Scrap Goes to the Movies

When winners of the 72nd annual Academy Awards are announced March 26, there won’t be a category for “Best Supporting Role by a Scrap Plant or Scrap Personality.” That’s a shame because scrap processing facilities and characters in the scrap business have often found themselves before the bright lights and cameras for everything from Oscar-winning motion pictures to popular TV shows to animated shorts and home videos.
   And while these portrayals are sometimes far from flattering, there have been times when a scrap setting helped the characters explore philosophical issues such as the nature of good and evil and the existence of the human soul.

Setting the Scene
Scrap has been helping the cameras roll for much of Hollywood’s history, both on-screen and off. Recent films such as Saving Private Ryan and Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace turned to scrap processors for props ranging from authentic World War II-era landing craft to jet engine parts for building a futuristic pod-racer. And Kevin Costner’s Waterworld recouped some of its immense budget by later selling its floating set as scrap steel.
   Scrap also figured prominently in the lives of certain men who made movies.
   “To understand the movie industry,” wrote freelance author George Mair in the St. Petersburg Times last November, “it is helpful to understand that it was … founded by hard-driven, hungry businessmen who had been glove merchants and scrap-iron dealers before they became movie moguls.”
   The legendary Louis B. Mayer, for instance, was the son of a prosperous scrap dealer in Canada and founder of his own Boston-based scrap business before he headed Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc. Director James Whale collected brass nails from the streets of Edwardian England long before filming the graveyard scene in which a mad scientist and his henchman collect scraps of bodies to recycle into the original Frankenstein of 1931.
   Scrap and junk themes (the terms are, unfortunately, interchangeable as far as Hollywood is concerned) date back to the silent era and early talkies. The 1921 melodrama Scrap Iron, for instance, featured the aptly named character John Steel. Likewise, the 1927 version of Casey at the Bat and 1929’s Innocents in Paris both included junk-dealing businessmen.

Waving the Flag (Then Thumbing the Nose)
Scrap helped propel America’s military mission in World War II, both in armaments and propaganda. These efforts ranged from the bureaucratically titled 1941 documentary Defense Review No. 2, which discussed aluminum recycling, to the 1943 cartoon Scrap Happy Daffy, in which Daffy Duck collects a scrap pile so large that it attracts Hitler’s attention. Der Fuehrer then sends a Nazi goat to America via U-boat to eat up Daffy’s scrap—only it’s Daffy who gets the goat’s goat, so to speak, while the U-boat ends up on the scrap pile for America’s war effort, according to the Internet Movie Database (www.amazon.imdb.com).
   Postwar Hollywood took a less-patriotic view of the scrap industry, though, as evidenced by the then-astronomical $1 million spent by Columbia Pictures in 1950 for film rights to the Broadway hit Born Yesterday. The movie version starred Broderick Crawford as an obnoxious and corrupt scrap dealer named Harry Brock who comes to Washington, D.C., to bribe Congress. It also won Judy Holliday an Oscar for her portrayal of the ultimately not-so-dumb mistress who gets control of all of Brock’s businesses.
   When Born Yesterday was remade in 1993 with Melanie Griffith and John Goodman, the Brock character now seemed more interested in real estate than scrap metal. Still, in both versions the relative ease with which Brock (almost) gets his way with Congress is likely to astonish real scrap professionals, who spent more than a decade before winning—without bribery, thank you—Superfund relief.

Scrap Meets Bond, James Bond
It took Hollywood until 1964, however, to make scrap “cool” by forever linking one particular form of scrap processing to that coolest of 1960s’ icons—James Bond. The process was baling and the movie Goldfinger. You know the scene: Auric Goldfinger’s Korean henchman Oddjob (Harold Sakata) drives a 1964 Lincoln Continental with a body in the backseat into a scrap plant, where a grapple picks up the vehicle and drops it into a baling press. Then it’s CRASH! SMASH! as the metal crunches and glass shatters (the film won an Oscar for its sound effects). A few moments later, out pops a nice block of compressed car, which is carried by magnet to Oddjob’s waiting pickup truck.
   OK, so the car that got crushed isn’t the same vehicle that Oddjob drove up in—the Internet Movie Database says it’s a 1963 Continental that’s already had its engine removed. The scene is still memorable, and it ends with a good lesson about sorting your scrap before processing: When Oddjob brings the metal bale back to his boss, Goldfinger (Gert Froebe) then tells him to retrieve the gold that was in the car’s trunk!
   In something of a throwback to the Born Yesterday mentality, a sometimes unscrupulous scrap dealer appears in 1974’s The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. This Canadian film focuses on how Duddy (Richard Dreyfuss) schemes and even cheats his way to success in Montreal in the late 1940s. One of Duddy’s get-rich-quick plans involves making films of bar mitzvahs and weddings, and to that end he enlists a scrap merchant named Farber (Joe Silver) as one of his first clients. The cigar-chomping Farber alternates between having a heart of gold (he helps Duddy recoup his losses from a crooked roulette game) and a heart of stone—he once let his partner go to jail for negligence in a scrap plant death that was equally his fault, only he was too smart to get caught. But those are the old ways, Farber notes, and he declares: “My [son] will never have to cheat a partner into jail.”
   In one key scene, the camera follows Farber and Duddy around the scrap facility as they negotiate the price of filming the upcoming bar mitzvah of Farber’s son. In the background, the audience sees workers breaking apart scrap with sledge hammers and hears Farber shout directions at his men, such as when he admonishes one: “Don’t mix the steel with the aluminum!”
  The film-within-a-film that results is a comical mishmash of the bar mitzvah plus images of African tribal dancers, diving Stukas, and other “artistic” elements tossed in by the drunken director Duddy hires. But the opening credits clearly list it as co-produced by “M. Farber Scrap Merchants,” and the mini-film ends with Farber and son proudly standing before their scrap company’s sign.

Metal and Metaphysical Musings
In 1980, the movie image of a scrap facility took a decidedly positive turn in My Bodyguard, which explored the friendship between a much-abused high school student named Clifford (Chris Makepeace) and his protector, a supposed local bully named Linderman (Adam Baldwin).
   At first, Linderman protects Clifford from a high school gang only because the younger boy pays him. But gradually, the two become friends, and they do it while scrounging around in various Chicago scrap facilities, looking for one key part that Linderman needs to finish rebuilding an old motorcycle. Against this decidedly cold and hard backdrop, the two warm up to each other, discussing the mutual problems they’ve faced in life and then, after the vital part is found, enjoying a joyous ride together on the recycled bike.
  It’s the first of several films that intermingled scrap metal with an almost metaphysical sense of exploring the larger issues of life. Continuing this theme was 1983’s Superman III in which the Man of Steel literally splits into two personas, one good and the other evil, after being exposed to a manufactured form of kryptonite. And where does the evil Superman battle his good alter ego, Clark Kent (both played by Christopher Reeve), until only one of them survives? 
In a scrap plant, of course—one of the ugliest and dirtiest operations imaginable. But at least it’s an artificial one. A 1999 newspaper article noted how England’s Pinewood Studios in Buckinghamshire required all the scrap cars in Devon County for the scene. And besides, it’s the imagery that matters more than the actual images. For as evil Superman tosses Kent first into a compactor and then tries to chop him up in a car shredder, the scrap setting offers a useful metaphor: No matter how worthless or damaged something might seem, the innate value—whether in an old car or a superhero—can always be recovered.
  There’s a somewhat similar scene in 1999’s Inspector Gadget, in which the title character (a police detective with a gazillion robotic parts implanted in his body) has apparently been killed by his nemesis and tossed onto a scrap pile while an evil Gadget terrorizes the city. But the good Gadget (both parts are played by Matthew Broderick) literally pulls himself together, rises up from the scrap, and sets out for the inevitable final battle between good and evil. It’s a beautifully filmed scene, with Gadget rocketing out for justice in his jet-powered car, framed by two tall piles of scrap and cranes, with the sun rising behind a picturesque bridge in the background.
  (Movie Trivia: While that bridge is a landmark in Pittsburgh, where many scenes for the film were shot, the scrap operation itself was apparently in California, with the two images melded together through the usual movie magic.)

Scrap Family Values
Inner turmoil also lay at the heart of 1993’s My Life, in which an ad executive who calls himself Bob Jones (Michael Keaton) tries to come to terms with his past and a future he’ll never see because he’s dying of cancer. But first he wants to make a video record of his life for his soon-to-be-born son. Unfortunately, that involves opening old wounds with his father (Michael Constantine), a scrap dealer with a thick East European accent who deeply resents the fact that “Jones” abandoned both the family business and the family’s ethnic name—Ivanovich.
  Family issues are also explored in a lighter vein in 1994’s Greedy, as a rich old scrap operator named McTeague (Kirk Douglas) is besieged by fawning relatives who hope to inherit his millions. Throughout the film, Douglas wears a “McTeague Scrap Metal” cap, which becomes a sort of icon to show who’s in his favor—at various points his beautiful young nurse (Olivia d’Abo) and long-lost grandson (Michael J. Fox) also don such props. The aging scrap patriarch is wheelchair-bound, so he uses a scrap crane (with company logo) to get lowered into his pool. There’s also a long scene at the McTeague plant where viewers see a giant overhead crane moving scrap around and watch an array of magnets and grapples swing back and forth in the background.
  Perhaps most interestingly, there’s no real reason in the plot for the McTeague fortune to be based on scrap metal. Unlike My Life and Duddy Kravitz, we’re not watching a slice of the immigrant expe-rience. Even the family’s name—McTeague—is not chosen for any heretofore unknown Scottish influence on scrap recycling, but rather as a pun: It’s the same name from the classic 1924 silent film Greed by Erich von Stroheim.
  Perhaps the producers just thought that scrap represented a great way to make a pile of money—1994 was a good year, after all. Wonder how the McTeagues handled the recent downturn?

Scrapping the Small Screen
Though the previously mentioned films about scrap were all big-screen presentations, there’s a notable entry in the home video category and a British television program that show the scrap industry in a uniquely positive and interesting light.
  A kid’s video, There Goes a Garbage Truck (1997), focuses mostly on the collection and landfilling of ordinary household waste. But the last several minutes of the half-hour storyline take viewers through the world of aluminum can recycling, covering curbside pickup or recycling center dropoff, sorting and baling, and then remelting and reuse in new aluminum cans.
  What’s most interesting, though, is that the entire tone of the video changes when its subject switches from garbage to recycling. The garbage portions are marked by slapstick humor and silly sound effects—especially when a truck drives off by itself or someone gets stuck in a dumpster. But as soon as co-hosts Dave Hood and Becky Borg visit Allan Co.’s recycling plant in Baldwin Park, Calif., they not only don the company’s green T-shirts and caps, they also stop clowning around.
  Viewers see Allan Co. employees sorting paper, plastic, glass, and aluminum cans, take a look inside the company’s baler, and watch baled aluminum cans being delivered to an aluminum smelter—without any funny music or mugging for the camera. Instead, the co-hosts discuss how using recycled aluminum to make new cans saves energy. They even make the case against flow control measures.
  When you set out cans by the curbside, you make money for your city, notes Borg. But when you save your cans and take them to a recycling center, “you make money for yourself!” she says, giving a big thumbs-up sign.
  Meanwhile, British television offers a show called Scrapheap Challenge in which two teams work against each other and the clock to build various kinds of devices—from cannons to hang gliders—using materials found in a London scrap plant. Filmed at the Canning Town facility of Mayer Parry Recycling Ltd., part of Co-Steel Inc. (Toronto), the show depicts scrap metal and other recovered materials in almost heroic terms. As co-host Robert Llewellyn told contestants in the episode about building flying machines: “The scrap and the skies await you!”
  Mayer Parry lets the production crew from Britain’s RDF Television take over roughly three-quarters of an acre in the 5-acre scrap facility, notes Jason Harris, Canning Town operations manager. Filming the show’s eight to 10 episodes takes about three months, from May to July, Harris adds, and begins with roughly one full month of building the set. Some 300 tons of material must be stacked up for the contestants to sift through, consisting of scrap from the Canning Town yard, plus “interesting scrap” from other Mayer Parry sites, such as an old bus, as well as special material as needed.
Various ground rules have kept both the show and the scrap company happy for the past two seasons, with a third season set for filming this summer.
  For instance, the shows are filmed only on Wednesdays, during which Mayer Parry agrees not to process any material “to keep background noise down to a minimal level,” Harris notes. The company also moved certain equipment farther back from the closed-off set to further reduce noise, he adds. In turn, the television crew agrees to follow safety rules, stays in its designated areas, and makes sure its cameras don’t show certain pieces of Mayer Parry equipment. At the end of the shooting schedule, they also dismantle the set.
  Even so, filming in a scrap facility poses unique problems. The metal itself can wreak havoc on the television sound equipment, disrupting the signal from radio microphones. The television crew eventually solved the problem, but not before some contestants’ voices “would suddenly cut out in mid-sentence,” notes Cathy Rogers, the show’s producer and co-host.
Mayer Parry is compensated for its lost production time and for helping construct the sets, Harris explains. The company also helps with suggestions on scrap utility and suitability. Mayer Parry has discussed the strength of various materials with the production crew and even used its network of suppliers to find oil drums for an episode on building an amphibious vehicle, Harris says.
  Incidentally, Scrapheap Challenge has recently been shown in the United States on cable’s The Learning Channel. But the name was changed to Junkyard Wars because “we were told no one knew what scrap was there,” adds Rogers.

A Scrap ’Toon Triumph
As with live-action movies, the image of scrap in cartoons swings widely. The popular TV and video programs involving Thomas the Tank Engine also feature an old traction engine name Trevor who was “saved from scrap.” Likewise, another locomotive fears every mention of scrap. “Don’t say that word,” he shivers. “It makes me wheels wobble!”
  But at the same time, one of the most positive screen depictions of a scrap processing facility since Daffy Duck beat that Nazi goat belongs to last year’s animated feature The Iron Giant.
  Focusing on the friendship between a young boy and a towering robot from outer space, this movie uses a 1950s scrap facility in Maine as the place where the robot finds refuge from his Cold War Army pursuers. It’s his place of nourishment (he eats car hulks, old farm equipment, and other metal), as well as the setting for perhaps the most philosophical debate ever held amidst mounds of metal.
  Having seen hunters kill a deer, the robot (who initially has no memory of why he’s come to earth) ponders the meaning of life and death and whether or not he has a soul—all while lying back on a bed of scrapped cars and other old metal, rendered in soft blue-gray tones and framed by towering pines and a star-filled night sky.
Mark Whiting, production designer for The Iron Giant, agrees that the scrap operation made a good setting for that scene, which he says was “about things passing—and this is a place where these objects have been discarded, passed over.”
Developmental artist Victor Haboush—one of hundreds of artists who worked on the film—recalls seeing a scrap facility surrounded by gorgeous pines when he and other members of the crew toured Maine to prepare for the film. They visited numerous locations, including several small scrap plants in the area, and took photographs to help with their drawings.     Noting that real scrap piles often grouped similar material together, Haboush tried the same approach in the film, drawing a pile of washing machines in one spot, then a pile of car doors together, and so on.
  “You didn’t want to just draw a bunch of junk,” he explains. “It would look like nothing. So I tried to make mounds and knolls and define it—sort of a ‘designy’ thing rather than stuff just thrown out.”
  And if those artistic aspects alone aren’t enough to get The Iron Giant a nomination for that long-overlooked scrap Oscar, then how about this scene: The owner of the scrap plant, a beatnik artist named Dean (voiced by singer Harry Connick Jr.), tells one of his scrap suppliers that he can’t pay him much for an old tractor because there’s a giant bite taken out of it—thus restating in visual terms the eternal struggle between scrap quality and price.
And the winner is ... •

Now Playing at the Scrap Theater
Here’s a partial list of movies, videos, and TV shows that included—sometimes only tangentially—a scrap scene or theme*:
• The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz: Scrap merchant immortalizes his son’s bar mitzvah in wacky film.
• Born Yesterday: Arrogant scrap merchant tries to buy Congress.
• The Brave Little Toaster: Animated appliances try to avoid being recycled in a scrap plant.
• Casey at the Bat: Includes a junk-dealing businessman.
• Cousins: Man marries his brother’s widow, who inherited a scrap operation.
• Goldfinger: Gangster gets baled in scrapped car.
• Greedy: Avaricious family wants rich old scrap merchant to leave them his money.
• The Empire Strikes Back: Droid C-3PO ends up in pieces on a futuristic sorting line.
• Innocents in Paris: Includes a junk-dealing businessman.
• Inspector Gadget: Robotic cop must survive being dumped on scrap pile.
• The Iron Giant: Metal man from outer space finds safety, nourishment, and spirituality in a scrap plant.
• My Bodyguard: Scrap facilities help two youths find missing motorcycle part and friendship.
• My Life: Dying son of scrap merchant explores his life and family with camcorder.
• No Mercy: Chicago scrap plant seen in background from bridge in cop thriller.
• Nothing But Trouble: Called “one of the worst movies of all time” by a scrap executive, but the whole film takes place in a scrap operation.
• Project Grizzly: Documentary about a Canadian scrap dealer who builds a protective suit to study grizzly bears.
• Salvage One: TV show about scrap-built spaceship.
• Scrap: German film about building a racing car from scrap.
• Scrap Happy Daffy: Daffy Duck fights to save America’s scrap from Hitler.
• Scrapheap Challenge: British TV show (renamed Junkyard Wars in the United States) about building fantastic objects out of scrap.
• Scrap Iron: Silent film features John Steel.
• Star Kid: Young boy finds a robotic suit in a nearby scrap plant.
• Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace: Young Darth Vader is slave to a winged scrap dealer creature.
• Superman III: Man of Steel battles his evil alter ego inside scrap equipment.
• There Goes a Garbage Truck: Kid’s video explores recycling.
• Thomas the Tank Engine: TV show and videos in which steam engines fear being scrapped.
• A Town Turned to Dust: TV science fiction tale about future where scrap metal is the only currency.
*Includes titles from various sources, including films not viewed for this article.