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