Saturday, February 7, 2009

Back to Basics...........Set Photos


I feel like one of those vaudeville performers who just keeps on tap dancing while waiting for the next act to come on.........except they're late.  Well, I may not be able to tap dance, but I am still waiting for my slides / cd  to come back from India so I can post more set photos.  In the meantime I'm trying to come up with other interesting photos--like a bust of Jack Lord facing Macy's at Kahala Mall!

This is probably the most obscure of all my set photos:  A 1945 basement of a Jewish Synagogue in China!  I'll bet the writer's stayed up all night thinking of that one--it's obscure even by "LOST" standards.  Again, no idea which episode or why or what it was for.  I scanned all 3 photos as one rather than individually since there's not a whole lot to see.

It is interesting, though, because the paint job on the columns is pretty good, there is dirt on the stage floor, you can see the ends of the set and catwalk above, and, of course, the set dressing is fantastic!  (what little there is of it--crates, brass items, boxes).

Another side note, I always have to laugh now when a director or designer says "just get a few wooden crates" and I respond with "we have to build them."  I suppose for 100 years or more, wooden crates were readily available and cheap and usually discarded.  Now that we have decimated many of our natural forests,  wooden crates are almost impossible to find anymore.  We used to get ours from a place called Jade Food Products for free, then .50 cents, then $1.00 a crate, then they switched to cardboard and no more crates.  Incidentally,  the only cardboard box plant in Hawaii shut down last summer.

Now I'm running out of obscure information about cardboard plants in Hawaii AND photos, so maybe I will have time to learn how to tap dance?  Hey, it could happen.

Aloha,  Rick


2 comments:

rubber chicken said...

Thanks for another riveting post Rick! : )

I looked into it, and that set was used in Torah, Torah, Torah (5.21). Shanghai to be exact, according to the show. The Japanese were getting bombed by the US and the Torah etc. needed to be protected.

Here's three screenshots. Would you typically be told beforehand that a set would be shown in black and white?

Magnum Decorator said...

That has to be the best title of an episode ever! However, I hope this doesn't start a war of opinions on that statement!

Good question (as usual) about the B&W filming. I think they may have said something about those fantasy episodes with the private eye. It was probably more important to know ahead of time for contrast in color, but I don't recall it affecting our choices very much. Something you learn after awhile in this business is that just because they tell you something, it doesn't mean it's going to stay that way!