Billboard Artist Has String of Big Draws

Ron Strang brushes past long tables cluttered with buckets of bright paint and walks to the center of a studio the size of an airplane hangar. He punches a button and a gargantuan creature rises from a crevice in the floor.

Emerging first is a wave of jet-black hair, followed by state-trooper sunglasses, then a sneering mouth chewing a match stick. Reaching full height, it towers three stories, sports automatic weapons, hand grenades and a set of muscles that could give Arnold Schwarzenegger a run for his barbells.

Move over “Rocky” and “Rambo,” and make way for “Cobra.”

Strang is sizing up an acrylic-on-cloth likeness of Sylvester Stallone as “Cobra,” a film to be released May 22, and anyone driving past Mann’s Chinese Theatre on or around that date will be able to see the work. For now, however, it’s nowhere near finished. But Strang isn’t intimidated. He has been tackling 30-foot movie billboards for 15 years as supervising scenic artist for Burbank Studios and hasn’t missed a deadline yet.

Billboards, ‘Triangle’

His work can be seen on the nine billboards lining the west side of Burbank Studios on Olive Avenue and on the three-sided billboard he refers to as “the triangle” on the island across the street.

“I like to think of those billboards as my own personal outdoor art gallery,” Strang said.

Unlike the air-brushed cloth mural of Stallone, the boards are hand-painted in oil by Strang and a regular crew of six to eight free-lance artists who work in pairs, either from the old-fashioned window-washer rigs or from a scissor lift.

Working outdoors in such a high-traffic area makes for an interesting workday. “You can really sit up there and watch the world go by,” said Strang. “Sometimes there are car accidents and, one day, the Bank of America got robbed. The cops showed up and asked if we’d seen anything and we said, ‘Yeah, he’s hiding behind that wall!’ They caught him.”

Air Gun Used to Paint

With that, he returns his attention to the crime-stopping “Cobra,” gives the canvas a quick appraisal, then summons scenic artist Pietro Palladini. Armed with an air gun--the kind normally used to paint automobiles--Palladini does battle with Stallone’s remaining white spots. Nicknamed “the color terrorist” by his fellow workers, Palladini paints solo. He artfully plants a bead of perspiration on Stallone’s partly exposed chest and assures onlookers that the monstrous task ahead of him “is really a one-man job.” He said, “A lot of people think doing billboards is just like paint-by-numbers, but it’s not like that at all.”

Strang said the billboard image is usually based on or identical to a film’s ad campaign or movie poster. That artwork is projected onto paper, and the paper is perforated, forming an outline. The paper--now called a “pounce”--is then placed over the surface (billboard or cloth) that will be painted, and charcoal is rubbed over the perforations to transfer the outline.

The artist paints, using the sketch as a guideline but relying heavily on the poster for exact details and shading. The entire process takes an average of one to two weeks, Strang said, with the outcome depending on a rare talent that is essential in the painting of movie stars.

“Let’s say you’re a billboard artist and you’re doing the Marlboro Man,” said Strang. “As long as he comes out good-looking, you’ve got nothing to worry about. But we paint celebrity personalities, and if you’re doing Barbra Streisand, it better look like Barbra Streisand.”

And, if there is one star that Strang and his men know how to paint, it’s Streisand. When “A Star Is Born” was released in 1976, they were required to produce 35 billboards featuring Streisand and Kris Kristofferson in a steamy embrace. Since they couldn’t squeeze a billboard onto a Xerox machine, they had to paint each individually.

Strang said, “It was really boring. After we got through about 20 of them, the guys were begging me to let them do something different--paint upside-down or something. When we finally finished the last one, we had a party and burned the pounces.”

Streisand Visits

But their work passed the acid test. Several times, Streisand showed up, in the flesh, to make sure Streisand on the cloth was up to her standards. “Barbra wanted to see just about every one of them, so she’d sit in the studio and chat for 30 minutes sometimes. But, after a while, she couldn’t find any fault, so she quit coming,” Strang said.

Streisand isn’t the only celebrity who has taken a personal interest in her billboard. Whoopi Goldberg left a note on the board for “The Color Purple,” thanking the artist for doing such a wonderful job, and Chevy Chase dropped by to let the crew know that, contrary to the ad campaign they were instructed to follow, his eyes are not brown. But the local favorite in billboard city is Clint Eastwood, who, Strang said, always likes to take an active role in choosing the board design. Consequently, the crew loved surprising him two years ago with a 14-foot pair of handcuffs dangling off the billboard for “Tightrope.”

Some Defaced

Strang quickly added that not everyone enjoys a good billboard the way Eastwood does--particularly the public. After laboring over a billboard for “So Fine,” a 1981 Ryan O’Neal movie about a man who creates designer jeans with a couple of transparent windows smack on the behind, Strang and crew discovered their work was “radically defaced by some feminist group with spray cans,” said Strang. “And they must have had a ladder with them because they got up pretty high.”

Occasionally, however, passers-by enjoy the art so much that they take it home with them. A three-story tall Prince was swiped from Mann’s Chinese Theatre during the “Purple Rain” promotion, but later recovered, and a cardboard license plate that read “Hooper” had to be replaced four times on the billboard promoting that 1978 Burt Reynolds movie.

“But Westwood is the worst,” Strang said with a laugh. “I’m definitely convinced there’s a museum of movie billboard memorabilia somewhere in Westwood.”

Painted Over

Of course, even if it isn’t stolen or vandalized, the art must eventually be painted over to make way for a new ad campaign. Strang said, “In the beginning, that really bothered me, but you get used to it after a while. We take photos of the boards and, inside the triangle, we sign our names with the date and the name of the movie we painted it for.”

But there are boards, it seems, that have barely dried before they mysteriously vanish under another ad. Marty Weiser, West Coast coordinator of advertising and publicity for Warner Bros. (Burbank Studios is owned by Warner Bros. and Columbia), explained, “If you’re a producer and you’ve put a couple of years of work and a lot of money into a picture and it bombs, you don’t want to be reminded of your failure every time you go to your office across the street. So you call up Ron and have him get rid of it.”

Weiser is the whiz who develops the outrageous, often three-dimensional concepts for the triangle, which are later turned into reality by Strang. In 1974, Weiser won a Belding Award for best outdoor painted bulletin from the Advertising Club of Los Angeles--the advertising business’s equivalent of an Oscar, he says. The winning billboard was a 3-D promotion for “Freebie and the Bean” and featured a car crashing out of the billboard, its wheel still turning slowly as if the wreck had just occurred. As usual, Weiser thought it up and Strang figured out the mechanics and put it together.

Moon Message

“He comes up with some wild things,” said Strang, “but that’s fine because I’m pretty outrageous myself.”

Only once did Weiser come up with an idea that was even stranger than Strang. “He called me up one day,” Strang said, “and told me, ‘Ron, I want to project Prince’s name on the moon,’ but I said, ‘Marty, you’re out of your mind! Nothing can project a picture on the moon.’ ”

Weiser insists that his request, for the upcoming release of “Under the Cherry Moon” was only a joke, but Strang struck a compromise. He’s going to fly his own moon over Mann’s Chinese Theatre and put Prince’s name on it.

Although Strang is known for doing the almost impossible, the 600 to 700 billboards he has done for Burbank Studios represent only about half the work he does as supervising scenic artist. He and his men spend the other 50% of their time painting background scenery and backdrops for movies and TV shows. Past work includes “Blade Runner” and “Dukes of Hazzard.”

Family Career

A graduate of Chouinard Art Institute, Strang has been working at his craft 30 years and said he was started in the business by his father, who was also a scenic artist. Ron’s son, Ed, 25, has already begun carrying on the legacy.

As Ed will learn, there are perks in the business. Ron gets to do body painting when casting calls for tattooed women. “Those are some of my best work--the girls I’ve painted,” he said, taking out a Polaroid of a “tattooed” actress. “She was 5-foot-10 and weighed 170 pounds--they cast her so I’d have a good-sized canvas,” he said with a cackle.

In his spare time, Strang free-lances, designing anything from luggage to stage sets for the likes of Van Halen, Michael Jackson and even Oral Roberts. But his heavy-metal T-shirt betrays his preference for rock over religious shows. It also betrays his youthful attitude.

Palladini said, “He’s the oldest living teen-ager--a hard-core rock-and-roller. He’s our god and, when I grow up, I want to be just like him.”