Here’s a pic from my place by the Warner Bros. backlot moments ago. I had to shut my windows. There’s smoke everywhere which is not helping my cold. For those un-locals, the Hollywood sign is on the other side of this hill. More pics here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/vidalia/440090181/

And here’s one I took at 8PM just now from my roof. You can see it’s still smoldering. I used to have a nice green hillside at the end of my street, now it looks like Mordor with the helicopters providing a War of the Worlds touch.

Weather it’s equine ejaculators, or salmon-flesh fan-decks, I’m fascinated by items created for incredibly specific jobs. Here in LA, the unique demands of the movie industry have given rise to products no average person would ever need.

For most consumers, getting clean is the goal, but Shmere’s collection of products lets you “get dirty the clean way.� Used mainly by the wardrobe dept., these wax based, deodorant-shaped sticks come in stain colors such as: “Grass Stain,� and “Sweat.� The entire set of aging crayons costs $135 but you can buy a single stick of Schmtzstik, another wardrobe distressing product, for about $8.

Aren’t grocery bags noisy? Many a sound editor seems to think so. Lucky for them, an inventive propmaker, Tim Schultz, has gone into business fabricating “silent bags.� Although they look just like your average grocery bag, they’re made from a secret material that feels like waxy fabric. These $26(!) bags quickly recover their cost by eliminating the work of needing to edit out the dialogue-obscuring crackling a real bag would make. I just like the idea of shopping with them and knowing I’m the only one whose bags are “silent bags,� as if everyone else is being terribly gauche with their “noisy bags.� Also, I love saying “silent bags.�

Expendable Props as Gifts

This past Christmas I gave friends and family the book Prisoner’s Inventions and wrapped it in police evidence bags from the ISS Prophouse. Filling out the “chain of custody� form is a fun alternative to the traditional “To: and From:� gift labels.

I also gave my brothers breakaway glass beer bottles with the idea they could stage a bar fight. It won’t be a cheap show though; a single bottle-smash-over-the-head costs $16. Often called “candy glass,� a reference to the previous fabrication method using sugar, modern breakaway glass is made from a fragile resin. But I’ll warn you – the broken edges cut like the real thing, so be careful when holding the jagged stem to someone’s neck.

Should you need to defend yourself in a fake bar fight, arm yourself with fake mace that sprays only water. (But if your attacker is an A-list celeb, they may request to be sprayed with aerosol Evian instead.)

Finally, if your fake barroom brawl leaves you with a fake bump on the head from the makeup department, the script may dictate you take two fake painkillers and apply a cold compress using fake ice.

Here in LA, Universal Studios has launched a new ad campaign seemingly inspired by hitchhiking, panhandling, and homelessness. The billboard on the corner of their property at Barham shows a family holding a sign reading “A LIFETIME OF MEMORIES” – a bit unclear if that’s what the family was looking for, or had already achieved (and felt the need to tell you by scrawling it on cardboard?). When I saw it I thought it had to be the all-time worst ad I’d ever seen for a theme park. But after scanning their site for a photo of the billboard (because I HAD to blog about it) I discovered they’d shot a whole commercial with the “people holding cardboard signs” concept – only, the people in the commercial look gloomy and we never see a vehicle or magic Universal Studios bus come to pick them up, the camera simply drives past as if they were just another Mexican selling oranges in the median.

So I shlepped down the hill in the rain to photograph the billboard when – oh heaven – there was an actual homeless person standing on the corner holding his own cardboard sign in front of the fake family holding their cardboard sign. His name was Ruben and he hadn’t noticed the ironic nature of the composition he was part of. (I took his pic then gave him five bucks.)

Which brings me to the moment when I offer Universal Studios my own free bad PR idea: Go guerrilla marketing with this and pay the panhandlers of LA to hold your cardboard signs. They’re already standing at the busiest intersections, only now, instead of spare change, they’ll be begging to be taken to the “Jurassic Park River Plunge” – and just like the people in the commercial, everyone will ignore them.

In other theme park advertising news, Disney, wisely deciding to take their campaign in a more upscale direction, hired Annie Leibovitz to shoot celebrities playing dress up in designer versions of Disney character costumes. (A $325,000 Harry Winston tiara and Steuben glass slippers for Scarlett Johansson as Cinderella.)

It’s a smart idea and the execution is brilliant. Mostly so because they’re a tad dark in tone but also because the celeb’s expressions are more complex than the beaming smile one would’ve expected in such an ad. Look at Beyonce in the spinning teacup, she’s not squealing like a little girl, she reclining in a VIP lounge, teasing you with that hand on her lap. Granted, I don’t see a conceptual reason it had to be celebrities, but it does ensure more press and one can hardly fault a company for trying to get that.

The print versions will run in Conde Nast publications including Vanity Fair, GQ, and Vogue, with the aim of attracting an older more sophisticated audience.

The decision to represent the Disney parks as high-end adult amusements is not a new idea though.
John Hench, Herbert Ryman, and other designers of the original Disney parks consistently saw a day at Disneyland as such. In a 1960’s Hench rendering of the Circlevision 360 theater in Tomorrowland, women clutch their furs as if it were a night at the opera. And a late 1970’s Ryman concept painting suggests a visit to Epcot was worthy of nothing less than your Sunday best, then in 1988, he painted formal evening attire on those watching the fireworks over Euro Disneyland.

But my favorite example of promoting Disney parks as more adult fare is a 1970’s Walt Disney World shopping bag (it hangs framed on my wall) with a spectacular graphic design featuring Mickey (the walk-around version, not the cartoon) and the castle, but not a single child. There’s a couple clinking wine glasses over lobster, a chef, jazz musician, hula dancer, and nightclub singer, a man golfing, a couple in a canoe,  a woman on horseback, another playing tennis - and everyone riding Dumbo and Space Mountain, they’re all adults.

Interesting aside: When Walt was planning the Florida parks, which he didn’t live to see, he’d imagined they’d be visited primarily by a sophisticated east coast clientele which would require a more elegant theme park experience than the casual west coast atmosphere of Disneyland. Boy was he wrong about that one.

But that’s a whole other tangent, so I’ll just say, I hope the Leibovitz promos do change any perception that the Disney parks are all cotton candy and culturally empty calories because there is an elegance, maturity, and complexity built into those parks (maybe not always maintained, but there nevertheless) and it’s refreshing to see it acknowledged again.

This is Last Stand at Big Thunder Mountain, a large-scale model of Disney’s Big Thunder Mountain Railroad attraction, on display through February 3 at Shoshana Wayne Gallery in Santa Monica.

It’s hardly a faithful representation, it lacks the exposed dinosaur bones and western town, but the inclusion of plasma balls in a tinfoil-lined cave is a vast improvement. And frankly, I think the world could use a few more models of Big Thunder Mountain.
Here’s past work I found on his site - also low-end materials - also fabulous.

A couple weeks ago I appeared on the call-in show, Ring My Bell. Here’s the condensed video.

If you happen to live up the hill on Blair Drive here in LA, your neighbor will be Universal studios, and this is the view out your front window - a plane crash complete with smoke effects and strobes. I was actually there to check out this wierd fake cave/mine shaft thing you can see from Barham. I wasn’t until I was leaving I decided to follow the road up the hill and discovered the amazing view. Poke here for the BIG picture.

Located off an alley, under the historic Higgins Building, The Edison is possibly the least “LA” bar in LA, not to mention one of the biggest. It features rows of the original generators perfectly complemented by distressed art-nouveau murals - lit with reproduction edison bulbs, of course. Disney fans will understand when I say it’s exactly as if the Tower of Terror load area were a nightclub.

It’s not officially open yet but here’s pictures from the press party last night.

Last night I was at the Hollywood Forever cemetery for the launch party of a ridiculously violent Xbox game, Gears of War. So I’m in the mausoleum sipping my “Green Emulsion,” a cocktail named after a substance found in the game, and people are lining the corridors on sheet-covered furniture frantically killing each other - “press the B button to use your chainsaw!” - and the whole time I’m thinking about the other dead people, the ones resting inches away from these gamers.

Louise Leith Wittier (1853-1917) has a great view of the action. She never lived to see a black and white TV, could she have comprehended her final resting place would host a party for a video game about killing heavily armed monsters named for a biblical plague? I take a picture, then notice it’s none other than Kevin Federline cozied up next to her. The DJ plays “Staying Alive” and the bass throbs and I’m thinking her dusty remains have got to be shifting around in there – almost like they were dancing I could say, or would “turning over in her graveâ€? be more accurate?

What happens when the young alcoholic actor, Scott Plank, befriends an old crazy actor and it’s all on film? You get the haunting and unsettling documentary, The Last Days of Jonathan Perlo. Watch it, and other great films, online at WholphinDVD.com.

The Film:

In 1923 Cecil B. DeMille filmed the Ten Commandments, a film he’d make again in 1954 with full color and sound. At the time, its sets were the largest ever made; the walls of The City of the Pharaoh were 720 feet long, 120 feet high and required 1,500 laborers to create. When filming was complete Cecil ordered the sets toppled and buried to prevent rival film crews from using them. The film itself was hugely successful and more than recovered the cost of production making over $4 million.

The Designer:

In 1906, designer and illustrator Paul Iribe launched the satirical journal Le Témoin (The Witness), a weekly anti-fascist publication produced with artists Jean Cocteau, Marcel Duchamp, and others. Two years later, Iribe became famous among the design community after illustrating a brochure of Paul Poiret’s new fashion collection with clean, elegant lines and flat color. Shortly after, Iribe opened his own studio and began designing fashion, fabrics, and home furnishings, Mesopotamian inspired works art historians would later cite as the beginning of the art deco movement. Iribe then moved to New York after WWI and began working for Vogue. By the 1920’s, he’d traveled west to take part in that new moving picture business where one of his first jobs was designing the giant sets for DeMille’s 1923, Ten Commandments. After designing and directing several films in Hollywood, he moved back to Paris and designed a jewelry collection for Coco Chanel, a woman he would be romantically linked to although never marry. He died in 1935 at 52.

The Ruins:

In 1998 I heard about “The Lost City of DeMille,�? as it has come to be known, and insisted I see it for myself. This was in the early days of the internet and all I had to go on was “it was filmed 100 miles north of LA in dunes near the ocean.�? I got out my maps and the only dunes I could find were near a small town called Guadalupe. So I told my college roommate we were going on an adventure to see some real fake Egyptian ruins. He was game and we headed off up the coast. Nearly 200 miles later (not 100) we were there. (Well, I’m leaving out us getting lost and the car sinking in the sand.)

The exact location was easy to spot. It was the one dune covered in plaster debris. The sand was so soft we could reach our arm in and feel the whole set right under us. But we didn’t even need to dig; whole areas were exposed, including a hand (of Ramses?) lying on the sand. Because the film was shot in a duo-tone process, giving some range of color but not the full spectrum, the sets were painted in color, color that was still intact on unexposed pieces.

I’ve since read that excavations were underway, and a team was brought in with ground-penetrating radar that revealed as much as two-thirds of the set were still burried. So a month ago (September 2006) I went back to see the progress. Sadly, there is no progress; the dunes look the same. Only now you can’t even see what was there because the Ten Commandments ruins share the dunes with the Snowy Plover, an endangered bird. The entire area is roped off now with signs every 20 feet all the way to the ocean.

This is all well and good, save the birds, protect the set, but nothing seems to be happening in terms of raising money for an excavation. I’m not surprised Hollywood doesn’t care, they’ve never seemed too interested in their own history, but you’d think the art and design world could pool resources to uncover Iribe’s sets. Considering his chairs from the same period sell for $15,000, and an Iribe cabinet auctioned at Christie’s earlier this year was valued at $750,000(!), you’d think his set would be worth something to someone. Until then, if you want to see the sets you’ll have to settle for the artifacts on display at the charming craftsman style bungalow that houses the Dunes Center in Guadalupe.

For more info:

The Lost City of DeMille

The Dunes Center

Seen at the LA County Fair, these are real white roses dyed with injections made directly into the stem.Mellano and Company is one of the few US wholesalers to order them. Gay-wedding planners have never been happier.

ORDERING INFO:I don’t sell these.You must call Mellano and Company (they are not on the company’s website) or call your local florist and have them place an order through Mellano & Co.

More info/pictures: Rainbow Roses: They Arrive, I Geek OutSee also: Beyond Rainbow Roses - Rainbow Everything