Shooting Peas
“OK, guys, goggles on!” a voice shouts through the dark.
The lights rise on the set, a ‘70s-style dining room, the camera rolls and, crouched in a corner, just out of filming range, Julie Moody stands by with a bowl of peas. At her side, several huge fans begin to whir and almost immediately 40- to 50-mph winds blow toward an actor who is strapped to his chair with duct tape, sitting at a dining room table.
Suddenly, Moody begins throwing peas into the wind. Tiny green projectiles hurtle past the actor. Six peas lodge in his ear, but most blow through the set along with dry cereal, fruit, bits of Styrofoam, newspapers, stuffed animals and other household debris flung by other crew members. Milk sloshes on the table and serving bowls rattle toward the edge. Through it all, the actor calmly eats macaroni and cheese.
“How was work today, honey?” shouts an actress off-camera over the noise.
“Totally crazy!” the actor responds. “It’s so great to be home!”
“Cut!” says the director. Moody, the set’s food stylist, lowers her goggles. She and the other members of the crew look toward the director. A perfect take? The director points to the sloshing milk glass on a replay monitor and frowns. He’d like a less vigorous slosh. And is it possible to get the food to fly more artfully? Word trickles down to the crew. “We need to do it again,” Moody says.
We are on a Van Nuys sound stage where 50 or so cast and crew members have gathered to produce a 30-second commercial for Kraft Velveeta Shells & Cheese. And the scene in question is just three to five seconds of the total commercial. Moody has been at work since 7 a.m. preparing several batches of Kraft macaroni and cheese, as well as peas, carrots and chicken blow-torched to a perfectly golden brown.
Most food stylists, Moody readily admits, do not go around throwing peas in the wind. On the other hand, in her eight years as a free-lance food stylist she has discovered that the job is about more than making food look pretty. At a biker bar outside Barstow she cooked side by side with a pierced and tattooed chef for a T-Fal commercial. For a Fox Sports commercial, shot in downtown Los Angeles, she mixed batter in trash cans (they were the only containers large enough) to create hotcake towers 45 pancakes high. In the backyard of a Hancock Park home for a Kraft American Singles spot, she made cheeseburgers while dressed in full rain gear during a simulated hurricane (“The hamburgers looked perfect,” she says). And at Universal Studios, she blow-torched a 150-pound ostrich for an airline commercial offering bigger and better first-class service. Why an ostrich? “The biggest turkey wasn’t big enough,” she says.
Today, Moody is helping create an indoor tornado--caused by a teen-aged boy who loves his Kraft Velveeta Shells & Cheese so much he inhales his food too quickly and causes, well, a storm. In the commercial, viewers will see the boy with his mother, father, grandfather and baby brother seated for dinner, strapped in their chairs with tape for what apparently is a nightly event. Today’s scene focuses on the father’s reaction alone.
Yesterday, the crew spent 10 hours shooting other scenes for the commercial and Moody went through 101 boxes of Shells & Cheese to get those scenes right (a new serving of Shells & Cheese is presented for virtually every new take).
The trick, Moody explains, is to make the food look good and taste good because the actors actually eat the product on camera.
Throughout the morning, Moody and her assistant, John Childs, run between their prep table and a small kitchen housed in a trailer against one of the studio walls. They fuss over platters of chicken, refill serving bowls with defrosted corn, dab at plates with Q-Tips, wash bowl lids with Windex, dunk pasta shells in hot-water baths for quick reheating and arrange defrosted carrots and baby peas on plates like jewelry displays.
Why frozen vegetables? They retain their bright colors and, because they’re blanched before freezing, they’re safe to eat. Cooking them would only dull their colors.
“We don’t use artificial anything,” Moody says. “We don’t put any weird stuff in.” And the food is actual food. “Truth in advertising is really strong now,” she adds.
By 1 p.m., the actor at the dining room table has consumed portions of several platefuls of Moody’s cooking and the rest of the crew is getting hungry--for anything but macaroni and cheese. The fans start up again and the pea-filled tornado begins once more.
“Cut!” says the director. Everyone pauses. Were the peas artful enough? The director looks happy. It’s a perfect take. And it’s time for a break.
But Moody can’t relax too much. There are scenes to prepare after lunch and final plans to settle for tomorrow’s shoot. Her challenge tomorrow: How to make peas stick to a cat.