for at least the next month I would be driving to a lovely wild place up into the Santa Monica Mountains, far from the grime, crime and beautiful transvestite streetwalkers of downtown Hollywood. Although I would miss those daily glimpses of the outrageous fashion parade on Sunset, I was definitely glad to be exiled from Hollywood Central for a while.
The drive off the freeway was idyllic; every curve in the road revealed more green and growing things. Huge oak trees, manzanita and fragrant sage covered the mountain sides and the sun shone on picturesque valleys. Further in, I passed multi-million dollar ranches with acres of white fences patrolled by thoroughbred horses worth more than my combined income from the past ten years. There wasn’t single human being in sight.
It was hard to believe that the teeming crowds of the Topanga shopping mall and its exponentially expanding population of tweens infesting the ice skating rink were less than twenty minutes away. The park was off to my right, and as I drove through it, I could see it was a nature reserve area more than a baseball field type of area. Nobody had changed it from its natural state. I liked the wildness, very much.
I found the house far back in the park, and it was a bit derelict, but charming, a storybook house. I stared at it for a minute. It looked eerily familiar. The carpenters had been there for a week before us painters, so piles of lumber cluttered the overgrown front yard, and I knew that the whine of power tools would be heard whenever work went on, drowning out the wonderful sounds that I heard all around me now as I got out of my truck: birds singing everywhere, noisy and happy and alive.
As we painters were shown around and given the rundown on what needed to be done to bring the building back to life, our gang boss explained why the house inspired a sense of déjà vu. It was the house that Cary Grant struggled to complete in the 1948 movie Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House. I wondered if the ghost of Cary Grant ever visited.
The house, perhaps because it hadn’t been used for a long time, or maybe because of its isolation, seemed otherworldly. It would be months before I left that house, working on it or in it six days a week, ten to fifteen hours a day. When we started painting and wallpapering, it was late spring. When we completed filming, it was late November.
In all that time, I never got over the faint, haunted feeling of the house. But it became comforting in its strangeness, and there were things that happened there which probably could never have occurred in another place.
I would meet my best friend for the next fifteen years there, learn about filmmaking there, go jogging every day through some of the most beautiful scenery in the world there, and because of the long hours spent sitting still during the months of filming, I would make friends with a lizard while I was there. Seriously. That lizard let me pet her, towards the end of our time there. So I believe there was something strange about that house, but also wonderful.
Next time, a story about lizards, a fire marshal philosopher-poet, and why you should never bring a cup of coffee onto a hot set.
August 2, 2010
That first job on the set of a real feature film was an adventure, the likes of which I will never know again. That’s because I will never again be so full of wonderment and fear, and pure desperation to get out of where I had been working, which was at a set shop I’ll call Cinnabangs. Every day at Cinnebangs was a hardworking, kick-ass experiment in boredom and/or terror, with a healthy dose of toxic materials handling and a puzzling lack of employee morale. Maybe it wasn’t so puzzling. We never knew when exactly we would be off work each day. We always started at 6:30 am, but we were allowed to leave at 5:00 pm or maybe 7:00 pm, or possible 12:00 am. You just never knew, because it apparently was an ongoing secret, one kept from you for obscure reasons.
As everybody kept working, drilling holes in plywood, mixing resin for some mold filling, spraying glue onto felt squares, apparently oblivious to the need for dinner as the clock crept past 5:00 pm, then left 6:30 pm behind and headed towards 8:00 pm, I couldn’t help but wonder, “Why don’t they just tell us what time they want us to work to?” I’d come up with possible reasons: maybe they didn’t know what time we should work to; or maybe it was just the competitiveness of the workers there (not me—I had a boyfriend and wanted to get home); maybe nobody working there wanted to be the first to cave in, exposing themselves as a detestable weakling and a coward by asking if they could go home. Anyway, whatever the reason, it was an eternal mystery as to what time you would be leaving work that day, and I learned not to make any plans with my boyfriend on weeknights. Whether someone in authority would remember to break you for dinner was a crap shoot, as well.
For some other unknown reason, even though there were at least ten to fifteen of us working in the set shop every day, and they only gave us a half hour for lunch, making it impossible to go out for anything, Cinnebangs had no break room, no lunch table, not even any chairs for their employees. Each day at lunch time we’d glumly file out to the sidewalk in downtown Hollywood and sit there like beggars, pulling in our feet when people with better jobs walked through our sad, mopey little cluster.
Conversation was hard and mean, and usually consisted of a statement from person A followed by a comment from person B that would be something along the lines of: “I did that, too, but I did it better.” Or perhaps a disdainful, “So what?” I remember I once mentioned that I had just had dinner with Timothy Leary, something I was rather proud of—it was a wonderful and very interesting evening. Person B replied (I’m not making this up), “Oh come on, everybody here has had dinner with Timothy Leary!”
So I was desperate to get out of the set shop, but didn’t know how to do it. Then when some of us were sent out on a mysterious mission to paint and wallpaper a place out in Malibu Creek State Park, I was thrilled. We didn’t learn until later that this was to be one of the sets for a movie that Cinnabangs had been hired to work on. And that movie was Invaders from Mars. For once we wouldn’t have to eat lunch on the sidewalk of the grimiest back streets of Hollywood. We would be out in the beauty of nature, and maybe, since it was in a park, we might even be able to find a lunch table.
As it turned out, Malibu Creek State Park had many, many things, amazing, lovely, and unforgettable things. It was also the place where I discovered the way out of the misery of the set shop and onto the set of a real movie.
July 26, 2010
Who can forget their first job? Certainly nobody who works in the film business can forget theirs. They will be able to relive it whenever the first film they worked on is shown again, thus embarking on a bright and nostalgic skip along memory lane or a repulsive stumble into the dark side. Sometimes, depending on the film and the experiences, it can be both (and for me, it was). In honor of that long ago on-the-set adventure, for the next couple of entries I’d like to talk about my first film job.
The other day, partway into an extended period between jobs, while successfully avoiding all forms of productivity, I came across my very first film. They were showing it on one of the outer channels in the satellite dish movie array, past HBO, Showtime, and any other recognizable franchises. Frankly, if I hadn’t been channel surfing for far too long, killing time and the battery life of my remote, I never would have found it.
Invaders from Mars was an ‘80’s remake of a truly creepy 1953 sci-fi movie of the same name. The plot was the stuff of a child’s nightmare: your parents and then everyone else in your town is taken over by… something horrible, and they become zombified, possessed automatons. You are all alone, the only person left who is still human. Come to think of it, this is probably the stuff of adult nightmares, too.
The Martians have landed in a big sand pit outside of town, but just over the hill in your own backyard. People go up the hill and disappear into the sand. When they come back, they aren’t themselves. As the one kid who hasn’t been taken over by Martians, it’s up to you to save yourself and everyone else. And that requires going down into the sand pit, to find out exactly what is under there. What you find is pretty amazing. Scary, too, if you are between the ages of four and seven.
If you get a chance, and you, like me at the moment, have the inclination to slothfully dispose of some time which could be better spent doing something (anything) else, give this film a look. The production design, done by Leslie Dilley with the help of Craig Stearns and sets designed by Randy Moore, is actually very impressive. The script is not, however. It suffered by being a product of Cannon Films filmmaking standards (slapdash, fast money, remarkably unconcerned with quality) at the time. Still, there’s fun to be had, somewhere in there.
I do recall what my mother said after seeing it for the first time, though. The very first job on a film her beloved daughter had ever had, a many months’ long ordeal of hard work and endless hours, framed by daily commutes from the north end of the San Fernando Valley down to Long Beach on the worst freeway in the world, the dreaded 405. For those of you unfamiliar with the geography of LA, that is a distance of approximately 400 miles, one way.
I was anxious to hear what she thought of this epic endeavor, and called her at home the night it opened, after she had gone to see it.
She was only slightly apologetic. “Oh honey, I don’t want to embarrass you, but that movie was pretty terrible!”
July 19, 2010
Depending on your brand of physics, light may be the fastest thing in the universe. However, light is not a thing, exactly. Light is both a wave and a particle, but it is neither until it is observed. Light seems to be extremely important, both in the concrete, everyday world sense, and in the metaphysical sense, the sense of reality itself.
I think about light quite a bit—its wavelength determines the colors our eyes perceive, and our perception is tied in with our emotions. Color choices can affect the entire feel of a film. If you don’t believe me, look at any David Lynch film (except Eraserhead which was shot in black and white for the emotional effect the lack of color engendered: fear, alienation, the darkness of nightmares).
Red makes us feel somehow different than blue, and the juxtaposition of colors can be pleasing or jarring, exciting or disturbing. Some responses we have to color are learned, while others, such as the “strobing” of colors which are equal in luminescence are pre-wired in our brain. An example of this, called “equiluminence” can be found here Luminance Differences Affect Our Perceptions
I recently reviewed Newton’s old experiments with a prism and along the way, discovered that in medieval times all painting was done with egg as the binder for the various pigments they made from minerals or vegetable matter. Medieval painters had no way to paint layers of color on top of each other, which is why medieval paintings appear so flat (although perspective wasn’t very well done or even understood, either). Instead, each new color muddied or threatened to erase the color beneath.
But then oil paints, using vegetable oil rather than egg to bind the pigments, came into use. This meant that different colors could be layered on a painting without disturbing the layer of color put on before. Once this elementary, but debilitating problem of egg-based paint had been overcome, painters could use all sorts of colors over, with and next to each other, and they could mix colors on the canvas as they painted. Finally people could play with color and thus, play with light.
Another innovation that arrived with oil paint was varnish, and if you have ever tried to get more depth into your colors or add dimension to a painting, you know that the colors and the depth of your work look much, much better, somehow, when you varnish, whether your varnish is gloss or matte. Somehow, that layer of clear or tinted clear stuff brings your painting alive.
I finally found out why this is so. It involves a trick of the light. While researching Newton I came across a diagram that shows how light is transferred and mixed by a layer of varnish, and how varnish brings out the colors of your painting. You can find it here: Optical Properties of the Paint Surface .
Isn’t that cool? I don’t understand how light can be so many things at once: energy, particles, waves, single photons, just a part of the electromagnetic spectrum that our eyes are designed to detect… Light is a Mystery.
But I do know light looks real pretty if you can get it to do what you want to in a painting or on a set. And film can do even more with light and color than varnish, adding dimension and depth and breathtaking reality—-even creating entirely new realities. Film, after all, is light. You go, light!
