Catering to Hollywood

On a recent episode of Fox’s “Melrose Place,” Rhonda served up a romantic crawfish dinner for two. But when it came time to shoot the scene, there was no crawfish to be found in Los Angeles--so the show had it flown in from New Orleans.

The crawfish may not have been readily available, but at least it was authentic, unlike the menu a few years back on “V.” On one episode of that sci-fi series, a character munched on a tarantula. The treat was concocted from chocolate and the ingredients used in Gummi Bear candy.

Clearly, the people responsible for providing television characters their on-screen eats have far more to worry about than the four basic food groups.

“When you get a script and there’s an eating sequence, you have to choreograph it,” says veteran property master Frank C. Irving, who supplies food and other props for “Melrose Place” and has worked on CBS’ “Murder, She Wrote” and numerous television films and miniseries. “The food has to look pretty, not conflicting with the color of the dishes or the actors’ wardrobes. Above all, you have to make it very edible. If it doesn’t taste good, an actor can make life miserable for you.”

To forestall such problems, Irving coordinates with set decorating and wardrobe personnel, and asks cast members their particular likes and dislikes, whether they are vegetarians or on special diets, and what foods give them digestive trouble. A hamburger called for in a script might be replaced by a veggie burger, while someone who detests a scene’s lemon meringue pie could enjoy a yellow-colored vanilla pudding.

The job is especially challenging for extravagant repasts, such as one for the miniseries “People Like Us,” supervised by property master Ron Greenwood and crafts servicer Rico Lozier, who have since formed a prop-food company called Scene Cuisine.

“When you do a show about millionaires, the food has to be the best,” Greenwood says. “There was a scene with 30 actors, so 30 individual beef Wellingtons had to be designed, and then replaced (for filming) the next day--otherwise they’d have looked like hockey pucks. We had a chef from Patina and three helpers, two stoves and a refrigerator big enough for four people on the set, all for four or five minutes on camera.”

Far less formal settings can still create culinary headaches. Carving a turkey at Thanksgiving, for example, calls for multiple, intact birds for multiple takes, with the prop master guessing in advance just how many may be needed.

For period projects, Irving researches the table settings and foods of the time. Vegetables were of a different size in the 1860s, for instance, while diets earlier in this century were more beef- and starch-filled. And for up-to-the-minute dining, a property master must be familiar with the fare at trendy industry-popular restaurants that a producer or director may wish emulated.

As for even more special requests, chocolate can work wonders if characters are required to consume insects or other creepy crawlers, report Scene Cuisine’s Greenwood and Lozier, who keep on hand a prop-food recipe book for science fiction, fantasy or comedy projects. “You’d use dark chocolate for the Madagascar hissing cockroach,” says Greenwood.

On “The Nutt House” series, characters chewed on realistic-looking chocolate nails and pencils, the latter also utilizing hardened cake frosting and mounted on real erasers. And in the aforementioned scene from “V,” Lozier remembers, “First they showed a real tarantula, but the one eaten had a chocolate body for firmness with Gummi Bear-legs for wiggliness.”

But even the most conventional prop food is not always meant to be eaten. When food is relegated to the background of a scene, prop houses or studio prop departments can supply crates of ripe but fake fruits and vegetables, bins of fresh fake fish, dozens of Jewish and Italian deli products, all manner of desserts, even sides of beef or entire cows or pigs, depending on the particular set.

“Let’s say you have a fishmarket set,” says Kathy Vasila, assistant general manager of the Hand Prop Room. “You don’t need to have real fish. If you’re going to use the set for a few days, the lights would ruin them.”

Her company manufactures food props on its premises and rents out millions of props to productions such as Fox’s “In Living Color” and “Beverly Hills, 90210,” CBS’ “Major Dad” and NBC’s “L.A. Law.”

Irving, for one, makes use of Hand Prop Room wares. But when it comes to the real thing, he says, “When I ‘prop’ a show, I prop it like you would give a party: You want to have food that’s good and will never run out.”