Footloose Shirt Logo

Several months ago my friend Barbara asked me to design a T-shirt for her husband (my former propmaster) Dwight and his prop crew, busy on the set of the remake of that Bacon-infused 80s dance hit “Footloose”. I confessed to Barbara that, while I knew it involved dancing and people wearing Chuck Taylors, I’ve never actually seen the movie. I looked at stills and screen captures from the original movie and I dropped by set of the remake a few times. Despite having “done my homework”, inspiration didn’t strike until the film was very nearly wrapped and let’s face it, the design you see here is pretty simple: just the word “Footloose” spelled out by one particularly long shoe string attached to a classic Chuck Taylor sneaker. As long as the movie has been around I can’t help but think some artist has done this same thing at some point in the past, but it was new to me! Since I’d had recently used discharge ink for another shirt design with great results that’s what we decided to do with the Footloose Prop Department shirts. I understand folks on the crew liked the design. What do you think?

Update: there were only 20 of these shirts made, so they’re super rare!

Give Me the Barrel

Give Me the Barrel

The year was 1998.

The place was a bend in the Yellow River, just south of Porterdale, about 40 miles east of Atlanta.

The movie was False River, a film best viewed while intoxicated, being savaged by weasels or in the throes of a malarial fever dream.

We had just returned to work after a weekend of torrential rain and the river was high. Really, really high.

Remarkably high.

Dark shapes keep appearing along the top of the churning, rock-strewn rapids then slipping below again.

Those were turtle heads.

Snapping Turtle heads to be precise…. and they were everywhere.

Dozens of them covered the width of the Continue reading Give Me the Barrel

Highway To Glidden

Have Roller Will Travel

Have you ever been watching an old car chase movie and thought to yourself “Gee, there sure are a lot of skid marks right there…” just as the good guy’s car fishtails its way onto the asphalt exactly where you spotted the skid marks? Until the advent of computer graphics technology, long black trails of rubber were a thorn in the side of action film editors; these days you can hire a skilled computer artist to erase all those pesky skid marks over a long lunch. I personally never gave car chase skid mark continuity a thought until working Second Unit with my Propmaster friend Joe Connolly on a wreck of a movie named “Black Dog“, back in 1997.
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Scene 144 (night)

Scene 144 (night)Ahhh, good old Scene 144 (night). You’re the one that really gave me a headache. The one that came back to bite me in the ass. The one that made Denzel Washington scold me like a schoolboy. Yeah, I’m talking about you Scene 144 (night).
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A Lot of Questions

The following is an email that I sent out to the list back in mid-March, just now making it onto the website.

“Do you miss it?”
I keep hearing that question echo through my mind.

“Are you coming back?”
We all know that very few get away clean.

*Do* I miss it? More than you know.
The water-slicked streets, the low background rumble of city traffic, the electric jolt of adrenaline knowing that your next decision could affect billions of people around the world.

Am I coming back? Eventually. Somehow. I have to.
Continue reading A Lot of Questions