Props

And so this is really about the kind of the buildup of the military industrial complex. And in fact, coming up here, we're going to have Dr. McNamara, who is based on Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense during Vietnam era. And ED-209 coming up here is based on kind of a Huey gunship idea, although obviously Phil Tippett and Craig Hayes, who designed it, actually made it work. This is still a big prop.

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So when it moves, it's a Phil Tippett miniature, but when it stands there, we just built it as a big robot that's... So from here on, it's Phil Tippett. Stop motion. Well, actually, Craig Hayes and Paula Lucchesi built the big prop, too, so... But this is pre-CGI. It's real-deal stop-motion, guys, just like King Kong. In front of a rear projection screen, a stop-motion miniature.

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We shot VistaVision plates for the rear projection. And now you're back to the giant prop, isn't it, here? I always loved that piece of art direction that William Sandell, the production designer, I guess, put in there with that kind of crow sculpture behind him. I always thought that was a really neat thing. So, Paul, how did you get involved with this picture?

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Jim Piddock

Well, apparently simple, I should have said, because here in a minute... Well, let's first just have a look at the props, all present and accounted for. Silly to have them in the purse if we're not going to take them out and display them every now and again. Quite a wide lens they're using there, isn't it? Not so flattering on the ladies. Well, this is a little bit better. Just off centre there. Oh, and here we...

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Jim Piddock

Seems to have entered a house that obviously doesn't belong to him. I'm thinking as I watch that this is not a man to be trusted, whether or not he has Slavic roots. The acting's so strong here, isn't it? The face, so strong. But this is evidently a man without a change of clothes. And once again we're being offered a display of all the props. The gun, which we've seen before. Always a smoking or

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Jim Piddock

It's our imagination. How strongly cued, though. I mean, how marvellously suggested. And under the fish, of course, the cigarette lighter, which the studio would have us believe is engraved Lauren, when in fact it says Todor. Now, sadly, no way to tell. And on this fact, the whole story hinges, as we shall come to see. So now we have a bit more fussing about with props. These, um...

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ostensibly was playing the song we'd written called rock and roll nightmare and the last shot or one of the last shots in the in the piece was we're on the floor cameras over our heads were doing like June Taylor dancers stuff with our legs as part of the finale of the song and they're supposed to be smoke billowing around us but the prop guy the hot oil which is supposed to generate smoke instead was as we're lying on the floor just generating droplets of hot oil on our faces and we had a choice between killing the prop man or

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talking to amuse ourselves while he worked out this problem and we started talking as these guys that later on fed our desire to do more with these people. Not the prop guy, but the characters. If the prop guy fed your desire, Harry, we have to talk. Anybody remember where this is? Pasadena? Is it the Pasadena Club? Perkins Palace. Perkins Palace, I think you're right.

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Angelica Huston. She wasn't a known actress at the time. She was a known daughter. And girlfriend. And girlfriend. This is also the Bonaventure Hotel, I believe. We had a problem with this prop, didn't we? No, this was good. Oh, okay. This was the embassy, I believe. We did a stonehenge that was too large for the room. At the Albert Hall. We went the other way. And you see this prop being just... Trying to jam it through the door. Trying to jam it through the door. It can't even get in the building.

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Tim Lucas

I was told the reason at the time, but I can't remember now if it was claustrophobia or something about the weight of the prop putting too much pressure on an old neck injury, but he wanted no part of it, so David Cronenberg sat in for him in the shop with the camera pulling away for Max on the chair.

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Tim Lucas

I think that even... These shots of James Woods approaching the stage were shot in December. The reverse angle of Les Carlson recognizing and backing away and getting shot were filmed in March on the stage rebuilt inside the Bathurst location. Then, in an elaborate effect supervised by Steve Johnson, cables were run through the holes in the stage to a prop head articulated with push-pull cables...

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Tim Lucas

Costume designer Delphine White, who I remember removing her pullover sweater to reveal a t-shirt that said, Courage, my love. Video effects team Michael Lennick and Lee Wilson. Gaffer Jock Brandes, who held the coveted eye-popping syringe. Wardrobe master Arthur Rowsell. Set dresser Angelo Stea. Prop master Peter Lauterman. And me. I was the stiff's upper lip. Four Paniflex cameras were trained on the effect.

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And you broke one of those at least. I remember killing any dogs. I didn't kill any dogs. Not in this one. But still, when you're watching a movie as you're a 12-year-old kid, kids were a safe space. And between the blob and Maximum Overdrive, killing kids off. Here it goes sometime. Oh, it's great. That was terrifying. So having that representation and setting those kids up back then was a perfect way to pull the rug out from under you. Can we just give props to Kevin Dillon for a second?

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We can give props to him all day long. He did a fantastic job. He was perfect casting. Was he offer only or did he come in and read? Oh, gosh, I don't remember. I think he did read for me. I don't remember. Was there something about... Because I don't remember him... He's truly not the typical even anti-hero. No. He was legitimately reminding me of a kid in my high school who was always in trouble. Very much so. So between him and Shawnee being such a great cheerleader type and Donovan being the classic...

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So it was a warehouse, but it was all right. So watch this now, folks. This is just so interesting. I have to narrate this a little bit. So full scale set. Right. But when Jeffrey DeMunn and one of Tony's better moments with the makeup prop effects comes floating up, it's well set up in that you want these two to get together, but not this way. We anticipated. She's trying to call the guy to save her. And he ends up as blob bait on her phone booth. Then Eric Allard.

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Terrific shooting, colonel. It was beautiful. Beautiful, was it? Goddamn it! I had another stoppage. Interesting that... This is in the early days of Steadicam, which was being used a lot. But John Alonzo felt that he could operate hand-held... ...better than any Steadicam. And so what we're watching here, for the next several minutes... ...is all completely hand-held by John Alonzo, out in the desert. It no more looks like hand-held than something on a dolly... ...but he always felt that he had a flexibility to it... ...and he was able to manoeuvre quickly. So I would just turn him loose on these scenes. Stage the scene and say, "John, you shoot it." And he would go along and shoot the scene beautifully... ...get all the coverage. I almost could've gone home or taken a nap... ...while he was doing this. John said he was built for hand-held. Because he was not very tall... ...and he said his centre of gravity is low to the ground. And a taller person has real trouble staying as steady and stable... ...as he could do. But this is-- It's just wonderful, as I'm watching here... ...how steady the hand-held is and how manoeuvrable it is. We're on a rough desert floor... ...and no special kind of plywood floor laid down for him... Twelve sharp. On a hard surface, he had his little apple-box dolly too... ...that he would scoot around like a monkey with. Yes, apple boxes are kind of hard wooden boxes... ...that we'll use on a movie set for all kinds of things: For people to sit up higher or prop something up. And they're used all the time. And John attached casters to an apple box... ...and he would sit-- if it was on a concrete floor or a hard surface... ...he would sit on what he called his "silly dolly"... ...and push himself around with his feet. And it was another kind of wonderful operating trick that he had.

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This helicopter, as you've seen-- I mean, it actually flew. And we had two of them as backup in case one was not working... ...because with movie props, you have to always be prepared... ...for them to break down. Things are happening all the time to them... ...and they're not coming from Toyota or Honda or General Motors... ...with 100,000-mile guarantees on them. They're fantasy things... ...so our job is to try to make them look real.

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This was our first moment on camera, right? I mean, for the rest of us. Yeah. I remember the, thank God, the prop, Art Lipschultz, the prop guy, got me that luggage cart. And we got it in about seven minutes before we went. And I said, wait a minute. What if I bring my, what if I have a rack, a clothing rack? Can I bring that out? You will be provided with the best possible food, shelter, and accommodations. Ted McGinley.

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Look at that, production value. We had a scene that became a black and white still, and we didn't use any computer graphics for that. We actually had a still and shot the two scenes on two separate days so that we could do that. I'm impressed. I requested the Beatle poster. You did? Yes. Remember they did that when we were setting up the Nerd House? Art came to us, the prop guy came to us and said, you know, whatever you want, what do you want?

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They're all over all the prop houses in L.A., portraits of me. I should have taken them all. We only have one of them.

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Where is that painting? - That's not the one we have. Who has that? It's in the prop house somewhere at Paramount. Well, I want that. It's nice. You picked it after 12 paintings. - No, I'm saying... I forgot... Well, anyway, that's... The reason I picked it is, it's great. But the idea of the scene that he takes you to see a painting of yourself that he had done, it's pretty romantic, and I'd never seen it before in any movie.

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I don't get, I've not gotten in a hot tub since I saw this scene. I'm good. Just in case. Just in case. I'll do a sauna, no hot tub. Thanks. I'm good. Truly. That book is so, that's one of my favorite props in the movie. It just says really black magic underlined. Right. Really black magic. Again, art department. The art department had a lot of fun. They did. The art department was great.

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especially in a skirt I'm not interested in doing that but Mac was all over it that was a really really cool moment for him you know what I think also maybe halfway through the film we realized it probably wasn't a good idea to give her money yeah make the day there was already quite a bit of improvisation happening around us I just want to point out that's a beautiful car right there that's probably the nicest prop in the film oh come on

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for people looking for this cap. Yeah, and they wanted the clip or something? They wanted the clip. I don't know, something about a glove. I don't know. Now, this is actual footage of O.J. or the movie? I'm not sure anymore. This is the movie, but there he is. We spent a lot of time on the props, as you can tell. It's all here. This completes our first shipment of heroin, 100% pure. Yeah, it better be.

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porcelain thing of Don Quixote with the long lance. So he sits down. I hear this little crack and a snap. He gets up, and I see the thing is completely trashed. So I've got the prop guys trying to glue it together. We put it back on the shelf and ran away. How many days did you tie up? How many days did you tie up the office? This was one day. This was actually one day. In the middle of the park and full view of 100 people, I shoot the bastards. That's my policy.

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John Mackenzie

Varga Street. And it lent itself beautifully to filming because very often, you know, the interiors are too small. You can't get a camera in, never mind a camera crew. It was quite spacious in a way. We did a few bits of little bits of rebuilding, but not much. And a few extra props we put in, but apart from that, it was really easy to use.

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And you came in and you went, Jimmy, bust the beat. Where's the props? They had no props, you remember? And that thing bucked in the middle of it. And when I did it, I got a round of applause from the guys. That was terrific. What Jimmy's talking about is there were no props on the film. There's no reason to have props. There was a reason, Michael. We didn't do it that way because it kind of limited the authenticity.

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All right, props to Sean again. Handcock Memorial Hospital? Well, you know, Handcock. God, I'm just picking up the nuances now. Ray Walston's in this movie a lot. He's so adorable. He's good. Didn't he ride a bike every day?

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One little anecdote here is that the cameraman that was up on the platform shooting this, the viewfinder of his camera was broken, the pellicle mirror had shattered, and he couldn't see anything through the camera and he just aimed and shot. He didn't want to slow down the production by telling anyone that he couldn't see anything, and held his breath all the way till dailies, and the shot worked out. Oh, that's right. 'Cause there weren't very many 65-millimeter cameras available, and all this was shot in 65 millimeter. Yeah. When we opened these cameras, they still had the sand of Lawrence of Arabia in them. Well, Flynn's arcade was in Culver City. Yeah, it's across the street from the old MGM lot, which is now the Columbia lot, but now renamed as Sony Pictures. Now, there was actually a loft at the location. But then the re-shoot... The close-ups were the re-shoots on a stage. Yeah. That's the... The actual... The practical location. Space Paranoids. Space Paranoids. I take my son to the arcade in Westwood. We go once in a while. I have to bring my earplugs. But I've never seen an old couple like that in a video game arcade. That's right. We knew that Bally was going to release a video game simultaneous to the release of the picture, and therefore we wanted to have the design of the game in the arcade and the game in the real world that people would actually play be very similar. So, we go to Flynn's, and we see Flynn playing the electronic game and fighting off a Recognizer. That is the console which we created for the film that represented the game that Bally was going to create. Although, obviously, at that time, there was no way that a computer game could have real-time, interactive, full raster graphic imagery. So, it was a prediction of the future of the way games were going to evolve, and that is what we're now seeing in CD-ROM games and the games that are in home computers and arcades today. Jeff did get very good at video games. We had some on the set. Yeah, he was remarkable, and one day you suggested that we videotape him while he was actually doing it. And look at the neon in the back. I'd forgotten about that. OA, right. I don't think any of the actors actually went so far as to get themselves a computer and spend hours backstage... Programming. -... learning how to program and... That didn't happen, but they got as far as games. Battle Tank. We used to play a lot of Battle Tank. Battlezone. Yeah. Battlezone. There you go. Now, as! recall, you... We re-shot this sequence. Yeah, and I don't even remember... The lighting... To match, I think, the lighting of the game arcade. Well, I think, actually... - We changed dialogue. Did we? - Changed dialogue. And here's a little secret. We told the studio that we needed to redo it to match the lighting. Well, see, /... Still using the same excuse. That's right, you're still... You're still well-programmed... - /'// never tell. The lighting didn't match. The casting process was interesting. Originally, I'd pictured Jeff's character being younger and the Tron character being older. We were affected by some things that were definitely outside of our control. Tron predates Splash, and people forget that, really, Disney was having a hell of a time getting popular actors to work for the studio. And it had been a tough time for Disney. And it didn't help that we were saying, "Yeah, we want you to wear these funny costumes." And Jeff was always enthusiastic about being part of the picture. The Tron character... Bruce was... I don't think Bruce was quite as adventuresome at first, although he got into it after a while. I would have liked to have seen Bruce possibly be a little, I think... I had pictured him as sort of a younger Kirk Douglas. I think he would have been better if he had been a little older like he is now. I like the way he looks now. And I think Jeff... I was surprised at how physical Jeff was. I thought that... I pictured Flynn being a little more geekish or a pencil neck, and Jeff is very physically strong. So, in that sense, the two became somewhat similar, although their personalities and what they represent are completely different. One little anecdote is that... I can't point back at the character of Tron and say, "There were all these actors." Or, "It was between this one and that one." But I do remember one surprising actor who really wanted to play this part, and it was Peter O'Toole. - Yes. Oh, he wanted to play the part of Dillinger. No, it was Tron. Tron, that's right. I think we wanted him for Dillinger and he said, "No." And I had this amazing scene with him in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel where... In his hotel room where he said, "I can do this!" And he started leaping from one piece of furniture to the other and screaming that, "I want Tron on my tombstone right next to Lawrence of Arabia!" And who knows, maybe he would have been great, maybe I really missed it right there. All these interiors... Shooting them, these low-light interiors, in 65 millimeter is very difficult, because the depth of field, the focus plane is incredibly short, and it was a real struggle. And some of the close-ups, we actually had to run light stands up the backs of the actors through their jackets as braces, so that they would stay in the exact same spot, so that we could keep their eyes and faces in focus. You know, if your file was in there... - Hey, wait a minute. If we can get in there, I can forge us a Group 6 access. Well, shall we dance? And ENCOM was shot in downtown Los Angeles. I forget the building. Of, the Transam building? Oh, yeah, the Transamerica building. At the top of that was the helicopter pad. This sequence between these two heads of the company really expresses the philosophical problems that the other characters are going through. Again, the office is designed to mirror the other world in terms of its graphic look. Wasn't there something about the cold, corporate look as well, Steven? There's your door. - There's the door. The scene where they sneak into ENCOM and open the door that is 10 feet thick or 12 feet thick, that's a real door, that's not a prop movie door. That's an actual radiation door at Lawrence Livermore. ENCOM isn't the business you started in your garage anymore. In one scene, you see a number of things flip up into four corners. Images. That was a traditional optical that had to be done, and opticals in those days would take two, three, four, five weeks at least, and it was a big task. It was like making its own little movie. You know, you can remove men like Alan and me from the system, but we helped create it, and our spirit remains in every program we designed... That line is one of the key lines in the whole script, about the human element that the programmers put into the system. And it's this discussion between those two characters that really elevates the picture well beyond a video game movie. Now, the reverse was shot, actually, on the Iot, so there's a reverse... Getting into the Disney vaults? Yeah. Lawrence Livermore was quite proud of the fact that although this door weighed tens of tons, or whatever it was, it was so well hinged that you could open it by just pushing it. One person could. In fact, you found... I believe you saw that door as we were taking a tour of the facility and you Said, "This would be a great place for them to sneak in." So, you kind of re-wrote the scene to accommodate that huge door. And the irony is, as he punches the buttons, that the giant door opens, and no strength is exerted, but it's opened automatically. I kind of inherited the job of not only setting up the giant rear projector and the mirror and all that stuff, but I also had the job of putting together what would end up going onto the desk. That's an actual wireframe on there, for the carrier, as you See... Right. - ...in the film. I began searching around for footage to go onto the desk, and it was getting late, and we were about to shoot this thing in a couple of days, and I just ran out of stuff, so I put the flowchart from the film on there, and probably things out of my address book and anything I could... I was down to pulling things out of Life magazine and re-photographing those. I was just running out of stuff to put on the desk. What's interesting about this protagonist, Jeff Bridges' character, is that he's actually, um... He's a creative, technical type, and he's fighting for his creations, he's fighting for his work. I think that's pretty unique. He is somewhat of a paranoid character. But with some reason. With some... Yeah. - Some good reason. Dillinger will never know we've been in here. Good luck, hot shot.

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Tom is good. He's a good guy. Yeah. Abby Wall, video coordinator. Tom Muska, producer and writer of Stand and Deliver. Ramon Menendez will show up here if he hasn't yet. Ramon's mother appeared earlier, actually, making tortillas, even though she doesn't really know how to do it. She's from Cuba. There's Tom Richmond. All the additional camera men on this. Bob Richardson, Tom Richmond, beautiful. Good work, those guys. There's Ramon, future director, writer, was our prop master.

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Judd Nelson

I don't even remember thinking that I understood that concept then, when we were making the film. That the simplicity of one room unlocking all of that potential, he really had something in mind here. And you're right, like you said, Jason, before, the school is definitely a character. These are the actual hallways of the school. And it was empty, so it was kind of... - And you get that feeling. They don't shoot that much outside the library, but you get the feeling it's this big, empty building. You really do. These hallways and the ADR with your footsteps and the whole bit. School on Saturday, who's gonna be there? Kids that get in trouble, the teacher unlucky to have the job, and the janitor. And then you set us out on this journey, which also represents risk here, like we're risking together to come back safely. Yeah, for all of you to agree to do it. 'Cause basically, I'm going to get my dope. Right. All these themes. - Look at that locker. It's very funny. The Doors, he's got The Doors going on in there. Yeah, all sorts of shit. Did you get to decorate the locker? I got to remove things that were incredibly bad, that I was like, "I ain't putting that in there." Meaning, for that particular character, I don't think we got... It was a little awkward. Most of the prop guys were like... "It's a little bit soft rock vibe for me, "so let's take Hall & Oates out."

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William Friedkin

And within five minutes, the store manager had the Treasury Department there. And they grabbed these kids, where'd you get this money? I got it from my dad. Where'd he get it? Visit him, boom, up props the name of our property master, Barry Bedig, who was in charge of the counterfeit money. And so for weeks, if not months, the Treasury...

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Oliver Stone

This is what we secure perimeters every night. In Vietnam, dug our holes. It's hard work, get the water out, get the resupplies. Another tough shot. You can see the actors are really struggling against the prop wash. On the feet, they're always getting swollen.

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By the way, what a great prop, Karen, cleaning out his office. It's not fair, Donny. Thank you, Jane. Thanks, sweetie. Good luck. I'm sorry. When we made this picture, there were still a lot of people who thought of these kind of layoffs as an outrage because costs could have been cut and...

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Gary Goddard

building the props, building the costumes, while we were shooting these things. This is pretty funny. Gwildor's the first one to discover food. He's got that little grappler hook that he used before, and he smells something. An interesting thing is we had no second unit on this. I had to shoot every frame of the film. I requested a second unit, but Canon was very tight on money.

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John McTiernan

That was one of the back to the drawing board parts. The only image of an alien life form that had captured the imagination or looked halfway plausible, or functional was this stuff that came from H.R. Giger. Illustrations that became Alien. You know, one of those images of the ultimately terrifying other life, only shows up once in a generation or more. You're not just gonna, you know, hire some cartoonist and say, "Come up with a next H.R. Giger." 'Cause H.R. Giger only comes along as I said, once in a generation. And I didn't see how you could do anything associated with it without just being that derivative also-ran. And, frankly, having seen what they did in the sequel, that's exactly what I thought. I thought it was, it was best that they didn't shoot it. Here you see Jesse actually carrying Painless. He had no ammunition at this point, that's why he could carry it. And there's obviously no battery connection and it wasn't operable that way. We shot this in Palenque, where we could get a real snake. The worry was that Painless would buck and get away from him, and spin. Even if you had everybody clear out in front for 50 feet, that the man firing it might not be able to control it. And that he could wind up in the way of all this wading and bits of brass and stuff that was flying out of the front end of it. So the first time, they fired it, they did a Iot of... They anchored it. And yet tried to give him a chance to figure out if he can control it, so it was like bungee cords and things. So that if it started to get out of control, they could yank it in and protect him. But to let him see, you know, what other... You know, what other concussive forces... You know, what happens when the thing starts spinning. We learned that there was enough gyroscopic force in the spinning of the cylinder, that it kept it online. That actually was very difficult to move it around or aim it, and in an odd way, it was very safe. You couldn't have it wind up aiming where you didn't want it, 'cause it wouldn't move. Because of all the gyroscopic force and the spin, but it took us a while of experimenting with it, and I think he first tried it out over, with the second unit. And it was like half a day, you know, we kept hearing reports of, "They're gonna fire Painless, "in 45 minutes. "Well, no..." It's like a count down to the moon launch or something, "They're gonna fire Painless." And I think later that afternoon it fired, and we were about a mile up the valley. I could hear tt. It sounds like, it's the loudest buzz-saw in the world. Some people, I guess, were concerned about how impractical it was, but the notion was that, Painless was... Look, it's a movie prop. You know, we never would've used it, but it's a lot of fun to watch. Here we got Bill Duke to fire Painless. You notice he is not walking while he does this. Now, this particular sequence, I made when I first went to work on this project, I had the feeling that people had a sort of perverse fascination with pictures of guns firing, literally almost a pornographic desire.

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These four rabbits, Carl, the one they're using as props right there, I took a couple of them home and put them in a plastic bag and put them in my icebox. And I just left them there. And then I heard a scream from Pam and she said, what is this? And I said, they're rabbits. And she said, well, what are we supposed to do? I said, I don't know, cook them? You are Mr. Shoop. Kind of become the character after a while. See, that's something I didn't know that you took...

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