Photograph by Dustin Snipes
If you head to YouTube and search for “jdsfx,” you’ll find the demo reel for J.D. Streett Special Effects. And you’ll find that Streett, originally from Eureka, is second to none when it comes to blowing stuff up for big-budget Hollywood films and TV shows. On the occasion of the annual St. Louis International Film Festival (314-289-4150, cinemastlouis.org), Streett discusses fake bullets, working with celebs, and his explosive career.
• The first question I always get is “How do you get into the business?” The second is “Were you a pyromaniac when you were a kid?” No, I was just a normal kid. I burned my fair share of plastic green army men, just like other kids—but never set any garages on fire or anything.
• A lot of what we do is “How do you make it look more dangerous and still keep it safe?” Rather than have a truck run into a solid metal dumpster, we weaken the dumpster so that it will deform and crush a lot easier than it would if it were unmodified.
• Bullets rarely spark when they hit anything, and vehicles rarely blow up in midair for no reason. But that’s Hollywood, and that’s what we’ve come to expect.
• Once, we were doing a movie and there was a huge blood bath; we were pumping fake blood from 55-gallon drums into chain saws. We all had to start wearing raincoats, and they were just covered in fake blood. This intern had them all in the back seat of his car after a long day, and naturally, he got pulled over by a rookie highway patrolman who called backup, and this guy had to explain to all the cops he wasn’t a mass murderer, he was just coming home from work.
• With pyrotechnics, a lot of it looks a lot more dramatic than it really is. The secret to a big fireball is to use a lot of gasoline and flammables that are atomized. Black powder explosive extends the moment, too.
• Some actors are just very physically smart, so they can do more effects and stunts themselves. Tim Allen was like that on Home Improvement. We said, “Do this, and this, and this…and don’t do that, or you’ll get hurt.” We trusted him, and he trusted us to do what needed to be done.
• In Men in Black, one of the things we did was the shot at the beginning when the alien gets shot by the state troopers and blows up. We used 35 gallons of what’s called “Super Slime.” They spent a lot of money cleaning up the rafters of the soundstage, because Super Slime went everywhere.
• CGI [computer-generated imagery] has helped and hurt the special-effects trade. In some ways, it’s expanded our work, mostly with “compositing,” taking separate elements and putting them together—like putting the hero next to the giant explosion… The best-looking special effects are still done in-camera in real life, though. Everybody knows that.
• The best time with this job is when the gag is over and everybody’s fine. I lose a lot of sleep with “what ifs,” but with time and experience, that’s diminished.
• There is tedium—how many times can you do rain, or do wind, or blow up cars? But still, each gag is a little different from the last.
