This Art’s in Your Face--and Hair

Deana Sterr and her significant other had just slipped into their hot tub when the phone rang. On the line were the people who attend to the needs--and whims--of a music superstar who will be nameless.

As unlikely as it sounds, Sterr is in the confetti business. Indeed, she and her business partner, Clark Bason, recently received a patent for an aerodynamically superior confetti, one of many patents they have been awarded since they started their Van Nuys company, Artistry in Motion.

As the rock star’s people explained, His Musicalness was not happy with the shape of the confetti that Sterr and Bason had delivered. Like the rock divas who insist on having nothing but green M&Ms; backstage, this rocker had decided that the confetti to be shot out of on-stage blasters during his upcoming tour must be rectangular, not square.

“ ‘Tis the season for confetti emergencies--in a big way,” says Bason, who met Sterr when both were working on the 1984 World’s Fair in New Orleans, she as director of entertainment, he organizing cultural events.

Ever since, their professional lives have been full of tissue-paper and PVC-film butterflies, pixie dust and confetti in a multitude of shapes and colors.

“We don’t stock tons of confetti,” they say, explaining that theirs is a custom business that works with clients to create spectacular effects in a deceptively simple medium. Most of their business comes from the entertainment industry. Dressed in evening gown and tux, they have done the Oscars, the Emmys and the Grammys, making sure their effects went off without a hitch.

They provided the simulated blizzard for the Christmas show that recently opened at Universal Studios, and the dogwood petals that appear in the opening of the movie “Pleasantville.” They have also floated paper for commercial clients such as Xerox.

Their first big project involved leaves. An entertainment company that writes nondisclosure of its name into its contracts with people like Sterr and Bason wanted cascading leaves for a live show based on one of its films.

“It was the leaf that launched the company,” recalls Sterr. To find out what different leaves looked like and how they would behave, she says, “We walked around my neighborhood, pulling leaves off trees.”

Entertainers, not physics majors, Sterr and Bason discovered the aerodynamic properties of different shapes, Bason recalls, “by throwing leaves off Deana’s coffee table.” (Making sure their confetti falls the way they want it to is now the special responsibility of their technical director, shop supervisor and “boy genius” Noah Winter.)

The resultant leaf-shaped confetti was a big hit with the children who saw the show, they say, because the paper leaves not only looked lovely floating through the air, they also functioned as souvenirs that the kids could take home. Confetti shaped like oak, willow and sycamore leaves has become part of the repertoire of shapes they offer, along with doves, bells, rose petals and baseball bats. The company can also provide showers of confetti shaped like footballs in team colors, as it has for the Super Bowl.

With the millennium only weeks away, the confetti business is booming, the partners say. Confetti says celebration as surely as champagne does. On a recent afternoon, Sterr and Bason fielded calls from, among others, Cirque du Soleil, Metallica, and Barbra Streisand’s, Bette Midler’s, John Mellencamp’s and Rod Stewart’s “people.” The organizers of the Lincoln Memorial millennium celebration also checked in. Artistry in Motion will be blasting confetti 75 feet into the air during that extravaganza in the nation’s capital.

“Each shape has its own choreography through the air,” Bason says of confetti, an Italian word that means sweetmeats. Leaves and circles float, and butterflies flitter. The partners’ recent patent was for confetti with a hole in the middle, which causes it to drop slowly or gently rock, they explain.

Although confetti is a decidedly low-tech special effect, it is an especially resonant one, they argue. Enough pixie dust, properly thrown and lighted, can make a stage, or a wedding party, seem to be aglitter with a million fireflies.

“At the sight of confetti, you’re a child again,” says Bason.

As someone who has produced theater, he believes confetti “breaks the fourth wall” between performers and an audience. “You actually become part of the scene, you become part of the action.”

Bason says Van Nuys is the perfect place for a business like theirs that serves the industry--he calls it “Hollywood’s backyard.”

Purveying confetti is an upbeat profession, says Sterr, just before she showers the nearest columnist with a handful of pixie dust. “People ask us, ‘Are you guys in a cult? You’re always so happy.’ ”

Sterr says she and Bason are upbeat because their clients are. “People don’t call us grumbling, they don’t call us sad, and we kind of get to play with them.”

But it’s not all fun and games. Sterr’s boyfriend, Kerry Millerick, a writer, producer and director who often helps with projects, likes to say: “If at first you don’t succeed, don’t take up skydiving. It’s the same with confetti.”

Bason points out that Ricky Martin “loves confetti.” But when Martin comes to the moment in his act when he expects white and turquoise circles to erupt on stage, they better erupt and float just right, streamers and all.