No apologies, but a bit of explanation for this gap in blogging, my friends. I’ve been very busy doing thankless tasks, which, as thankless tasks often do, took all of my time and accomplished nothing of note. Except for a hideously painful failure that engendered the following (and too familiar) feelings of worthlessness, hopelessness, anger, depression and ultimately a big, fat burst of cynicism. But as George Carlin once said, “Inside every cynical person, there is a disappointed idealist.” I suppose I’m one of those, because after several days of negativity, I put the failure behind me and began dreaming and hoping again. Although now that I think about it, Stanley Kubrick once said, “You’re an idealist and I pity you as I would the village idiot.” But I can’t depend on the words of others to define me, and besides, both of those guys are dead.

So in honor of the thankless work that ruined my Thanksgiving and the holidays and consumed all my time off (I’m starting back to work on another season of that television series soon), this week I would like to describe some of the thankless tasks of the standby painter and scenic artist.

1. Possibly the most incessant and boring and physically hard thankless task is that of cleaning up after yourself. Somehow, even if you are painting a tiny prop the size of your hand, your work area soon explodes with paint, containers, tools, rags, and garbage. If you don’t clean it up immediately, someone from production or another department will knock over your most expensive metallic glaze or trip over your water bucket or complain about the smell of your toxic materials. If you do clean it up, nobody will notice, care, or thank you (except your fellow painters, who are the only ones who understand, and they don’t count, because they’re part of the problem, just like you are).
2. Getting ready for something that never happens. This is a standby painter task, and involves the gathering together and organizing of a vast array of bizarre, mysterious and toxic materials, objects and tools, “just in case”. You end up with a huge cart full of what looks like just a pile of old crap, but which, in reality (someday) will be necessary to make a set presentable, finish a prop or repair damage to a set or prop, thus allowing the movie to keep moving, (no) thanks to you and your professional preparedness.
3. Aging. This is a special skill that is really quite necessary to make sets and props look real. A brand-spanking-new freeway sign will look incredibly fake unless it’s aged. As will most vehicles, which are often too shiny and reflective to film unless they’re aged. Age well and nobody can tell that somebody aged the car, sign, prop, or set. Do it badly, or in hurry, or too close to filming, and everybody even remotely connected to the show will notice and whine and complain and sneer. Plus, once your awful work is on film, it lives forever, blaring out your incompetence to everyone who notices that weird-looking, fake rust on those pipes you did late the night before shooting with only a distant, dim overhead light to work by. If you do an awesome job, nobody will ever notice, because it looks completely real.
4. Organizing. Anything. When you do this thankless task, it looks like you’re fooling around, shuffling papers, wasting time until break, confused about why you’re there (to paint, not to move things from one place to another or line things up on shelves or label things carefully!). But if you don’t organize—constantly—you will lose your way and the paint department will fail spectacularly or implode because of some tiny forgotten, incredibly crucial task that wasn’t written down in an organized way. If you’re organizing and organized, you’ll still look like you’re just barely holding things together (except to the other painters, who, as I said before, don’t count).

Of course there are so many other thankless tasks we painters do—but I have to stop writing now so I can vacuum the house, do the dishes, make dinner for my parrot and clean my parrot’s cage. You’re welcome!

Whooo! Long time no write, I know. My apologies, and things should be changing here very soon, as I will wrap my television series in a couple of weeks, after which I will take some well-earned time off, and begin writing this blog in a regular fashion once more. It has been a long, long road through difficult country. My job on the series was far from my usual gig as standby painter (although tomorrow I will do that for one day on the biggest set of the finale episode—yay!). This show I am gang boss, meaning I assist the lead scenic with the paint crew. This is the first series I have done since the Wonder Years, and I quickly remembered why I detest television and prefer features.

There’s no time to think, very little time to paint, and letting some of the work go without finishing it because of deadlines is hard. That work will be on the screen in reruns for eternity (or close to it), and the perfectionist in me does not like this. The pace is grueling and non-stop. One script fades into another and it’s hard to keep caring. But I do. Last night I had a nightmare, guilt-induced because I took Sunday off after six twelve hour days, when everyone else came to work. I know. Selfish. Indulgent. Guilty. I dreamed I had made some special prop socks for Diane Lane (who I enjoyed working with in reality a few years ago). The socks were due on set the next morning. But in the dream the next morning I was in my truck, lost in the mountains and late for call. My peeps covered for me in the dream. Just as they do in real life.

Our construction and art department crew are all old friends, with some new ones coming in at the end of the show. We have a good time in the midst of all the hustle and hurry and looming deadlines. But you know what? I will not miss seeing them every day twelve hours a day from 7:00 a.m. onward.

The time is coming when Tennerin, my wild red-tail hawk friend, is due back from his migration. I plan to be at home waiting for him when he arrives. I will be working hard on a book for my agent, trying to make things change for this standby painter so she can change up careers. They might make a movie based on my book. When that happens, I will be a part of it, and then I won’t mind coming to work for those twelve hour days.

Wish me luck, and see you back here soon.

To write or to work, or perchance to sleep—those have been my limited choices during the past weeks of my absence from this blog. To catch you all up, I have embarked on a very long-term, very full-time project, working as the second-in-command for the paint department on a television “dramedy” about one-time thieves and con artists who have left the dark side and rejoined the human race as do-gooders who are both witty and attractive, even as their checkered past lends them a certain rakish, damaged, risky charm. Luckily, there are quite a few shows on television right now that all feature these very same kinds of people, because I signed a confidentiality waiver that promises my first-born or my lifetime wage-earning potential to the producers if I betray any salient secrets about the show, the actors, the scripts, or even the most banal of scurrilous gossip. With so many similar shows, I am safe within comfortable entertaininment anonymity. Because of my fear of litigious wrath from those on high (I mean relatively high compared to lowly me, but only in the limited and artificial hierarchy of the show and its production company), I cannot reveal the title of the series or anything of real import about it.

But we can still talk about paint and adventures within the paint department, perhaps even adventures among the carpenters and set dressers. However, I will name no names and if there are set descriptions, I won’t reveal any more about them than is necessary for the purposes of painterly discussion. Mostly, we will still talk about my life (because it’s all about me, as many of you will remember) in this world of wonder, of glamour, of fabulous complexity and medium-to-megawatt star-power—this world of Show Business!

Let’s begin with today, which is the first day I have actually had time to sit down and open my computer up for anything other than looking at art department reference photos and set renderings. In fact, on this job I rarely have the opportunity to actually sit down. The kind of work I do these days is all about climbing, standing, or kneeling, and sometimes running. But now I find myself alone on the second floor of a one-time primate lab, a real monkey house, if you will, most of which is now empty except for our shooting crew. They are downstairs shooting a scene that, according to the call sheet schedule, should have been finished three hours ago. I have to wait for one particular scene still to come (several hours to come, apparently) before I can do my job for the afternoon (or maybe evening, it’s looking like, here). I have the entire second floor to myself right now, and I have chosen a set-dressed office that overlooks the monkey yard, where I have set up my computer. I look around, contentedly admiring my counterfeit office, imagining myself as a counterfeit office drone. Far off, across a field and behind a chain link fence, are two tan playground structures that I can call, correctly for the first time in my life, “monkey bars”. There’s a monkey now! I catch a quick glimpse of a dark head and long arm swinging down from the monkey bars and dropping out of sight.

My real job here is to remove a wide, colored vinyl strip that runs along both walls of a maze of hallways. We painters put it on the walls several days ago, but it will have to go away once we change pretend locations with the upcoming scene. Removing vinyl, especially vinyl that has been up for a while, can be very tricky. You must pull it off with the aid of a hairdryer, coaxing it gently up from the wall surface at a 45 degree angle, lest you pull up part of the wall paint with it. I told a story several months ago about this kind of problem and its potentially tragic complications, except that instance involved wallpaper which had to be removed, and it resisted all our efforts, eventually defeating us and ruining my life (temporarily, but still, my life was ruined for nearly two weeks—two weeks that I’ll never get back again). I hope that sort of thing does not await me or the on-set dresser who will be helping me today.

I arrived here this afternoon from the stage, leaving behind the department head and our other painters, who are filling in seams of set walls that have been thrown up for the next Big Thing. I feel lucky, real lucky to have been assigned this mission. I have been aching all over, sore from head to foot, and feeling dragged down by extreme fatigue for the past few days. I think it’s due to the problems I’ve been having with my other, more real, life, the one where I am a talented yet unknown writer about to burst on the literary scene with a bestselling and utterly unique book, only I am beset by stressful hurdles on my road to success at places where I least expect them. When I get this tired, and must face my other, less real, life of working as a painter for a living, I have to silently and constantly talk myself into moving and working. I’m doing it as I step up onto each rung of my ladder, giving myself a tiny pep talk to meet each massively difficult effort: “You can do it, just lift that foot—don’t think too far ahead, don’t think about all the thousands of steps you have yet to take, today—that way lies madness! Just take it one step at a time. You can do it, girlfriend!”

I sneak looks at my watch in between talking myself into moving forward or upward, and whenever I read the time, I feel a deep and hideous despair: time has slowed to a crawl, no—it has slammed to a stop, a dead stop. It has been 10:46 for at least two hours! Why have the laws of physics, of time and space, turned against me? Why can’t my weekends slow down to this glacial pace? Why can’t I master this time thing? Okay, take another two steps up that ladder, paint this header and this corner of the wall. Good job, girlfriend!

Let’s check the time again—it’s still 10:46! What is this, the most boring Twilight Zone ever fallen into by a human being?

But right now I am free of the Twilight Zone of time standing still. Thankfully, I am, for the moment, free of the awful effort that working on stage has been for me this week. I am in standby painter mode, and it feels great to be with the shooting crew, taking some time to catch up on my real life, not being pushed by deadlines and looming sets that must be finished in hideously short amounts of time. Which is somewhat paradoxical, seeing how time slows to a stop for me personally, while it speeds up beyond belief for the job in general, deadlines rushing up to smack us in the face every other day. Of course, those sets will still be there waiting for me on stage tomorrow, unfinished, needing all hands on deck, and the paradoxical and hideous nature of time will once again haunt every endless minute of my personal existence.

But that’s on stage. This is now, this is on the set. This is nice.

Now, I will sign off, and when I return next week, I will reveal what happened with my vinyl-removing job. Will I have cause to regret my trip to the monkey house? Will time for once be on my side? Stay tuned.

What a month off it has been. Not really a month of not working, but a month of not working on film. However, that is all about to change. Very soon I will go to work on the next season of a television series, one that has been in production for several seasons already, so I’m coming in after many of my friends have already been on the job. I had a taste of the production company I’ll be working for, since they also did the pilot I worked on in December. So it’s not all terra incognita, but it is still exciting, intimidating with unknowns, although I do know that I won’t be able to sleep the night before the first day of the job, which means I will be operating at 30% capacity (if I’m lucky). I know this, I accept it, but I still detest that this is the way the first day will always go for me when I begin a new project.

Meanwhile, I am trying to get my taxes done before I go back to work, trying to ramp down from a marathon writing stretch for a proposed book I’ve been working on over this past month, and congratulating myself that I finally turned in my promised writing to the right people who will be reading it and coming up with (I’m sure) lots of editing for me to do before it is ready to go out to the publishing world. I am going to be editing as fast as I can while working full-time, and this is a difficult thing to do. My wild hawk friend Tennerin’s season with me this winter is also entering the home stretch—he leaves on his northern migration just as spring begins. I cannot short him on time, and all we may have are weekends once the series gets rolling.

I think this is the time when I have to trust the universe. I have to trust that I can handle the work load and also handle the editing that must be done perfectly and done quickly. I have to trust that my writing is meaningful and valuable, or that it can be. And I have to trust that my hawk friend will leave me only to return to me next fall, as he has done for the past fourteen years. This is the time, for Tennerin’s sake, that I have to trust the universe.

The last entry was about my day of alone-ness working on finishing the sets for the television pilot I’ve dubbed Head Aneurysm (not real title). Presented here is a brief sketch of the one day I spent as (unofficial) standby painter during the shooting of those sets. Poles apart in energy, personnel, and activities, my standby day was the antithesis of my alone day.

My department head had come in at 4:00 a.m. (maybe 3:30 a.m.—I am afraid to verify the awful hour of her arrival) that morning so she could beat the shooting crew and get various tasks done before their call time, which was 6:30 a.m. I arrived a little before 7:00 a.m., so the action was just beginning to heat up. The first noticeable difference in my day was the hundreds (or so it seemed) of cars now lining the streets a block out from the two stages. I parked a long, long ways away, but luckily Harry, one of my favorite guys from the team of van drivers for the show, was waiting to give me and any other parking crew members a ride to the center of the whirlwind. He put down his newspaper, completely unfazed by the mad activity that had construction and all other departments sending people throughout the huge compound of buildings, everyone scrambling like ants defending an ant hill that’s been set on fire.

“Heading to set or construction?” he asked.

“I’d better see what’s going on in construction,” I said.

What was going on in construction was the morning meeting to plot strategy for the day ahead. I was told to bring whatever I thought I might need to help with wilding and repairing of set walls during shooting. “Wilding” a wall is when you (and your helpful carpenters, grips and electric guys) move a wall out of a set, leaving that area now available for a camera crew so they can have room to do POV’s or masters from that particular angle, or perhaps lay a dolly track for a moving shot.

Now I was scrambling like one of the insect hordes. I had not known that standby was even happening on this show.

A few minutes later I was back in the stage where I had spent those solitary hours just two days ago. Huge yellow canvas tubes almost two feet in diameter snaked in from one of the four or five bay doors, blowing in heat to make things warm and toasty. Such luxuries were, of course, out of the question for us carpenters, painters and set dressers who had been working in here ahead of the shooting crew, in bitterly cold indoor temperatures.

Also alien to our part of the work world: chairs. Nobody—I mean nobody—brings their chair to work when you do carpentry, painting, set dressing or standby paint. But during shooting, everybody with some kind, any kind, of obscure connection to the director had a chair just for them, with their name emblazoned across the back (translation: NO TRESPASSING ASSES IN THIS CHAIR).

This clump of chairs was directly in front of the monitors and directly in the way of ingress and egress for the stage and both of the sets. In other words, the chair clump was in the way of everything. But this is normal. I recalled the chair clumping of my television days working on the Wonder Years. Some things never change. Television gives out the title of “producer” for a number of services or purported services, which turns many people with only a passing importance in the show into permanent residents on set, each with their own chair.

Many of these people, I noted during the day, had IPads. Judging by the glowing screens, one guy was reading a Dave Barry column, someone else appeared to be involved in Sudoku and others were reading emails. Of the IPads, a minority actually seemed interested in the monitor and the action of filming the pilot.

The rest of the working crew were scurrying from place to place, or nervously checking their little projects (props had a gurney with a dead body and EMT trappings) or equipment (electric was doing last minute cable rerouting) or supplies (I was checking to make sure I had all touch-up colors next to set). Actors and extras not working in the first scene sat and gabbed nervously.

The camera crew was inside, hustling to get the camera and dolly set up, which required moving a massive wall encrusted with several layers of dry wall mud and paint.

The moving crew cracked the wall, something I might have to deal with when the wall went back in, and then we were off to the races. The burning pace of television is non-stop and quite different from film in feeling and atmosphere. Filmmakers love what they do, but for many, making television is an acquired taste.

The 1rst AD seemed to be an unhappy fellow and informed all of us with radios about the reasons, most of which concerned questions about why people were so slow; and what was the problem; and how long were we going to have to wait this time? Nobody answered him, I noticed, except on rare occasions, so perhaps these were rhetorical questions. I had nothing to do with any of the questions he posed, so I remained silent, listening in like a little standby fly on the (set) wall until I was on duty and working on pulling out wild walls.

When duty called, I would thread my way through the thick crowds of people all trying to do their jobs, not touching any of them or causing anyone to have to stop with whatever they were doing. If I absolutely had to touch someone I would put a light hand on their shoulder for a split second and say, “Behind you.” They would move out of my way like automatons without stopping their work, showing that they were true professionals. I would be carrying a ladder or a carpenter would have brought one in already. When I got to the junction of two walls, I would run a blade down the corner seam, which was finished not with caulk, but with one-inch masking tape painted over. Meanwhile more guys were on ladders outside of the set, unscrewing the walls I had just cut, and they would pull out the wall or walls and set them off out of the way, making room for the camera people.

Most of us have worked together before on many shows, so this was very easy, and my only anxiety came from the timing. Once those walls came back in, I needed to get my paint dry in a hurry, before the set dressing came back in along with the actors. All went well, and between frenzied wall wilding and wall repairing, I said hello to friends I had not seen in months, picked up some news and a little gossip, laughed a lot and was sorry when the production designer (not wanting to have me on overtime past ten hours) said I could wrap out and go home.

The rest of the shooting crew was there working until midnight or possibly 2:00 a.m. The details are fading, but the general rule of the show led to long, long shooting days, fifteen hours and more. Which might explain the unhappiness I picked up over the radio. On Sixty Minutes years ago, they had a segment devoted to the issue of sleep deprivation and its effects. Studies showed sleep-deprived people get angry faster, lose their tempers more often, and stay irritable longer. The reporter summed up the research by saying, “If everybody, especially all those overworked world leaders, got enough sleep, maybe we would have no more wars.”

But who cares about sleep when you’re living the dream, staying up all night under the bright lights and glamour of Show Business…

I’ve been busy, and the days are getting shorter and shorter. Somehow, even though there are still twenty four hours in each one, winter makes every day seem to be about eight hours shy. I never have enough time for sleep, let alone writing, let alone my dear hawk, who I see only two days a week right now. Sorry, Tennerin, but I have to earn money. It’s another silly human thing, which we need. Unlike you, who have wings to travel, claws to catch food, and feathers to keep you warm and dry, we humans have to buy all those accoutrements.

But I have been working on a television pilot, which has been as good as it gets without working on set as a standby painter. We have been working ahead of the show, and because it’s not only television, but cable, they have no budget or time for a standby painter. Sigh. However, everybody on the crew not only knows each other, but we all like each other. Yep, we actually laugh and joke and play well together. We also work together, as—what is the word? Oh, “team”. That’s it: we are a team.

I can’t really say much about this pilot because when I signed my deal memo I also signed a page full of lawyer-speak warning me not to reveal anything about this project lest I be sued for every cent of the fortune I do not possess. So, in the future I will be referring to this pilot as “Head Aneurism” instead of its real title, to protect the innocent and the producers. Other than admitting that the script was so funny that it made me laugh out loud, I will not be saying anything about the plot, the cast or repeating any news worthy of reprinting in the Hollywood Reporter. So what does that leave?

For today’s blog, it leaves a memorable personal experience I had yesterday (we work Sundays).

Every once in a while, and only when I am working ahead of a show, an extraordinary thing happens. I am left alone on a stage to work, without a single one of the usual throngs of crew people hustling to construct the set, get the set dressing in, or hang rigging for lights or back drops. There are dozens of people normally filling my work place, but on Sunday the construction guys were out on location, as was my paint department head. The set dressers were gone for the day and the rigging guys were done. The shooting crew had a night call, and would be filming somewhere downtown.

I had the whole vast stage, the size of an airplane hangar, to myself, and I was doing small touch up jobs on two sets, a sleek executive suite and an academic office. The work was time-consuming but light, and it was auto-pilot stuff—laying down tape on seams, using a sponge to make scenic “cement”, and cutting in paint. I hooked up my mp3 player to my boom box, which I keep just for such occasions, and listened to my favorite music as I worked. I turned it up loud. Because I could.

The sets were soon going to be part of another world, one created by the screenwriters and seen by millions of viewers. But for now, they were mine. Someone had parked an expensive black sports car in the back of the set and the main permanent “hang out” set for another cable series, which is going into its fourth year was carefully preserved in the corner, a picturesque bar which the costumers has co-opted for fittings for a photo shoot last week. But now it was deserted, eerie, even. And, as with so many of the oddities around and on stages everywhere, nobody was sure what the deal was with the car.

Here and there, old walls with windows hovered, ready for use in some upcoming set, and multicolored flats were stacked against the stage walls. Tall piles and shelves of vast assortments of things used by set dressing rose alongside the fire lanes.

I thought of the strange absurdity that everything around me, everything I do is an illusion. Carefully crafted, crazily run on a short leash, but still—an illusion. And I had to do my solitary part perfectly today, or that illusion might fail at an important moment. Some of those millions of future viewers might be able to see that our “cement” columns were just plywood screwed on to a recycled set flat. My job was to make it so good an illusion that nobody could see through it.

So I sing along to my favorite songs, listening to my voice echo in the cavernous space, enjoying my alone time, such a rarity in the crowded, hurried world of show business.

By the next blog entry I will be working again, this time on a television pilot, so we will soon have more exciting experiences to explore. I haven’t worked in television much for the past few years, but this year my work has been all TV and no features. The problem with TV? Many of those shows don’t have the budget for a standby painter. But hey, I’m still in Show Business, so it’s all good.

It has been a very slow year, the slowest, in fact, that I have known while up here in Oregon. However, because I had so much free time “between projects” (i.e. unemployed) I was finally able to do some real writing on real books that I had been neglecting in favor of paying work. The end result is that after months of no film jobs, I now have a literary agent and can realistically hope that my books will be published and hopefully read by a lot of people who have paid for the privilege rather than family and friends I have bribed.

This blog helped me to get my writing and my books going, something I never expected, but am infinitely grateful for. I plan to keep up the writing here on The Standby Painter, and I’m not quitting my day job in the Business any time soon, which means I will have plenty of stories and filmmaking fun and advice to share.

I hope that my books will be films, someday, too. Wouldn’t that make for some fascinating blog entries? But no matter where I am on the great wheel of filmmaking, from lowly painter drone to not so lowly standby painter drone to a possible “From the book by Renee Prince” credit on a blockbuster (or at least a great little indie flick), I will always love film.

Film permeates so much of our lives, and my life especially. As an example, I leave you with this true story from my yoga class on Saturday. I was floating in the dull aching boredom associated with this class when suddenly I began to feel the true beauty of yoga, and my stretches ceased to be tortured efforts, turning instead into a deeply felt dance. My mind joined with my body and I soared into a new, wonderful state of yoga. What was happening to me? I gently found my way back to earth and as I did so I realized we had all been doing our stretches to the beautiful, emotive music from the soundtrack to Avatar. The magic of film—it’s everywhere.

First, a hearty thank you to “Andrew” for your email last week. I hope you will come away with something useful from this blog entry, which explores the wallpaper and wall treatments you might find (and replicate) in a creepy Victorian hotel. There were several popular designers in Victorian wallpaper, including Walter Crane and William Morris, whose work you can find by googling their names with “Victorian wallpaper”. Morris transitioned into the Arts and Crafts movement, and Crane’s work was figurative, resembling Tiffany’s lamp designs, with peacocks, flowers and vines.

Their designs were light and intricately beautiful, but as I recall, for Nightmare on the 13^th Floor our wallpaper was mostly damask, either metallic or flocked, depending on the room. Damask (google this term in “images” search) is a type of design that features flourishes and elaborate curving flowery patterns as texture on a flat background. When damask or any other design is flocked, it means that those curving patterns are covered with a felt-like coating, giving the wallpaper a three dimensional texture like velvet on a smooth background. If the damask is metallic, it meant the designs are done in simulated gold or silver leaf on a matte or satin smooth background.

With damask done in either metallic or flocking, putting the wallpaper up is going to be a bit tricky. First, though, you have to estimate how much wallpaper you will need to cover your wall area. Check the actual length of the rolls you are buying: so-called double rolls are not always twice the length of single rolls, and the other aspect of measuring your wallpaper is the “drop”. This is the length of the space in your design when two pieces of wallpaper are put together to make a seam where the design lines up perfectly. Designs repeat down the paper, and are made to match up, but simply cutting your first piece the height of the wall with an extra 2 to 4 inches on either end is just the beginning. The second piece may not line up with the first unless you move it up or down several more inches, perhaps even as much as ten inches. This distance is the drop. You have to add in the extra length of the drop for each estimated piece to your total amount of (vertical) linear feet to do the room. You’ll also have to divide the size of the room by the correct width of the wallpaper, and treat windows and even doors as if you’re running a whole piece down the wall, even if the “wall” is mostly empty door or window space—otherwise your seams will not line up.

This entire process is hard to explain, so I’m putting a link here to a demonstration of what I’m blabbering on about: YouTube - flock wallpaper how to hang and match. Check out that groovy music! Let me add that the wallpaper adhesive for flocked wallpaper should be heavy-duty clear-drying, and you should never use a seam roller to press down seams—it will make a mark on your damask flocking. Instead, smooth the wallpaper and the seams with a wallpaper brush. And don’t cut your pieces ahead of time. Unless you’re a professional or a genius, your drop will eventually make the pieces not line up correctly. That’s why the video is important. You will see that the paper hanger actually measures his next piece in place, ensuring there’s no error. Always begin at an unobtrusive corner, and when hanging the first piece, use a plumb bob (weighted string or chalk line) to ensure that your vertical line is not slanted, i.e. that it is square to the floor (90 degree angle from horizontal of floor).

The color schemes for Nightmare were red, gold, burgundy and black. If you select your wallpaper background in one of these, and chose an intricate, rococo pattern of damask in a contrasting color, you will get the right look. Always buy at least one roll extra of wallpaper, to be ready for the unexpected. Wallpaper patterns go out of production very quickly, and it can be a nightmare (heh heh) trying to find your particular design later on.

Let’s say the idea of wallpaper is hideously frightening to you now that you have begun to suspect the difficulty involved in doing it correctly. You could practice, but that might cost you some considerable money, unlike your paint practicing. However, if you feel that a fleur de lis pattern (look up this design, which is based on the lily) or a heraldic crest might work in a repeated pattern, perhaps as a border on your wall, or spaced evenly in a diamond pattern, you might consider stenciling your walls. They (check the internet or some place like Michaels to find out who “they” are) make stencils in various patterns, or you can make your own (but this is harder than you might think, and requires sharp knives or hot, pointed implements).

Once you have chosen a stencil, also buy a stencil brush, which has a flat bottom. You lay out your design’s spacing (use chalk to make marks), chose your colors for background, and the stencils’ color, paint the background, then practice with your stencil brush and stencil on a vertical surface until you know how much paint to put on your brush, and how to use the brush (hint: it needs to be tapped onto the wall, not brushed—this will prevent seepage under your stencil’s edges). As in the scenic work, practice will help you improve a lot with a little time. Paint using the stencil, clean it between uses, repeat.

But first, to launch your ideas, take a look through the wallpapers of the Victorian era—here’s a site that features designs faithful to real Victorian era wallpaper:  Historic Wallpapers. They should inspire you, and of course Nightmare on the 13^th Floor should be studied for its style and color schemes. Take your marble and wood graining references with you to the wallpaper store or hold them up to the online wallpaper versions so you know how it will all work together.

Good luck with your design adventure, and may your nightmares come true!

Last week I received an unusual letter from “Andrew”, who tells me that he came across my website (www.reneeprince.net) while looking for photos from the TV movie, Nightmare on the 13^th Floor. He goes on to say that as a child he watched that movie many times and has always been fascinated by the “look” of the sets. He wanted to know if I have more photos to share (I don’t, sorry Andrew!), or decorating tips, because he is trying to create a similar look in a room he’s decorating.

Well, Andrew, thank you for writing, and as The Standby Painter, I am happy to offer you some definite pointers, instructions and references for creating a room that will hearken back to the fabulous 1990 production of Nightmare on the 13^th Floor.

For those of you out there who would like to see what Andrew is talking about, head on over here. Just click on each of the pictures for a large size view. What you’ll see is the Hollywood idea of Victorian-era creepy luxury hotel living. The scenic part of this formula is a bit complicated, and the set decorating is somewhat problematic for a person such as Andrew, who, I must suppose, is probably not able to rent Victorian fireplace screens, candelabras, velvet settees and the like from an LA prop house. Antiqueing is the only route to real Victorian bric a brac, but some judicious and lucky finds at Big Lots or even Ross Dress for Less can often stand in for the real thing.

However, even if finding the right furniture and décor for your Nightmare room is going to be a long term labor of love and may well involve quite a bit of cash or credit, you may be able to do the scenic work yourself and save some serious money.

My first suggestion is to buy this book: Mastering Fine Decorative Paint Techniques by Elise Kincaid, Sharon Ross, Glee Barre, which you can order from one of the Amazon used book stores online for about $4.00 plus shipping. You might also check out some of the other books under “faux finishing”, but make sure they tell you what kind of brushes you will need, what kind of materials you will use, and also if they will give you formulas for both oil based and water based paints.

To reproduce the Nightmare room decoration on walls, fireplace and hearth, most of your scenic effects will be either marbleizing or wood graining. These are both multi-layered paint projects, and they will require that you practice first. Practicing really makes a difference, and you’ll be amazed at how much better you get with each piece of scrap plywood or cardboard that you seek to transform into marble or wood. The most important parts of the preparation of your wall or any other surfaces are the priming and sealing, followed by the base coat that you choose.

Woods: The color of the base coat for woods is much, much lighter than the final look of the wood you will end up with, so follow the suggestions of whatever book (or website) you find where your wood, in the Nightmare case, beryl or mahogany, is featured. Usually that base color will be something unbelievable, as in a dark oak, where your base coat is school bus yellow. The base coat is usually semi-gloss. There are anywhere from two to four next steps, and these also require practice, both in mixing the right consistency of graining and glaze colors and in making the colors themselves.

If you have sample colors for reference and you can transport them to your nearest paint store in chip form, where they can fit it under the color reader, the store will make you a perfect color match in the paint type you request. Make that a “sometimes perfect” match—if you’re at Home Basement or some such place with a sullen teenager behind the paint department counter who doesn’t know what “Z-Prime” is, then go somewhere else. In fact, this is always a good professional knowledge question: “What is Z Prime?” It is a primer available in shellac, oil and water base versions that seals out stains, graffiti, mold, crazed school children’s scribbles with permanent markers, etc. They may or may not carry it, but they should at least know what it is.

For the later stages of the wood graining process you’ll need a flogger, which is a brush with long (10 inches or so) natural bristles, and possibly, depending on your wood and how showy it is, one of the various “heart” or “grain” rubber rollers. There’s also a multi-sided rubber comb for graining, as well as a rocker version of the “heart” roller (although may I warn gently, this thing often makes your wood walls look like something out of a cheesy music video). These implements are expensive, added together, and a nice long flogger can set you back $50 or more.

This is about the time, by the way, when most DIY home painters begin to seriously consider hiring a professional scenic to do their wood graining and marbleizing. But you are stronger than that, or you wouldn’t be reading this, right? You can do it yourself! And it will be fun!

The final coat for both wood grain and for marble is a clear coat, either satin or gloss for wood, and always gloss for marble. But that clear coat is the very last step, and right now it’s far away, so before that, you must do your homework on whether you want oil based or water based paint for the first layers of your project.

Oil makes it easier to get that soft, yet defined wood grain, with depth to it, but oil base paint is toxic, it’s hard to dispose of properly (and you should always dispose of oil based paint properly, no land fills or burning), it smells, and it takes days sometimes to dry between coats or layers. Water base paint is hard to work with and blend, without introducing retarders (they retard the drying time) to every facet of the work. The retarders sometimes cause “dropping”, which is when several paint layers fall down into each other and may even run down the wall. That, my friend, is not fun.

An important tip to remember when doing any scenic work is: the final clear coat or coats (with marble you’ll want several for the depth to look right) must be oil based over oil under painting, but with water base under painting, you can clear coat it with either water base or oil or shellac.

Marbleizing: For many people, including this painter, marble scenic painting is much easier than wood graining, in the sense that almost anything looks pretty good, once you get the hang of using your tools: a natural sponge (for mottling on the various layers of color) and an ostrich feather (for drawing the winged, winding, scattered or heavy veins). But things can get away from you, and that soft, rosy gray marble you wanted can morph into a gaudy color battle of black and pink once it’s on the wall. The best way to ensure that you get the marble that you intend, and not some kind of mutant fossil stone, circus marble or chunk granite is to find a clear, close-up photograph of what you like (or better yet, a piece of real marble from a flooring or stone store) and then find the different colors in that sample, make a bit of each, and choose the lightest as your base color. After the base, which should be gloss, add successive layers of color and texture.

Look at the layers of your sample marble—are they “rocky” or smoothly pebbled looking or swirling softly? Study each part of the marble and try to imitate them, always keeping your working layer transparent. This means you’ll be working with glazes if in oils and water or clear medium if in water based materials. For an interesting marble effect, you can use alcohol (shellac thinner), which forms bubbles of less color when dropped or sprayed lightly over semi-wet water based color layers, or you can sprinkle salt at different parts of the process for color resisting. Experiment. Be surprised. Be afraid, even!

So, find a good book, study it, get some help with color matching if you need to, collect your paint materials and your equipment, practice (seriously, practice more than once or even three times) and then take your skills to the walls.

I’ll talk about wallpaper and facades next time. Until then, Happy Nightmares!

During the shooting of Invaders from Mars in the wilds of Malibu Creek State Park, I’d go running every day at lunch, exploring the narrow tree-shaded dirt trails that wound through the brushy hills and miniature canyons of the park’s wild reaches. One route took me to the same pond where Master Po first called the young Kwai Chang Caine “Grasshopper”, and another trail led past the small wooden bridge where Master Po told Caine he would have to leave the temple because he had killed the emperor of China’s nephew. It was like stepping into a magic realm each time I caught the light hitting Grasshopper’s pond. I would think, “This is where something eternal and important happened”.

Back before I worked in the Business, certain television series and movies had the capacity to inspire in me a sense of the sacred unsullied by reality. Kung Fu was one of my favorite such shows, and even if it turned out that everything about the show was pure Hollywood, and the writers of it were not Shaolin masters, there were enough of the original Taoist texts dropped in and illustrated through mostly good storytelling that for me it was only a short step from that television series to the reading of real Taoist works. In fact I became more Taoist than anything else as I grew up and grew more circumspect. But back then, in the excitement of working on my first movie, somehow the fact that parts of Kung Fu had been filmed there imbued the entire place with a mystical beauty.

It was as if the Kung Fu reality (well, not reality in the real sense, but you probably know what I mean) was an overlay that added a kind of exoticism that colored everything in the landscape I ran through. I would compare this sort of extra glow of meaning and beauty to seeing a film shot in deeply saturated colors, like David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, but without the creepiness. There was a feeling of magic there which I think, if I were to return there right now, would still affect me the same way.

As the weeks passed, I got better at my job, finding the courage to hang within hearing distance of the director and the DP, anticipating what they wanted sometimes before they had to get the first AD to call me over the radio. I also got comfortable with using a radio, learned about which departments were on which channels, and began to help out with the on-set dressing when they needed an extra pair of hands. After a lifetime of debilitating fear of heights, I lost most of it in one afternoon when I was asked to climb on the roof and age it down. The fact that for the first time in my life the director of a movie was asking me to do something magically erased the acrophobia of my childhood.

There were lots of magical moments in Malibu, but the one which has stayed with me and touched me most deeply concerned my lizard friend. On the last day of shooting there it was getting on to November and the weather had turned cold. That day my lizard was very friendly, letting me pet her and even pick her up. But by afternoon, she would move away from me and look me in the eye, then she would dart around the corner of the paint shack. A moment later she would return to me, only to repeat the same sequence. I went around the corner with her, finally and saw that she was digging a hole. She dug deeper and deeper as I watched her, then she popped out and looked at me for a long minute.

I had the feeling she was saying good bye. Yes, I know this sounds as bizarre as some kind of Kung Fu mystical moment, but this is what I felt. Then she went back into her hole and sent more dirt out behind her until just her tail showed. Then she wiggled in further so that she was buried in the dirt.

I didn’t see her again.

This odd event that I witnessed was, I feel, something the lizard wanted to show me.  She was saying goodbye. I learned later that lizards in cold weather bury themselves and go into a state of hibernation. So my little lizard friend was going to sleep for a time, and she had let me know where she slept, which takes a great deal of trust, especially when the creature you’re showing your hiding place and bedroom to is a thousand times larger than you are and is an entirely different species.

There was definitely magic in Malibu.  Maybe that is the best explanation for such a strange and strangely wonderful interspecies friendship.