EP. #87 -- “PROPS! with Jeff Butcher”

Dan Fisher (0:04)

It's October, but the Mahoning Drive-In Theatre, located in lovely Leighton, Pennsylvania, is still open for business, and showing retro classics and cult favorites exclusively in 35 millimeter. From now until the end of the month, there are a bunch of scary movies on the schedule, but also a rare outdoor screening of 2001 A Space Odyssey, as well as a retro robot rager double feature. And the Mahoning offers so much more than that, with a pre-show DJ, raffles for merch, specialty food items at the snack bar, the occasional celebrity guest appearance, you name it, making it more than just another night at the movies. It's an event that you'll be thinking about all the way into next summer. Wherever you are, if you're a movie nerd like me, it's definitely worth the trip. For more information and to see what's coming up on the schedule, go to mahoningdit.com.

We're rolling.

Welcome to Let's Talk Ten. I'm Dan Fisher.

Jeff Butcher is one of my best friends. We met in the fall of 1986 on the set of the John Sayles film, Matewan. He was a prop assistant and I had been hired as an art department production assistant, even though I wasn't quite sure what that actually meant. Jeff was a little bit older and more experienced than me, so he patiently showed me the ropes for a little bit. When Matewan wrapped and I moved to New York City, we were even roommates for a while. In his over 40-year career, Jeff was one of the busiest prop masters in the New York City area with a resume that would include 37 feature films and a number of television projects. He's worked with an impressive list of notable directors, including Jim Jarmusch, Darren Aronofsky, John Sayles, Lassie Hallstrom, Mira Nyer, Noah Baumbach and Michelle Gondry, among many others. Jeff also wrote and directed two independent feature films of his own, Criminals and Strange Deal, which have screened at film festivals all over the world. And now, as we're both retired prop masters, whenever we get together for lunch and a movie, which we do fairly often, we really can't help ourselves. We'll still talk about our old jobs, as we reflect on the good days and some of the not so good too. But it was a hell of a time, and it all seemed to go by so fast. What this whole episode is really is kind of a hangout show. But I love hanging out and talking props with Jeff Butcher, and I think you'll enjoy hanging out for a while with us.

I don't know about you, but I'll meet people. Don't work in this business, and they'll ask me, so you were a prop master, that must be really exciting and interesting. What do you tell them when they ask what it's like to worked in props on movies and TV shows?

Jeff Butcher (3:21)

Well, I tend to think of it as a scavenger hunt to the death.

That it was especially TV, because they would hand you the script every 11 days or whatever it was. It was great because it's fun. It's like a scavenger hunt with the added challenges that the props, the objects are hidden within this document. It's spelled out, but some of them are, we're going to be in a hospital corridor. It's a set, but it needs to look like a hospital corridor. So you better have an IV pole, you better have a wheelchair, you better have a gurney, you better have some things that would be there, whatever those objects that would be there.

Dan Fisher (3:59)

Right. But is it cool? Is it fun to do what we've done? What do you think?

Jeff Butcher (4:03)

I think it is. I got a lot of my memories of it are mistakes, or the things that went wrong. I don't think that they were that frequent as much as the memory works like that.

I remember it mostly as being a lot of fun. It was something that on the surface is fun, but because everybody is taking it so seriously, and because the hours are so long, and because the budgets are constrained, and there's all these things that make it challenging, sometimes I would have to remind myself that this is fun.

There's a skill in that. As long as you can remember that. It's fun.

Dan Fisher (4:41)

It is fun. Making movies or TV shows, it's not that it's not important, but it's not surgery, it's not landing an airplane full of passengers. You know, nobody's going to die if you don't bring the proper prop to set.

Jeff Butcher (4:55)

But it's pretend surgery. No one ever said, hey, you know, take your time, you know, we need to shoot. That meant something. Like, you know, one of my fears always was, you know, you're responsible for not just what's scripted, but what would be there. So it's up to you to have thought about that when nobody else is necessarily thinking about it. And at any moment, someone can come up to you and say, hey, where's the blank? And if you didn't think of it, it won't be there. And the next thing they're saying is, well, we can't shoot without the blank. Now, I don't actually remember that ever happening, but living in constant fear that that would happen, because these were, you know, $100,000 days, whatever. You know, there was, we didn't work in the ER, but we worked as if we worked in the ER. And I've been in ERs recently. We're more efficient, we're better.