In my last “episode,” I was in Naples on Florida’s West coast, and we were filming the swampy and outdoor scenes of the Hollywood movie Just cause. We were in REAL swamps, and they were nasty.
Our carpenters built an old log cabin which would be in a scene right at the end of the movie. They did one hell of a job and then it was transported to the grungy water and installed on stilts for the big fight.
Hundreds of man hours were spent on putting it all together. Sean Connery and the bad guy (Blair Underwood) were going to wrestle and fall off the cabin into the murky soup and fight to the death.
Then a problem.
The actors came to look it over and Connery refused to do it. I do not blame him. I know I wouldn’t jump into that sewer-like swamp water.
So, we ended up loading the cabin on a big flatbed truck. Later we would build an indoor version in a very huge abandoned warehouse in
West Miami with trees, foliage and running streams… of Miami tap water!
It was an amazing feat. If you pull up a copy of the movie, you would be blown away by how realistic it is.
When we moved to Miami for the second half of shooting, we were working out of Greenwich Studios, which was originally built back in the 60’s to film the T.V. show “Flipper.” The pool that was used for closeups of the swimming dolphin was still there, covered with plywood sheeting. Our temporary sign shop was located there.
In the sound stages of Greenwich a huge crew was assembled to build a full sized section of a two tier prison, complete with real bars and steel doors. (Although the walls were ¼ inch plywood painted to look like concrete.)
In the plot, this is Death Row, where the crazed serial killer Blair Sullivan (Ed Harris) is being held. He’s also a satanic nut who paints his cell with bizarre murals and Bible verses.
To do the artwork on the walls, they brought in Pablo Miranda, a fairly famous mural artist from Miami and assigned me to letter the religious wording on and between Pablo’s images.
Pablo, originally from Cuba, did not speak a whole lot of English and smoked a LOT of really stinking cigars. For an entire week he and I shared a tiny room about the size of a typical mobile home bathroom. The one little round table, maybe three foot wide, was covered in little paint filled paper cups, stale Cuban coffee containers and food remnants. Close your nose and keep working.
Our big boss was a rather large, ugly and bad-tempered woman who had won an Oscar some years before for the movie “Amadeus.” She treated anyone who had no Academy Award like French peasants in the 1600’s. You were not allowed to speak to her directly unless she asked you to.
Needless to say, she was universally despised by the crew. Our nickname for our boss was “Momma-deus”. And that was no cutesy endearing name.
After a couple of days writing random sections of Bible on the wall, I started slipping comments about her into the writing, most of which I can’t put to paper in a family newspaper. They were VERY nasty. The mildest would be something like “Momma-deus sux,” often using her actual name. I finally just started writing only stuff about her on the cell walls. She couldn’t read the tiny writing from outside the cell. She would never think to enter that stinking cave.
When the movie wrapped, I found out that some high society friend of hers was going to disassemble the cell – including the walls with art and my words – and display it in his New York City museum.
That’s where the title of this article comes in: Revenge of the sign painter.
Thom Caraccio ([email protected]) is a retired musician and retired motion picture scenic artist living in West Palm Beach, Florida who hails from Columbus. He graduated from S.D. Lee High in 1968 and still considers Columbus his real hometown.
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