Lights, Camera, …Uh Oh

Lighting can make or break a movie faster than anything else.  Before the actors even speak, before the plot thickens, the lighting says it all.  Even the most brilliant set design, painting and decoration can be lost under the flattening glare or murky dark of bad lighting.  That’s why it is important for a standby painter to have a rapport with the director of photography, who is responsible, along with his minions (the gaffer and the best boy electric, and the other electricians) for what the lighting does to the set.

The set is what you are responsible for during filming; specifically, the overall look of the set.  That may sound like a broad category, and it is.  You might have to darken too-white trim on doors or wainscoting, patch holes left by lighting mounts, wax the floor, or un-wax it, if the floor is too shiny.  You may have to repair scratches on furniture, or even label hospital glass doors with Victorian lettering (did that on Twilight).  You might have to paint in shadows where there are none but there should be (did that a great deal on Untraceable).

As a standby painter you never know what life is going to send your way throughout the filming day (and night).  That’s why my standby kit is so large and so varied.  In a future blog I will detail the items in my kit, but today I would like to relate an interesting story that involves the lighting component of filming.  And I mean ‘interesting’ in the sense of the Chinese curse that says, “May you live in interesting times.”

Years ago in a small town in Wisconsin, while working on a movie about bugs that transformed themselves into facsimiles of people; we were scheduled to film in a lovely house on location.  It was in the Wisconsin neighborhood equivalent of Beverly Glen in Los Angeles, and it was a spotlessly maintained home with a lovely designer interior (although somewhat dated by about 15 years, which will figure prominently in the events that follow).

The production designer wanted to put up our own wallpaper in the civilian home’s foyer, and the owners gave their okay with the absolute, unbreakable promised requirement that we would not damage or remove their original, pink and gold foil damask wallpaper.  In other words, our wallpaper would have to go up over their original paper and then come off easily enough to leave no trace behind on their original wall covering.

This requirement, which I took very seriously, initiated my research into the best way to solve the problem.  I tested various strengths and types of wallpaper paste and found that when they were removed, they all destroyed the samples of original damask wallpaper I was given.  I then ordered five special kinds of low tack double-stick tape, aiming for a “Post-It” quality of the most fleeting, temporary attachment.  We set up five sample boards with a first covering of the original damask paper and a second covering of the production designer’s wallpaper using each kind of tape.

All of the tape samples except one came off the damask wallpaper fairly easily.  However, they would be on the wallpaper for five days of filming, so we extended the test to five days, after which we tried to remove the tape and new wallpaper.  This left us with only two versions of double-stick tape that still came off the damask without damaging it.  I chose the least offensive, least expensive tape and ordered enough to cover the hallway.  We put up the new wallpaper and went on to the next set, then returned to the foyer five days later to remove it.

The tape wouldn’t come off the damask wall paper when we tried to gently coax it.  I got out my hairdryer and tried heating it up.  The tape wouldn’t budge.  I got rubber cement thinner and tested a small area for color fastness, and it seemed to work—-sort of.  I bought another large container of the rubber cement thinner and we got to work.  The outermost edges of the new paper came off, but nothing else budged.  I got another solvent and tried that one, without success.

During all this, the owner of the house, an impeccably coiffed housewife wearing a satin dress that seemed to have come directly from a 1952 Neiman Marcus couture collection kept an eye on our progress.  She kept up a lively narrative as we worked.

“We really love that wallpaper.  I hope you haven’t done anything to it under there.” She mentioned again how important it was to keep that wallpaper unharmed.  She reminisced about how she and her husband had chosen it and ordered it specially from New York on their designer’s recommendation.  How that wallpaper had seen off her daughter and her son’s first prom dates; how her husband loved to come home to that wallpaper every day after work because the colors were just so perfectly matched to the carpet it was a wonder to behold and a pleasure that meant: “This is home.”

She mentioned that the wallpaper had seen her first grandchild come through the front door, and how it never had faded in all those years, which was a testament to the kind of quality you just couldn’t find any more in today’s slipshod, modern world.  The very first time she had seen that wallpaper in the sample book, both she and her husband (who normally couldn’t have been bothered with such things) both agreed that this wallpaper would complete their lovely home’s entrance area and establish exactly the right sort of milieu for greeting guests and family over all the years to come…

Four hours later, the new wallpaper was still clinging to the old wallpaper in every spot but the one inch edges of each seam.  The housewife had touched on many of the most memorable moments in her family’s interesting history with the wallpaper in the foyer, but eventually she had covered the entire span of the wallpaper’s life up until the present.

After discussing it, we all decided it was time to call the production designer and suggest that the painters (there were four of us, who after the first two hours of hellish failure had been trying our hardest to stop from either screaming or dissolving into hysterical laughter) were all getting punchy and that it was getting late, and maybe we could figure out how to get the paper off tomorrow, when we were fresh.

But I knew in my heart that tomorrow wouldn’t change anything.  The lighting and the intense heat from it over five days had managed to fuse the wallpapers and the tape into one indivisible unit.  We had inadvertently discovered a new method of lamination.  Not that we needed such an invention.  It was an obvious disaster, with our only option to somehow find that old, original wallpaper and order it, then steam the entire mess off the foyer walls and begin again.

Thus I began the second phase of research.  I contacted the designer who had worked on their house, got a set of possible wallpaper manufacturing companies’ names from him, looked them all up in New York, found the right one, called them and asked about ordering twenty double rolls of “Damask Woodland Rose”.  Which they had discontinued a decade ago.

Through wheedling and eventually pulling out the “movie card” (“We’re working on a movie with Ed Begley Junior and we could really use your help—”) I finally found a warehouse in New York that specialized in vintage wallpaper.  I could get “Damask Woodland Rose” sent out to Wisconsin by the end of the week.  Flush with victory, I told our production designer and he relayed the wonderful new to the house’s owners.

The production designer called me back that afternoon and said the owners had fallen in love with the new wallpaper and wanted us to return and glue down the loosened seams for them.

So we did.

But sometimes, late at night, I feel regret at how it all turned out.  The original wallpaper is gone, and it’s not coming back.   However, I will never forget the stories I heard that long (really long) afternoon about the life and times in a Wisconsin home’s foyer under the watchful, beautiful benevolence of walls featuring “Damask Woodland Rose”.