Prop and Crew Appreciation Day

If any of you have ever had the privilege of visiting a set, you know that for every actor on screen there are 50 crew members running around with walkie talkies, jangling keys and cell phones. They wear jeans and tee shirts, and tennis shoes for comfort. They are men, women, young and old. They aren’t impressed by stars – they don’t have time. They have an intense bond; they work twelve, fourteen and sixteen hour days. They laugh hard and they work hard. And they are very, very good at what they do. It takes a village to make a movie or television show. You actually just cannot appreciate it until you’ve seen it. Crews work their fingers to the bone every day, behind the scenes, to bring what you’ve written to life.

So the Rouge Wave-inatrix was sitting in the office of the Property Master of an ABC mega-hit medical show the other day. We are old friends, long story.

As I watch, my friend and one of her assistants hurriedly discuss how to set up a prop for a scene in which a character eats cereal. Simple enough, right? The character eats cereal. But the prop department cannot simply throw a box of Fruit Loops into the scene. All sorts of legal issues come up. No, my friend must turn to a prop supplier who makes boxes of cereal closely resembling real boxes of cereal. This particular box is “Cocoa Spheres”. But there’s a problem. The prop boxes of cereal don’t come with the plastic bag inside like real cereal does. My friend can’t allow the scene to look unreal; picky viewers will notice. Did I mention this is a mega-hit show? It has millions of viewers. What to do? She must go to the store, buy three boxes of regular cereal, pull the plastic bags of cereal out of those boxes and insert them into the fake boxes. But the scene will undoubtedly require several takes. So the prop assistant on set that day will have to switch out sealed bags of cereal for every take. My friend decides the assistant will not only swap out the boxes, she will reseal the plastic bag in-between takes so that there is a finite amount of cereal, plastic bags and boxes to make the scene work. This discussion takes at least ten minutes. Total time to supply the prop: two hours. Estimated screen time: two minutes.

On another occasion, my friend had her two assistants open and sample a few boxes of different flavored popsicles. In an upcoming scene, two characters would be eating popsicles and also have dialogue; she needed to figure out which popsicle left the least tongue-stains. Because if the scene had to reset and start over? The actors couldn’t have pre-stained tongues. Continuity. Lemon was the least tongue-staining flavor, just so you know.

A prop is anything an actor touches. The book in their hands, the glasses on their faces, the cell phone in the scene – it is a huge job. And on a medical show, my friend is in charge of obtaining the props necessary to make a surgery look real (cow guts, usually) a pair of lungs look real (a plastic creation by a guy the show hires to do just that) preemie babies look real (expensive, life-like dolls) a bottle of Pepto Bismol look real (a bottle full of strawberry yogurt, colored pinker with cake decorating, edible dye) or even a dozen whole, plucked frozen chickens for a character to chop up for surgery practice. Those things got smelly.

Her job is endlessly challenging and endlessly fascinating. The first thing she does is break down the script. That is to say she gets out a pen and a highlighter and reviews each page for props. Then she figures out if she already has the prop in her collection or if she’ll need to rent, make or buy it. Many of the best props are cobbled together by skilled property masters and their assistants. Many of her decisions are on the fly. The pressure is intense.

It’s a medical show, so it’s a given that there will be injuries and surgeries. She pretty much has the blood and guts down. She has suppliers and artists and a methodology that works. Most of the time. But she is entirely at the mercy of the writers. When she opens a script on Monday afternoon and reads this:

INT. Frida’s House – Day

An exhausted and depressed FRIDA has spent her day off building a four-story doll house out of Popsicle sticks.

Okay so my friend is staring at this page. And one thing is going through her mind: where in the hell am I going to get a four-story popsicle stick doll house in less than one week? And the process begins. Rent it? Odds are astronomically low a prop house would have such a weird and frail thing. Buy one? Yeah right. It will have to be built. In the space of perhaps five days.

Writers reach the heights of imagination – and we should – but somebody literally has to make it happen, that dream sequence of yours, with the flying monkeys eating frozen yogurt. Frozen yogurt melts. An animal handler will have to be hired. Have the monkeys had their vaccinations? The actor is terrified of monkeys and stays in his trailer for two days negotiating with producers. Yorkshire terriers are substituted. But they won’t eat the yogurt unless Purina dog chow is mixed in. But that makes the yogurt look lumpy. And on it goes.

If you watch the Golden Globes you will notice actors thanking the crew of their shows and they should. I am humbled and amazed at the sheer passion, creativity and energy it takes to work on a set. Whether you are a grip, prop assistant, electric, best boy, makeup and hair guy, script supervisor or any of the dozens of other job descriptions all the way down to the craft services guy whose job it is to provide interesting, healthy, hot and cold food to the set five days a week plus, on time and ready to go – crew members rock.

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