Making Season Bright--All Year
When Debi Staron sees a Christmas-themed movie like “The Ref,” she has trouble concentrating on the story or performances. Instead, the 42-year-old former actress finds herself scrutinizing the screen for crooked wreathes and badly hung tinsel.
“I have a tendency to want to go over and fix it,” Staron said with a chuckle.
Christmas perfectionism is an occupational hazard for Staron, who, with partners Beth Anderson and Bob Pranga, will open an all-Christmas prop house in Burbank later this month. .
Dr. Christmas Rents has already provided chichi ornaments, fake snow and other Christmas trappings for a mattress commercial, an L.L. Bean catalog and the cover of Barbra Streisand’s upcoming CD.
Stocked with thousands of designer ornaments, animatronic elves, Victorian-style Christmas angels, remote-controlled snow machines and neon reindeer, the Burbank shop is part of a small but bustling industry that allows movies, television and magazines to simulate Christmas year-round.
On the Westside, the Almost Christmas Prop Shop has been all Santa all the time since 1992. A dozen other studios and property houses in the Los Angeles area keep Christmas props on hand, specializing in a holiday that is both heart-tugging and glittery--two things that Hollywood loves.
“It’s a huge industry,” Catherine Hale, 50, said of show business yuletide. The owner of Almost Christmas, she said her rentals of flickering lights and the rest bring in about $500,000 annually.
Such prop houses serve a real need, said veteran set decorator Bill Reinert of Granada Hills.
“It’s much easier now to do Christmas in July,” he said, recalling when Christmas decorations were readily available only from November through January.
“It’s really a specialized entity, and when you need it, you need it fast,” he said.
Reinert, who has given a Christmas glow to dozens of TV shows and movies, remembers one particularly tough shoot.
During the 1970s, when “National Lampoon’s Animal House” was being shot in Eugene, Ore., the script called for decking the Delta House halls with boughs of holly. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the Christmas season, and there wasn’t a wreath or Christmas ball to be found in any store in town.
“We ended up renting them from people’s houses,” Reinert recalled, adding that the holiday scenes, with their hard-won Christmas trees and lights, were ultimately cut out of the film.
Doug Randall, 40, is a property master in Santa Clarita, an area with a growing industry presence. He owns The Company, a cooperative of 15 firms that provides a full range of art department services, including prop rentals. Hale has set up an Almost Christmas satellite at The Company.
According to Randall, Christmas always presents a challenge for prop masters: “To get all the product you need can be the ultimate scavenger hunt.”
September is the beginning of television’s big season for shooting holiday episodes aired in December. Before the all-Christmas prop houses appeared, he said, you had to move quickly or all the local snow machines and artificial poinsettias would have been snapped up.
At Dr. Christmas Rents, where a 6- to 8-foot tree with lights and ornaments rents for $200 to $1,250 a week, the Christmas goodies are displayed in a series of theme rooms.
The Good Glass Room is filled with high-end glass ornaments by Christopher Radko, Polonaise and other makers of Christmas collectibles. There are Harry Potter ornaments and glass geckos wearing Santa Claus hats. The Angel Grotto includes African American seraphs.
Occasionally an art director is looking for an object to abuse. Staron said she keeps some battered stock on hand to oblige clients like the one who wanted an elf to run over with a sport utility vehicle.
“We provide anything,” she said.
As to the season’s eternal appeal, Hale speculated that it is the same in Hollywood as it is in her native Tennessee: “Everybody feels a little lighter, a little brighter, a little cheerier.”
Staron said her heightened Christmas consciousness makes her sensitive to off-screen holiday irregularities as well. She said she and her business partner often joke about forming a Christmas police squad. Their mission: to approach post-holiday procrastinators and say, “Sir, it’s May. You can take your lights down now.”
