Animal wranglers, prop masters, stunt performers, food stylists, costume designers, Foley artists, and more explain how they quietly shape Hollywood
“I always say we’re the hostesses of a giant cocktail party, but we’re not actually on the guest list.” Illustration: Sam Island Vulture’s “How Everything Works” series of stories turns the spotlight toward those Hollywood craftspeople whose contributions are consistently under-appreciated and criminally overlooked.
Gary Hecker: That was an intense scene. I was working with Wylie Stateman, who is the sound supervisor, and he turned me loose on that just to do whatever I wanted. It started with the Manson gang getting out of the car and walking up that long street. Wylie wanted to hear their pants and jeans, that sound it makes when their legs move together. Then they were carrying knives and pulled out a gun.
What was cool about that one is, Brad Pitt was hallucinating on LSD from that thing that he smoked, so I did that cue and I’m pounding the phone, and you know how that ring echoes? The last hit, the bell would be just resonating out and this machine I was using happened to do some weird thing to that last ring and it made it into a weird flurry, like it wasn’t real. We were actually laughing after, because that’s how this might sound in Brad Pitt’s mind. It was perfect.
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By 5 ‘o’clock we were doing the fitting part, so that gave an hour and a half, two hours, before dress rehearsal to alter, and we were still working. We had to refit a couple of things between dress and air. We were still working right up until showtime because we wanted it to be as right as possible.Can an Actor Cover Whitney Houston’s Version of the National Anthem in a TV Show? It’s Complicated.
Amanda Krieg Thomas: We were chasing him. I tried every email, every phone number we could find for his individual publishing company. A member of my team, my music coordinator, was Facebook friends with someone who knew him, so he reached out to this one person he hadn’t talked to in many years. My coordinator’s friend then connected us to a close friend of the arranger, who then connected us to the arranger, who was in the woods of Washington teaching a workshop.
Increasingly, VFX studios are challenged both by multimillion-dollar franchise movies, with their long timelines and bigger budgets, and by ambitious indies and TV shows, which often wish for Hollywood-level effects even if they don’t have the time or money for them. Situations that used to pose a production-delaying physical challenge can now be mitigated on a computer after the fact, at a fraction of the cost.
I’m really fussy about data capture. In fact, I’m a pain in everybody’s ass about it. We scan all the performers and all the knives, and get complete, super-photogenic versions of every single person and prop, so we can re-create them digitally. If you want it to look real, you need real-world measurements. You need lighting measurements. You need to do the work.
It’s one of those things: You look at the dragon sweeping over the ocean and there’s fire and all these amazing things happening, and the hardest thing in the world is having her stupid knees not slide on top of the dragon. That one little detail was probably half the labor that went into those shots. Just getting her to sit down. The first time we did it, we had no idea how hard it would be. The second time, it didn’t get any easier. It was just as hard.
Indeed, casting director is one of the most misunderstood jobs in Hollywood, in part because “people often don’t realize that we’re actually part of a creative process,” says Shopmaker, who relishes the period before a film when she can sit down with the director and imagine different actors in different parts, matching them not just to their roles but also to their castmates and collaborators and, perhaps most importantly, the audience itself.
If you’ve ever tried to Instagram an enticingly symmetrical plate of food only to be thwarted by bad restaurant lighting, you’ll have some idea of how hard it can be to make even the most delicious food look good on camera. Erm, we take that back. You have no idea.
“It’s when the food itself seems to be performing,” says Melissa McSorley, food stylist on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Nocturnal Animals, and True Blood. To hear the pros describe it, food stylists are experts for hire, rung up when productions are in crisis. Food stylist Tamara Reynolds remembers being sought for Law & Order: Special Victims Unit: “Someone says, ‘Oh my god, we need some cheesy lasagna!’ And a prop master says, ‘Oh, call Tamara.
Well, the director loved it — and then we had to actually do it. I had never cried doing food-styling before, but I cried when trying to do this. It was so, so hard. It was so frustrating. The thing about a photo is, you don’t know what they’ve done: It could be photoshopped. We think whoever made the picture must have either froze the food and cut it with a band saw, or hired the best sushi chef in history.
Water for Elephants , Robert Pattinson’s lion food Chris Oliver: I’ve done lots of memorable food. I did Friends and Seinfeld — the Soup Nazi, top of the muffin, when they did the turkey on his head. Tons of stuff like that. But the littlest thing can turn into a nightmare in this job, and not always what you’d expect.
A good way of describing the job: It’s a bridge between a film or TV production and the world that they’re entering. A scout does everything from suggesting a shooting location based on a script to managing the practicalities of transforming a corner of the real world into a set. In short: permits. “Once we find the locations, we then are responsible for all of the logistics that are needed to facilitate a 150-person crew to film at all the locations,” Mark Logan says.
An unnamed production: Roughly two dozen three-to-four-foot-tall horses Tom Lounsbury: On one of the first projects I was location manager, I was working in rural Illinois outside of Champaign. The director was looking for a farmhouse with “character” that wouldn’t have any neighbors in sight.
Julio Macat, a veteran cinematographer with studio credits from Ace Ventura: Pet Detective to Pitch Perfect under his belt, describes his job as “facilitating” the vision of the director. “Our job is to translate what’s on the page to the screen in the visual sense.” Stefan Czapsky, a longtime collaborator of Tim Burton’s, concedes the same. If “the director of the film is the boss — in the hierarchy of authority, you work for them.” But it’s “a collaborative job,” he continues.
“On Batman Returns, in the Penguin’s lair. It was all pre-digital. I think there’s something like 120 visual-effects shots in the entire thing. We used stages at Warner Bros. mostly, but this set required water and tall ceilings and space enough for a half-million-gallon pool, so we went to Universal. Oh, and the whole thing had to be refrigerated because it was filled with real penguins. My job was to light this space, and I’ve never been a big planner. I don’t make diagrams.
Why was it important to you to make sure that there were going to be no circus animals involved in the shoot? Really, none? I just assumed the “no animals were harmed” spiel meant some sort of laws were in place. For Adler, even the toughest shoots can be ameliorated by a freshly baked cookie, like the kind she provides each day she’s working. Sometimes, it’s more than a cookie, though: white flowers for Mariah Carey, or guava water for Sarah Silverman, a custom cake for Krysten Ritter. Anna Terlikowska of Chef Ania Production Catering and Craft Service said that Dom Pérignon is a frequent request on sets.
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