The Roulette Wheel Set of The Nightmare Before Christmas
In between confrontations with the perennially disgruntled animators and cameramen, a few other adventures awaited me on The Nightmare Before Christmas. One of them actually involved Tim Burton.
He showed up at the studio one morning with Lisa Marie in tow.
Jenny, the Nightmare’s greatest accounting assistant, had just poured water into the coffee maker and hit the ‘On’ button. Nightmare had an old-fashioned restaurant style machine. It lacked an automatic switch-off. Tim, in his zeal to get some caffeine into his system, made a bee-line for the kitchen.
Before I could intercede, he’d snatched the glass coffee pot off the burner; emptied its contents into a large Styrofoam cup; added milk and/or sugar or something; and placed the pot back to catch the remaining coffee.
Tim and the strikingly beautiful Lisa Marie disappeared to their confab with Kathleen Gavin, our producer and Henry Selick, Nightmare’s director.
I turned back to survey the damage.
Me: “Jen, the best Smiley Face I can put on this one, is that
Tim Burton is one intense and focused individual.”
Jenny: “Yep. You want the counter or the carpet?”
Me: “The carpet. It will take longer and delay my inevitable daily public stoning in front of The Big Board at the hands of the animators.”
Jenny: “Oh come on. It’s not that bad. They don’t stone you every day.”
Me: “Sometimes twice.”
****
Another incident involved the late night stage inspections, of which I became a part with Jackie on maternity leave.
The production department split up the responsibility of doing the final walk-through of the stages, among every member of the staff, so the pain of 14-hour days got shared equally.
Before heading home, one person checked the stages and made sure the animators, some of whom worked very late, had everything they needed to finish their work.
I pulled that duty once a month. Most of the inspections were fairly routine and involved finding someone a missing prop or getting them tape, paint, or glue. The animators were a very self-sufficient bunch, used to working long hours on their own.
One night I headed to the Roulette Wheel set, the one used for the final confrontation between Jack and Oogie-Boogie. It occupied one of the larger stages in the complex. The exact dimensions escape me, but about half the set lived on a couple pieces of plywood whose length and width exceeded that of Malibu bedroom.
Which turned out to be an appropriate comparison.
Perhaps now would be a good time to explain the physical rigors of stop-motion animation. Anyone trained in the artform has to be in good shape. I’ve never seen a fat animator.
Okay, that’s not true. I’ve seen plenty of fat animators. They sit on their behinds and push a mouse, pencil, or joystick around and make pretty pictures on a computer monitor.
The qualification is I’ve never seen a fat stop-motion animator.
One of the animators would rise every morning at 6am and do an hour of plyometrics before coming into work. Another one studied martial arts. One of them, an artist from Boston, had to be one of the most athletic people I’d ever met. Had he not gone into animation, I believe he could have played baseball, golf, or ice hockey at a professional level.
All this cardio exercise might excuse me for not paying enough attention to the heavy breathing I heard coming from the roulette wheel set. The presence of two sets of rhythmic respiration triggered common sense, or I’d have walked into quite a performance. Just before I yanked back the black curtains which surrounded all the stages, I withdrew my hand.
Not quite quickly enough.
Panting Occupant: “Anyone out there?”
Me: “Uh. No?”
Occupant: “Is anyone out there?”
Me: “I’ll come back later.”
Occupant: “I don’t need anything.”
Me: “Evidently.”
Occupant: “What was that?”
Me: “I’ll go check on the Santa Sleigh flying rig.”
Several animators were left wondering if production forgot about them that evening. I fled the scene and skipped a few stages, hoping that the independent buggers could get along without someone to fetch them one inch white camera tape for a night.
For a week I avoided the couple I speculated occupied Motel Oogie-Boogie that evening. Not easy to do in a facility with 100 workers, all of whom knew each other down to their personal sexual assignations.
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