Tag Archives: Eimer Murphy

End of the Week Links

American Theatre has this week’s “must read” article on jobs in technical theatre. They look at where new technicians get their training and interview a number of people working in theatre to see how they got their start. The interviewees come from a range of different departments, like lighting, sound and costumes. No props people appear in the article; probably because we were all too busy to give an interview.

The Abbey Theatre has a video up where Eimer Murphy talks about the vintage working dentist’s chair that appears in their current production of You Never Can Tell.

Propnomicon found this great video on aging glass bottles. It’s a lot better than giving your actors actual antique bottles that they have to drink out of.

Take a tour through the prop warehouse of the Food Network. In the basement of NYC’s Chelsea Market, Wendy Waxman stores thousands of vintage items which appear on the various shows and specials of this TV station. I bet a lot of my readers wish they could spend every day finding and buying quirky kitchen items.

Finally, this is short but interesting. The actor who originally played Darth Vader (David Prowse, not James Earl Jones) posted a photo of the original Vader mask that burned at the end of Return of the Jedi and compared it to the prop that Kylo Ren holds in The Force Awakens. Since the original was made of fiberglass, it turned a little “hairy”, while the prop in the new film looks more “melty”.

Proper Reading for Today

George Barris, creator of the 1966 TV version of the Batmobile, passed away this past week. He also built The Munster’s car and worked on the cars of many other shows and films. The LA Times had a great profile on his career a few years back that is worth revisiting today.

Roger Christian talks with Cinefex about his work on Star Wars and Alien. Christian created a lot of the props for Star Wars, such as the first R2-D2 prototype, Han Solo’s blaster, and Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber. On Alien, he built most of the interior of the Nostromo space ship.

Eimer Murphy, prop maker at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, has an article at the Victoria and Albert Museum’s blog on Dublin Protest Graphics. It’s not so much prop-related, but it is about objects used in a performance-type aspect. Plus, I’ve seen so much theatre/film/TV where the protest signs are just way off the mark, so this is good research too.

The League of Professional Theatre Women recently released their newest study of gender breakdown in theatre roles at Off and Off-off Broadway shows over the past five years. The New York Times has a great summary of that study. Men still dominate set, light and sound design positions, as well as directing and writing. They don’t look at props; props (in theatre) have always seemed to have a bit more gender equality than other departments, but it’s hard to say without actually coming up with some numbers.