In 1981, a young Adam Savage was dead set on seeing the movie Excalibur. John Boorman’s tale of King Arthur and his knights was what Savage describes as a “hard 'R'” movie. “It was bloody and there were guts and crows eating eyeballs and skeletons and there was sex,” he told the crowd at Wired By Design. “And I managed to convince my dad to take me to this movie twice.”
The movie fascinated Savage, but not for the reason you might think. There was violence and triumph and a cast of beautiful movie stars. “What I knew is that I saw this armor and it represented some kind of transformation to me,” he says. “I wanted a piece of it.” After the movie, Savage came home and removed a slat of wood from a fence surrounding his childhood home. He went down to his father’s workshop, shaped the piece of wood into a sword, spray painted it silver, covered it in aluminized tape and added a glass bead in the bottom of the hilt. Suddenly, he had himself a sword straight out of Excalibur.
Savage is most well known for myth busting, but he got his start making special effects models for movies, commercials, and photographs. This was before the boom in CGI; a time when movies required physical props, not pixels. In his years as a professional model builder, he created the payload bay in Space Cowboys, guns for the Matrix and worked on Star Wars Episode 1.
Since giving up professional model making for MythBusters, he’s gone back to the trade as a hobby. He's made everything from an exact reproduction of Jason Bourne’s carryall (credit cards, passports and USB drive included) to a hand-machined replica of Harrison Ford’s gun in *Blade Runner *(down to the exact weight of the original). Right now, Savage is undertaking a particularly detailed project: Major Kong’s survival kit from Dr. Strangelove. If you recall, the kit is full of wacky items including---but not limited to---nine packs of chewing gum, three lipsticks, three pairs of nylons, and a 45-caliber automatic. “I’m not only making one, I’m making a bunch of them,” he says.
It’s a curious hobby, best suited for people with an eye for meticulous detail. But prop making is more than just a casual thing to pass the time for Savage. After working for decades in the film industry, it occurred to him that these models have an important narrative. Stories are told not just through actors and directors, but also through the objects we see in a film. Every detail you see in a movie is excruciatingly thought-out. The panels on a spaceship, the numbers on a fake passport---they all need logic to make sense in both the imaginary and real worlds. When done well, these objects are able to suspend reality, in the same way a good book or performance from an actor can do. “My job was to tell stories just as much as the director’s was,” he says. “I used to think that a story was a one-way transmission from teller to listener,” he says. “What I realized, is that the story not only changes the listener, but it changes the teller as well.”
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