Evergreen Twilight: Landscape in Film: We Can’t Paint the Forest for the Trees

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

Evergreen Twilight: Landscape in Film: We Can’t Paint the Forest for the Trees

Part1 of 2:  Story in Place and Living in La La Land

Why two parts? Because discussing landscape in film covers a lot of ground! And because something that feels like a giant buckyball coated with glass shards has been scraping around under my left eyelid since yesterday and I can’t concentrate well enough to tie the bow at this point.

Followers of the Twilight books and the movie have recently descended on the little town of Forks, Washington, which now finds itself at the center of a genuine tourist boom.  Fans of Twilight have decided they want to experience for themselves the place where it rains an average of 121 inches a year.  Its near-constant overcast skies and the atmospheric green gloom of the mossy, fern-filled forest has intrigued them, because through that landscape they feel a little closer to the world of Twilight.  After all, it was this landscape that drew the Cullen “family”, good vampires all, to live in Forks, where they could exist in relative anonymity, untouched by the sunlight which would expose them for what they were.

The landscape of the rainforest and the little town within it is an integral part of Twilight, and because of that, Forks has become a way to enter into the story through a real-world portal.  Some people may laugh at this kind of attraction, but I have to admit that I felt the same way when I discovered there was a real Ponderosa ranch up near Lake Tahoe, where the fictional Ben Cartwright and his four sons lived and had western adventures every Sunday night on Bonanza while I was growing up.

I made a pilgrimage to the Ponderosa ranch one spring break during college, first traveling up into the forested hills of Northern California’s gold rush country, then around the edge of Lake Tahoe to the ranch, which is conveniently open to paying visitors most of the year.  And let me tell you, walking into Ben’s log house and laying eyes on the same map above his desk that always burned up during the credits… tears came to my eyes.  I wasn’t alone, either.  I saw the reactions of the other people on our tour.  There was reverence, there, and by golly, a sense of coming home to something.

But most powerful of all to me was seeing the exact same meadow with its trees and the familiar mountain range where Ben and his sons rode up to center frame for their individual credits, smiling and ready for anything their wild west television world had to offer.  There I learned that Ponderosa pines and snowcapped mountains were as much a part of Bonanza to me as Little Joe or Hoss.    

Further north, up here in the great Pacific Northwest, there is a certain kind of heft to the surroundings, a dark, lavish power that genuinely affects perception.  You slow down to wind through forests on many of the roads just outside the major city enters.  There are always shadows at the edge of even the open places—mountains are visible from almost everywhere, as are the trees, dark green evergreens or deciduous tangles that skeletonize in winter.  The trees are uncountable in their millions, marching into the distance, level upon level of them, covering the steepest slopes like a dark, rough bark upon the world.  Most months of the year it is rainy, or cold, and otherwise inhospitable to human outdoor life.  It is a good place to think and to write, but for the better part of the year, it takes determination and effort to get out of the house and stay out there in the woods—to feel at home in the great outdoors.

But within a movie, you can go anywhere in even the most difficult environments, strolling easily through mud bogs and over slimy moss, leaping boulders in the icy rain, playing among the tree tops during an arctic blast, just like a superhuman vampire.  That’s one power of film—to give you the ability to live in a landscape without suffering in the elements and shelling out hundreds of dollars for the right survival gear and travel arrangements that usually have to include a four wheel drive and stout, broken-in hiking boots.

There is a scene in Twilight where Edward is sitting with Bella at the top of a tree overlooking the vast expanse of the Columbia River Gorge.  In their magnificent, perfect, accommodating tree, they are atop a world of silver rivers and towering cliffs, the light behind them alive with clouds and mist roiling across a wild sky.  In the film world, the happy couple flew to their treetop haven in a few moments.  In the real world, we in the crew parked in a mud bog several miles away and took vans up a one lane road, then hiked through more mud for another quarter mile to the place where Edward and Bella’s tree had been placed.

The tree did not fit the place we chose for it.  Selected for its looks, height, foliage and branch strength, it had been cut down somewhere else and brought by truck to the lookout point, then it had risen from its premature death with the help of scaffolding, cables and other reinforcements.  Any branches that interfered with the action of the hero and heroine were pruned away and before filming, while the camera crew was setting up a crane below, I rubbed a mixture of mud and floor wax into the pale, raw wood where each branch had been.

The beauty of the landscape and the tree were manmade in one sense—we had arranged the tree and its stark, exaggerated height as if it hung directly above a blue abyss, the land far below it but still in focus.  In contrast, the real, natural trees at the lookout grew cautiously far from the cliff of the point, often bent and broken from the winds that blow down the gorge, and none of them hung out at the edge of a rocky crag that held no soil.  But this tree was a movie tree and didn’t have to follow the dictates of environment.

Over the course of my work on films, I’ve painted and sculpted a lot of trees.  Sometimes they’re made of plaster, sometimes fiberglass, and sometimes they’re real trees that just need some paint to look good, or they’ve been fitted with a prosthetic branch that has to be matched in color and texture to their real trunk.  When I worked on miniatures for Sam Raimi’s Army of Darkness, I spent weeks fabricating tiny California live oaks to various scales. Sometimes when you get to working on a great many trees, you start thinking like a tree, and you realize there are rules to how trees form.  Then it would get easier and easier to create your tree so that it looked right.

A few years after that project, while in my scientific, analytical mode of perception (a legacy from those years studying experimental psychology),  I learned about the mathematics of fractals, which produce forms like those found in nature, from the detailed musings of coastlines, to crystals, shells, flowers and, of course, trees.  As I saw the shapes that fractals produced, I felt the shock of recognition, and thought that maybe I had internalized something of this mathematical relationship when designing trees that “looked right”.

Occasionally I would work on sculpting not only trees, but also the rolling hills that the trees grew on.  Hills also have rules which change depending on what kind of hills they are.  In Hollywood I made many miniature landscapes that followed the rules of the Californian hills of Newhall, Chatsworth and the San Gabriel Mountains, which are the mountains where I grew up.  In fact, Hollywood itself was built at the bottom of their foothills.  Coincidence or a mystical connection?

It was more coincidence.  When I worked on miniature landscapes from drawings or photographs, they were based in those outlying areas, and even if they were supposed to be landscapes from another world, as in Army of Darkness, they picked up the major features of the locations where we would be filming the exteriors, which would be the places I mentioned above.  I grew up in those landscapes, but the task of reproducing them in detail was a new way of knowing them.  It led to a realization of how much I had internalized them, and why.

Where I grew up, in the greater Los Angeles area, we lived a half hour from downtown LA, but at different points along the borders of the metropolis, empty wilderness lies just beyond the outer suburbs. Up at the top of the street where I lived, the houses and things of man ended and the Angeles National Forest began.

I was firmly grounded in a landscape where I could walk into uninhabited national forest to sleep out there, even in January, with nothing but a cheap sleeping bag and still feel comfortable and at home in the dry sage brush and pines, the rustling cottonwoods and ephemeral streams.  When I got my drivers license I traveled through the mountain forests into the desert and camped out there, drinking in the silent distance and following the boulder-strewn paths though huge alluvial fans that had eroded outward from the sharp-shadowed mountains.

It was easy to live outdoors in Southern California, and easy to love it simply at face value, to be content to bask in the dry heat, knowing that water was a luxurious secret, hidden in canyons and all the more beautiful for its scarcity.  I don’t believe that I would have been outside so much if it had required waterproof raingear, constant insulation against the cold, and an acceptance of discomfort during my time outdoors.  Being at home outdoors meant I was familiar with my landscape in a deep, unconscious way.

When I was growing up, I would see movies or watch television and often recognize my landscape on the screen—the plants and trees I knew, the peculiar, steep slant of the slopes of the San Gabriel’s, the distinctive rock formations of Chatsworth and Joshua Tree.  Whether I was watching a western, a spy versus spy chase on winding mountain roads (they always used the Angeles Crest highway, which would later become a joke in the second Austin Powers film), or a B science fiction movie, that was my country up there, with its own colors of sunlight and shadows, colors I would put to use in matte paintings, and both vast and tiny landscapes when I went on to work in the Business.

Next Week: Evergreen Twilight: Landscape in Film: We Can’t Paint the Forest for the Trees

 Part 2 of 2: Meaning Out of the Wilderness: No Country for Old Paint

Part V: The Shade of Fear, Jewelry for the Aged, and the Blue Man sans Group: Special Effects at Twilight

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

Part V: The Shade of Fear, Jewelry for the Aged, and the Blue Man sans Group: Special Effects at Twilight  

Once upon a time I was working on a show where the owner of the brand new, never-before-used stage complex had a right hand man who had never worked with a film crew before.  Normally someone in charge of operations for a multi-stage studio complex wouldn’t even cross paths with any of the filming crew, and would only deal with the line producer and the UPM.  But this man didn’t know any of that, and thought he should be there during shooting to “supervise”.  He was completely alien to the process, hierarchy and madness of filmmaking, but thought, as the manager of the complex and directly below the owner in importance and responsibility he should be in charge, somehow. 

He had been in the military for most of his career, higher-up on some kind of special ops program for the latter part of it, and a marine before that, so his idea of teamwork and organization was about to be blown to bits by what he saw and tried to handle on the set that first day.  Showing up in his suit and tie at 6:00 am, he saw at least a hundred people, most of them dressed in ragged shorts and torn tee shirts who seemed to be either sitting around talking, or standing around talking, while fiddling with things absent-mindedly.  Nobody appeared organized, and most horrifying of all, the thing that finally drove him off the stage and ended his dreams of “being in charge” at some level on the film was that nobody was in charge. 

The set dressers told us later that he freaked out and ran into his boss’s office cursing and red-faced with frustrated rage, certain these “Hollywood guys” didn’t know what the hell they were doing, and that they wouldn’t get anything done on that stage, today or ever.  “It’s complete, utter chaos in there!” he howled. “Nobody has a plan! They have no leader!”  

He was right.  We have no leader.  We are all operating in little self-directed units that sooner or later interact with one another.  Not even the director or the first AD is really in charge.  Military models of efficiency we are not.   And yet we are incredibly efficient at getting a thousand separate things done at the right time to come together by the deadline.  What he saw was complete, utter chaos.  But it was our kind of chaos, dozens of different little stories going on, from beginning scene to build-up, climax and denouement, each with its own heroes and villains. 

Because of this nature of filmmaking, I think the stories behind the film are sometimes much more interesting and involving than the story in the film itself, especially if you’re working on a derivative, predictable script with a sub-par budget and under-pressure departments with real Characters who will clash and battle and eventually learn to live with and perhaps even have secret affairs with one another. 

Once my writing partner was pitching a script to a nice guy from Newline who laughed at all the right places, loved the story and then sighed.  “They don’t let us do these film-within-a-film scripts.  It’s such a waste of good material.” 

Maybe they don’t do them at Newline, but others of us in the Business can’t seem to stop making film-within-a-film movies because of the very same reasons I’ve outlined above. My own story within the story of Twilight on that morning, while not worth making a film about, did contain enough drama to produce fight or flight adrenaline in amounts hazardous to my health and wellbeing.   It was a story about a shade, the kind you usually see hanging in cracked and decrepit windows of old houses.  You pull them down from a wooden roller, knowing that they have been on the window since the post-war years (World War II), and notice that they are made of yellowed, sometimes cracking-with-age, cloth-like material. 

There’s a certain color to these shades when they’re old that production designers find very attractive and dramatically suggestive of all sorts of subtext.  Also, directors of photography find them seductive and useful and cheap—sort of like a lighting whore, with the ability to cheapen a hotel room or sully a window and add a grimy, vice-filmy feeling, or even the aroma of horror to the light that comes through any opening. 

Weeks before, I had seen at least two dozen of these shades lying in rows on the floor of the paint area, patiently awaiting the toxic process that would change their white newness to a yellowed, old “alcoholic smokers have used this thing to block out the light during a lifetime of hangovers” kind of color.  Then, when the set was finished, I had seen them carefully hung 20 feet off the floor of the dance studio set at specific heights prearranged by Elliot, our DP and the pre-rigging crew of grips and lighting guys.  Most were pulled down half-way, and all had the same great old aged look we sometimes call “nicotine”.

 Except for one.  It hadn’t gone through the same aging process, and was a weird rust color.  I was wondering if it was intentional, when somebody—was it an elf? No, it was a PA from the director’s assistant—ran up to me and asked if I knew where Chris (our lead scenic painter) was.  I said yes, and learned that the one rust colored shade was not the right shade (so to speak), and that we needed to find Chris and get another shade that matched the rest of the shades. 

After a little investigation, it appeared that all the well-aged shades had already been used.  There were only the weird rust-colored shades left.  I asked Chris about getting a new shade put down on the floor and aging it the right way.  He told me that we happened to be all out of new shades.  Oh, hell no.Jamie’s voice could be heard echoing from the set, asking for a new, properly aged shade to replace the rust-colored one.  We looked at each other.  Orders were given and orders followed. 

Somebody, from somewhere in the paint or construction crew ran out of the building, trying not to scream, and charged out of the parking lot, looking for a store that would be open at 7:00 am that stocked old fashioned cloth shades the right width and length.  A nightmare.  But not my nightmare, fortunately.

My nightmare started when they returned with the shade, forty minutes later.  I had only water-based, quick-drying pre-mixed spray to work with, and I layered a couple of colors together, all the while knowing that even if the shade looked the right color on the ground, the difference in the paint that was used on the original shades and the new one might show up as less opaque or not a match once the lighting shone through it.  I matched the color on the ground, sprayed the shade and dried it, then handed it off to construction who would install it on the window. 

High up on the cherry picker a few minutes later, one of the construction guys was hanging the shade, and we saw that it was not quite the same color as the others with the light shining through, although it was better by far than the rust shade.  Conference with the production designer and the DP and an assortment of other interested parties.  It was decided that the offending shade would be switched with another good shade placed at the end of the row of windows, and rolled up so most of it wouldn’t have to show.  It looked fine once it had been switched.  There was no visible difference, in fact.  However, I hated that shade, and I still do, even at the moment of this writing. 

Aging the shade the right way would have required using asphaltum, a flammable and therefore verboten thing to bring on set if it hasn’t dried (and it takes hours to dry).  So the shade wasn’t perfect, and therefore I hated it.  For the rest of the two weeks at the dance studio set, my eyes would stray to that thing up there, even when I didn’t want them to, and I would once again recall the ugliness and fear of failure generated by that shade.  Yep, I hated it. 

***

Other departments often come to me with little things that I can do for them, and unlike some standby painters, I accept any such tasks as part of my job, figuring that it’s all for the same movie, and I would rather have the film look good than reflect badly on any of us.  So it is that I find myself doing rather odd jobs from time to time.  I returned to my cart after the Shade of Fear incident and found a little pile of strange jewelry on it.  Funky, primitive skull charms on leather bands strung with lumpy beads…  I didn’t know who would be wearing the stuff, but I knew it was from props, since I had seen the propmaster scurry away from my cart with a guilty look on her face. 

I found Kami, assistant props, and asked what I usually ask:  How old is this supposed to be?  What kind of shape is it in?  Who’s going to be wearing it?  I mean if it’s for Edward, or any of the Cullen’s, they have a certain level of tidiness.  But if it is for the bad vampires…  They live like swine. 

I got my answers, and a few minutes later the jewelry had gone from new to aged, about ten years’ worth of everyday vampire wear.

Probably 70% of my job involves aging things.  Take a close look at your world tomorrow and you’ll notice that nothing is new.  I mean this not in the metaphysical or philosophical sense, but in the real, visually apparent sense.  Even the elegant copper or bronze sign of a fancy restaurant has verdigris, soot, tarnish, and oxidation—all sorts of time-related effects.  And this applies not only to signs, to but shoes, sidewalks, curtains, doorknobs, walls and banisters—all the things of our fallible, dust-filled, time-affected, dirty little world. 

The beautiful flawless surface of the new doesn’t last long in the real world.  If things didn’t have some sort of damage or dirt, they actually look very strange.  And in a movie something without any aging looks fake—like it’s a set, and not the real thing. We notice all of this at a subconscious level, the gestalt of general awareness, if you will.  And that’s one important level for movies that work. 

One of the things that tip off a cheap movie with a bad art department is the signage—not only amateurish, horrible lettering and design but also when even the straightforward road sign, professionally made and placed well, can be ruined by somebody in a hurry with spray-on hair color who is trying to take off the gloss of newness with their attempts at soot and rust.  “Gloss” is another Bad Idea from the POV of the DP, but we’ll talk more about that another time.

 As I was drying the last of the jewelry and holding it up to the work light off set, someone brought me an envelope from the main office, which was a good half hour drive away from our warehouse/stage.  I had been expecting it; my deal memo and a crew list were inside.  What I didn’t expect was the bright blue, bald-headed PA who handed it to me.  His entire head, neck and chest were the same color as that hideous group of mutated mimes that does shows in Vegas. Dare I ask?

I didn’t need to, actually.  I knew that makeup and special effects had been experimenting with the “sparkling” of Edward the vampire when he shows his true form in sunlight to Bella.  Someone had apparently had the idea to try to “blue screen” Edward and add his sparkling in post, hence the blue skin.  So now the PA was a guinea pig for some sort of oily blue makeup.  He looked sweaty, uncomfortable, and I thought he might be developing a rash on his Adam’s apple. 

I realized my Shade of Fear story was really not so painful.  At least I didn’t have to find my way through complete, utter chaos wearing oily blue body paint. 

No part numbers from now on, because I’ve never felt comfortable with Roman numerals after ‘V’… 

Next Week:  Evergreen Twilight: Landscape in Film: We Can’t Paint the Forest for the Trees

House of Mirrors, Radio Hell, and the Little Piece of Plywood That Could: Dancing at Twilight

The Long, Strange Road to Working with a Bunch of Vampires on the Set of TwilightPart IV: House of Mirrors, Radio Hell, and the Little Piece of Plywood That Could: Dancing at Twilight 

No matter how many movies I have worked on, no matter how many sets where I have painted or done stand by, there are new, never-before moments—strange and brilliant bits of life-within-art that I will always remember.  Sometimes it happens on the first day.  I gave them a name, years ago, that reflected the ambivalence of such moments: “hideous absurdity”. I would suddenly realize: this moment is very bizarre, right now, so incredibly intense and yet so…stupid.  It’s like having an epiphany—but about nothing.

How could I ever have imagined that one day I would be standing in the dark, inside a giant, vaulted warehouse, inside a smaller (but still enormous) fake dance studio listening to a very young actress screaming her head off every time her leg got broken by an evil vampire named James?

 Let me just say that during the first two weeks of the filming of Twilight, when it was all up to Kristen Stewart as Bella, our teenage loner and soon-to-be vampire love interest, that this girl worked harder than any actor I’ve ever seen (except Michael Caine, but that’s another time and another story).  Usually actors spend about two, maybe three out of every ten hours that we technicians spend working on the set.

Part of the discrepancy is the huge amount of preparation that is required before the actors can just get in and do their job.  Lighting, loading in cameras, laying dolly track, figuring out the shots’ mechanics with the different departments, laying cable between video monitors and cameras, sound, etc.—it all takes unbelievable amounts of time.

But the result is that most actors—sorry if I offend any actors, here, but (Clint Eastwood, you’ve been on both sides of the great camera divide; you’ll back me up here, won’t you? Feel free to write a comment in support, sir), you actors don’t know what hard labor and long hours are when it comes to working on the set.  You just don’t.  Of course, this may be the Bitter (and Jealous?) Renee speaking.  Oh—and maybe the impending threat of a SAG strike has raised my hackles, but still… Jeeeeez (can you hear that? It’s my bitter and jealous sigh).

Sure, sometimes you actors have an early call for make up.  But you’re just putting on make up.  And actually somebody else is doing that for you. I have to put on make up, too, you know—long before your call time, and, I might add, I have to do it all by myself.  And my time isn’t paid for this, which I assure you, is a very necessary task.

I’m not saying that being an actor isn’t hard work.  But I suspect that the hardest part of your work is done in the years before getting on to the set, in auditions, preparation, courage and perseverance, and in learning how to let somebody else put on your make up for you.

So on most films actors usually work on the set less than half of the time that we do.  This was not true for Kristen.  It seemed like she rarely ever left the set, even for a ten minute break the first day, the second, the third—and she was acting her heart out, throwing herself against the floor and walls of the set, presenting agony to the camera constantly, and doing her best to make it count, because even though we were shooting it first, this was the dramatic climax, the big pay off for the entire film.  And she was only seventeen (although she would turn eighteen later on during filming).

Of course, she knew that this would make or break her future acting career, so that’s a lot of motivation, but she didn’t complain, slow down, or even hesitate to go again.  Kudos, Bella.

Meanwhile, a completely different world existed all around Bella, but unseen and mostly theoretical to the filming crew, like an other-dimensional plane from string theory that contains an entirely different (and more boring, and more physically demanding, and much worse-paid) parallel world.  This was the ‘off-set world’ and the crew of carpenters, painters and other construction types, in another part of the warehouse, were working and working hard, in a constant hurry to keep ahead of the shooting crew.

 Meanwhile, back in the ‘on-set world’ with the film crew, I was dealing with the fact that the camera was now inside a literal hall of mirrors.  The dance studio was two stories tall, with rows of square columns, each fitted on all four sides with huge mirrors.  There were also mirrors on the walls.  And any mirror that reflected the camera or the crew had to go away when the moving camera came around for coverage of Bella’s leg getting broken, or James leaping onto her, or any of the action taking place throughout the set.

For each column we were supposed to have a set of “marbleized” (which means painted to look like—surprise! marble) plywood pieces that would fit over each mirror, neutralizing them and helping to hide the crew. It had come up in the early part of the day that the camera would be moving around several columns, seeing almost 360 degrees around the set.  Two on-set carpenters were about ready to put up pre-painted marbleized panels to hide some of the offending mirrors, but they had just realized there was a serious shortage of panels.

Whaaat?

Since coming up with more marbleized panels would directly affect my job, I got anxious.  And a little pointed in my suggestions to some of the ‘off-set world’ carpenters.  Politely reminding them that although they were cutting something else on the table saw that could wait until next week, there were panels that needed to be cut and then painted to look like marble right now for use in front of the camera in less than 20 minutes.

Word of the crisis spread throughout the construction crew, and somehow, with all our mightily talented people racing at top speed, we, in our invisible, incredibly sped up parallel world managed to produce marbleized panels as they were needed, as more and more of the rest of the set was exposed to the camera, effectively breaking the normal laws of time and space—

Suddenly I got a call on my radio.  I was immediately ripped out of the ‘off-set world’ and found myself in the ‘on-set world’.  This was, of course, the world I was supposed to be in, with its own issues and requirements.  I had been pulled away from it by the burgeoning mirror panel crisis, and my heart nearly seized in a moment of terror.  Had I missed somebody important on the radio asking me to do something for the past twenty minutes?  Had they been calling me over and over again???  Was I failing to do my job????

Everybody on the set wears a radio, or walkie talkie.   Along with your radio you were issued either the “Taco Bell set”: large, cheap headphones with a ball mike on a curved piece of metal that hung in front of your mouth; or the professional set, a tiny single earpiece with a tiny lapel mike containing a tiny talk button.  Spend enough time on the set during filming and you probably have bought your own professional set, so you can go about your job looking like a secret service agent, talking to someone unseen, hooked in electronically to etheric voices, stylish and sinister, another agent of the Matrix.

As part of my job, I have to be listening to the first AD (assistant director) or someone who does his or her bidding at all times, because it will be usually be that person who will ask for my services.  Another important part of my job is responding to the request, first by acknowledging it and assuring the unseen voices that I am on the case and it is happening as fast as it can.  I usually give a time frame as I go, if I am doing something out of sight, letting them know my ETA and asking if that is fast enough.  Nobody wants to wait on art.  Nobody wants to wait on anything, of course, not lighting or sound or camera.  But especially heinous is the idea of having to wait on art. I mean, art is so simple anyone can do it, right?

Fortunately, nobody had been calling me, until that moment.  Jamie, the first AD was saying “…tell Renee if she pulls this off it will be the most incredible achievement in her career.”

I went inside the set, found Jamie, who gave me a brief glance and said, “Renee. Finally.  I’m glad you decided to join us.”  Excuse me?  I had responded instantly over my radio with a “Copy, on my way,” not five seconds earlier, immediately upon hearing my name mentioned.  I learned that they were going to need a four foot by eight foot piece of fake floor painted and ready for filming ASAP.

Of course, we didn’t have any fake floor, just a few dozen assorted pieces of hardwood floor boards meant to be placed along a huge break in the main dance studio floor caused (in the film reality) by James and Edward hurtling onto it at stupendous vampiric velocity.   In fact, we didn’t even have a large piece of plywood on hand.  I sent the carpenters off to scavenge, while I ran off to get latex paint, shellac, and two brushes, as well as a heat gun.  Along the way I talked into my radio mike, informing Deon the second AD and Jamie of what I was doing, gave them an ETA of 15 to 20 minutes, and then went into the zone of “anything you try will work”.

It’s hard to explain what this zone is.  Something comes over you, like a trance, and you just grab whatever jumps out at you as possibly useful, take it to one place and start painting as you plan.  I had to make a highly varnished blond hardwood floor with the same size planks and matching wood grain as the real floor so the good vampires could throw scraps of wood on it and set fire to that wood while not harming the real dance floor.

I had passed by my electrician pal Andy, who knew what I needed, and found me a stinger (power cord) for my heat gun, then brought a work light to my chosen paint area just off the stage.  I started with the base coat, and I was drying it while tinting some shellac dark brown for wood graining  when I heard Jamie on the radio asking, “Where’s Renee?  What’s she doing?”  I hurriedly answered him, but the anxiety of his questioning rose.  “Can anybody see where the stand by painter is?”

“Just give me 5 more minutes, Jamie,” I said.  “I’m off stage right from the cloak room.”

Silence.  Then, Jamie querulously:” What is going on with Renee?”

A small eternity later, the grips opened up a space between mirrors on the outer wall of the set and brought in my floor, which while not perfect, was actually a good match in tone and patterning.  It was a challenging job because of the time frame, but not the most challenging I’ve had.  And certainly I wouldn’t call it “the most incredible achievement of my career”.  But it was pretty darn good considering I had minutes, not days, to create it.

Yet once we got the floor on the set, nobody said anything like, “Thank you,” or even, “Let’s go.”  In fact the floor was barely acknowledged. I felt like I had unknowingly done a Very Bad Thing.   Jamie was annoyed even when we showed up with the finished floor two minutes early by my ETA.  Why?

Then something occurred to me—something hideously absurd…  I stopped our medic, Taylor, and asked her for a radio check.  I could hear her fine.  But she could not hear me.  All day I had been completely radio silent.  Ohhh, hell no. Now I knew why Jamie was annoyed.  ‘Stand by’ anything’s were supposed to be in constant contact with the crew.  It had appeared, during this, our first week, that I was an idiot who didn’t bother to actually respond to questions from the first AD.

But how was I going to tell him what had happened?  Anything I blabbered out would just sound like a pathetic excuse.  Dagnabbit!  I had done my own radio check every morning by saying on air, “Radio check”, and someone had always responded with, “Good check”.  Hadn’t they?  Maybe they had responded to somebody else’s radio check, and not mine?  Hell, it didn’t matter, now.  I was screwed.  I would have to find some way to let Jamie know what happened, but subtly, with aplomb, not like a whimpering cur begging forgiveness for some odious infraction.

I told Deon what happened.  I told Andy. I told everybody I talked to, working my radio failure into the conversation: “Speaking of _______ (the script, the weather, the smell outside the Porta Potties), guess what? My radio hasn’t been working for all of today, even though I did a radio check, like I know I’m supposed to, and somehow it got past me, even though it wasn’t my fault, and it could happen to anyone— Weird, huh?”  A voice in my head (my own real inner voice) finally said, “Just shut up and get a new radio, pronto.  And make sure nobody else gets the broken radio and ruins their career.

 The plywood looked good, though.  For about five minutes.  After the first take, dust and plaster had covered it all, so that I could have painted a huge skull and crossbones on it, and it would have still been perfect.  Maybe I should have painted a skull and crossbones on that frigging radio.

Next week: Part V: The Shade of Fear, Jewelry for the Aged, and the Blue Man Sans Group: Special Effects at Twilight 

Tiny Elves and Big Trucks: Packing Heat on Twilight

The Long, Strange Road to Working with a Bunch of Vampires on the Set of TwilightPart III:  Tiny Elves and Big Trucks: Packing Heat on Twilight 

Twilight became the number one movie in America during its first weekend, which made most of the Oregon film community as happy as a little girl—as happy, in fact, as the little girls and bigger girls who poured into the theaters that first week to see their vampires come to undead life on the silver screen.  Two film sequels based on Stephenie Meyer’s bestseller book series are already in the works, and we of the Pacific Northwest who worked on location hope that our famous overcast skies, eternal rain and moss-infested forests will be on display for at least two more big shows.  But that is now, and my blog is then.

Back in this blog’s timeline, I have just joined the film crew, and Twilight was just a glimmer in my resume’s future and I knew nothing about the film or the book, so I did what I always do.  I went to IMDb, which stands for Internet Movie Database.  This has become an important website for the Business as it contains crew and production information for all kinds of films, past, present, and future.  I looked up what I could find on the show—which was not much.  Sometimes just before (or even long before) a film goes into “production” (shooting the script with a camera, crew, actors, and lights and everything) the film will have a site on IMDb with everyone from the “above the line” crew(director, producer(s), director of photography, casting director, production designer, perhaps costume designer and a very few others) all the way down to the lower-level crew (me, of course, and those above and out to the side of me, such as propmaster, wardrobe, first and second assistant directors, and the like).  Sometimes a film won’t have jack, even after it has gone into production.  At this point, Twilight didn’t have jack.

By the time a movie has been filmed and edited, the entire crew may be on IMDb, including even the production assistants, or PA’s, those much put-upon and much-maligned crew persons who are generally not treated like a person, but rather like a highly intelligent dog, who is not your own dog, and therefore is not regarded with any great affection, but is presumed to be obedient both as a requirement of its species and the reason for being in your workplace orbit.

Even though PA’s may be very happy to get on their first show, nobody wants to be a PA for more than one show, and most are scheming to move upward and onward from the hideous fealty of PA servitude.  PA’s can be likened to tiny elves, always working, working, even into the night, and rarely seen consciously, but more “believed in” than believable as a real entity. Being a PA is worse than being a drone, even, because drones get paid much better than PA’s.  In fact, even though shooting days as listed on the call sheet usually last a minimum of twelve hours, with at least two pre- and post- hours tacked on to each end of that day, PA’s rarely get overtime, but are often required to be the first ones on the set and the last ones to leave.

Perhaps you’re getting an idea of why crewmembers, as I mentioned in a previous blog entry, are never seen on the set with a big smile, happy just to be there.

So back to me searching the IMDb.  What am I looking for?  Usually I begin by checking the other films my bosses have worked on before this one, which gives me an idea of: how experienced they are; what kind of work they do; their ideas about lighting (if a DP or director); their taste in the illustration and look of their films (director and production designer), and what they expect from their people.  It’s safest to assume they expect miracles, by the way.

Before the days of IMDb, it was often a mystery as to what some of your other crew members had done before this film.  In the early days of my work in film in Los Angeles, a lot of people had never done anything on a film before, which made the production journey on some independents like a wild and scary, bumpy and humiliating bus trip through real ugly country.  This came about because some people had it together from the beginning, and others were attempting the impossible for their abilities and/or training, which, while you might applaud their gumption, might also put your entire experience on a film into the CAUTION: DO NOT OPEN THIS BOX of bad memories for all time.  And later, even when one of the latter people had learned how to do their job extremely well, you would have a vile taste in your mouth at the sight of them on the IMDb, a visceral reaction to remembrance of things past like fear and failure and “all-nighters” (not using the fun sense of that term) to keep going on something that was doomed to deformity and financial deadfall no matter how hard everybody worked at their own job.

More than a few people may have the same kind of negative gut reaction at seeing my name on the IMDb based on some of my earlier film experiences (especially that Roger Corman thing about the mutated cockroaches, which I will always feel sorry about and guilty for in so many ways).  But I am not the same person as I was then; having gained much in job skills and life lessons, and lost much in arrogance and rebel-with-an-illusory-cause ethics.  So I try to squelch the unpleasantness of a knee-jerk reaction and approach the previously repellant fellow crew member with a heart not filled with hate and fear.  Because I would hope they would do the same for me.

Of course, if they continue to disappoint me, I’ll remember that, too, and add the latest experience with that person to a grudge list somewhere deep in my subconscious where it will no doubt fester and poison my happiness in life and prevent me from achieving enlightenment and complete inner peace, which serves me right for continuing to judge and condemn.  Let’s look at the preceding worlds of wisdom and remember, judge not lest ye be looked up on IMDb yourself and have judgment all come back to you in karmic reciprocity.  Word up, Bitter Renee.

So IMDb was of only minor help for Twilight information. Catherine, of course, I knew, and almost all of the local crew I would know as well.  The more people you know, the easier it is to find that great working rhythm once filming starts.  This is one major wondrous difference about living and working in Oregon compared to living and working in LA.  As much as I long for and love LA, with its beaches (and dolphins who surf those beaches), and its beautiful, hot weather so suited to people like me who are half reptilian, and honor their lizard half which loves the baking, broiling sun—working in Oregon allows you to know just about everybody in the lower echelons of the technical crew.  It really is almost like a family, and when you have faith in the people you often have to follow behind, or even work over and around, you can just relax and sometimes possibly even have fun as you toil during the endless hours of repetitive hard labor.  I said ’sometimes’.  Not often enough to wear a smile plastered on your face, though.  Also, repeatedly getting up at 3:30 or 4:00 am to begin your workday that ends around 7:00 to 9:00 pm somehow exhausts the supposedly few facial muscles it takes to smile.  Yep, those muscles are the first to go.

The next question I would need to answer involved big trucks.  My “kit”, for which I would be getting a sizable rental, and would be depending upon to save my job and defuse a film crisis at least once a day, was a giant, wheeled, two-level rubber cart stacked six feet high with things best not mentioned at this juncture.  Besides the cart I would also bring various pieces of large, unwieldy equipment.  I would need to find a big truck from some department willing to take my kit aboard with them so it would always find a place close to set.  As individual crew members, we would often be asked to take shuttles to and from the set in distant locations, and only the big trucks would be allowed within cart-wheeling distance of the set.

Usually the prop truck takes the stand by painter’s kit, and it nearly always takes the on set dresser’s kit, which is almost as big as mine.  Usually.  Sometimes, on really small films that can still afford a stand by painter, I have to use my own truck, which makes it much more difficult to be prepared for anything and everything.  Especially if the only way you can get to the set/location is a two-mile van ride with six other crew members who don’t want to share their space with paint-spattered tubs filled with God-knows-what.

However, I realized the prop woman was avoiding me entirely during the first week we were at the warehouse, before we would all be sent out to locations and would be working out of our trucks.  She didn’t even introduce herself, but scurried away whenever I came near, which was noticeably odd, until I realized she didn’t want me asking for space aboard her world.  And she really didn’t have any space to spare, as I could see from where I skulked around the tailgate.  She had a really big truck, but she, like me, had to be prepared for any and everything.

I sidled up to the Unit Production Manager just to let him know I was alive and on the crew and would need at least part of a big truck.  He sent me to the Transportation Coordinator, who came up with:  (WOW!) my own truck, with its own driver.  Various other crew members, mostly of the painter species, made envious remarks about my good fortune.  Stand by painters and stand by carpenters and the like rarely, if ever, got their own company trucks.  Even if mine was just a little half-size truck, I still had lots of space to spread out and even a little table inside to do graphics work on the fly, a lift gate to get all of my crap (technical term) in and out and down to the set in a hurry; even power would be supplied for lights, power tools, and (thank you, Great Spirit) life-enhancing, soul-affirming space heaters for the cold rain, ice, rain, snow, and rain to come.

Yee-hah!  We would be working in a lot of exterior locations out and around the real Oregon Trail (or where it petered out) for a good part of the shoot.  Now the wagon train was ready to roll, and I had my own little prairie schooner.

Next week: Part IV: House of Mirrors, Radio Hell, and the Little Piece of Plywood That Could: Dancing at Twilight