 Good afternoon. My name is Mark Jason Gilbert. I'm Professor of World History at Hawaii Pacific University, and I'll be your host today on Global Connections. Our guest is Rick Romer, an art director and designer, very famous within Hawaii. Distinctively, he was the art director, set director of films, theaters, and television in Hawaii for many, many years, most importantly, was the director or art director or designer for many film, theater, and television shows produced locally. And we're going to talk a lot of those because they range from magnum PI to lost. In fact, we might have a picture of lost up here. You can give an idea of the kind of work that he has done. Rick, hi. Hi, Mark. This is going to be fun because your career is so long, and it's so very interesting. How many hours do we have today, Mark? I think we'll do fine with what we have. Normally when we start one of these kinds of interviews off, we ask, you know, how you got interested in the field. I know you came to the University of Hawaii, and that was an area in which you got your degree. I actually have no formal training in film or television. I was a MFA in theater, stage design, lighting design, and spent eight and a half years at Diamond Head Theater. And because of the proximity of the theater to the film studio, it was pretty soon I was building or creating things that they didn't have time or in some cases even know how to build. So Higgins Bridge on the River Kwai was me in my toothpicks. Yes, I always remember that because it's so distinctive. And you made three models of it. Well, beginning, middle, and an end. So there's always a thrill. I mean, I'm not a performer of any kind. But when you see something that you personally have created on the screen, you do kind of get a little bit of thrill out of it. I have to admit. And this actually, just for those who are interested in becoming designers, this opportunity actually came from a dinner where someone mentioned your name. Oh, yeah. This was, I call it my Lana Turner Schwab's drugstore moment, even though that supposedly never really happened. And I wasn't wearing a tight sweater either. Not that that would have worked. But Buck Henshaw, who was the set decorator on all 12 years of Hawaii Five, all the original founding member of the set decorators union in LA, and the first three years of Magnum PI needed some help at one point. And that was sort of my entree into beginning to help. And then eventually I needed to get into the union, which I did. And just things fell into place. And was there, is there working on Magnum PI, actually, for a very long time? Was there a kind of singular moment or set direct set decorator challenge? Every day, every day was a challenge. Every script was a challenge. But at the same time, looking back on it, I didn't know how good we had it. There were so many places we could rent from, and there were so many more sources than exist today. But it was just a different time. And getting to work with people like Jackie Cooper and, I can't even think of, I mean, famous actors who became television directors later in their life. And Magnum PI was a top 10 TV show for many years. And maybe again, who knows? But yeah, there is really hard to say any one defining moment, one special set. It was just a daily challenge that I met and had a great crew and worked with really great people. But the business has changed a lot since then. The power that the set decorator had in those years is pretty much, you're now, it's the production designer. Television has gotten a lot closer to being like film than remaining how it was in those days. So a lot of changes. A lot of changes, yeah. You know, I remember, I've seen a still of Higgins' apartment at the estate in Magnum PI. And, you know, you look at it and you see that this must be where Higgins lives, this old British experienced officer. And, you know, production designers, set designers, set decorators, they all have to make sure that that's a space in which the actor actually would live, don't they? Well, I call it telling the story. And set decorating is telling a story. I actually created that set. A lot of people give me credit for when I started on Magnum, it was the fourth season, so all of the permanent sets had been created. But when they would throw in a new set like Higgins' bedroom or his girlfriend, Agatha, her home, even his living room, I got to create that. And when I say create, basically they gave me the walls, and then I made it into what it became. And in those days, I would meet directly with the director, independent of the art director, but obviously working in collaboration with and be able to have the creative, I don't want to say freedom, but freedom within what it is that I put on the set as long as I told the story and reinforced the character, which is really what set decorating is. And, you know, while you were working after or during, after when you worked on Magnum, you had a, was it two years working on Shake and the Fat Man when they were filming in Hawaii? Oh, it was way more than that. It was like two years in Hawaii, two years in LA. And the way we found out our show was canceled in LA is that Steven Spielberg had, was going to be using our soundstage for a movie he was going to make about dinosaurs. And we all thought dinosaurs, well, it was the first Jurassic Park, so obviously he lasted a lot longer. Well, people have been canceled for a lot less. Oh, yeah. Well, I had a show pretty much run its course and strangely never syndicated by the creators of the show, the Viacom, the biggest syndicators. But that was again, another really popular top 10 TV show that unfortunately kind of has been forgotten except for Bill Conrad. But it was it was a big show. It was a good show. And I got to work in LA for two years. And what was that like? I mean, you've lived for a long time. Well, it was like I called LA the land of conspicuous consumption because anything you could ever imagine was there and you could rent it. And the prop houses, the size of Macy's were common. And it was mainly, I mean, I have the ability to shop for multiple sets at the same time, just kind of file it away. And I had a great time. I was a kid in a candy store. I mean, we don't have any resources like that and probably never will in Hawaii just because of the volume that is done there. But that it was a great experience. We believe it or not, Diagnosis Murder was a spin off of Jake and the Fat Man and ultimately obviously more popular. But I was offered that show, but it was it was moving to Denver. I'd been gone for two years, Hawaii's my home. So I came back and I'm glad I did and I'm still here and I'm still working. Yeah, that was a Dick Van Dyke show. Yeah. Yeah. It was great to work with to a real pro and still is still going. Still going. Yeah. Yeah. Do you ever, you know, because of the way production, TV, film, theater production goes, did you ever have an actor who wanted to contribute to what you had done to his thing? You know, I want to walk over here and drink out of this glass as a bit of business. No, that would have been more from the would have probably gone through the director. I did have a lot of actors who wanted to buy things off the set at great discount, which could sometimes be arranged and other times not. But yeah, I actually had very little interaction with the actors, unless it was somebody like Carol Burnett or Frank Sinatra or somebody I wanted to just happen to hang around and watch. Usually by the time the actors were on the set, I was already on to the next one. As soon as the director accepted, you know, what we had done, we were out of there because there's always the next set, my next set. But if it's a really special set, or if it's somebody with an actor who I've always enjoyed or wanted to see more of, could delay a little bit. That's really interesting. Do you, when you mentioned a little bit earlier that things have changed in terms of set design, set decoration, etc., why is that? Well, a real obvious one is technology. We're sitting in front of a green screen that the viewer may be seeing the Eiffel Tower or the Parthenon or anything they want to put back there. And for example, on Y5O right now, they can do three and four moves a day because they're hauling around digital cameras and much smaller lighting equipment. In the old days, when they had film cameras and needed all these, you know, heavy equipment and generators, moving at all was usually a big deal because while you're moving, you're not filming and when you're not filming, you're not making money, so it all translates to that. So the action in films is television. When you look at something like a Magnum PI episode and it's not airing here, but on occasion and when it does, it seems kind of slow moving. 1983, 1984, MTV changed the way we film things. Two seconds is kind of a long shot now. It's one second, half a second, things happening, cars exploding, running into a room. Clear, clear, clear and they run out. Some set decorator had to create a whole set for McGarrett to run into and say clear and run out of the set. And so you have a lot more activity, you have a lot more action and that's what people want. And so that has changed. My working relationship, I have actually the first person from Hawaii to get into the art director's guild working at a level that I would now tell the set decorator what I wanted to see, what my vision was. When I started, it was my vision, but it's changed. Responsibility has changed, the amount of detail has changed, high definition TV, you're seeing labels on things. Clearance, I could hang any picture I wanted on a set and now unless you can clear that picture, meaning get the person who has the rights to it, which is not you, just because you own the picture doesn't mean you have the rights to it. And if you don't have the rights or you can't get the rights, you can't hang the picture. So it adds a lot more, there are now full-time clearance people as part of the crew who do nothing but clear images or clear backgrounds so that they don't get sued. And so there's a whole world of things that we didn't even think about back then. And so yeah, it's changed quite a bit. You mentioned casually that if you had an opportunity to see an actor at work or get to talk to them a minute, did you ever have an opportunity to bring someone onto a set in a background or something like that? My sister happened to be visiting me and it was her birthday and we were filming a big scene with Sawyer on Lost and it was at Bob's Big Boy that we had made into a Iowa diner and I talked to the person who places the extras. She was a good friend of mine at a second AD and she put my sister in a location that she was guaranteed to be seen a lot. And even that I told her, I said, don't be telling everybody you're going to be on camera because a lot of times, you know, you get cut. Well, she wasn't cut and she was there and she was right next to Josh Holloway and she had a great time. It was a very memorable birthday and more people saw her that day than probably saw Olivia on the stage in his entire career. I mean, that show is hundreds of millions of people all over the world. I remember once since the White Pacific University, it's on 4th Street Mall, it's downtown campus and I went into class for a couple of hours and I saw them setting up the street from the shot and when I came back outside it was Bangkok with all the signs and I think you've mentioned this to me earlier, the idea of wrapping the bottoms of the palm trees so they look like a walnut or... Oh, yeah, there actually is more of the art department than set decorating but they're what they call skins that they can put over things to make them into other things. And of course, you're limited as to how high that skin is that you can actually see. But yeah, we, downtown Hawaii was London. It's been, I can't even think of all the locations. You know, Big Ben chiming over 4th Street on another episode. It was fun to see what they would add to what we had already done. But yeah, we turned a lot of places into other things and that's part of what Art Direction does is if you were to ask me what is Art Direction, it's basically everything you see on the screen except for the actor. It's what's in the room, what's behind them, what they interact with, the doors they open and of course you're not officially watching that but it interacts with the actor and the actor is casting and hair and makeup and wardrobe in terms of breaking down what departments are involved with them. But the art department is, it's a big department and it can range from creating a set from scratch in a studio to modifying an existing set on location and anything in between. So it's a pretty wide department. Just for the fun of it, the descendants was filmed in Hawaii and they made a big point of using actual locations. So if a goat was tethered to the lawn and was eating the grass, it stayed in the frame, so to speak. Do you ever have a favorite scene set in Hawaii or something that was of particular interest to you? Because again, Hawaii, for example, in Los, they turned the subterranean satellite city hall underneath King Street and they turned the steps down to it into a London subway. Which was probably just a sign and us telling you that it was the London subway and then you of course accept it because yeah, no, it's hard to, I mean literally thousands of sets to have. If I had to pick one, it would probably have been, I think it was the second season I had done of Magnum, which would have been the fifth season and I was able to furnish the Cook Spalding House, which later became the contemporary art museum, furnish it one more time. I had a huge budget and it was starring a relatively unknown actress playing the good sister and the bad sister named Sharon Stone. Oh, that's right. Yeah, that was something. You could kind of tell she was going to go someplace, but so she did. But to see that house that was so magnificent, furnished one more time before it was turned into a museum, that was pretty proud of that. And of course, the other issue I guess I should mention is by the time I was doing 5.0, I would say anywhere from 60 to 80 percent of what we did on a set was not seen at all. You simply did it because you didn't know where they were going to film. And whereas back on Magnum, we had directors who would say, I'm only going to see from here to here. And you could trust them. And later, if they said that, they'd come in and say, no, we're going to see over here. No, no, and it's not dressed. So that also has changed. It's just different. You give them 360 ceiling floor, everything. And so it's more costly, but it's just how it is. We'll come back after this short break. Aloha. My name is John Wahey. And I used to be a part of all the things that you might be angry at. I served in government here and may have made decisions that affects you. So I want to invite you in. I want to invite you in to talk story with me and some very special guests every other Monday here at Talk Story with John Wahey. Come on in, join us, express your opinion, learn more about your state, and then do something about it. Aloha. And welcome back to Global Connections. We're talking to Rick Romer, designer, set designer, art decorator in Hawaii for many, many years, working on everything from Magnum PI to Lost. And we were talking about individual experiences that you might have had. Later on, we'll talk a little about the career of a set designer, set decorator, and your own work more recently, working as a designer. But I'm always curious. I saw the first episode of Lost in real time, so to speak. And that plane crash was pretty impressive. It was downright scary. Tell us something about that. Well, a little bit of background on that. We had three pilots being done that year, and Lost was the last one. I had actually done North Shore, and we'd even started the we were on episode one. They really wanted me on Lost, and I turned them down three times. I said it's a plane crash. I don't know, bodies and burned luggage. But as it turned out, it was especially that first season without a lot of the network and corporate involvement that later resulted on that show. It was just an amazing experience. And actually studying debris fields, it kind of got into, but actually the way JJ Abram shot the pilot, it was pretty much, I call it my haul and dump theory of set decorating, where you simply haul everything and dump it, and they pull out what they want for each shot. Even though we had these things all we thought figured out, things were created basically for every shot. And of course, we had that big hulking plane in the background, the burning one on Mokolia Beach, and we had the fuselage was in Heiakea in the jungle. It was a real plane. It was cut into pieces and shipped over here. And we had to move it at one point when flooding occurred during the winter season, which actually prompted the script to say they're going to be moving out of the plane, which the show was kind of fluid. I mean, they literally did make a lot of it up as they went along. So our moving of out of the plane into the jungle as it were upon Police Beach was kind of caused by the fact that it was a surf in Hawaii and they didn't fight mother nature. They went with it and it became part of the story. There's an interesting issue, which is, what about this kind of job today? Well, today, again, things have changed a little bit. More and more the films that are coming over here pretty much bring everybody with them. They bring at least through the decorator, maybe even the lead man, all comes from LA. And it's primarily because these people have worked together before. And I understand that if I was going to go to Des Moines and do a feature, I'd kind of wonder, well, who am I going to find in Des Moines? Well, as it turns out, there might be some good people, but not knowing that ahead of time, you might feel more comfortable bringing people that you've worked with. And that's kind of how things have been going. So I have actually been doing more. I just art directed a national supercuts commercial, a great, pretty famous director. You kind of have to wear a lot of different hats in Hawaii. You can't just say I'm a set decorator or I'm an art director. You want Christmas decorations, I'll do them. You want a big party, I'll do it. I've been creative director for a local events company. And it's all part of the same world. It's design, it's creating. And I find it all just as interesting. And you certainly can't get stale. You have to keep reinventing yourself, reinventing your work. And you don't really have a look. Your look is, well, what look do you want? And that's the look you get. So you don't want to be too tied to, you know, you only do this or you only do that. And in Hawaii, you can't be because you're doing so many different things all the same time. So it's one of the challenges and also one of the things I enjoy most is that I get to do a lot of different things here. And if I'd stayed in LA, I'd be, you know, one of 200 other set decorators or 500 art directors or whatever. So the tradeoff is, you know, it's a few lean times here and there, but it's kind of how it is. And you just do something else. That's all. Well, recently you did a little work on Lion King? Oh, that's a whole, that's a whole nother career. But something that's kind of funny how it happened. I worked in theater for more than 10 years in lighting and set design. And for some reason, the only work I've had here, professional work, has been as a dresser on everything from Lion King. I forget 150 some performances over a five month period. Les Mis, Phantom of the Opera, and just basically anything that's come to Blaisdell, even an occasional opera. And it's a connection with theater that I in some ways never really had because usually by the time the show opened, again, I was on the next one. I wasn't there every night. But it's a discipline. It's a whole different mindset. It's really not creative, per se, because you're doing exactly the same. In fact, creativity is strongly discouraged. You do exactly the same thing you do every night in exactly the same order. And if something else happens, then you kind of go with it. But occasionally things would happen. It's live theater. But I love, it's still my little theater heart working backstage. I still enjoy it, although it really has literally nothing to do with film and television. But I'm fortunate that I usually wind up getting the leads, which is I'm honored to be working with the level of some of those people. And they expect and demand a little more. And I give it to them. So it's a challenge. I love challenges. So it's another aspect of what I get to do in Hawaii. That's great. Well, we have two images to look at just as we come to the close of the program. One of them is the McGarrett's home. There we are. There we are, which because of some distant connection to the people who owned it, I actually went to a party there once. And before it, I think just as FIBO was revived. Well, this was an interesting challenge because it was an existing home. And they had chosen it for the pilot. And I don't get to say anything like he's the cop, but he's got a house on the beach. They always have houses on the beach. So anyway, we furnished it according to the vision of the director primarily, whose favorite color was brown as it turned out to be. But so when the series went, and I started as the set decorator, filming there, pretty much every episode required that we went into their home. We packed up all of their things, we brought in all of our things, and we had to repack up all of you know, it was a several day process. And about halfway through, well, I'm not halfway through, maybe five or six episodes into season one, they said, let's build a duplicate of their of their living room on our soundstage, which was then at the advertiser building. So it was an interesting thing because some of the objects in the on the set belonged to the owner, which we couldn't use. And so we found, I don't know that anybody really noticed that there was kind of a little shift in things at one point in the show. But we built a duplicate of the house and got to make doorways a little wider that were a little inconvenient to get equipment through and make a few little changes. But and then actually started adding rooms. We added a kitchen that the kitchen in the house was way too small to film. Actually, I remember that kitchen very well. It was very small. Yeah, it's like a 50s kitchen. Well, it was like a 30s kitchen, but maybe remodeled in the 50s. But yeah, it was the joys of September. Right, right. In our direction. We've been talking to Rick Romer, and we enjoyed it. I certainly did. I hope you did. Please watch for global connections every Thursday at one o'clock. And thank you very much for your attention and thank you, Rick, for being with us today. Thank you, Mark. Great. Okay.