STORIES FROM THE SET
OVERTIME
Tony Tremblay and I were working on the backpacks late into the night,and a girl came into the model shop from the insert stage and asked us what time it was. Tony looked at his watch and said, "It's five o'clock." She said, "Is that A.M. or P.M.?"
We had to admit that neither of us knew. So we all went outside to look at the sky to see if we could figure it out, and we STILL didn't know, because it was heavily overcast that day and we couldn't see what part of the sky the sun was in. We had to wait a couple of hours to see if it was going to get darker or lighter before we could tell. It turned out to be morning. We'd worked a thirty hour day and hadn't realized it.
THE WORM TURNS - OR SINKS - SORT OF ...
The guy that did the really big stuff was Al Apone, who built the giant maggot and brought the thing in a big truck. It was so heavy that at one point it went through the floor of the set they'd built for the scene it was supposed to appear in. Thom Shouse tried to catch the thing, not realizing how massive it was, and sprained his wrist rather badly.
FLAMING BACKPACKS
The backpacks the cast members wore were a continuous source of conflict. We individually numbered them and had the actors remember which pack was theirs. The prop mistress had a fit when she found out we'd done that, but we were all into the attention to detail thing, and wanted to enrich the experience for the audience by doing that sort of thing.
The people who handled the packs once they were built weren't especially careful with how the lantern batteries inside were hooked up, though.
There was a large pyramid gridwork set, at the top of which was a platform. The way you got down after climbing up there was by sliding down a large chute tube built for the purpose. One afternoon I was working on the set wrangling props, and I heard somebody shout "Fire!" I looked up and saw a huge cloud of smoke at the top of the pyramid. I have never climbed anything so fast in my life.
When I got to the top, I found a backpack on the platform spouting huge clouds of acrid smoke, and people standing around in a circle trying to get near it. Nobody could, because the smoke was so thick. I held my breath and went in. Opening the backpack, I found that two wires that weren't supposed to be touching had been twisted together, and the entire wiring harness inside had turned into a unique form of toaster oven, the wires red hot and burning off the insulation. That's what
the smoke was - burning vinyl. I reach in and ripped out the wiring, and with the pack still smoking I grabbed it and jumped down the chute, thinking I might need a fire extinguisher to put it out and this was the fastest way to get it to one.
By the time I got to the bottom of the chute with it, though, the fire was out, and the emergency was over.
D-DAY
Taeffe O'Connell was pretty, and a reasonably good actress, given the material she was given, but it was very clear why she was on the cast. She had this nude scene with the giant maggot. Completely gratuitous.
She was also something of a klutz. She'd break the prop guns we made for the show, often within an hour of being given one. None of the other actors had this problem. It earned her the nick-name of "D-Day" O'Connell.
It happened so often that we finally started making guns of a tough, self-skinning foamed urethane for her. Astonishingly, she managed to break even one of these in half, again within about an hour of being given it. We tried ripping one in half ourselves to see what it took to do it, and discovered that clamping a foam gun in a vice, gripping it with a pipe wrench, planting both feet and pulling wasn't enough force to tear the gun. To this day, how she managed to tear one of these
guns completely in half by accident remains a mystery.
MISBEHAVING
There was a certain amount of cocaine floating around, and I got invited by one of the department heads (I wouldn't say which one even if I did remember her name) to join her and a friend in a line of coke in her production trailer.
I'm pretty sure she got the job partly because she was involved with cocaine, because she routinely screwed up things that even a little planning could have prevented, leaving her crew to clean up the mess.
The medical tools I made were the source of some monkey business too - the prop mistress wanted them a little sooner than she got them, because Thom Shouse had the lathe and had a couple of day's leave - she wanted me to break into his garage to use his lathe. Naturally, I refused to do this.
Once the tools were done, they were constantly disappearing off the set. They were some of the best props we had, though the art director simply wasn't interested in such detailed items and hadn't designed them. The prop mistress wound up with them, and after that, nobody knows what happened to them - they were probably lost or discarded. The photograph of them is all that remains.
Note continuity assistant in the background Gene Truebow