Pete Von Sholly, "Capitol Hell" artist: Mr. Media Interview, Part 3 (Return to Part 2)

(Return to Part 1)

BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: I know you want to talk about dinosaurs, so let’s talk about dinosaurs. You like to mix them up in your work, combining dinosaurs with real people, which I’m thinking is a little bit Jurassic Park, which is your film background, but it’s also a little bit of creationism, too. Do you want to touch on that a little bit?

PETE VON SHOLLY: Well, The Lost World, by Conan Doyle, might be one of the first and one of my favorite books involving the survival of dinosaurs into our times. There’s really nothing new about that in fiction. I don’t think of it as having anything to do with creationism myself. I think anybody who looks at the fossil record and looks at science will find that that’s just absurd to think that that’s literal creationism. No, I don’t. I just look for any excuse to draw and paint dinosaurs.





ANDELMAN: Why? What is it about dinosaurs?

VON SHOLLY: Well, there’s a good question. Why do people like cars, or why do people like horses? There’s this great musician, Tay Zonday, who’s on YouTube who did “Chocolate Rain,” and he’s done a lot of really incredible music. He’s a singer/songwriter who plays the piano. He’s just an amazing guy who’s on YouTube, and somebody asked him, “Why did you become a musician?” That’s kind of a dumb question, but his response was, it included the question well, “Why did you become silent?” which I thought was a great question because don’t we all start out singing and drawing with crayons making pictures and doing stuff, and we all do that when we’re little, and some of us stop, and some of us stay with it, and it’s kind of like we all like dinosaurs, I think, when we’re kids. All kids go through a dinosaur phase. Some never get over it. Maybe it’s arrested development of some kind. I don’t know. I still love dinosaurs. I still love comic books. I still love rock and roll music. I like the things that I liked when I was little. Those things inspired me. I loved artwork with dinosaurs. This guy, Mo Gollub, that painted the Turok covers that were a big highlight of my comic-book-reading youth. Particularly, the 13 covers that Mo Gollub did were fantastic, and so you see that, and there’s just something exciting about it that makes you want to do it, too. I wanted to do that, and I am still there.

ANDELMAN: What you’d really like is to be able to take your pet dinosaur for a walk around the block, wouldn’t you?

VON SHOLLY: Oh, indeed. But the movie Prehysteria was kind of like that. That was a movie I made up and sold to this, let’s not get libelous here, this fellow named Charlie Band who made a movie, made three movies based on the concept, but it was about a kid with pet dinosaurs.





ANDELMAN: I want to use that as a segue. I want to talk about your film work. Tell folks about some of the other films you’ve worked on. I think you’ve mentioned Prehysteria and Dinosaur, and I think in the opening I mentioned Mars Attacks! and The Shawshank Redemption. What are some of the other films you’ve worked on?

VON SHOLLY: I’ve done all of Frank Darabont’s movies so far, The Mist and The Green Mile and even The Majestic, some stuff for that, plus his first movie, Buried Alive. Then there was Darkman, which was really fun because that was kind of a comic book, and Sam Raimi is a riot to work with. I worked on a lot of crappy movies; they pay just the same as the good movies, and there are so many more of them (laughs).

ANDELMAN: Didn’t you work on Tim Burton’s unproduced “Superman” movie?

VON SHOLLY: I did. I was basically called in to draw monsters. Brainiac, I guess, was going to have like a monster zoo on his spaceship, and I guess they weren’t happy with the monsters that they were getting, and so a friend of mine recommended me, and I worked for just a few weeks. And Tim Burton came in one day, and I knew him from Mars Attacks! and from James and the Giant Peach, and he looked at the monsters, and he said, “I love your monsters, Pete.” I said, “Oh, thank you.” And he said the most fun he ever had was drawing monsters at Disney when he was young, early in his career, I mean. So I was just kind of brought in to do that.

ANDELMAN: And you mentioned James and the Giant Peach, which is another Burton film. Some of these guys like Burton and Darabont that you’ve worked with a couple of times. How does that take shape?




VON SHOLLY: It’s quite different actually. When I started doing storyboards and as part of the segue, if I may, I said I wanted to be a comic book artist, and I couldn’t make any money cause I was no good. But it was something I wanted to do. And then when I saw storyboards, I didn’t know what storyboards were up until I moved to California from upstate New York after meeting Vaughn Bode and all that and met a lot of people out here who did comics and stuff. And still, even though there was George DiCaprio, Leonardo’s father, was a great, great help, and Vaughn Bode introduced him, and he helped look out for us. But I saw storyboards, and I thought that looks kind of like comics. Maybe I could learn to do that. And a lot of people get into animation, I think, who find that here’s a place an artist can make a living, and there’s not that many. So I got into doing storyboards cause they looked kind of like comics, and then you have to learn about film and the differences between film and comics. But when I started with Frank Darabont and a few other people, it was more one on one like you sit down with the director and have a meeting. And what I liked to do was take pencil and paper and sketch, and the director describes the shots that he wants, and sometimes directors want your input and sometimes they know what they want, and they’re not really looking for input. You figure that out really quick. On the bigger movies and on feature animation, it’s more of a team kind of thing. There’s less interaction with the directors, which I think is a shame, and it’s not as much fun. Mars Attacks!, there were three of us doing storyboards, and one guy interacted, Michael Jackson his name is, great, great guy, great friend, great artist. He was sort of Tim Burton’s guy so he would be the one having the meetings, and then he would tell us. He would give us the feedback. On The Mist, that was just like old times with Frank, which is just the two of us sitting down talking, drawing, having fun. So different directors have different approaches.

ANDELMAN: Tell me about you and Darabont. You worked on Shawshank, which is rather unlike a lot of these other films.

VON SHOLLY: Yeah. Storyboarding, as a process, usually involves stunts and special effects. And so on Shawshank, there wasn’t that many of those. There was an opening helicopter shot, and there were some shots that were going to involve wire removal and things where people got dangled off of roofs and dropped off of tiers in prisons and things. We went to Ohio and went to the actual prison that they used for the exteriors. Every now and then you travel, too, which is a side thing, but it’s a fun thing about storyboarding. But movies like The Shawshank Redemption don’t usually require as much storyboarding as something like The Mist because it’s mostly for special effects.

ANDELMAN: Do you have any other Darabont stuff coming up?

VON SHOLLY: Well, he’s supposed to do Fahrenheit 451. I don’t know how much storyboarding there will be in that. I’m not in touch with Frank so much outside of working arrangements.

ANDELMAN: Okay. Go ahead.

VON SHOLLY: A lot of people are busy, so when they need you, they call you.

ANDELMAN: I understand.

VON SHOLLY: And when you’re done, it’s not rudeness or unfriendliness, they’re on to the next thing.

ANDELMAN: Of course. No, I understand that completely. Now, your latest storyboards were for a film called Superhero, which is, I gather, in the satire form of Airplane. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

VON SHOLLY: Yeah. That’s the group of people that’s been doing the Scary Movie films, and Leslie Nielsen is in it, and that was more like it. I was talking about how some of these things are done in little teams of storyboard artists working individually where the directors will cherry-pick the shots that they like. If you come up with an idea, they’ll, “Oh, I like that. We’ll use that.” Superhero was like the old days where it was me and the director, Craig Mazin, and we would be sometimes down at the set. He would say, “Come to the set. We’re shooting Monday at this high school gymnasium and show up there at noon, and at lunchtime, I’ll take a break and draw with ya.” We would really knock out the stuff, but it was like being in the trenches. There was no time…Feature film animation is this big, long, rambling process where you try things and throw things out and start over again. I don’t really like it that much. This is a lot more fun because it’s immediate. And David Zucker is the producer and Robert Weiss, and they’ve produced a ton of big movies. It’s going to be very much the same kind of tone with a gag every couple seconds, but it’s like Spider-man and Batman, all the superhero movies that have been made lately. It’s kind of like they combine them all into one spoof. Should be pretty funny.

ANDELMAN: Sounds like fun.

VON SHOLLY: There’s a scene where the young hero character -- like Batman or Spider-Man, he blames himself for the death of his parents, and a hoodlum holds them up. They’re coming out of the theater at night in a dark alley, and a hoodlum holds them up, and the kid goes and grabs the gun and accidentally shoots his father and drops his gun on the ground and shoots his mother. And he’s talking as a flashback about, “I always blamed myself for their deaths,” and in fact, it’s totally his fault. So that’s an example of one of the scenes that could play pretty funny.

© 2008 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

Labels: Capitol Hell, dinosaurs, Fahrenheit 451, Frank Darabont, Jurassic Park, Mars Attacks, Pete Von Sholly, Sam Raimi, Superhero, The Lost World, The Shawshank Redemption, Tim Burton, Vaughn Bode

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