Rick Gladmaid (28:09)
Yeah, I think we. The first thing we did is obviously in the script. Script is really about this character named John Digby. He's an unhoused man, comes into the emergency department and he has this really gnarly cast on his arm that's just brown and disgusting. So they bring him in to the emergency department, they give him a shower, clean them all up, and then they go to cut the cast. Stop. We use a real cast saw to cut through the cast and we pry it apart. And when they pry it apart, they see this character has a 6 inch wound on his arm and there are about a hundred live maggots crawling over the arm. So in order to do that, we have to backtrack a little bit. We have to get, you know, we use animal wranglers. We have to contact the animal Humane Society as well, because we want to use maggots. Well, what we realized is maggots are a little dirty and they're really difficult to get and they're small. So we instead went with wax worms. Wax worms are bigger. They don't stink, they don't bite, and they're really active. So when you put them on a cast inside there, they move around like crazy. So. So the scene is really. They cut it open and, you know, they spread the cast apart. And what you see is, first of all, the effects department puts like this slimy yellow kind of web stuff in there. So when you pry apart the cast, it looks like there's like this infection pulling apart. And then you discover there's a bunch of maggots in there. So it's pretty gross. And then we have to use a spray called ethyl chloride, which freezes the maggots. And then we scrape them all off into like a 4x4 container. So in order to do that part, we need to have fake maggots as well. So we used the real wax worms, we put them in there, did the scene where you open it up, you establish it. Then we do a scene where we put all the fake maggots in there, which are basically silicone maggots that we've had made or we buy, like, at a fishing supply store, and we do that, and then they spray it and they take it off. So, you know, one of the interesting things about that is just like an actor, everything is real. We try to make it as real as possible, but everything has to be 100% safe. So the actor has to be safe because we're using a real castaw and we don't want to hurt him. But the maggots, we need to make sure they're safe as well. So if we put 100 maggots in this cast, we have to count every single maggot when we pull it off his cast so that no maggot or wax worm actually gets hurt in the process. So I guess if we're backtracking a little bit in the meetings, we were trying to figure out the best way to do that. And I think ultimately what I just explained was kind of the route that we went with was using wax worms, and it worked perfectly. And so my job is just to make sure that we keep the communication going as props. So I'm looking for the fake maggots or the fake wax worms, whatever works. And then at the end, it all comes together because we have an exceptional crew, the communication is great. And ultimately we want to do is be able to go from the concert meeting to the production meeting and say, we've got everything that we need to make this happen. We'll do tests on it. So we'll actually. For this main actor, for the character, John Digby, we actually had his arm molded so that we can actually build multiple casts. I think for the cast cutting scene, for instance, we built 12 casts, and they're exactly the same size as the first cast. So they all fit on. They can all slide on. We'll do a test. We'll do a test where we're cutting the cast to make sure we put enough padding so that nobody gets hurt. You know, we'll do a test with the maggots. We'll usually not do that with a character, but we'll do that with, like, a volunteer, like someone from the production office. We're like, yeah, I'll do it. And then we put the wax worms on there and everything, and then everybody comes to watch the tests. So the director will be there the producers will be there, the writers will be there, and anyone in the production office that wants to see these gross little wax worm mets. So that's usually how it works. I mean, it's a collaboration of, like, every single department coming together and approving the process. And then when we're ready to film it, it's usually pretty flawless.
