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Oh, and a big truck.
Every prop master has one.
(The Blacklists prop master, Courtney Schmidt, affectionately calls hers Trash Mountain.)
Hoarding is necessary in a line of work that entails highly specialized problem-solving on the go.
When I get a script, we break [it] down.
Do you want this or do you want that?
We have relationships with the actors that no one else has, says Miller.
Because were there every day with them, teaching them how to use these things.
They may not know how to handle a gun.
And they all adore period pieces, when the prop masters job becomes an exercise in preventing anachronisms.
We all love to do period shows.
You have to go out and find all these things, says Miller.
[With] a contemporary show, basically, you might shop it.
And thats not as interesting.
Now I can just open my computer and start looking at Etsy and eBay, Gallaher Glenn notes.
Some prop masters are wistful for the old days of independent cinema, before CGI.
And that was fine, because it was so low-budget.
Now that props have evolved into what theyve become, you need a shop, technicians.
Unless its scripted that you should notice Wilson.
At some point, I called back and got some kind of great sales rep. And she got it.
She understood exactly what this was.
She said, Let me see what I can do.
They had to make them specially.
I needed the Wilson only on one side of the ball.
I needed to do a face on the other side.
Apparently they were made in China.
They had to do a special run of them.
She would only give me 20.
I went, 20?
Im going to Fiji with these things!
And I needed as many as I could get, because things happen to props all the time.
Everything we took to Fiji, we had to have there with us when we shot.
Cause there was no getting anything else.
She only could make me 20.
And we made do with that.
They made it through the storm, so to speak.
We wanted either the WashingtonPostor the New YorkTimes we wanted both of them, pre-crash, on September 11.
And no one had them, because the whole infrastructure fell apart that day.
None of the libraries.
We could not find them anywhere.
We actually ran ads.
Thats how we found it.
And then we reproduced it from that.
It was at the very end of the shoot that we needed it.
We had a pretty long prep, but we looked and looked and looked and we exhausted every resource.
No one had it.
But we found it.
I also handle cars, vehicles, animals, weapons things like that.
This is a scene where Raymond Reddington [played by James Spader] was coming.
He was supposed to talk about this dog that has huge testicles.
We donotwant this thing to move.
We want it to be lazy as hell.
Just get the oldest thing possible.
On the day, dogs there, James is acting.
And he looks down and stops in the middle of the shoot.
He says out loud, Does anybody notice this dogsdistinctlack of balls?
And I was like,Oh God, here we go.
He likes everything real, which I respect.
Were not shooting the dogs balls.
But he basically ended up giving me a ten-minute lecture on dog balls.
That was a really fun day for me.
Note to self: Get a dog with balls.
Like, he picked it clean, right?
So I wound up contacting a museum.
I paid, I dunno, $350 or something for this fish skeleton.
And it looked great!
All he had to do was …
It wasnt even his business!
He kinda threw me under the bus.
But I dont look atAirplane!as anything but a great accomplishment.
Pee-wees Big Adventure(1985), the breakaway bottles
Levine: It was a weekend.
Like a Saturday afternoon.
I was at home.
And Pee-wee was doing a dance with those giant white platform shoes to the song Tequila.
So they tell me this on a Saturday afternoon!
To shoot on Monday morning!
I told them, Look.
Honestly, I dont know if I can pull this off or not.
But Im gonna go work on it now.
To cut to the chase, I lined em up.
I got a shop that builds breakaway props.
They had them in stock, so they didnt have to be made.
I got them to open up early on Monday morning.
And I called the transportation department and had a driver pick them up and deliver them to our set.
I arranged all of it, and they were there Monday morning at call time.
Of course, they were very happy that I did that.
But the studio wasnothappy that I did that!
I spent a thousand dollars and I didnt get their approval.
I suppose in retrospect, I can sort of see where he was coming from.
On the other hand, I didnt see that at all at the time.
To put all this shit together!
It was the star and director who asked me to pull this off, and I did.
I fought right back to his face.
At that point, I made a decision.
And I made a conscious decision: Im going for them.
Even if it costs the studio more money.
My training was, its all about the directors vision.
It turns out that that film made bazillions of dollars.
Its a cult classic.
And they hassled me from day one till wrap.
They made it so hard.
Nobody would think to save a laptop from 2003.
Theyre throwaway items now.
Whereas maybe a typewriter from the 1920s there are people who collect those items.
No one wants to save things that we all look at.
There were different ones that [Mark Zuckerberg] used for different things.
There were three: There was one that he used early on in the dorm.
He had two different laptops for that.
I think we probably tried to get between four and six of those.
Then theres a scene later in the film, where a laptop gets smashed.
On that one, we may have gotten somewhere between 12 and 18 of those.
My recollection is that we found a picture of [Zuckerberg] in theHarvard Crimson.
We were able to identify not only his laptop, but also his roommates.
I think we found images of those computers, or in an article, it may have stated exactly.
He happened to have a Sony early on.
We found multiples of those.
Later, when Facebook was up and running, they switched over to Apple products.
We found stuff in blogs, too, about what computers [they used].
I have a team of people that all are working on things.
Most of the time we also have a full-time researcher.
They sometimes will find that information.
All of the laptops that Mark used, we found evidence of exactly what they were.
To work with Wes Anderson is just insane the level of his interest in everything visual.
Every single prop in that was a design or fabrication.
Because everything you do with Wes, he starts out with an image, or maybe four images.
And hell tell you what hes getting closer to.
And then you take it from there and you refine it a little more.
Then hell say, Yeah, I like this, but maybe here for a shape.
And then you just keep going until youve got the shape.
Color-wise, palette-wise, he knows color like crazy.
[For] the graphics, he has a wonderful woman who works with him [Annie Atkins].
Shes been with him on a number of shows.
What he had her do [is] come up with concepts for that box.
I had samples from, I dont know, four or five European cities.
I was getting every sample imaginable of this blue ribbon.
Just to see what was perfect for the lighting and the texture and the shade.
The box was this kind of blush pink.
Not to mention, it had to be rigged.
I had a brilliant crew in Berlin who could figure that one out.
Its unbelievable what went into that.
And we ended up with that wonderful, perfect box.
We shot it in 1995 and it took place in 1970.
There was a ton of research involved.
I went to NASA in Houston.
I went to a place called Kansas Cosmosphere I think its calledCosmospherenow.
At that time, they were making all the replica capsules for the Smithsonian Museum.
You gotta find all of those period eyeglasses.
In Mission Control, most men back then wore different types actually more similar types of all-black framed eyeglasses.
And then all the specific things that were in their little pocket packs.
Oh, I had to recreate all those flight manuals.
He said that was an amazing task and that they were flawless.
Some of the things that we did were based on a lot of research about the church.
Other parts were completely made up and fantastical.
I think thats really important.
The actors eventually are going to use it.
You want to have a logic behind what you do, what you make.
We made the popes ring.
They wanted to do a reflection shot.
So first of all, we had to design a pope ring.
That had to go through all kinds of clearance to ensure we werent copying anyone elses work.
So we built the replica of that ring that would literally slide on my upper arm.
Thats how big it was.
That movie had a lot of inserts of secret coded messages in the sides of ancient documents.
All those ancient documents we created.
Some of them, again, we made really, really large.
Just for camera reasons.
The hard stuff was the simulating of the drugs.
So I hooked up with an ex-junkie in L.A. who I knew.
He had been clean for a while.
He worked with Jennifer [Jason Leigh] and Jason [Patric].
He made all my prop heroin to make it look like it was heroin.
Coffee grounds was part of the ingredients.
I think we used a cocaine substitute.
I used a lot of that.
To make the brown heroin, I think he added coffee grounds to that.
But he worked with them showing them how to bend the spoon, how to cook it.
He went over how you shoot up.
He then became the technical guy.
He was an ex-junkie.
He was with us for all the drug use.
There was one particular prop, called the Blue Ringer.
It was some kind of narcotic pill.
For most of the pills, I found this magazine calledHigh Times.
They simulated these pills called Black Beauties, which were uppers and quaaludes.
Anyway, I bought all of the pills and that kind of stuff fromHigh Timesmagazine.
I couldnt find anything to simulate these Blue Ringers.
That took him a few days, to make up all of those pills.
The Addams Family(1991), the dinner
Miller:I did the firstAddams Family.
We had Raul Julia on that wonderful, wonderful actor.
We had the food scenes.
They had to eat squid and octopus and eyeballs and things like that.
Mostly, I found things that approximated this food.
Really, I was doing all my own food for that.
By the end of the day, he said hell never eat calamari again.
Cocoon(1985), the aliens box
Levine:We called it the aliens box.
In the two scenes it was featured prominently in, it was sort of the center of the scene.
The aliens could monitor the life force in the cocoons by this electrical box.
It was made out of very dark plexiglass.
The box functioned beautifully.
It was an amazing piece of art.
It was all done off-camera by remote control.
It was my fourth film.
Even though I was doing well, I still had lessons to learn.
Now, for an overflow prop room, I had a motel room next to where the crew stayed.
The box was located there with a lot of my extra stuff.
They came to see the box operate.
The guy that built it ran it through its paces.
And they were very pleased.
Then they left, and we were congratulating each other on how awesome the show-and-tell went.
The operator who built it, his name was Harvey.
So he tests the flashing lights.
And the box caught on fire!Flames!Shooting out of the top of this box!
I just saw my entire efforts shot down the drain.
Right in front of me, the box is on fire.
I immediately called the fire department and they came rushing over.
Harvey put the fire out.
At this point, the top of the box was deformed.
Obviously, the lights were not functioning in the upper half of the box.
I looked at Harvey and said, I dont care what you have to do, man.
This boxhasto function in three days.
And if you dont have that done, we are both straight down the shoot.
And he did it!
I dont even remember how.
When that box made it to the set, it operated like a charm.
That was probably the most difficult prop [of my career].
