Last-Minute Saves
Phone books piled high on Allen Reid’s kitchen table show that he’s working, searching, scrounging. “Actually, what I’m doing is dog-robbing,” he says. “You never heard of that? Proves you’re not in the Industry. Industry people know what that is.”
Reid is a forager, of sorts. “You put me anywhere, give me a Yellow Pages, and I’ll get what you need. I don’t even have to know what it is. I just need to know what it’s called.”
He’s an independent, someone who finds things for TV and film people who are paid to find them but can’t. He’s a prop man’s prop man, a costumer’s secret consort, a set decorator’s last resort. A guy to call when people with real 9-to-5 jobs have already scoured EBay, swap meets, secondhand stores and still can’t come up with the requisite stuff. He is proudly a part of what he frequently refers to as The Industry--but just barely.
Like thousands in Hollywood who help make films, he’s so far out on the edge that his name will never appear, even in those credits that flash by so briefly, proclaiming the identities of gaffers, best boys, greensmen and caterers attached to a film. Yet he’s a part of Hollywood’s pulse. And that’s enough for him.
Reid does business as “Anything Found Reliably”--a catch-all name that accurately reflects the idiosyncratic nature of his work--and his life.
He gets calls day and night, and almost always last-minute. “You wake up in the morning, and you never know what’s going to happen. It’s a really cool way of life.”
The reason he gets so little lead time on each job, he says, is because “everyone thinks they can find things on their own. They try to do it themselves to save money.” When the clock runs down, and they haven’t found it, he says, they call him, willing to pay his rate, which he won’t discuss. “My rates vary. I can be hired for a half or full day, a week or month. There are different degrees of difficulty for each job and different rates for various media.”
He is neither the biggest nor the best in his business, he tells you. There are dozens of other dog-robbers in town. Many have specialties. He’s partial to military garb and gear. “Medals, badges, guns and stuff. But I’ll find anything you ask me for.”
Not too long ago, there was panic on the set when a prop man--the kind who gets screen credit for his work--was unable to come up with a huge clam shell from which a magnificent sea nymph was supposed to emerge. An emergency call was made to Reid, who produced the humongous shell. From where? “I never tell trade secrets,” he says. “I started with nautical places and worked it from there. People all the time ask me my sources, and I say no.”
In this Industry town, filled with workers paid handsomely (or at least union scale) to bring stories to the big and little screen, people like Reid, with odd lines of ancillary work, get little recognition or thanks. That’s why the satisfaction and pride they evidence in their work is somehow inspiring.
“I’m from an Industry family,” he says. “My mom and at least seven other close relatives were in The Industry.” He says the words as if it were an exclusive club, something you “belong to,” with its own vocabulary and rules--even its own code of dress. “If you see a bunch of industry guys and gals anywhere, you can pick them out. They have a certain demeanor, a certain look, a certain way of wearing the shorts, the T-shirt, the belt, the baseball cap. There’s just a certain way of telling who’s in the business and who isn’t.”
Mike LeVitre is. He’s a sculptor, another unsung toiler who helps make Hollywood tick. He does mostly large-scale works these days, he says, but he can sculpt anything. What some might find weird about his work is that he sculpts mostly in polystyrene foam, otherwise known as Styrofoam. LeVitre makes movie magic by helping carve things like the boat in “Hook,” a full scale replica of the Lincoln Memorial for the movie “Nixon” (“Lincoln’s head was 6 feet tall,” he recalls).
He worked on the Disney TV movie “Cinderella,” which he proudly reports won an Emmy for art direction. “Of course, I was not listed in credits for the film. It runs about 60-40 against credits for people like me,” he says. “We’re in Local 755, which is the plasterers, model makers and sculptors local. We don’t even have a category in the Academy Awards.”
Not that he’s complaining, he quickly adds. But people like him and Reid, who is his friend, do unusual kinds of work that merits recognition sometimes.
“It amazes me that people who drive the honey wagons get credit, and people like me do not,” LeVitre says. “We sculptors provide a lot of the visual entertainment on screen.” (A honey wagon is the truck that carries portable toilets, in case you wanted to know.)
Anticipating Demand
LeVitre has worked on two “Jurassic Park” films (“for those I did mostly rocks and trees”), “The Flintstones,” “Hook,” “Scary Movie”
LeVitre and Reid met about five years ago. “I’d never heard the term ‘dog-robber’ before we met; the term I’d use for him is ‘prop locator,’” LeVitre says. “I know that when people in the industry can’t find something, they often turn to him. He usually can find it, and sometimes when he can’t, he calls me to make it for him.”
And sometimes, Reid tries to prepare in advance for calls he thinks might come. On this day, at his modest tan stucco tract home on the edge of an industrial area in North Hollywood, he is phone-scrounging for leather dye because shoe dye didn’t work on the seven dozen pale leather gun belts he’s bought and stashed in his garage, anticipating a surge in combat films. He wants the belts to be brown and black, ready for the next prop or costume person who needs to deliver and suddenly realizes he or she can’t find them, can’t make them, hasn’t the foggiest idea how to get them to the set on time. So who you gonna call?
Reid says the term “dog-robber” has nothing to do with dogs or robbers, but comes from military lore--he mumbles something abut an aide de camp willing to steal a dog’s dinner to feed his captain. People in the prop and wardrobe industry, phoned at random, say they’d never heard the term until they met Reid.
For a visitor to his home, which is also his office, Reid runs down a list of films, TV shows and photo shoots on which he’s worked, explaining that on most jobs he provides only a very small amount of stuff.
But for “Independence Day,” for instance, he says he “provided the principal military wardrobe for the stars. Will Smith’s flight suit had a patch in the wrong place all through the movie,” he reports, as if he’d committed a crime by putting it there. “With military stuff, you want to be as detailed and correct as possible. They are paying me for my expertise.”
For a TV show called “The Parkers,” he was asked to provide lighted powder compacts like the ones women used in the 1950s. “Believe it or not, they don’t make lighted compacts any more,” Reid says, his expression troubled. He’s recalling the exact call, the frantic voice, the guy who said, “Allen, I don’t care what you gotta do, where you gotta go. I need three lighted compacts by 5 p.m. this afternoon.” Reid proudly says he got them there an hour early.
“I knew someone in the cosmetics business who knew someone else who knew another person. It took a good few phone calls, but I did it.”
He also does conventions and parties, mostly for the entertainment industry. And props for print shoots. And sometimes what he does he considers bizarre.
“Five or six years ago I got a call from Tim Burton’s executive assistant, who said they were doing a combination party--a premiere for ‘Mars Attacks’ combined with his girlfriend’s birthday, and he was announcing his engagement to her. He wanted it really wild. So I got a bunch of dead trees, hung Chinese lanterns from them, had a fountain spewing multicolored water and a hugely oversize French bed--I think we found it at Warner Bros. Everyone wound up having their picture taken on it. Burton said he really liked it.”
Bridging Personal, Professional Life
Reid, 52, seems so sincere, so earnestly in love with what he does, that it’s difficult sometimes for him to separate his personal life from his work. Asked to do the props for a Christmas photo shoot of the “Everybody Loves Raymond” cast--”they wanted a kind of Norman Rockwell Christmas gone awry”--he went to his mother’s house and borrowed her carving knives, platters and an afghan she’d made to make the scene look real.
He has a scrapbook featuring photos of almost everything he’s done. One photo, from People magazine, featured the Taco Bell Chihuahua, who seems to be sitting on grass right in front of the Hollywood sign. Of course, there is no flat patch of grass on the steep scrubby hill on which the sign sits.
“They told me the dog had to be in front of the sign,” Reid says. So he purchased some sod, put it on the roof of his battered truck, sat the dog on top of the truck and parked it so that it looked, in the photo, as if the truck was right below the sign.
“These jobs are brain teasers, like doing puzzles,” he says. “I’m a guy who thinks puzzles are fun.”
