there we go hey everybody adam savage here in my cave
i am answering questions from tested patrons and this question comes from wolfsbane films
clearly you make romantic comedies i'm kidding uh wolfbane wolfsbane films wants to know what is one
that joke that joke is kind of the way my brain thinks through jokes it's like what is the thing
that oh a person whose username is wolfsbane films what is the one thing they probably don't make and
then i think romantic comedies but i could be wrong maybe they actually do make them at any
rate enough of explaining the joke because nothing's funnier than an autopsy uh what is
one of the fondest or funniest memories you have from your time at the berkeley repertory theater
do you also have any standout memories from your first year in san francisco um lovely questions
thanks for asking me to think through these things uh yeah i have a lot of amazing memories from my
first year in san francisco i showed up here in august of 1990 low 30 plus years ago now uh fresh
from new york no job no prospects i took a job as a a bicycle delivery guy that lasted one day
that's a story for another time and then i got hired at a multimedia theater extravaganza known
as george coates performance works they had they had taken over the
the theater the unbeknownst to everybody theater that was hidden at 110 mcallister
down on market street and this was this was the the the the cutting edge of of of multimedia
theater george coats performance works was digital projectors 3d projections slide projectors
louvered mirrors and windows and all sorts of amazing theater tricks you
didn't know if you're looking at real people or projections of people um
if i have one specific memory that sort of typifies the san francisco theater scene
was i was uh i showed up as just a theater carpenter and my friend mark and i built
some stairs we were told on our first day go build some stairs from that level to that level
we didn't know how to build stairs uh so we built some stairs we looked at some
other stairs and we're like okay we're just going to make them like that and i
traced the this some contractor walked by while we were putting them he was what's the
rise and run on those stairs and i was like i don't know what any of those words mean
but that's not the story the story is is that as i uh matriculated up through the ranks at gcpw um i
became uh i i became educated i started getting educated in stage rigging and theater rigging
and ernie the guy who was teaching me rigging had a wonderful methodology for doing it he took me
out to mount diablo and taught me how to rappel down a cliff down a mountain uh he then had me
in the theater one day build a cable out of build a build a cable it means take eighth
inch airline cable 8 inch braided steel cable put two thimbles and crimps on the ends of it so it
had attachment points rig it up into the ceiling through a shiv a pulley down to a block and fall
and then have myself raised to the top of the proscenium arch on the cable i had just built
yeah that is an intense exercise i'm here to tell you uh first of all you got to get your
crimps right on the ends of the cable because if they're not right you die don't worry ernie
checked all of my work then you connect it up to locking shackles and locking [ __ ] and you send
it up through the shiv you make sure the shiv is nice and solid in the ceiling you bring it down to
the block and fall which is a i think ours was a four to four to one mechanical advantage and then
i put on a climbing harness per his instructions and i clipped into the other side of my cable
and um one of the one of the dudes at the theater started lifting me up nothing makes you
think through a system like that faster than your life depending on it i am sitting there
even just two feet off the ground all of a sudden i'm picturing this cable's good that cable's good
i can see the connection the shift is not gonna move okay yeah and just constantly rolling through
it this was an invaluable mental exercise one i would repeat on mythbusters on countless days
but it began at this theater that was the first time i had made something that my life depended on
and learned how to think through a rigging system and so also i want to point out that when you're
hanging from an eighth inch braided cable do i have one here do i have one here hold on
hang on i just i want you to see what i'm talking about here i think i thought i had a little bit
of this there we go okay this is eighth inch braided cable yeah let's give or take actually
it's probably more like 3 16 but this is about the stuff that i'm talking about and this has a
a live load strength i i'm not sure what its actual rating is but i'm quite positive that
the live load this can take includes the weight of me right that it's rating can handle that
but when you are hanging from a thin cable like this boy it feels thin boy it feels too thin
for you it feels frighteningly thin so i'm sitting there sort of swinging right and you
don't have any control over how you swing and i'm being lifted up and up and up and the dude who's
pulling the block and fall that's lifting me that's the mechanical advantage pulley system
he's pulling i'm going up and he starts to talk to a friend of his next to him and the subject
of their conversation is how much acid he had done the night before lsd how much lsd he had
done on the previous night and then he might still be tripping just a little bit yeah so
in addition to the skinny cable and the rigging system i had just put together under supervision
and it had been checked by a professional i'm listening to this dude here talking like dude i
think i might still be having some flashbacks from last night because that was some clean stuff yeah
that is a quintessential perfect early 90s san francisco theater experience
the reason i was doing this cable system is because i was working in a house without any fly
rail like the high school theater you probably grew up with had a fly rail a bunch of regular
ropes and and poles that came down you could hang scrims and curtains and all sorts of stuff on them
most theaters in san francisco when i got here didn't have that i mean berkeley repertory theater
had it and orpheum in the big places but most san francisco theaters in the early 90s were all
these little black box theaters these little tiny rooms like the eureka and the rhinoceros and uh uh
project arto oh my god project arto where it was just a bunch of steel beams across the top of this
46 foot high space and in order to get to them you had to climb this a-frame rickety ladder all the
way to the beams and then hand-over-hand yourself out on these i-beams and then clip your harness in
yeah a lot of those early days of rigging was was hairy but it was fantastic training it was perfect
training for mythbusters yeah show me somebody who could think through a rigging system like that and
i could teach them a lot of different things as as ernie taught me and i'll be forever grateful
except for the dude who might still have been having flashbacks that was the roughest patch
of that uh of that escapade um but you asked about a berkeley rep story too and i think i think
uh i do have one from berkeley rap the last show i worked on at berkeley rep was the
first stage adaptation of maxine han kingston's amazing book woman warrior and woman warrior is
uh it's a it's an amazing book and it includes a lot of ghosts and so did the stage play and
ghosts moved things around so we built i built several pieces of remote control ghost equipment
there was a giant clothing press because part of it takes place at a chinese laundry this clothing
press that had its own will and i built one out of wood that looked like a real clothing press
but it had a cam in it so when you turned it on it would sort of like go and sort of scoot itself
across the floor but uh the most complex prop in that show was a remote control la-z-boy chair
and i was asked to build that by paul feinberg the prop master uh and the the amazing people i worked
with in that place that was a thrilling couple of years i was working at berkeley repertory
excuse me i was working at beach blanket babylon um like three nights a week and spending most of
my days at berkeley rep and around that time was when jamie hyneman heard about me and gave
me a call and so i was in this i was in berkeley rep's prop department welding together the the
base of this remote control lazy boy chair i had purchased a uh an electric wheelchair and i had
used remote control servos to be able to remotely drive it anywhere i want it's my very first robot
and i got a call and it was from jamie heinemann he said i heard that you're pretty good at put
making stuff i'd love to have you come on in uh this week and show me a portfolio and see
if i might be able to hire you and i said i was thinking how perfect is this that i
get to say these following words and i said i can't come in this week because i'm building a
remote control lazy boy chair but i can come in next week and that might have helped seal the
deal i did go in the following week jamie offered me a a gig on a nike commercial um
and my income doubled overnight i went from the theater income which at that point was
like 11 or 12 bucks an hour to uh to commercial television which is almost 20 bucks an hour and
yeah i never looked back i i i miss theater and i still do a lot of theater i've toured around the
world um and theater is as i point out to a lot of people an incredible gateway drug to making
because the threshold to entry in a lot of theater is very low and that means the ability one has in
a theater to learn a lot of different skills is very high i was lucky in my early days of theater
to work with some incredible people at georgia coast performance works at berkeley rep at dita
rhinoceros eureka theater beach blanket babylon all those places my colleagues from every one of
those places has warm spots in my heart thank you for letting me relive some of these moments that
was an awesome question and i hope my answer wasn't too long thank you tested
members please keep submitting your questions and i will answer them i'll see you next time