Planning the perfect disaster

Working feverishly in October’s autumn heat, a half-dozen technicians are fussily manipulating the cables to ensure that the Golden Gate Bridge will come tumbling down on cue.

Eighty-five feet long from tower to tower and 15-feet high, the wooden replica of San Francisco’s most identifiable landmark is set against a blue screen in a Van Nuys parking lot, propped 10 feet off the ground and wired to a forklift that will maneuver the ripple and sway of the bridge during what will be a catastrophic earthquake erupting along the Pacific Coast in NBC’s miniseries “10.5,” airing Sunday and Monday.

Finally, with a little tugging and pulling, the bridge smashes onto the ground. Reviewing the playback on his monitor, director John Lafia studies the structure as it folds and implodes with tiny model cars pinging through the air like hot popcorn. Leaning toward visual effects supervisor Lee Wilson, Lafia smiles, “That’s going to look great going into the water.”

A few weeks prior, there was more miniature destruction of major West Coast landmarks. A 25-foot facsimile of Seattle’s Space Needle was destroyed and a mini-Hollywood sign took a tumble. Then there was a commuter train swallowed by an encroaching fault line and the breaking off of Los Angeles from the rest of the United States.

Like the bridge, many of these scenes from the miniseries were created using models; footage of that was combined with computer-generated images (CGI in industry parlance) and live footage to create what producers hope are big-budget movie-style effects for this reported $20 million small-screen disaster feature.

“Generally, explosions and things breaking are done in miniatures as opposed to CG just because there’s a reality to it,” says Lafia, who wrote the teleplay with Ronnie Christensen and Chris Canaan. “Like for this, let’s say the cable breaks on the miniature but we want to have it coming flying to the camera; then we’ll continue that in CG. You put the two together and that really seems to be most effective.”

“This looks very real,” adds co-executive producer Gary Pearl, on-set in Van Nuys. “If they just built it all in CGI, it would be like the last ‘Star Wars’ film. You can tell that it was all CGI.”

The filmmakers admit that other than the factual aspects in the film regarding tectonic activity and fault lines, “10.5” is pure fantasy, dealing more in science-fiction possibilities than actual probabilities.

Still, critics from the scientific community have slammed the miniseries for its sensationalism and technical inaccuracies. For one thing, seismologists contend that a 10.5 earthquake is unlikely. That, and the epic climax when Los Angeles separates from the rest of the United States, is likely to incite fears.

“It’s supposed to be fun,” notes executive producer Howard Braunstein. “The big spectacles on television are very few and far between these days. So to be able to play in the sand box and create something this big and pull it off is fantastic.”

“It’s the fun of taking your kids to a haunted house and watching them freak out, and yet they enjoy it because it’s in a safe environment,” said actor Beau Bridges, who costars in the miniseries. “This movie is a chance for people to ride out the Big One, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with acknowledging the power of Mother Nature.”

To create that power took about 25 effects engineers working for four months on the miniatures and nearly a year on computer graphics. With such a tight schedule, there was little room for snafus, which meant extensive pre-planning.

From his home office in La Canada Flintridge, Lafia spent two weeks prior to pre-production last April sketching each nuance of the film with storyboard artist Joel Venti. “I’d lie on the sofa and dictate what I see in my head, what the shots will be,” Lafia recalls, “and Joel frames it, basically like a comic book, drawing all those panels out for me. Before you know it, I’ve got 50, 60, 70 pages worth of these drawings, and that is what I use to start communicating with everybody.”

That doesn’t mean it all went as planned. In the end, the bridge didn’t split down the middle, so many of the scenes in the film ended up in computer graphics. There were a couple of re-dos on the train set, and there were several homes that had to be constructed and demolished by the Hollywood sign.

“That was probably one of the biggest,” says Wilson, from his office at Rainmaker in Vancouver, where the live-action footage of the miniseries was shot. “So for one house that we did, I suggested that when the [landslide] comes and the rocks are going through the house that we hit a gas main ... and then we blew it up. I was determined this house was going to be gone at the end of the shot,” he laughs. “If you can’t get it to fall, just blow it up.”