Last week’s Halloween-themed episode of “9-1-1” saw Buck (Oliver Stark) bring what he thought was a fake skeleton to a haunted house attraction held at Fire Station 118. Terrifying everyone, he later learned that the fake skeleton was actually the real skeleton of an Old West bandit named Billy Boils, who Buck believed had cursed him by accidentally cutting off one of its arms.
TheWrap spoke with the show’s props expert Bryce Moore and his assistant Megan Casey about how they “transformed” the skeleton. They also did a convincingly creepy performance and storytelling session with the skeleton on Zoom and explained all the work that went into the show’s other big prop from Season 8, Episode 5, an oversized pumpkin stuck on a guy’s head.
TheWrap: How did you create the skeleton?
Bryce Moore [proudly showing off his props]: This is our Billy Boils. We start with a regular skeleton, and then we do the skin. Believe it or not [we use] cellophane [like] for your sandwich. That’s how we get the wrinkled look. And then we paint the skin. It dries wrinkled, and it holds the color. The coloring and aging really sells our bodies.
Is that a famous trick in the industry?
BM: Yeah, everyone in the industry and in the body building industry. You can bend it and see the texture and the skin move. It’s very convincing. And then our tendons. [This makes Buck and the trick-or-treaters realize the skeleton is real]. It’s just rope that’s been painted and colored.
What’s the bone made of?
It’s a regular Halloween bone that you can buy on Amazon or in Halloween stores.
Megan Casey: You can also buy them in anatomy classes all over the world.
So this is a synthetic skeleton, because I understand it was a practice to use real human skeletons?
BM: Yeah, that’s something we stopped doing around the 1960s.
There’s a rumor that they used real skeletons on “Poltergeist”.
BM: It was an accident. They didn’t know until it was too late. They got the order, the special effects team and the props, they got the order and they were putting it all together before it was too late. “Oh, by the way, these are real corpses,” so that information came out at the end of the shoot, pretty much.
You said you had a couple of versions of the pumpkin stuck on the guy’s head. Did you have a backup for the skeleton?
BM: We did. We made two skeletons, one that was a little scary and one that wasn’t too scary, because we didn’t want to scare the audience too much. And when it was on set, it looked very real. We used two skeletons in the process of creating the mummy. And we used parts from one body, as we would say “Frankensteined” them together for the other body. We took the arms off one body and put them on the other body. We did that a lot. That’s how we did most of our quick fixes.
How much time do you usually spend working on a prop?
BM: The body build took about three to four days for us to prepare for that scene, and that’s all the time we actually had to do. I worked with a crew of six people. We all got together and worked on it. They say 90% of the work is prep.
Are you on set with “9-1-1” to make sure everything is working?
BM: That’s where Megan comes in. I usually run and get everything ready for the script and the next episode, and I run tests with Megan, our props expert on set. She’ll have to make a few changes here and there, due to a little tweaking and production, maybe last minute.
For a show like this, we have to bring in two prop trucks. We have a 48-foot prop truck, filled with everything from laptops to cell phones to bulletproof vests. We have badges, we have watches. Whatever you want, we bring it. If they ask for it, we have to have it. So I have to be ready for anything they might come up with.
Bryce, you also worked on “24.” And with director David Fincher.
BM: Yeah, I worked for David Fincher for 10 years. My dad and I are a father-son team, and we’ve done most of the feature films with David Fincher. So like “Seven,” “The Game,” “Fight Club,” “Panic Room,” just to name a few.
