Movies

My love affair with movies started in the mid 70’s at the Aztec movie theater in Eagle Pass, Texas. I caught all the Saturday matinees I could with my best friend. Wearing matching overalls, we’d bring dimes and quarters in our pockets to buy Jolly Ranchers from the grey metal candy machine, dill pickles from the big jar at the counter, and share a tub of buttered popcorn. Maybe because our town was so small we didn’t even have a mall for years, going to the movies was an event in itself, and it did not disappoint. In that dark theater, the world became much bigger than our small town. We could be anyone and go anywhere. 

I couldn’t believe my luck a few decades later when I overheard a woman not much older than me telling her friend about the movie she was producing in town. I knew movies were made in Hollywood, but here we were in Austin? I was intrigued and mustered up the courage right then and there to ask her to coffee, an in-person “cold call” of sorts, so that we could chat about this movie she was making. She graciously met me the following week and introduced me to an art director friend of hers who was working on a little Mike Judge movie called Office Space. Though I’d graduated from law school and was slightly overqualified, I eagerly accepted a PA position in the Art Department, and began the most thrilling, interesting, and creative career I didn’t even know existed.

I learned the nuts and bolts of almost every aspect of filmmaking during the 12 years I spent in the Art Department, because making a movie is extremely collaborative and interdependent. Nothing can happen without coordination and communication between departments, from Production, Locations, Props, and Construction to Accounting, Editing, Transportation, Hair and Makeup, Wardrobe, Casting, and Catering. 

Some of what I learned was useful from movie to movie, like how to build and track a budget, how to secure clearances for artwork and music, how to negotiate and coordinate product placements, how to distribute and track script revisions, how to stay friendly with accounting, how to stay calm in the chaos of filming, how to be chill walking around on set or with the actors. 

Some of what I learned was completely obscure and relatively insane, like how to find taxidermied squirrels in various positions of death for the kitchen scene in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. There isn’t a taxidermy aisle at Target, and this was before Amazon. We had phone books in our cars and had to dial numbers from the yellow pages to find things. But it was the early days of the internet, and with the help of a modem cable I managed to track down a 17-year-old in another state who’d won a teen taxidermy contest. Or maybe it was a squirrel shooting contest. She was happy to shoot, stuff, pose, and FedEx eight squirrels to me for the scene. I also found myself in the middle of a field in Elgin, Texas, meeting with the owner of defunct slaughterhouse, so that we could look through it and buy authentically rusty meathooks and implements of death from him at a low price. Staying on budget was important, after all.

Obscure or not, the treasure hunt for things that would make the movie look and feel right was my very favorite part of the job. If we couldn’t find it, we would make it. It had to be on camera so we had to figure it out. What I learned by working on movies was, above all, how to become a collaborative, creative, tireless problem solver. 

Here are the movies I worked on, mainly as the Art Department Coordinator and Buyer: