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