Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1177962
necessary rights and approvals. TV advertising was in full view on the streets in the '60s, bus- side billboards, billboards on building tops and bus benches. I pulled a collection of overhead billboards; Quentin had favorite TV shows he pulled from his massive period TV Guide collection. I rough-formatted our picks, then Tina Charad, the wizard Graphics Head, and her team started to work on detailed high-resolution versions of the ads. This was a massive graphics show, with Tina and her team turning out all the scaled graphics in-house with Blair at Universal Sign Shop printing them in full scale. For picture vehicles, I could not have had a better "comrade in arms" than picture car coordinator Steve Butcher. Steve was so enthusiastic in his embrace of this show. He and picture car captain Leonard Jeff erson made a wonderful creative team. Besides the hero picture cars driven by the cast members and the hundreds of background picture cars and busses needed for the streets and freeways, I had dozens of trailers, commercial trucks, step vans and semi-trailers I wanted to create the street life of 1960s Los Angeles. Helms Bakery, ice cream Adee, plumbing, diaper and beer trucks. He was great at taking a reference picture of a company's truck and fi nding that exact truck, then Tina Charad and team would recreate the graphics for Steve's team to apply. The picture vehicles in this fi lm are the "icing on the cake" set pieces. Spahn Ranch was challenge of scope. After a long scouting period, a park was found out in the same area as the real Spahn Ranch, near the Santa Susanna Pass in Simi Valley. I brought Tarantino out and he and I walked the terrain, with Quentin fi guring out some rough blocking ideas that would work for his scenes. Then I took the wide photos of the landscape and started roughing in George's house on the hill and the Western set, barns, corral, etc. This was all once again imported into Illustrator on Nathan Schroeder's computer, and working from some of the Spahn Ranch research, Photoshop was used to rough in the layout of the set. This was a huge build and had to feel like it had been there since 1940s. I wanted as much old weather-beaten wood as possible, rather than have the crew try to distress and scenic an entire world. Construction coordinator Chris Snyder had luckily found piles of beams and weathered lumber from warehouse teardowns that worked nicely for the barns, some western buildings and outbuildings. We also reused any sets that had already been shot on stage for some of the outbuildings. For instance, the bookstore that Sharon Tate went into in Westwood Village became one of the motorcycle chop shops. The terrain of the building area was dotted with concrete pads left over from buildings of D. PICTURE CARS ON FINISHED HOLLYWOOD BOULEVARD BLOCK. PHOTO BY ANDREW COOPER. E. SPAHN RANCH ILLUSTRATION BY NATHAN SCHROEDER. F. SPAHN RANCH OUTBUILDINGS. SET PHOTO. D F E