Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1531433
PROPERTYMASTERSGUILD.ORG 13 The final piece of the scripted props was the note from Jim's mom that accompanied the pie. As scripted it read: "Jimmy – Apple, your favorite. I'll be home late. Enjoy! Love, Mom." front of his pants when his dad walked in. This was originally not scripted but came out of discussions with the director. In the scene, Jim holds the pie to his groin, but the other complication was that he needed to go hands-free. This would be a good time to mention that what is on the page or even decided later in meetings, or even shot on the day, often doesn't make the final cut. Such is the life of a Property Master. After much discussion and pie auditions, we decided to go with an apple pie from Costco for two reasons: first, it was very large and second, I could get multiples of the exact same pie. On the day of shooting, I had more than 30 pies ready to go. We would need every one of those pies. In the opening scene, Jim stuck two fingers into the pie, which motivated him to then get on top of the island with his pants down and violate the pie. We thrashed a lot of pies that day, enough for the final scene of the "mushed" pie close-up. For this prop, we had several conversations and a "show and tell," about what the note should be written on. We took the character of the mother into consideration and came up with a pink stationery note card. At that time, my crew was all 30-something- year-old men, and none of our handwriting remotely resembled that of a mom's. My bright idea was to have the note written by Molly Cheek, who played Jim's mom, to write the note with a black felt tip marker so the audience could clearly read it. She gladly obliged and wrote the note in cursive. It was beautiful. Of course, we shot a close-up of the card and it played 20 feet tall on the theater screen. Let me say right now that when we shot this scene, there were a whole host of people who saw this note as it was written well before it was aired in theaters. Stay with me. Here is the rundown of all the people who saw the note: the actor who wrote it, myself, my crew, the director, the camera operator, the director of photography, the script supervisor, the film's writer, all the producers sitting at the playback monitors, and finally, the editors and any studio executives who may have previewed the final edited version of the film. After all of that, here is the shot from the movie. Sigh. All that work and attention to the pie and then this, which proved to be the biggest gaff of my career. Proofreading is one more task that Property Masters must add to our toolbox. What appeared on the page to be a very simple scene is actually a complicated amount of planning and detail that is far more labor-intensive than the untrained eye would ever imagine. When you consider all the work that went into this one single scene, which took up just one single page of a script consisting of 110 pages, an appreciation for the amount of work and detail a Property Master must do is put into perspective.