On the Set of Twilight: Of Talking Dolphins and Giant Inflatable Apes: Further Travels Toward Twilight

The Long, Strange Road to Working with a Bunch of Vampires on the Set of Twilight

Part II:  Of Talking Dolphins and Giant Inflatable Apes: Further Travels Toward Twilight

Long ago, when I was deep into a graduate degree in experimental psychology at the University of California at San Diego, I discovered that it would not be easy to follow my lifelong dream of working with dolphins on interspecies communication.  This was because I had not yet formed the concept of “working for a living”.  Somewhere after my Masters degree, when the small inheritance from my father’s life insurance ran out and I was scanning the want ads and beginning to panic over how to pay the next month’s rent, I realized that money does, in fact, make the world go round.  And if I wanted to keep my place on the carousel I would need to make money so I could afford the basic necessities of life in Southern California: food, shelter, and a working car.

 

To my naïve amazement and functional stupidity, nobody wanted to hire a recently-graduated psych major with a Masters degree, not even for maid work at La Jolla’s cheapest hotels, or door-to-door sales of air conditioning units in the suburbs of La Mesa.  No, employers didn’t even want me flipping burgers at the McDonalds down the street from my one-room apartment.  It was a wretched awakening.   After the initial embarrassing failures, I learned to portray myself as a high school graduate with no other ambition beyond the job I was applying for, and as such, I finally got to the interview stage for a few positions.

 

Unfortunately, this was in the heyday of “trickle-down economics”, which as history has taught us time and time again, is another term for “recession”.  Jobs were receding all over the place, and the rent was coming due. When I learned that one of my erstwhile professors was now reduced to stacking books at a publishing house for minimum wage, I threw my dreams of talking with dolphins aside and tried to become interested in— well, whatever it might be that could earn me a buck or two.   After more weeks of job-seeking failure I finally came across an ad that simply asked: “Can you think in three dimensions?”

 

Well, of course I could!  Maybe.  I was certainly intrigued. What kind of job asked that of a person?   I immediately called them to find out. “Can you sculpt?” they queried me over the phone.  “Why, yes!” I lied.  “Then come on down for an interview,” they said.  “We’re in the Clairemont Street industrial park, and you can’t miss us.  We’ve got a 25 foot tall tequila bottle out front.”

 

And indeed they did—a nice looking bottle of Jose Cuervo that was actually a cold-air balloon, which meant a fan was continuously blowing air into the shape to keep it inflated.  The company made giant inflatables, mostly of beer and soda cans, with the occasional liquor bottle thrown in.  But now they wanted to expand (inflate, you might say).  A client had asked for a 20 foot tall giant panda sitting with its arms outstretched, and as part of the inflatable company’s (supposedly) patented manufacturing process, they needed a scaled down clay model of the bear in the correct pose, which would be used to make their pattern.  They needed to hire a sculptor.

 

CUT TO: The set of Twilight, close to present day: It surprised me that Catherine looked exactly the same as I remembered her.  While I, on the other hand (shut up, Bitter Renee)…  I introduced myself, and she said that she remembered me from our work on that Jaclyn Smith movie.  I asked her if she still wore birds in her hair.  She laughed.  Amazingly, her laugh was immediately familiar, as well.  “Oh yeah, the birds!  I still do that sometimes.”

 

Back in the day, Catherine had told us girls in the model shop one afternoon during lunch that she wanted to be memorable whenever she met anyone in Hollywood, so she had decided that she would put small fake birds into her hair, sort of weaving them in artistically.  This was in the big hair era, and everybody even marginally cool was a little punk in their fashion proclivities.  This resulted in great leeway as to what could be seen as “professional”.  The birds worked, too.  Later on during our job Catherine had actually been invited to the Magic Castle, an exclusive and super cool club in the Hollywood hills where Michael Jackson (pre uberkinder-weirdness) had come over to her table and complemented her on her avian coiffure.

 

Peter Facinelli, alias Dr. Cullen, politely asking my forgiveness for interrupting us, wondered if Catherine liked his make-up.  Catherine studied him.  “Yeah, I really like the circles under your eyes.”  Peter actually blushed with pleasure.

 

“Do you?  I did that myself.  I just let my own under-eye circles show—no make up.”  The two of them stepped over to the video playback cart to admire the eye circles, and I realized the reintroduction was over—hey, this woman was busy!

 

Chris took the cue as well—no time for excessive pleasantries at this stage, with the production pressure on.  He whispered to me that the DP’s name was Elliot, and pointed him out.  I walked through a snake’s nest of cables and got close to the camera, where the Man in question was watching the gaffer take a light reading.  “What do you have?”  Elliot asked him.  I stood there in the inner circle, feeling weird.  No time to be shy—this was the beginning of an important working relationship—but on the other hand, only an asshole interrupts the DP when he’s working.  I waited, feeling like a small elephant in the cramped quarters of the mini-set for the make up tests.  I tried not to breathe too loudly and kept a slight smile on my face, not a big smile, because that’s how you can tell a “civilian” (uninformed, blissfully ignorant non-crew visitor) from the rest of us.  We never just stand there with a big smile, obviously pleased as punch just to be here.  If you see a stranger on the set and they’re happy and smiling from ear to ear, they don’t work in the Business.

 

CUT BACK TO: San Diego, too long ago for comfort: I got the job as sculptor that day, and was to start work the following morning.  I raced to the local Michaels craft store for some sculpting tools which I scuffed up and muddied, so as to look well-used during my mythical sculpting efforts over the years.  Before my real years of study to become a scientist, I had been fairly good at drawing and painting, but I had never tried sculpting except for a stunted and crippled brontosaurus I had made in the second grade.  But hell, if I could think in three dimensions, how hard could sculpting be?

 

Not that hard, it turns out.  After the panda was sculpted, I went on to sculpt a twelve foot hand reaching into a giant pack of cigarettes (for a billboard just off the Hollywood Freeway), life size killer whales, an eagle with a forty foot wingspan, twenty foot ducks, the Hulk enraged and enlarged, and finally, towards the end of my career there, a sixty-five foot tall inflatable King Kong which we mounted on the top of the Empire State Building.  Yes, I was on top of the world.

 

And then I met my now ex-boyfriend, who lived in LA, my home metropolis before I had moved to San Diego for college and my eventual inflatable servitude.   He was a gaffer in films and the son of a very famous gaffer.  I was now making, as the head sculptor of my company, about $1.50 an hour over minimum wage. My boyfriend, on the other hand, was making the incredible sum of $250 a day, worked only when he wanted to, had time off for hiking and camping and enough spending money for bi-monthly trips to Vegas.  I wanted some of that!

 

I had been secretly taking photos of my sculptures for some time. The giant inflatables company wouldn’t have approved of my photo-ops because they didn’t want their “patent-pending secret inflatable design process” to be compromised, but in reality it was ridiculously simple to figure out.  Disney by that time had already stolen it via a series of “tours” through our company when they supposedly wanted us to construct replicas of their characters as inflatables—a subterfuge that was hardly necessary.  It turned out my own little bit of subterfuge was my ticket out of the subsistence-existence inflatable jungle.

 

Armed with a pile of photos of my work, I met with an art director, a friend of my boyfriend (jobs through friends and boyfriends and girlfriends and friends of friends: it’s the Hollywood Circle of Life).  The friend was working on a show using miniatures as part of their special effects.  They needed people who could sculpt, paint, and otherwise manufacture tiny houses, bridges, roads, mountain ranges and such for a television movie of the week called “The Night They Saved Christmas” .  It was nonunion, which allowed me to get my first job in film.  It was television, actually, but it was a huge, fantastic leap: from underpaid drone in boring San Diego to better-paid drone in exciting Hollywood!

 

Next week: Part III:  Tiny Elves and Big Trucks: Packing Heat on Twilight

The Long, Strange Road to Working with a Bunch of Vampires on the Set of Twilight

Part I:  Madness Has no Chronological Boundaries

On this, my first blog entry, I would like to write a heartfelt “Howdy!” to all of you interested-in-film people and all of you working-in-film people.  I work in The Business as a stand by painter, or stand by scenic artist.  Although I sometimes work as a simple scenic (or as I like to think of it, a faceless drone, one of many), my favorite and most exciting job as a scenic is doing “Stand By” for a film.  This is a mysterious position, because nobody is really sure how you got there, or what you need to know to do your job—sometimes not even you, the person doing the job.  Although, if I think about it, and then put it into words, maybe we’ll all learn a little something about the process of becoming a stand by painter and what you might need to learn in order to do a good job.

It’s different for everyone who does what I do, but my particular path, though roundabout and maybe even (because I like to use big words) labyrinthine, is clear enough in retrospect.  So I’ll start at the beginning—eventually. But because we are dealing in the written word and communicating via cyberspace, we are unencumbered by real time, so I intend to jump around in the time stream as it suits. Please, do enjoy the ride.

I’d like to tell you about my last stand by job as it happened, once I get some exposition out of the way.  That gig was working on the  feature film version of the Stephenie Meyer book, Twilight, which, as I learned during shooting, has become a huge teen and pop culture phenomenon with thousands, maybe even millions of devoted and sometimes (dare I say it?) demented fans.  A shout out to y’all!  You are legion!

After reading the script, then the book, then living and working with all the vampires in the book, as well as the book’s protagonist, Bella, for the past several months, I now see evidence of Twilight mania everywhere.  It’s something probably akin to the experience of buying a certain model of car, say a Mercedes Slk 350, and then suddenly seeing other Mercedes Slk 350’s just like yours everywhere you drive.  Or in my case, after my most recent vehicle purchase, suddenly seeing stripped-down Toyota trucks with raised camper shells tall enough to fit my special cart and its plethora of tubs containing the bizarre artifacts and substances of my trade.  Put another way, without the metaphors, working on Twilight has effectively altered my perception of the world.

And that is something about film that I treasure.  Whether watching or working on films, I love how, because of them, the world changes, my horizons are expanded and my understanding grows in unexpected ways.  Strangely enough, I never planned to work in film, never suspected when I started working for living decades ago that I would eventually earn my paycheck toiling on a movie set.   I had an altogether different plan for my life.

But here I am—many years after the all those plans fell through, and bitterness is probably a large part of my being, although I try to exorcise it whenever something good happens.  I tell myself, “Hey, looky here!  Something good just happened right in front of you!  You got your wish, which proves the universe isn’t a mindless abyss of empty darkness.  Yep, irrefutable proof, and you’d better remember this the next time you start moaning about how your life is so far off course, you big, dumb idiot.”  That is indeed what I was telling myself as I left the office (a trailer, parked inside a huge warehouse in a place called Clackamas—look it up on Google maps if you’re curious) of Chris, the lead set painter for the film version of Twilight.

Chris had just told me I got the job, coveted by most of my dearest scenic artist friends and feared by the rest, of stand by painter for the shoot.  I would start in a few days, when real production began.  The full crew would be on set and the shoot would truly be off and running.  But today only a smattering of the upper echelons of the shooting crew were doing test shots of the vampires’ make up.  Out in the darkness of the huge (we’re talking aircraft hangar big) warehouse, the director was talking with the actor who would play Dr. Emmet Cullen, the leader and father figure of the pretend “family” of good vampires.  She stood in a little pool of bright light a few feet away from the camera.  Her name was Catherine Hardwicke, and I actually knew her from the very first job I ever had in The Business.  We were both miniatures artists for a special effects studio which has since vanished in the way of the dinosaurs—evolution of CGI made them too dumb and ponderous to exist alongside the new species.

Through a lecture by a screenwriter local to Oregon, where I have lived for the past several years, I had recently learned that Catherine herself had evolved to the level of director, up from being a long-time production designer.  She had zoomed up and crashed through what is an almost impenetrable glass ceiling.  Not only are women directors a rarity, but production designers who make it to directing are perhaps even rarer.  During the lecture, I had been distracted by my bitter self, who was bemoaning the fact that I was not much farther along in my “real” career than during that first job that Catherine and I worked on back in the ‘80’s (a lie, but the bitter Renee does that all the time).

Anyway, it so happened that less than a year after the lecture, fate would bring Catherine to my home turf of the great northwest, and because I had known her before, it made me the first choice for the job I now had—a job that would be fun, with months of long hours and overtime which would fill the near-empty coffers of my union health care plan, and begin to pay off my monstrous credit card debt which reflected the scarcity of film work in my state over the past few years.  Bitter Renee shut up and went to sleep or whatever it is that she does when life has become an interesting and well-paid adventure once again.

“Shall we go and talk to Catherine?” Chris asked.  I was only a little hesitant.  Then my excitement at being on a feature again as stand by took over, and I realized this was a great opportunity to meet the DP, who is my closest superior, along with the director.  A good relationship with both is essential to doing stand by on a feature.  We left the trailer and walked quietly into the darkness, heading for the spot of light and the little knot of people around the camera.

Next Week: Part II: Of Talking Dolphins and Giant Inflatable Apes: Further Travels Toward Twilight

THE STANDBY PAINTER

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.