So You Want to Be a Painter… Part Two

First, a shout out to Corinne, who wrote in a couple of weeks ago and wanted to know how to get into the movie business as a scenic artist or set painter: this is Part Two of your answer.   As much of an answer as I can give, anyway, because as you’ll see—that first step through the stage door relies on a certain amount of luck or, depending on your philosophy, synchronicity.

Is making it into Show Business as dependent on luck as winning the lottery?  Probably not, if you have the prerequisite skills as a painter, along with a tendency to work hard without complaint for a minimum of ten hours a day and up to sixteen (or more if you get the dreaded all-nighter emergency set job).  But in the end, you’ll have to depend on the undependable, because that’s what luck or synchronicity is: an unpredictable, nonlinear cause and effect sort of grace from the universe.  The movie The Secret is popular with a lot of us show biz types for probably this reason.

I asked three of my friends, two in LA (where I also got my start) and one in the great state of Oregon (where I now base my own operations out of my secret lair) to tell us how they made that transition from an “artist” to an “artist working in films as a painter”.  With names changed to protect the innocent and the guilty, here are their stories.

Mel is a beautiful woman who hails from England, originally, but made her way here to the states via the Bahamas and a technical background in rock and roll history that is just as colorful as she is (she once spent an entire night conversing with David Bowie in his room after a show).  She was always an artist, self trained, and through her work with various bands, she did graphic art on album covers.  Then as a result of knowing someone else from the rock band road technical crowd, she got her first gig on a low budget film doing wardrobe.  Which she hated.

However, the cinematographer on that show knew her from her work on the album covers, and he had an ultra low budget film that needed a painter, so he asked her.  They did three shows together and by that time, she knew somebody else who asked her to work on their next film, and from then on out she kept getting work through a network of people who had all worked on some of the same shows together—a “social network”, although this was before Facebook or email or websites.

By the time I met Mel, she was sculpting foam with a chain saw for a remake of a 50’s science fiction classic out in the wilds of Malibu State Park.  It was a nonunion show, but she had learned an immense amount of stuff about painting and sculpting, almost all of it self-taught, as she didn’t go through the union apprenticeship process. It was my first movie as a real set painter, rather than a miniature artist working in a shop completely removed from the real movie filming.  We took a shine to each other the first day out on location, and we’ve been friends ever since.

Mel didn’t get into the union until ’91, because before then, like me, she was leading shows and making good money on nonunion films, which were plentiful in those days.  Nobody sought you out to ask you to join the union, and at that time, a number of the LA unions were notoriously hard to join unless 1) you were related to someone already inside, or; 2) you were friends with someone already inside, and; 3) you were not a woman.  Generations of men and their brothers or uncles or buddies formed the old school majority of union members, and there were very few women painters. Still, the union shows paid more, and there was a health plan and benefits, something unheard of on nonunion shows.

Mel eventually got asked to lead a film about Jack Nicholson trying to romance Ellen Barkin.  The show was going union, and because by now she had accumulated enough days here and there on union shows that had called her in because they had run out of union guys on the books, she decided to take it and join the union, bringing along her fiancé, Bart.

Bart is a tall, strapping fellow who used to wear his hair almost down to his waist in a ponytail that Mel and I would often admire with not-so-secret envy.  He got his start as a painter in LA also, but through another route that eventually led to his working with Mel and then marrying her.

I have to say at this juncture that I introduced Mel and Bart, when they both agreed to help me out on one of those dreaded “all nighters” during a show about Melanie Griffith having real estate problems involving Michael Keaton.  Mel and Bart each asked me separately whether the other one was single, and then they took it from there.  They’ve been happily married ever since, somehow being the perfect fit for one another although separately they’re both so weird that you would think they had no equivalent match on this planet (and I mean that in the best way).  We’re still buddies after all these years, which is one of the perks of being in this business: the weird ones find each other and support each other all along this journey we call life.

Back to Bart, who was an artist from the Midwest who relocated to LA, and had landed an art director job for a low budget kids’ morning television show which was filming at Culver Studios.  From that job, he got work at Carthay, a set shop which did business with the kids show, and it was there he learned the basics of scenic painting.  Through one of his Carthay friends he got a job as a set painter on a nonunion show about comic book characters that are fighting skull-faced villains who are out to destroy the universe.  The show later went union, months after he had finished on it.  This gave him his 30 days, and the union sent him a letter telling him he was eligible, but he looked at the initiation fees, and decided to stay nonunion until Mel got her Jack Nicholson show.

Now the both of them have been union since ’91, and have done well enough to buy real estate other than their own home, which is telling you something, this being in LA, after all, where even after the implosion of the housing market, a one bedroom 1930’s bungalow with a postage stamp sized yard still goes for $600,000 if you’re in the right neighborhood.

Our third painter, Bella, is the only one of us who had actually trained in college to do the job she ended up with.  However, I think she would agree with me that the majority of her real training happened on the job, because nothing can take the place of those ten hour plus days where real sets need to happen and they need to look real nice, and real professional, like.

Bella moved to Portland after college, and got work in the local theater scene, first.  This is a good way to get your knowledge, but not a good way to make a living.  Too many people love the theater to distraction, and are willing to work there for little to no pay, because— Well, there’s an old theater joke that goes: How do get an elephant out of the theater?  Answer: You can’t.  It’s in their blood.

So that’s why.

Bella got a better paying job at a set shop that specialized in opera and theater sets, and that shop went union.  Now she was in the union, which is my union, IATSE (which stands for International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees) Local 488, which, in Oregon and Washington covers almost all technical job classes, from painter to craft service to electrician, and many others.

However, she was basically in a slot within this shop, not moving up or forward, just working for a living, until the shop came on hard times or some such unpleasantness, and she cast about for something different.  She then heard about a film starting up in which Tommy Lee Jones chases Benicio Del Toro all over the woods and into a cold river.

The film’s art department needed lots of union painters because they had decided to create fake trees and fake river rocks even though Oregon and Washington, where they were filming and chasing, was chock full of the real things.  From knowing someone on that film who had worked at her old set shop, she jumped on that show, did a good job, and kept getting work on films coming to town.

By the way, ‘films coming to town’ is too euphemistic a description, because there have been years when little or no films have come to the town of Portland.  But, as you may remember from my earlier blogs, we fought the good fight this last legislative session, and got our Oregon state incentive package increased, so our town (our state, actually) really will have films coming in, hopefully in numbers that will sustain a working girl like myself and all the other members of our union.

So these are the stories.  Every one is different, but each depended on the chance person to person connection and the chance that they connected somehow with a film production that found itself looking for a painter who more or less knew what they were doing.  But not all painters necessarily know the business when they get on their first film.  We ran out of union painters during the last show and hired house painters, some of whom were future union material, some of whom were not.

Remember, the film business is very much like running away to join the carnival, except the work isn’t as steady or as glamorous.  It takes a certain something to make a go of it as a scenic artist in the film business.  Is it desperation? A blind, unreasoning infatuation with films and filmmaking? A Pollyanna-like faith in your future work? Willingness to settle for uncertainty and lean times?  Yes, something like all those, plus a work ethic that makes you stupidly happy to be driven like a rented mule in a single-minded race to get the next set done on time and done well.

Which reminds me of the last night of filming on the Wonder Years, their next-to-final season.  It was an experience somewhat typical of the scenic artist life.  Everybody else on the crew was off to a big wrap party, a karaoke phantasmagoria open bar epic event in upscale Westwood.  Me, I had to (by myself, because they had no budget left) repaint the seedy diner in the Valley where they shot their last scene, working all night to finish it in time for the breakfast crowd.

I missed the wrap party, just like I had missed almost every other party on that entire show, and when I complained to the construction coordinator afterwards, he accused me of being just like that guy who follows the big circus parade, sweeping up all the piles of elephant dung that got left behind.  Someone asks him: Why don’t you get a better job? Answer: What?!  And quit Show Business?

 PS I noticed the discussion about a comment I made in Part One, and I’ve clarified (I hope) or excused (I hope) my words with a note after that article, if you want to check it out.