Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1531371
Carol DeMarti L Carol DeMarti is a Head Ager and Dyer who has always had a passion for fashion history and films. "One of my favorite things growing up, before TCM bought them all, was watching all the old movies all the time on TV and my favorite part was the costumes. My mother and my grandmother taught me how to sew, and then I just kept with it on my own. Sometimes I would make historical garments from Folkwear paerns and stuff, just because I loved them so much. I've lost my mom and my grandmother, and there's memories connected to it that I just treasure." As a young mother, Carol started working in the theater as a Stitcher to support her family, first at Cerritos Community College, then at Center Theatre Group in the shops for the Mark Taper Forum and the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Carol spent several years working in theater but got her lucky break when Muto-Lile brought in overhires for the Disney Light Parade. "I call it the most hated parade in Disney history. The Electrical Parade had been stopped, which pissed off all the Disney fans and this is what they tried to replace it with, I don't think it lasted even a month. I worked in the millinery section of the parade. When that work was done, they let me go with the other overhires but I was still technically working for Center Theatre Group. When anything would come up, like a film or a television show, I would talk to the workrooms and say, 'Hey, can I take some time off?' A lot of times it worked out perfectly and other times it didn't. When I finally got to the point where I was geing offered enough production jobs, I le Center Theatre Group." When she was starting to work in the film production world, Carol had several experiences and influences in learning aging and dyeing. "Ha Nguyen was the first person that asked me to do a gig. She needed someone to age a leather jacket, because the person that she usually used was sucked up by one of those huge movies that sucked everybody up, so us 'lile people' got some work. I really needed the money because I was a single mom with three kids." Nguyen continued to ask DeMarti to work on projects, but she was intimidated by dye work. "So if somebody needed dyeing, I was always just scared to death." Her partner, Dominick De Rasmo, a Specialty Costume Maker Foreman, started teaching her how to see color. "He started teaching me how to take that blue-green to what I actually needed it to be, to match the swatch, to see what colors are in other colors, and what you would need to change them in the direction you needed them to go. I was really lucky and met some great people on the way that were willing to share their knowledge instead of hiding it away. I learned from Rebecca Roberts and from Melissa Binder. Rebecca Roberts taught me how to dye wool because I didn't know how to. You have to be very careful, it's not like throwing it in the machine." Carol has been working as a Textile Artist for more than two decades and dyeing and aging to be her best talents. "I am a very good dyer. I can match colors really well. And then my other skill is I can age things and make them look realistic. You sometimes wouldn't even know it had been aged. You just think it's an old garment somebody found. Once, I asked my neighbor to tell the difference between the real one and the one I had copied. He had no idea because they look the same and that's always what I strive for in aging—that it's realistic." Her work has been seen in Planet of the Apes (2001), The Perfect Storm, Seabiscuit, Team America: World Police, National Treasure and National Treasure: Book of Secrets, True Grit (2010), Cowboys & Aliens, Ant-Man, A Wrinkle in Time, and the Star Wars television series Ahsoka, The Book of Boba Fe, and The Mandalorian. The Perfect Storm (2000), a biographical disaster film about the fishing vessel Andrea Gail lost at sea during the perfect storm of 1991, was the first film that Carol worked on as the Head Ager Dyer. On this production, they had to have multiples on standby and each garment had to go through her aging and dyeing team as they needed to look like well worn, dirty clothes of New England fishermen and the look needed to be maintained throughout filming. "Every one of those garments had at least 20 dupes of each T-shirt, because they were geing wet all the time, and they would change it and start again." Her department was asked to aend a camera test to see what the color of the costumes would look like with a blue screen for a CGI background. "This kid, I think he was the UPM's son, is wearing the fisherman gear. Wolfgang Peterson, the director, yells out from the front of the screening room: 'I want these clothes to look like they smell! I want them [the audience] to smell the clothes.' Not realistically, obviously, but so that you would believe that it was that bad and smelled." As part of the research, Costume Designer Erica Phillips went to Gloucester, Massachuses, to get some firsthand research from the 32 SPRING 2025