The Crack of Dawn #640

Volume #640

8/14/24

Newsletter #640

The Crack of Dawn

My friend Rick once said, “Cecil B. DeMille was the best filmmaker in the world in 1921, and never got any better.”  In some sense this is true.  There is a stodginess to his films that he stubbornly held onto into the 1950s, with both The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) and The Ten Commandments (1956), where they have sound and color (and widescreen) yet still feel like silent movies.  There’s more to it than that, he stages his scenes and composes his shots oddly.  Yet DeMille’s films always sold and made big money.

Steven Seagal on top of a train in a studio in Under Siege 2: Dark Territory (1995).

My old buddy Marvis was the assistant construction coordinator on many films, including the movie Under Siege 2: Dark Territory (1995) with Steven Seagal.   For that film they built a 200-foot green screen on the Warner Bros. lot.  To accommodate its size they had to knock out the walls between two soundstages.  They brought in four or five full-sized train cars to put in front of the green screen.  I dropped by a number of times during preproduction to watch them assemble this enormous set, though I never saw them shoot.

The affable and funny Leslie Neilsen.

Marvis also worked on the silly film Spy Hard (1996) with Leslie Neilsen and asked me if I wanted to attend the wrap party with him.  I said, “Sure, I’d love to meet Leslie Neilsen.”  At the party there was Leslie Neilsen happily greeting everybody.  Marvis and I stepped up to him and Marvis said, “Hello Mr. Neilsen, my name is Gary Marvis, and I was the assistant construction supervisor on the film.”  Leslie Neilsen rolled his eyes and said, “That’s what everybody says.”

Marvis also worked on Luc Besson’s, The Fifth Element (1997), constructing miniatures.  I would stop by the fantastic miniature shop in Venice (CA) just to see how the exceptionally cool and intricate miniatures were coming along.  For a truly silly movie, which was made before the extensive use of CGI, it’s astounding how much work (and money) went into that film.  In the film, depicting the congested future, you see flying cars going by all the time.  Those aren’t digital effects; they actually built them all.

In the construction office of all these movies, Marvis always posted a sign.  On the sign was a triangle with a word printed at each corner: “good, fast, cheap.”  Below that it said, “Choose two.”  It works like this: you can have it good and fast, but it won’t be cheap.  You can have it fast and cheap it just won’t be good.  Or you can have it cheap and good, it just won’t be fast.

When I first met Marvis, he was working on the sets of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978).  Although the category of Worst Film Ever has a lot of nominees, this film would certainly be one of my nominees.  The film stars the Bee Gees and George Burns.  At one point the Bee Gees get into a fistfight with Aerosmith.  Marvis and the carpenters built an entire little town in an empty lot in Culver City, across the street from MGM.  In the movie they got a couple of shots of George Burns at 110 years old smoking a cigar and attempting to explain the utterly idiotic plot, and a really lame musical number.  Then they came in with bulldozers, tore it all down and threw it all out.  Marvis told me it was a million dollars’ worth of band new lumber.

Marvis worked on four or five of the Star Trek movies.  Since Paramount Pictures was both paranoid and cheap, at the end of shooting they would bulldoze the sets and throw them out, not believing that they might ever need them again.  When they surprisingly made the next film, and the next film, and the next film, they had to keep rebuilding the ship’s bridge over and over again. 

I remember when he was working on One from the Heart (1982).  This was when Francis Coppola had purchased one of the big old soundstages right in Hollywood, that had previously been many things—Allied Artists, Avco Embassy, Robert Aldrich Productions, and not all that long ago, Scott Free, the production company previously owned by the brothers, Ridley and Tony Scott.  Tony committed suicide, and they sold facility.  Anyway, back in 1982, when he was directing, Francis Coppola would not come out of his Airstream trailer, named the “Silverfish.”  As per Marvis, there was a lot of cocaine on that set.

Marvis’ career as movie set builder came to an abrupt end.  He managed to take off the ends of four of his fingers with a router.  A router is not an extremely sharp power tool, mainly used to cut curves in molding.  If you have cut off the ends of your fingers, it’s one of the last tools you would choose.  As Marvis summed it up, “I don’t seem to be getting more coordinated as I get older.”

Over the years I’ve lost touch with Marvis.