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We had paint crews in several locations in Detroit while working on the movie, 8 Mile staring Eminem.

During the time the Detroit Stamping Plant was being prepped for filming, I was working in a trailer park located on 8 Mile Road, which was the dividing line of the have’s from the have-nots. One of my co-workers told me that he thought I would enjoy painting it. Unfortunately, the only time I saw the location was the time we stopped by the plant at the end of a work day to pick up the crew working there.

I sat in the back seat of our crew cab and did the pen & ink sketch in the few minutes it took the crew to load their tools and equipment. I did the watercolor from memory when we returned to our hotel.

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I had been drawing movie and television sets, props and people for the Hollywood Backlots since 1977. However, it wasn’t until September 2001 when I did my first watercolor painting. I remember the date well because I was to have taken a flight out of Los Angeles destined for Detroit in mid September of 2001. I was to working on the Eminem movie, 8 mile.

As you know, the tradgady of 9-11 happened a few days earlier, and all commercial flights in the U.S. were grounded. When we finally were able to fly out of LAX and arrived in Detroit, my first location to paint was a laundry mat near my hotel. I was there with several coworkers washing clothes.

I stepped outside and did this painting while standing up and holding my paints and easel in my left hand while sketching and painting with my right.

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Project X seems to have gone to great lengths to kick Battlefield Earth from its bottom ranking. It might be more accurate to say that Project X  lacks what it takes to avoid being tagged as one of the worst movies ever.

According to Wikipedia, the premier source for facts and information:), one of the worst films to appear on-screen was John Travolta’s Battlefield Earth.

I’ve not seen Battlefield Earth, nor Project X, but found it painful to sit through several minutes of trailers of the two Rotten Tomatoes. I imagine Travolta may be happy to see Project X make a public showing, as it seems to have made an effort to knock ‘Earth’ off its throne; or should I say, out of its hole.

Even before I saw the Mercedes in the swimming pool in pre-rehearsals, Project X had the look of a rabid dog that no sane person would want to be in the same room with. I can imagine the pain of sitting in a theater full of…half full of…a handful of…alone, watching a male-adolescent, testosterone-driven, misogynistic plot bark at the moon for over an hour.

But every cloud has a silver lining. I came away from my tour of duty with a handful of lunchtime watercolors.

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In 1885, I worked on an amazing television series produced and directed by Steven Spielberg. The show was ‘Amazing Stories’.  It lasted for only one season; but not because of a lack of viewers.

The opening sequence, which would be considered first-year film school by today’s standards, was ground-breaking at the time.

As I remember it, Spielberg sold the concept of the show based on his name, not on a pilot he had made. Once the television show went into production, each episode was constructed and shot like a feature film. There was always multiple episodes in production; occupying many of the sound stages at Universal Studios. I was a lead painter and usually had 10 – 20 set painters on my crew. When you consider that other paint crews were comparably staffed, Amazing Stories employed a disproportionate number of local #729 members.

When the show was canceled, rumor had it that it was too expensive for television. My research on IMDB revealed that the show lasted two seasons. However, I’m almost certain that all 24 episodes were shot in one season.

I happened across the series on Netflix this evening. I recall working on a big wooden train in the mill at Universal Studios. I also worked on a living room which had been parted like the red sea by the train.

The train in the painting above, ‘Loco Notion’, is not the one we used for filming. The one shown here is something I painted from a sketch I did in the same year as the launch of Amazing Stories. Whenever a tour tram approached the railroad tracks, the train would come speeding down the rails and stop just short of hitting the tram. The voice of Mr T would shout, “Watch out sucka!”

You can see the entire Amazing Stories series here.