This custom made Silver Cross opens to store cocaine. Due to a brief prep time and  an uncertainty of which cross design would be best, we decided to create two sets of silver crosses; we sent designs to two different jewelers. Both turned out to be very good designs but one was preferred by the director and actor, and proved easier to open and close.

Danny Collins birthday cake. At the last minute the director decided that he wanted to have a slice taken out of the head which was made out of Styrofoam. My foot stylist and I came up with a plan. We sent an assistant to the market to buy a cake. we cut into the Styrofoam head and inserted a this slice of the cake into the head on top of the Styrofoam so it would look as though the whole head was cake. These are the sort of last minute demands a property master fields all the time.

This watch was a perfect compliment to his character and his costumes.

It was a large group effort to make all of the graphics necessary to create a 40 year history of a rockstar. Evan Regester, the graphic designer, had a blast drawing on every era with influences such as Rod Stewart, Neil Diamond and Elton John. Once he created the graphics, it was my job to make these things come to life, creating the albums, backstage passes, the tickets the CDs and the newspapers.

Much of the story of Danny Collins centers around a letter written by John Lennon to Danny Collins in 1971. Creating this letter gifted us with many instances of lucky coincidence. For the hotel stationary it was written on, I searched a file my parents keep of hotel stationary. Our favorite was from the Hotel Cap d’Antibes in the south of France. When searching the Internet to see if the era of this particular piece of paper Match the logo that the hotel used in 1971 I came across a photograph of John and Yoko at that hotel in 1971. When I went to create the letter, I discovered that my handwriting was actually quite similar to John Lennon’s, so it was easy to write the letter in hand writing it could easily be mistaken for his. I had to make 15 copies of the letter and have them framed, as it was used in many different scenes. Also, I had to use a variety of glass, some reflective and some nonreflective, and for the scene where the glass gets broken we needed to have breakaway glass. I found a framer I had never used close to our office. When I went to get samples of the frames, he showed me a picture frame that had been used only for John Lennon’s apartment at the Dakota, he had bought all of it from the vendor in New York. This frame was too large for our photograph but we felt it was very good omen.

This is the offstage table that was set up for the band Chicago at the Greek Theatre. I created a similar table for our backstage scene when Danny Collins walks to the stage.