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The Trenches Documentary - Greg - 10-03-2018
I've fallen down the rabbit hole. And there is a lot of crap in there. Some of it might remain lost forever. But some I can put to use.
This a video from Angels and Demons. It's the set I built of the Santa Maria del Popollo. I have a lot more footage than this. Plus I have pictures of the original in room.
RE: The Trenches Documentary - Drunk Monk - 10-03-2018
cool.
makes me want to see that movie.
RE: The Trenches Documentary - Greg - 10-03-2018
Hard pass. Although, the churches were good.
RE: The Trenches Documentary - cranefly - 10-03-2018
Dammit. That's a movie I DO NOT want to watch.
But it's an impressive set...
RE: The Trenches Documentary - Greg - 10-04-2018
Planet of the Apes (2003)
Deep rabbit hole - Greg - 10-04-2018
The Haunting 1998
This is Cindi's favorite film I worked on because during a set visit Preston peed on the set.
RE: The Trenches Documentary - The Queen - 10-04-2018
(10-04-2018, 03:33 PM)Greg Wrote: The Haunting 1998
This is Cindi's favorite film I worked on because during a set visit Preston peed on the set.
And because I love watching Liam Neeson push off the “marble” pillar to stand up and seeing his fingers sink into it.
RE: The Trenches Documentary - Greg - 10-18-2018
Wizards of The Lost Kingdom II 1988
Trenches
The Novel
Wizards of the Lost Kingdom 2
After sort of graduating from San Francisco State University in 1988, I traveled to Los Angeles to pursue my upcoming career in the Motion Picture Industry. I had graduated with a degree in Screenwriting, so ostensibly, I was going to be a screenwriter. Spoiler Alert: That still hasn’t happened.
My parents gave me some cash to keep me alive for six months while I got started. My girlfriend was going to work at the IRS as an auditor to fulfill her CPA requirements. We found a nice little apartment in the Toluca Lake section of Burbank. I wanted the place because Warner Brother studios had a back lot called The Warner Ranch at the end of the street. I was inches from the movie business.
In order to get some cash, I worked at Domino’s Pizza in Van Nuys. I worked there a previous summer when I came down to take some extra curricular classes at UCLA one summer. For a short period of time, I had considered becoming a Domino’s Pizza franchisee. By working at the Van Nuys location I could still keep that plan alive if working in the Motion Picture Industry failed.
My career in pizza came to an end when I took a job at the Corman studios in Venice Beach. While walking through the corridors of Melnitz hall on the UCLA campus, I came across a flier seeking interns in the Art Department on upcoming film at Corman studios. I answered the ad and set up an interview.
I didn’t know what sort of jobs were available there were in an Art Department. I didn’t even have a clear idea of what an Art Department did. But I got on my one suit and headed to Venice Beach.
The Corman studios were housed in old lumber yard just on Main Street near Gold’s Gym. It consisted of three sound stages and a warren of small offices. Out in the yard were stacks of old movie sets.
I looked completely out of place in my suit walking through the yard to offices. Everybody else was wearing jeans and T-shirts. Production Designer Kathleen Cooper probably did know what to make of me but she gave me the job of helping out with whatever needed doing around the Art Department.
The Corman studios, as I was later to learn, hearkened back to the good old days of the studio system under the direction of Roger Corman. Their production schedule was three weeks of prep, three weeks of shooting, and then three weeks of post-production.
I had been hired to work on a film called Wizards of the Lost Kingdom II. It was to be a fantasy story about a young wizard learning the tricks of the trade from an older Wizard as they quest to find a magical artifact. The reason the film was being made was because Corman had thirty minutes or so of footage of an old battle scenes he wanted to use in a new movie. If he filmed sixty minutes of new footage to tie in with the old footage, he would have a brand new feature to sell.
The old footage has some scenes of David Carradine in it too. Naturally, that meant he needed to get Carradine in the film, too. My little film brain almost exploded with the knowledge that on my very first film I would be working with as big a star as David Carradine.
On my first day, I went to work for Lyndell Wolff. Lyndell had no idea what to do with the untrained neophyte foisted upon him. He opted for the only option available to him where I couldn’t do too much damage to his crew. He handed me a broom and told me to sweep up.
The crew was busy building, to my eyes, an elaborate castle interior complete with dungeon. They were in the process of stapling fake bricks on the wall to give the interior a rock like feel. I was fascinated by the fakery of it all. After I exhausted my sweeping duties, I was partnered up with Dave to help him put the fake bricks up on the walls of the soundstage.
I worked 12 hour days. I arrived at 6am and I left at 6pm. The crew got coffee breaks in the morning and took lunch at noon. There was a large box near the front gate where we got a daily delivery from Western Bagel. One of the bagels I ate from the box, a raisin bagel, caused me to be sicker than I had ever been in my life. I had to swear off bagels for many years.
The subject of breaks and food caused me to commit my first of many industry Faux Pas. Every day one of the crew would be dispatched to go pick up breakfast. Then everyone would sit down and eat. For whatever reason, I would not take part in the daily purchase. While I everyone ate, I would have my snack and then go back to work..
After a day or two of this, my partner pointed out to me that I was being a jerk and should just sit there quietly until we all went back to work together. That way I didn’t make the crew look like lazy slobs with my continued working.
Eventually, I graduated from sweeping and brick holding to my own little project. It was decided I would get to put the jail cells together. This involved cutting all the pieces to make the doors and walls on either side of the doors. I cut down dowels to make the bars. For added effect I ground down the ends of some of the dowels to make extremely sharp points.
I was proud of the dowel grinding. I discovered that if I set up jig on the grinder table to hold the dowel in place while I rotated the dowel, I could make a very point. It was almost like sharpening a pencil. My boss saw how they sharp they were and immediately told me to dull them. It turns out accidentally puncturing actors with pieces of the set was contraindicated.
I was quite proud to see my little jail cell in the movie. There was quite the scene surrounding it because the heroes had been locked up and had to break out.
About the time, Kathy Cooper introduced me to another production designer. Under the auspices of being hired as Art Department Intern, I was supposed to learn the film business. This introduction was the effort to educate me.
What he told me was that if i was going to be a carpenter, I had to always wear my bags. Bags meaning a tool belt. I guess he had decided after watching me work on the jail cell, that my destiny was to be a carpenter. I still figured my destiny was to be a screenwriter. But over the weekend, I went to the hardware store and bought my first set of bags. I also bought my first set of tools to go in the tool belt.
At this time I was also introduced to the tool that would revolutionize set construction. It was the battery powered drill, better known to all as the screw gun. Sure you could use as a drill, but it’s main task was to help screw walls together. They were made by Makita. They used a 9.6 volt battery. They came in Makita green color. If you were going to build sets, you needed a screw gun.
At this time, they still had chuck keys. The one piece advice Lyndell gave me about the chuck key was that I was to take the chuck key and throw it away from as far as I could. He figured that I was going to lose the chuck key anyway, so I might as well lose it now and avoid all that time spent worrying about losing the chuck key.
After building the jail cells, I was tasked with building flats. A flat is the most basic building block of set construction. When you start building a set, the first you usually build are flats. Flats are the walls of the set. They are built to be lightweight so they can be moved around easily. And put together easily.
They are made of pine 1x3s and luan. If the flat is the basic building unit of set construction, then the basic size of the flat is 4’ by 10’. Flats come in all shapes and sizes, but typically they are 4 x 10. That’s because the material used to cover the frame of the flat, luan, comes in 4 x 10 sheets. Luan is a mahogany covered plywood that is a 1/4 of an inch thick.
I asked my partner David how many flats he had built in his career and he said thousands. Set Construction 101 is how to build a flat. And if you wandered around the Corman Studio Lot, you would see flats everywhere. Nothing ever gets thrown out at the Corman studio.
I think my most interesting find on the Corman Lot was a set piece used in the movie Escape from New York. At the end of the movie there is climactic chase across the explosive laden bridge. Then they climb the wall to get out of the prison that is New York. All this time our heroes are being chased by the Duke. After they scramble up the wall, President Donald Pleasance reappears atop the wall and shoots a machine gun and kills the Duke. Pleasance screams “You’re the Duke. But you ain’t number one” Well, the block wall that Donald Pleasance stood on was dumped in a corner of the lot up against the chain link fence. My little movie heart went pitter patter at the sight of such a well known movie set piece.
One of the scariest moments on the Corman lot involved Lyndell. I was making my way through the lot outside the stage when I came across Lyndell at a work bench. With a machete in one hand, he chopped a large block of green foam. With a few short effortless chops, a giant cat took shape in front of him.
I was appalled. If that was one of the job requirements to being a carpenter there was no chance that I would qualify.
Turns out Lyndell was an exception not the rule. He could be a carpenter but he was more of a fine artist. At one point, he showed us a pipe that he had carved from a very rare wood burl. It showed all the Tolkein characters around the bowl complete with dragon. And it was a Bas Relief. These were sculpted three dimensional figures. Scary good.
Not only did we build inside the sound stage, we used the area between the sound stages the castle walls and the surrounding village.
A couple weeks in, Kathy and TC decided that since I was doing the exact same work as a regular crew member, they might as well pay the same as a regular crew member. TC, our construction coordinator, explained to me that they had gone through the budget, took a little from here, took a little from there and came up with enough money to pay me. Just like that, I went from making nothing for my twelve hour shift to make fifty whole dollars for a twelve hour shift. Even at that time, I was making far less than the mandatory minimum wage for the state of California.
I didn’t care. I was working on a movie starring David Carradine and I could go look at the sets from Escape from New York any time I wanted. There were also topless women wandering around from the other movie they were shooting in the soundstage on the other side of the lot. That was just a bonus.
We also had the good fortune to go out on location. We built some set pieces that we took out into the Mountains off Kanaan drive. We built the exteriors to a little hovel where our hero lived and we built the exterior of the bar where they go to find David Carradine’s character and hire him for the quest.
It was a great couple of days out in the forest. I also experienced first hand the hurry up and wait side of motion picture making. Our location call meant we would drive out to the location in our own personal vehicles and meet the production vehicles out in the park.
There was a lot of discussion about the thirty mile radius and whether we were inside of it or outside of it. The thirty mile radius was centered on West Beverly Blvd and North La Cienega. It was circle that would determine whether you got paid gas mileage when you drove your own vehicle to a location away from the studio.
If you were inside the circle, you didn’t get paid gas mileage. If you were outside the circle, you did. Studios paid particular attention to the locations because they really didn’t like paying mileage. Although this point was moot for Corman productions. They don’t pay anything extra.
We stood around a lot waiting for our truck to arrive. It turns out our driver, related to our Production designer, was dyslexic and couldn’t read a map. He also had to stop and recover one of the set pieces that had blown off the truck and broken. Our truck did explain us to not worry because the broken piece looked like a pile of shit, anyway.
Here’s the problem with that. We had built two hay stacks out of AB foam. It’s called AB foam because two chemicals, A and B, combine to make this expanded yellow foam. It is usually used to insulate between the walls of homes but the Motion Picture industry adopted it because it is also great for sculpting. In our case, we used it to make hay stacks for a gag in the film.
The older wizard was teaching our younger wizard how to use his magic. He was supposed to turn one of the hay bales into a pile of food. But since the young wizard was still learning to control his powers, he misfired and turned the hay bail into a pile of manure. So, the broken set piece that our Truck Driver complained looked like shit was actually supposed to look like a pile of shit.
The AB tanks were always a problem, too. Invariably one of the chemicals would bleed into the line of the other chemical and set off the reaction, causing the hoses from the tanks to fill with solid foam. Your supposed to use these tanks one off. Fill the walls with insulating foam until the tanks run dry. We would use them on and off all day until the blockage occurred. I don’t know how many times I saw TC up to his arms in toxic chemicals trying clean the lines so we could keep using the AB foam. They were much too expensive to throw out.
One of our other fabulous locations was Bronson Caves over in Griffith Park. Initially, the name meant nothing to me until someone pointed out to me that Bronson Caves was a famous filming location, probably most notable for being the exit to the 1960s Batcave. I can’t count the number of times I saw Batman roar out of that cave in his Bat mobile. The excitement to be at that location went up a tremendous amount. Granted, we didn’t do much there and it was at the opposite end from where they shot Batman. I was still excited.
The entire time I worked on Wizards, I had my camera with me. I took pictures of everything. It probably would have been cooler for me to act blase about working on a motion picture, but that didn’t happen. It never happened. Somewhere there is even some Super 8 footage of the castle I shot.
I took pictures of everything. I shot the sets. I shot the lot. I surreptitiously shot photos of the actors. At least I think it was surreptitious. I shot a photo of the license plate of Carradine’s Cadillac since it read “IKUNGFU”
I committed the ultimate fan failure with actor Sid Haig. He was sitting on the stairs leading up to the loft above the mille. He agreed to let me take his picture. I had been seeing Haig around the lot and I was sure I recognized him. But I couldn’t remember what I had seen him. So after I took his photo, I asked him if he knew what movie I had seen him in. I could almost see the circuits in his brain frying as he tried to parse the absurdity of what I had asked.
Since I was a young man, I also shot pictures of all the pretty actresses. I probably don’t have to qualify that with young. I could stick with the fact I was a man. One in particular was this blonde actress. She ran around with a bow and arrow and wore a very revealing costume. Years later I checked out on IMDB to see what had happened to all the actors and actresses I had worked with on Wizards, to see if they had gone on to greater recognition. Well, the tall blond with the bow turned out to be Lana Clarkson. Lana Clarkson was the woman killed by Phil Spector one night in his home in Alhambra.
The other notable tie-in for our little production was our director, Charles Griffith and our star Mel Welles both worked on the original Little Shop of Horrors. Griffith wrote the film and Welles acted in it. The direction was done by Roger Corman. It also had a little known actor by the name of Jack Nicholson in it.
The legend has it that Corman was on a studio lot. He saw some sets that had just been used for some movie or another. He thought that he could use those same sets for another movie before they were torn down. Corman hired some actors. He got Griffith to write the movie. And three days later he wrapped shooting on Little Shop of Horrors.
RE: The Trenches Documentary - cranefly - 10-18-2018
Very nice.
There will be more, right? A book?
RE: The Trenches Documentary - Drunk Monk - 10-18-2018
The Birth of the Hollywood Wood Butcher
Luv Corman. This post needs a trailer.
RE: The Trenches Documentary - Dr. Ivor Yeti - 10-18-2018
That was...*Craptastic*.
RE: The Trenches Documentary - Drunk Monk - 10-18-2018
Machete Maidens Unleashed! (2011)
This is a doc about Corman, Phillipine film industry (Weng Weng to Apocalypse Now), blaxploitation Kung fu babes - hardcore craptaticism from a bts view. It was what was on El Rey tonight INSTEAD OF MY SHOW.
Gotta confess - it was pretty engaging. Greg - having worked on a Corman film earns a special badge on honor in DOOM.