But it’s a versatile dish; it works well served over fried eggs or mixed with scrambled eggs, over grilled steak or hamburger, or just mixed with beans and eaten with a spoon.
As to what you wash it down with, beer is traditional, but I generally have Diet Coke. Champagne is fine, though, if you happen to have some left over.
Happy New Year!
* * *
1 The sausage isn’t bad. Bacon butties are, on the whole, vile. “Bacon” in the U.K. is not what you in the United States are used to; it’s limp, stringy, ultra-salty, thin-sliced fatty ham. Serve in a squidgy white bun with ketchup, and you’ve really got something. Mind you, contemplating this probably would take your mind off the hangover….
2 Imagine a combination of Karo corn syrup and club soda, dyed a brilliant orange. Then think what your intestines will look like after drinking it.
PART EIGHT
THE INVISIBLE TALENT
Author’s Note: “Talent” is what publicists, producers, and agents call the people who provide the visible face of entertainment—actors, for the most part. But anyone who is even temporarily appearing in his or her own persona is “talent”—even me. But what about the people who give so much to the TV show and the world of Outlander, who normally don’t show their faces and talk about what they do?
I asked a few of the many, many talented people who create the world of the TV show (and other aspects of the ever-increasing world of Outlander) to give us a brief glimpse of what they do and how they do it.
TERRY DRESBACH
Costume Designer
Author’s Note: Terry kindly allowed me to reprint here three of her excellent blog entries, dealing with the work she and her brilliant costume department do on the Starz Outlander TV show. The blog itself—titled An 18th Century Life—is at terrydresbach.com and well worth reading in its entirety. Not only for the entries but for the glorious pictures, which we are, alas, not able to reproduce for you here, owing to legal constraints and to the limitations of black-and-white printing.
WHAT WE DO
et’s see, what are we currently doing?
Well, we have found the 24,000 buttons, give or take a few thousand. It seems I underestimated how many we needed.
We have dyed and decorated about three–four thousand shoes. We’ve made about a thousand costumes in the last six months. That means frock coats, waistcoats, breeches, shirts, cuffs, stocks, coats, gowns, skirts, stomachers, caraco jackets, capes, petticoats, chemises, corsets, fichus, cuffs, shawls, reticules. We have accumulated gloves and jewelry, made and decorated hats, dyed and printed thousands of meters/yards of fabric.
Last weekend Ron and I did our first appearance together at a fan convention organized by UK Outlander fans. It was an amazing experience. I had the opportunity to give a talk about what I do, what we do in the costume department, and it inspired me to reach out to the broader audience and share a bit more of the process of costume design.
It is the same basic process that all Costume Designers and Costume Departments work to, with variations on the theme depending on if you are working on a Space Odyssey or a Western. But there are always particulars to any creative project.
As I have referenced before, no two snowflakes are alike.
I wasn’t so sure I wanted to do Outlander three years ago. Yes, it was a book series I loved and read many, many times since they were first released, but I knew how huge it was, and one of the reasons I got out of the business over a decade ago was the dwindling amount of time given to prep these massive shows. Prep, as we call it, is the period of time before a show begins where each department pulls everything together needed to do a show. The Art Department builds the sets, Costume Department makes the costumes, Props make all the props, Writers write, and so on. You live and die over the course of a season depending on how much prep time you get. That amount of time decreases every year in our business, so you rarely get the time needed. I knew there wasn’t going to be enough time to do a massive show like Outlander, without it being completely crazy. But Ron wore me down, and I finally agreed.
So this process begins with reading the scripts. That’s when you get a feeling for the tone and direction of a piece, where you begin to get to know the characters and the story. But at this point there were no scripts yet, but there was a book and I figured that would be a tremendous help as I knew the story and characters so well. Sometimes scripts are really bad, but sometimes you get an opportunity to work with a gifted writer like Ron Moore, and that makes everything better, on every level.
So, that was a plus.
The second plus was that I was married to the Executive Producer of Outlander, and figured that would put me ahead in the information department. Information in the film and television business is like some sort of secret buried treasure. Those of us who make the costumes and build the sets spend weeks trying to glean any information we can. What are we doing? When are we doing it? Where will it be, and WHO is doing it?? All of those answers are locked in some secret vault, and we are safecrackers doing everything we can to get in. Usually we end up just hurling our crowbars at the damned thing after all else has failed. Living with the vault keeper seemed like it might help.
So based on those two “pluses,” I threw my brain and every bit of sense I possessed out of the window and signed on. In retrospect, I cannot help but laugh, that cynical me, who knows exactly what this is like, was still so idealistic and optimistic, still believing that this one would be different from all the others. This is a woman who once went temporarily blind in one eye on a show, due to stress. Believe me, I am no lightweight, I am a tough broad, but the closest thing I can think of to being in the film business would probably be the military, albeit with no REAL weaponry.
We needed about twenty weeks minimum to prep a show of this size. When all was said and done, we had eight.
Eight weeks out, we had a raw space, no tables, no sewing machines, no phones, no racks, no crew, no cast, no costumes. We had also discovered that we were not going to be able to rent any costumes except the barest minimum. Every TV show and movie in Hollywood was shooting in the UK, and the vast majority of costumes were not available.
To top it all off, I had personal challenges. My family was unprepared for me to get back in the business, we had two teenagers still in school, and had just moved into a new house. I had been out of the business for ten years and all of my crew had scattered, not that I could take any of them anyway. I knew NO ONE in the UK in the costume game. No contacts, no one who knew anyone, no one at any of the rental houses, no dyers, no equipment hires, no suppliers, not even fabric stores. Like any business, you spend years building contacts you can call on when you need them, and I had nothing. But yeah, let’s walk away from life as we know it, kids, pets, unpacked boxes, and do this!!
So, back to prep. The first thing you need to do is to find is a really good Costume Supervisor.
A Costume Supervisor is your right hand on all things of a practical matter. They are the Project Manager. While you deal with everything creative, and even though you are responsible for the budget and oversee the running of the department, you need someone who will deal with all the nuts and bolts. So the supervisor hires the crew and has ALL the contacts and connections for everything else. In this case, as I had none, this position was the key to happiness and fulfillment. Will any crew member be good or bad? In our business, we try to get a crew together that we can keep for years and years, so starting from scratch is scary. As I had none, I hired a costume supervisor recommended by our UK producer. It is a leap of faith. The wrong choice can be disastrous.
Once the supervisor was in place, we could get started. But it wasn’t quite so easy. Just as there were no costumes available, there was almost no crew available either. Every studio is currently filming in the UK right now, taking advantage of tax breaks, like Canada in the 90s. Almost everyone is employed. Crew is at an absolute premium, so finding anyone to work in such circumstances was pro
blematic at best. The few people who were available were highly sought after in a highly competitive market.
Another challenge.
So we searched for crew, and while we were climbing that little mountain, we turned our attention to building a costume house. When you do a show you need access to resources, supplies, and vendors. Very few of those exist in Scotland. If you want to rent a costume, it has to come from a costume house in London. If you’re in the States, it comes from a costume house in Los Angeles. But that means that someone has to fly to London to find that costume, that fabric, the buttons, everything, every time we need something. We didn’t have time for that. So we had to build our own Costume House, filled with everything we need.
Our Costume Supervisor had found an Assistant Designer, and the beginnings of a crew of 12. We needed sewing machines and the tables to put them on, lighting, phones, desks, shelving, office supplies, hangers, irons, steamers, racks, dyeing vats and dyes, aging supplies, sewing supplies, hooks, tapes, linings, interfacing; an endless list of items. And understand that it is not a home sewing kit, it is an industrial sewing kit. Hundreds and hundreds of spools of thread, a couple of thousand hangers, thousands of yards of fabric. It is big, really big.
Where do you hang all the clothes, and store all the shoes, and accessories? Racks and shelves, enough to hold hundreds and hundreds of costumes. You have to install a racking system that goes from floor to ceiling in the warehouse. Floor to ceiling shelving systems also have to be built, and hundreds of boxes purchased to store everything in. The aging and dyeing department has to be set up. They are seriously an industrial endeavor. They need to dye and age hundreds and hundreds of items. Chemicals, machinery, these women actually blow torch costumes to age them.
Setting all that up takes months that we didn’t have. But you have no choice but to go forward and hope for divine intervention.
The Assistant Designer is absolutely essential. They have to live in your head. The Assistant Designer is the one that you download everything to. They are the one who see it through, taking your sketch to the cutters, who make the patterns and cut the fabric. They make sure the fabric is dyed exactly that right shade you want, and make sure it all happens on schedule. They gather all the bits and pieces, help with research and sourcing materials, schedule the fittings, and interface with our set crew.
While the Assistant Designer is buying bolts and bolts of woolens and linens in London, the equipment begins to arrive, and the fabric is shipped in from London, the cutters and makers are starting to show up. But we still have no actors, so we start them making extras clothing, while we wait.
When I am not figuring out how much rack space we need, I am designing, thankfully for characters I know so well. In the beginning of a show, everyone wants to see sketches, the studio, the network, directors and producers. The first part of my job is to put what is in my head onto paper. So, you do a million sketches. It is harder than one would anticipate. Not only do you have to do a lot of them, because you need to convey a real overview of the entire season and all the characters, but those drawings need to be good. So you draw, and redraw, then redraw again. A lot of designers hire illustrators, but I can’t do that. Drawing is what I do, and it is where the design is formed. I wouldn’t be able to do it any other way.
On Outlander it became very clear not long after arrival that everything I thought the costumes would be was completely irrelevant, due to the climate. I had to throw out everything I had designed before coming to Scotland. If the characters of Outlander had pranced around in the fine silks associated with the 18th century, they would have all died. Scotland is so very cold and damp, and it was clear that people would have had to wear fabrics much heavier and warmer. I had to figure out how to redo the 18th century silhouette in heavy woolens, something a lot easier to do with paper and pencil than actual fabric. But eventually it began to take a shape of some sort, though it felt very vague and theoretical. Nothing to really grasp a firm hold onto. No solid research, paintings that can be anything the painter or subject wants them to be. Surrounded by chaos and stress, you just have to hold on and have faith in your own experience and talent. It was a shaky hold after being out of the business for ten years.
Sam Heughan was cast first as Jamie Fraser. He was the easiest actually, because I never saw him as having more than a couple of costumes, and because I had such a clear image of him in my mind. Plus he is a delightful and lovely human being. We have been very blessed with our cast. All lovely and accommodating people. We took care of Jamie Fraser and waited for the rest of the cast.
I am not sure how to describe how absolutely mad things are at this point in production. Building the studio, writing scripts, a million meetings, building sets, finding crew, all at once, everything down to the wire. Waiting for cast, waiting for Claire. All in one breathless, gasping rush. It’s a pretty stressful place.
Finally Caitriona Balfe was cast as Claire, two weeks before we began shooting. Then the rush really began! I wish I could tell you how we pulled it off, but I can’t really re member. It was pretty tough going, there were a lot of tears, people falling apart, and sleepless nights. Maybe it is a good thing that we really can’t remember how we did it, otherwise we might have all run screaming, as we approached Season Two. I think it was just cobbled together out of a mad combination of faith, panic and experience. Things come back to you from years and years ago, like riding that proverbial bicycle, just as everything is about to burst into flames.
But it seems to have all worked out. The response from the fans and the press to the costumes has been wonderful and extremely gratifying for the entire Costume Department.
We are now a department of fifty, instead of fourteen. My Costume Supervisor stuck with me, I have two wonderful Assistant Designers. We’ve added an embroidery department with four embroiderers and five super embroidery machines. My Alchemy lab (aging and dyeing) are still in their room grinding up frogs and bats’ blood, or whatever the hell they do in there. An amazing textile artist has joined our staff, as we continue to discover that we may as well just make everything, since it is what we do. The walls are all in place, the machines hum, the crew is solid, and there are fewer and fewer tears. Things still get really crazy sometimes, but a rhythm and flow is beginning to take place, and a system is taking hold, that keeps us afloat when the going gets rough.
And here we are just beginning Season Two, sewing on about 30,000 buttons.
I often rage against the machine. The pace, the stress, the lack of humanity. My “justice issues,” as Ron calls them, run rampant. I am the child of union organizers, after all, and this business needs all the “justice issues” one can possibly throw at it. But Ron gave me a lecture the other night about who I am and what I do. That I need to accept it and make peace with it. I am considering the possibility.
Maybe, just maybe, this is what I do. But don’t quote me on that!
THE DEVIL’S MARK
I’ve been thinking about this episode and what to write. There are no new costumes, unless you count Ned Gowan’s lace stock, and maybe Jamie’s trews, though we did see those once before.
But our job is so much more than designing really great-looking costumes for the stars of the show. It is about creating a world that YOU the audience can believe. It is about what we do TO those costumes to make you feel that world, to make it feel real. It is about the costumes for all the rest of the people you see on camera, some of whom never say a word. Some have a few lines, but they are as essential as the lead actors.
There are hundreds and hundreds of them, way more of them than our leading cast. They all have to be costumed. We make all those costumes, we age and breakdown all of them, and then we fit hundreds of them over the course of many days, continually through the show. It is a staggering amount of work. My team on this show is truly brilliant, and there is no one whose costume is not as important as Claire’s or Jamie’s. In a way the costumes on the day players and extras (supporting
artists) can sometimes be MORE important, because they don’t have to look good, they just have to look real. They are the ones who sell the authenticity, the ones who make you believe what you see on your screens.
Many of you now look at the details on our lead actors, but when you watch an episode for the 5th time, look at all those other people. Look at the crowd surrounding Claire and Geillis through the streets of Cranesmuir, or in the courtroom. Some of those clothes are made out of old bedspreads and vintage sweaters that have been completely repurposed into 18th-century villagers’ costumes. It is extraordinary work, full of absolutely beautiful details and textures. My team seriously rocks.
Then there is what we actually DO to the costumes. If Claire and Geillis are thrown into a filthy, vermin infested pit, you have got to believe it when you see them.
We have a zillion meetings about what is in that pit.
“How wet is it, really?”
“What do you mean, there will be water pouring down the walls?”
“How much water?”
“What are they sitting on?”
“Dry leaves and filth, or wet leaves and filth?”
“As long as everyone knows we only have two of their costumes, and one has to stay clean.”
“Are you shooting in sequence, or out?”
“As long as you understand that we are going to have to predict how filthy and torn they are, if you shoot the end before the beginning.”
The Companion to the Fiery Cross, a Breath of Snow and Ashes, an Echo in the Bone, and Written in My Own Heart's Blood Page 85
