Chevy. Like a rock. A lightweight plaster rock, anyway, at least according to a nosy ironworker who was fooled by a fake construction site built recently by Santa Monica’s Plum Productions for a Silverado truck shoot in San Diego.
Crashing the set with policemen in tow, the ironworker wondered aloud where they could have gotten so much iron without his hearing about it, and how many scabs they must have employed for the structure to have progressed so quickly in the course of a single weekend. “We let him kick our ‘steel’ girders,” recalls Sean Hargreaves, production designer on the Eric Saarinen-directed spot from Campbell-Ewald. “They were actually wood, made to look like steel girders, with hollow-base pillars. We’d dug a 30-by-30-[foot] pit and put in water and machines and surrounded them with false caissons. We were reproducing the controlled chaos of a construction site. I guess the [ironworker’s] comments were a great critique of what we’d done.” Call the technique trompe l’union.
The would-be shop-closer wasn’t alone in being deceived. Located in the foundation of a future parking structure at the Padres’ Petco Park, the set was surrounded by actual buildings-in-progress going up at an embarrassingly leisurely pace. One neighbor, consulting a Webcam view of Plum’s work, offered some constructive construction criticism of what he took to be their tragically misbegotten use of materials. The city of San Diego reported calls of congratulations for the speed of the project, says executive producer Shelby Sexton. “Now that’s our tax dollars at work!” they raved.
Strike While the Faux Iron Is Hot
