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- [Ross] When you're watching a television show
or a movie, and you see an actor
holding a magazine, or a book, or a letter,
a lot of what you're seeing on the screen
was custom-made by people like me.
- Let me see their paperwork.
- If I've done my job right
in creating that piece of paper,
the possibilities are literally endless.
I mean, one single piece of paper can communicate
a huge amount in telling the audience
about the character or about the scene.
It's figuring out how this thing
can best do its job of being a part of the story.
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My name is Ross MacDonald, and I create paper props
for movies and television.
When I was a kid, I was obsessed with comics,
was obsessed with paper and illustration,
and really loved that world that I was reading
or seeing on paper.
I've done a little bit of everything.
For years, I worked as a magazine
and newspaper illustrator, book illustrator.
That eventually led me into making props.
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For the last 25 years, I've made tens of thousands
of paper props for close to 50 television shows and movies.
My first major motion picture was "Baby's Day Out,"
and I was hired, basically, as an illustrator
to illustrate a faux 1930's children's book.
- [Man] Take the book.
- I've done literally tens of thousands
of props for all five seasons of "Boardwalk Empire."
I did the Pawnee Charter for an episode
of "Parks and Recreation."
For "Joy," I did all of the patents
for the mops that we see.
For "Hateful Eight," I did the Red Apple Tobacco tin.
(chatters)
Book.
I've designed everything from passports,
and maps, and travel documents, wanted posters,
government forms, FBI reports,
psychiatric files, agent identification folders,
anything that's made of paper,
I made it one time or another.
Part of what you need to figure out
when you're making a paper prop
is the backstory of the piece of paper.
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You don't just take a new book,
and slosh brown ink on it to make it look old.
You gotta figure out how it got worn,
how it got dirty.
The scene might involve an actor
reading three lines out of a letter,
but you have to figure out, how old is it?
What kind of paper is it made out of?
How was the paper made?
Should it be made with carbon paper?
Should it be on onion skin?
Is some guy gonna pull out
a rumpled piece of paper from his pocket,
or is he gonna pull it out of a file folder?
What color paper should it be?
Should it be yellow, should it be white,
should it be ivory-colored?
Who's signing it?
What does their handwriting look like?
What kind of ink are they using when they write it?
What kind of pen are they using?
And then, because no letter is ever three lines,
you have to write the rest of the copy in the letter.
Depending on what I'm making,
a project can take, you know, a day, an hour, weeks, months.
Every page is filled out.
Every book has text on it, and pictures.
Every paper in the file folder
is a real document that's all filled out and created.
For example, for "The Book Of Secrets,"
they said, "Just come up with secrets,"
so I said, "OK, well, let's do Roswell,
"let's do the Kennedy assassination.
"Let's do all these crazy conspiracy theory things."
Then, there was the research into those specific things.
So, you have to find all that,
figure out how to recreate it convincingly.
It was a huge undertaking.
It took about four months to really build that prop,
and it's just communicated in a split second in the scene.
- Let's see here, what do we got here?
- Have you seen the evening paper?
- I have here pieces of paper.
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- There's so many amazing things
that start off with a piece of paper,
and the props that I'm making are all part of that.
Sometimes, when I go to the theater,
I'm so excited, I'm almost shaking,
and it's not because I want to see
the driver's license I made for one of the actors.
It's because I did a tiny bit of work on that movie,
and that's very exciting to me.
In the end, you've produced this thing, which,
you know, you've done your best job of nailing,
getting absolutely right, and, you know, sometimes,
I'm just like, "Wow."
When you see something like that in the final product,
and realize that this thing you worked on
is this huge moment in the story,
that can be just really, really a great feeling.
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