Floral FX Wizardry

When a movie is set in, say, a tropical rain forest but the action has to be shot at a studio, veteran greensman Dan Needham gets called in to create an instant jungle. Needham, co-owner of Green Set in North Hollywood, fashions realistic and fantasy landscapes using live and artificial flora. Give him a sound stage or an empty lot, and he’ll turn it into a rose garden, cornfield, desert--whatever is needed for a film, TV show, music video, ad or special event. He’ll wire fake azaleas to waxleaf privet, disguise anachronistic telephone poles with faux bark, even attach phony fall foliage to bare branches. “With enough money and time,” Needham says, “we can make anything happen.”

Part garden designers, part prop artists, Needham and his wife and business partner, Debby, operate in the shadow of monster electrical towers on 13 acres leased cheaply from Los Angeles’ Department of Water and Power. There they grow everything from sod and daisies to cacti and palms in lightweight containers that are portable and easily rented to set designers and party planners. “You name it, we’ve got it,” Needham says. “Just the other day, I shipped a bunch of dandelion weeds to New York. I even rake dead leaves and keep ‘em in bags just in case.”

Needham also stocks plenty of props: silk flowers, fiberglass statuary, plastic seaweed, hay bales made of raffia-covered cardboard boxes and at least one foam broccoli floret the size of a small sofa.

The inventory comes in handy on jobs as diverse as TV’s “Dharma & Greg” (a community garden for one episode), the action feature “Con Air” (the crash site), ads for Diesel shoes (a 10-foot-tall topiary cowboy boot), Barbra Streisand’s wedding and Frank Sinatra’s funeral. Regardless of the project, though, success always boils down to producing a seamless illusion. “When someone looks at something we’ve done and thinks it’s real,” Needham says, “that’s my reward.”