PAGE 19 - PuppetMuseum.com
Transcription
PAGE 19 - PuppetMuseum.com
I f someone had told us six months or a year ago that we would have our first major film out, our first kid’s book out as well as Portland Oregon’s first Puppet Museum and miniature performing arts center, I would have said that they were stark raving mad, and they’d eaten the wrong part of the mushroom from Alice in Wonderland. Yet, here we are. And HOW we got to where we are today is our story. ••• One of the things people always ask me is “How did you get started in puppetry?” Well, I crawled under the stage of a puppet theater in Germany when I was about seven, and the puppeteer didn’t kick me out, but let me watch the show from inside the stage. This sparked my Mom, who is a very creative actress and artist in her own right to start the Castle of Tiny Children, a performing troupe at the military base where we were stationed in Germany. Using Pelham Puppets and play books bought at the military store, we began performing on the base and in the area surrounding it. supplied the recorded voices and the music was taken off my folks original classical records. Enter Marty In the mid ‘70s I met Marty, and that’s when his involvement with puppetry began. He brought a technical knowledge of building to the puppets and stages, and as he says, “My best work is always covered up.” Moving mouths and blinking eyes, stages made of plastic pipe that knocked down to fit in the back of a Volvo Station Wagon–these are all Marty’s doing. (Much of his work is chronicled in the “Workshop” section of our website www. puppetmuseum.com. This is a five year accounting of our building and performing - a Blog before they were even invented.) Returning stateside, I continued doing puppetry until I was in High School, and it wasn’t “cool” anymore. Finding a Name and a Style But needing money for the senior prom (our family was not doing financially well at the time), my high school art and drama teachers suggested I take up puppetry again since there wasn’t anything like it in Port Angles, Washington, when I was 17. My dad and mom helped me put the theater together and my sister-in-law helped me with the voices, all recorded on a old Wollensak tape deck. When we moved to Beaverton, Oregon the next year, I advertised for birthday parties under the name of Olde World Children’s Theater, and was hired by the Beaverton Mall to do holiday shows. The mall folks though the name was misleading since I was performing with puppets, so I changed it to Olde World Puppet Theatre, and my sister did the original graphics for the new name on business cards and fliers. I have always been drawn to the fantasy realm of literature and read Lord of the Rings almost yearly when I was younger so it seemed to fit into the puppet theater. I wrote 12 interlocking original plays in the fantasy theme for the theater; my family Steve Overton and Marty Richmond PAGE 19 We moved to Hawaii, opening a theater there, but after a year returned to the mainland, moving to Pacifica in the San Francisco Bay Area. Thus started the California years, probably the most formative years of our lives and in the life of the Olde World Puppet Theatre. Early Influences We got to know the members of what we like to call the California puppetry “Mafia”: First we met Frank Paris at a puppetry convention, who in turn introduced us to Bob Baker, Sky HighChief, René and Tony Urbano. We also had the chance to meet other superstars of the puppetry world, such as Bil Baird, and Shari Lewis. Knowing and working with these major artists opened up a whole new world of puppetry– to vaudeville, cabaret and standup improv, quite different from my medieval and renaissance puppetry. I worked with René on his show for Knott’s Berry Farm; met Shari Lewis at Disneyland and received the gift of a Lambchop hand puppet; collaborated with Frank Paris on a number of projects, including his work on Madame for Wayland Flowers (we refurbished her wig and put the stars in her eyes, later going to see Wayland perform at a local LA nightclub.) Marty and I lived in San Francisco, but went down to visit Frank in Los Angeles over and over. I was in my really early 20’s and became the darling of the California marionette artists. They were very influential and weren’t shy in any way; all of them were looking to preserve the art of marionette performing. They told me that first of all I built really ugly females, and second of all, I was lazy. Sure, I was a good artist and a good sculptor, but if I would just take more time, maybe my puppets wouldn’t look like they were costumed in ‘50s ball gowns that were recycled from my mom’s closet. I took their advice, and my costumes have become one of my trademarks, both for their elaborate nature and the attention paid to their detail. People began recognizing us as puppet curators, and other puppeteers were not afraid to send us their puppets, knowing that they would be well cared for as well as being lovingly displayed. We’re proud of breathing life into our exhibits, for after all, the skill of a puppeteer is to create the illusion of life in a puppet, and we brought that to our displays as well. This was followed by displays for a P of A regional as well as national festivals. In the Movies Living in California led to some work in the movies as well. George Lucas was doing special effects for a Blake Edwards movie called Skin Deep with John Ritter. My agent at the time called me and said that they needed a puppeteer. I went up and interviewed for the position and got the job. It turned out that they also wanted to consult with me as well, since they were building a very special type of puppet for the movie. What they wanted was a glow-in-the-dark light saber prophylactic for John Ritter to use in a scene in the movie. It was to be used in a Busby Berkeley type number in the film. I helped them design and build the “puppet” and also helped direct the scene. To this day, anyone who remembers seeing the film remembers little or nothing about it except for that scene. Kind of off the wall for a children’s puppeteer. We were featured on some local TV shows including Evening Magazine as well as some local cable access shows. We later found out that one set of shows we did were sold to a foreign network and were seen across Canada. Coming Back Home to Oregon Steve in his early 20’s This was when Marty and I took the time and learned the Neoprene casting technique from Frank and Bob Baker. To this day, we still cast most of our heads, hands and feet and sometimes torsos out of this material. Puppet parts we made from Neoprene in the ‘80s still look like the day we first made them and are just as strong. ••• During our 10 years in California, we were members of the San Francisco Bay Area Puppeteers Guild, where we started a program for teachers, librarians, mall event directors and others interested in puppetry to come and meet puppeteers and to see just what their shows were like. We opened our first indoor theater in Pacifica in the old firehouse. We rashly promised a new show every six weeks (a goal we met for an entire season) as well as performing in Ghiradelli Square in the heart of San Francisco. We were also Macy’s puppet company performing at their 11 Bay Area stores setting up our shows surrounded by racks of pants, women’s scarves, kids shoes or housewares. Exhibit Curators We also started doing exhibits for various clients, including the San PAGE 20 Mateo County Fair. They had a lot of space to fill, and they wanted lots of puppets. Our signs included documentation about the puppets to give the visitors a better idea of what they were viewing. In 1992, we relocated back to Portland. Both of our families were living here by now, so it was a giant family reunion. We almost immediately opened yet another puppet theater, this one at Mall 205. We were placed in a vacant store, of which they had several, and were sponsored by the Mall Merchant’s Association to draw visitors into the mall. Every time they signed a lease for our store, we moved down the mall into another one. We were doing shows every other weekend along with displays surrounding the audience. Finally, a new mall manager was hired and we were no longer in their plans, so we moved across Portland to the Jantzen Beach Mall and kept doing our series, The Tales of Belvuria, sometimes in the middle of the mall, and sometimes in yet another empty store. Each of the tales stands alone and tells a bit about life in Belvuria, but all of them feature the same cast of characters, off on a new adventure. We also continued doing the traditional puppetry events like elementary schools, birthday parties, church suppers, holiday bazaars, special events, and grand openings. “Puppet It All...” In 1996, Portland had a flood. The rivers rose well above their banks causing water havoc all around downtown. One of the places hardest hit was the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, or OMSI as it is affectionately known here in Portland. Although it was housed in a comparatively new building, it had been built over an old electric generating plant, whose basements had never been entirely cleaned out. The resulting mix of flood water, old oil and goo fouled the entire first floor of the museum creating a hazmat situation, and they had to close for several weeks. To bring visitors back after their reopening, we were contracted by OMSI to stage a huge puppet extravaganza called The Incredible, Fascinating Wonderful World of Puppets. They gave us their largest exhibit hall, along with all of the hallways and corridors in the building and said “Puppet it ALL” So, we did! Included were three months of performances by puppeteers from all over the United States in their auditorium, along with lectures and demonstrations. Plus, they were all paid their full rack rate, so it was a real boost to the local puppet economy. It was the largest puppet event ever held on the west coast, drawing some 70,000 visitors at a time when OMSI sorely needed them. Perseus all over the shop This was followed by a similar, albeit smaller event at the Cannon Beach Historical Society, on the Oregon Coast, called The Magic World of Puppets. The focus here was on the puppets of the Oregon coast, and it featured shows and displays as well. Puppetry On the Web Around this same time, we started www.puppetmuseum.com, pioneering puppetry on the Worldwide Web. Over the last 13 years, the web site has grown to be one of the largest puppet websites in the world with several hundred pages and visitors from over 100 countries. An early feature was a week-by-week account of activity in our shop, starting in early 2001 and ending in early 2007. It was a blog before they were even invented. There are many pages devoted to plaster casting and working with Neoprene for those who are interested, as well as moving eye and mouth mechanisms. Just click on the “Workshop” tab on the top of the main page. Marty Richmond & Bill Holznagel mixing plaster There are also lots of pictures of exhibits we have done, especially for Tears of Joy Theatre at their performing space in downtown Portland at the Winningstad Theatre as well as at the Furstenburg Center in Vancouver, Washington. Collaborations Here in Portland, we also began building puppets for commercial clients like Nike, Barq’s Root Beer, and the puppets for Walt Disney World’s Hunchback of Notre Dame stage show that was seen by over 21 million people during its seven year run. When we first located back here in Portland, the late Janet Bradley was a little wary of us, afraid that we were going to steal business away from her theater, Tears of Joy. Over time she came to realize that we weren’t going after the same clientele at all; at first a tentative truce was established, followed by a friendship that lasted until her death. We were jointly responsible in holding up the Columbia Association of Puppeteers (CAP), the local P of A guild, swapping the President, Vice President, Secretary, and Treasurer positions at times when no one else wanted to hold them. The friendship led to our building the puppets for their show, The Adventures of Perseus, which is being featured again this winter as part of their family series in downtown Portland. We had to step down from the CAP when we started working on our first movie, Witch Key, a Prince’s Adventure, for we knew that it would be a challenging project and we would have to devote all of our energies to it. Our last gift to CAP was to shut down production on our movie for three months and devote all of our time to CAPs adult Cabaret, Diamonds to Duct Tape - a part of the Northwest Region’s Rolling Regional Festival. Here in our studio, we laid out the stage floor exactly like it was at the performing venue so that the acts could rehearse their segments. We also Lots of Perseus Neoprene parts ready for painting planned the lighting and special effects that accompanied each of the acts. The cabaret was an overwhelming success and it raised quite a bit of money for the CAP scholarship fund. Making Movies of Our Own Why did we decide to film one of our traveling shows as a DVD movie? Well, for a long time, we tried to interest major studio releasing organizations to bankroll our efforts to bring one of our stories to DVD, but to no avail. So, we decided to do it ourselves. Persons of influence in the media told us that if anyone was going to front us the money to proceed, we would have to invest some of our own money to show that we were serious, and to prove that we had the capability to produce a DVD movie. Thus started a four year adventure in filming one of our tales, Witch Key, for release. This wasn’t a film of a staged puppet show, but an actual movie using marionettes as the actors in the story. We began to build new puppets, storyboard the action in the PAGE 21 movie, plan the camera shots, build the sets to fit the puppets, and then film each scene or piece of each scene until it was just how we wanted it to be on the film. Then we took down one set and replaced it with the next one. People who helped us in the project were Steve’s Mom (Bobbi) and Dad (Ken), Dan DeMoy, Jason Ropp –a very skilled marionette and rod puppet animator,and one of the younger puppeteers to whom we had taught the skills of neoprene “Witch Key, a Prince’s Adventure “ casting, computer wizard DVD Cover Geordie Humphrey, and Samantha Anne Maggio, a gift from heaven who has an extreme art background and who dressed the sets to perfection. Enchantra’s front garden set for the Witch Key DVD, One of the difficulties of making the movie was the limited ceiling height in our studio. Since we were working with marionettes and their strings, we had to be suspended over the sets to manipulate the puppets, and the ceiling was so low that we had to crouch on the bridges to perform. Once the movie was finished, we sent it off to our media contacts and found all the doors were locked and bolted. The earlier expressions of interest had turned to dust. We also found out that the music rights that we had performed under as a traveling marionette company were not valid for use in making a DVD movie, and the music owners wanted extortionate amounts of money for their use in this way. One of the music owners wanted $7.00 per DVD for the music rights to 11 minutes of music. So, yet another roadblock. Since the music and dialogue had long since been mixed together, the only thing we could do was to find new music and re-record the vocal soundtrack, and mix it all together to replace what we already had. PAGE 22 Since most of the music we have used over the years is classical, often a child’s first introduction to it, we went searching for free classical music on the web. We found a wonderful resource in www.musopen.org, which has a great repertoire of classical selections with no copyright restrictions or royalties to pay. Just download your favorites and they’re yours to use in any project you may be working on. In most cases, the overall quality is really hard to tell from other more famous orchestras. We used local actors and actresses from here in Portland, and by listening to the old soundtrack we were able to match the dialogue to fit the old one. We were also able to fit in a few new lines which helped to explain the story a little better. Then we went into the recording studio and recorded the new voice track which we married to the existing film. Although the new voices and music took a bit of getting used to, the new music propels the story along in a much better way and we’re really pleased with the results. We were able to release the film independently last summer. It is available for purchase on our web site, www.belvuria.com, at the P of A book store and for rental or purchase at www.amazon.com. Opening the Museum Once we had finished the movie, we were left with an empty studio, and we decided that it was time to implement a life long dream of ours and open Ping Pong’s Pint Size Puppet Museum. The room is only 16 x 32 feet big, so each exhibit is pint size, but so far each has had over 100 puppets on display. We planned each exhibit to last two months, since we didn’t have glass cases to house them all, and we were concerned about light fading the costumes of the puppets, if they were on display for too long. We discovered that most visitors to the museum expected that there would also be puppet shows as well, and since we happened to have a nice-sized back yard, we turned it into a performance garden to hold about 50 people at a time. Here in Oregon that space can only be used some of the year, before it gets too wet and cold. So, in the winter months (i.e. October to June) the performances are held inside the museum itself, with seating for about 25-30 people. So far, shows from Jason Ropp’s Dragon Theater Puppets, Tendrak Theatre, The Olde World Puppet Theatre and Emily Alexander have been presented. We opened the museum in May, 2012. It is open four days a week, Thursday through Sunday from 2:00 - 8:00 pm. The highlights of the Olde World building with Puppet Museum first exhibit, Stars signs in place. of Stage & Screen included the first puppets (built by Frank Paris) ever seen on the Howdy Doody Show, a lighting double of Topo Gigio, the Lambchop hand puppet that was given to us by Shari Lewis, and an original Will Vinton diorama. There was also movie memorabilia like the original program from the Dark Crystal, girls to read about another little girl who took responsibility of her own and meet the challenges that were put in front of her as she went on her own adventure. I did a part of a chapter a day and sent it over to Marty to edit, which he did and then sent it back to me. This process helped me set out a clearer version of the story. The book ended up being much more elaborate than the original play, with many more characters than what we could perform live in a half hour. “Nuts about Nutcracker” exhibit - Ping Ping’s Pint Size Puppet Museum 2012 and the first Miss Piggy and Kermit the Frog hand puppets ever produced as toys, as well as some larger puppets that we built here for other companies that were seen on local Portland Stage. This exhibit was extremely popular among seniors and people in their fifties because we took them back to their childhoods. The next exhibit was Favorite Fairy Tales, where we enchanted the building with props and sets from Witch Key and kids had to look around bushes and fountains and waterfalls and peek through trees to find dragons, and witches and even the puppets from Tears of Joy’s Perseus. So it was a really fun exhibit for the little kids. It also included puppets by Albrecht Roser and early Steiff hand puppets. Puppets from our first book and movie, including Enchantra the Witch were there as well. She’s a collector of fairy tale memorabilia, and the rafters of her house are lined with her collection. Enchantra’s Fairy Tale Challenge was a big hit with kids and adults alike. They had to guess the 12 fairy tales depicted in miniature on the museum wall, with prizes awarded to those who could guess them all. Legends of the Exotic East came next. It featured puppets from Cambodia, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Myanmar (Burma), Nepal, and Vietnam. We set up QR Codes so that you could see 12 examples of the exhibits come to life on the screen of your Internet-capable cell phone. We believe we are one of the first museums anywhere to offer this special capability. A Book We also found time to write a book featuring one of our other Tales of Belvuria. The Enchanted Ring, A Princess’s Adventure was the retelling of a show of ours that we used to perform for little girl’s birthday parties. Our movie, Witch Key, a Princes’ Adventure, focused on the Prince of Belvuria, so we figured that we should also have something for little girls as well. Like JK Rowling, Ursula LaGuinn, Terry Pratchett, and Lloyd Alexander’s series for young readers, we decided to set up the book at third and fourth grade reading level, because we figured that that was where they could begin to get into adventure. We shot photos of the puppets that were in the stage show in sets from the old live shows. This gave the book the same feel as the movie. The newer characters that were in the book but not in the original story–like the Pixies who think they’re all little pirates and the fairies who think they’re all Lord of the Rings elves, and the Witches who are all extremely crazy– I had to do in paintings to match the other characters. The printed version of the book is available as an 86 page laser-printed, spiral-bound edition on our website. Kindle, Nook and other e-book and .pdf download versions are available. A free sample chapter as well as ordering information are available at: www.belvuria. com. We are also lurching our way forward into social media where Olde World Puppet Theatre Studios is on Facebook, and www.youtube/user/pingpong97202 is our YouTube address, and our websites are www.belvuria.com and www.puppetmuseum. com. ••• Changes We’ve seen the face of puppetry change a lot over the past 30 years. When we began there was no Internet, no YouTube, no Facebook, no e-mail, no DVD’s and digital photography was still over the horizon. To contact clients, letters were written and mailed; if photos were included, film was first taken down to the local kiosk for developing and printing (with most pictures thrown away as unusable). Make your own DVD or movie on a desktop computer? Surely you jest -- You hired people with cameras and editing equipment to film your performances and paid them a lot of money to put them on VHS tapes. With all these changes, the only constant has been the puppets themselves. They still hang around patiently waiting for their time on stage – ready to delight and amaze children of all ages. I decided to write the book as if it was the screenplay of our next movie. In the original story, the little Princess sat in her ivory tower as the Knight went off to rescue her favorite toy that had been stolen by the Witch. However, in the book, she straps on a set of her brother’s armor and goes with the Knight for an adventure all her own. Since this is the age of the girl power story, I thought that the plot twist would empower little PAGE 23 OLDE WORLD PUPPET THEATRE Scenes from their video, “Witch Key, a Prince’s Tale” Left: Sterling and Prince Aaron in the garden Charlemagne the Dragon has Prince Aaron in a cage Enchantra, the Witch Scenes from the shop. Olde World worked with Tears of Joy (also in Portland) to create puppets for the TOJ production of “The Adventures of Perseus.”