Every shop has a story it tells at the counter. This is mine, and it cost exactly fifty dollars.
In the mid 1980s I was running an appliance shop with my friend Talmadge Roberts, who everybody called Robbie, out of a building at 75 Front Street in San Rafael. The days were exactly what you would expect. Load, scrub, refurbish, sell, rent, repeat. Used appliances are heavy and the work is not glamorous, and I loved it.
The shop was called R & M Appliance, for Robbie and Mike. Mike was Robbie’s original partner and he was gone before I got there, but nobody repaints a sign over something like that. The name stuck around longer than the partnership did, which is about as small business as it gets.
What made the neighborhood strange was what sat a few blocks away on Kerner Boulevard.
The company that was not on the sign
Industrial Light & Magic had moved up to San Rafael in 1978, and by the mid 80s they were the most important special effects house on the planet. Star Wars, Raiders, E.T. All of it came out of a plain building in our neighborhood.
Here is the part most people do not know. ILM deliberately kept a low profile, and locals mostly knew the place as the Kerner Company. The unremarkable name was the point. It kept fans and reporters from figuring out what was being built inside. So we had this world famous operation sitting quietly down the street, and the only real sign of it was that you would occasionally see film crew people wandering around the neighborhood.
We got used to seeing them around. We did not expect them to walk into our shop with a shopping list.
“Do they need to work?”
Late in 1985, a couple of ILM crew members came through the door. They were not interested in a nice refrigerator. They walked right past everything we had carefully serviced and asked for the oldest, most basic appliances in the building.
I asked the obvious question, already doing the math on how long it would take to get some old relic running again.
“They don’t need to cool and they don’t need to heat. We just need the lights inside to turn on when you open the doors.”
That is a sentence you do not hear in the appliance business. Normally the entire job is making the cold part cold and the hot part hot. These guys wanted a box that lit up.
It took me about forty years to work out why. Watch the opening credits of that movie and one of them plays over a shot taken from inside a refrigerator, looking out past the shelves. They were not filming a kitchen with a fridge in it. They were putting the camera in the box. That is the whole reason the compressor did not matter and the light did.
As it happened, I had exactly what they wanted. A weathered old stove and a refrigerator to match. To a customer they were junk taking up floor space. To a prop master they were perfect. We settled on a rental price of fifty dollars.
“What movie are you guys working on?”
We were writing up the paperwork and getting ready to load, and I could not help myself.
One of them looked up and said, “It’s called Howard the Duck. It’s based on a Marvel comic book.”
You have to remember what those words meant in 1985. Marvel was a comic book company, not a machine that prints billion dollar weekends. And a talking alien duck as the lead in a major motion picture sounded, let us say, ambitious. But George Lucas was the executive producer and ILM was doing the effects, so who was I to question it.
Here is the part I did not appreciate until much later. That was the first Marvel feature film ever made for theaters. There had been a Captain America serial back in 1944 and some television movies in the seventies, but a real, full length Marvel picture built for the big screen had never happened before. Twenty two years before Iron Man kicked off everything that came after, the whole thing started with a duck. And two of the appliances in it came out of our shop.
It makes more sense to me now than it did then. They started shooting that November, and the production ran across more than thirty Bay Area locations with something like fifty sets built from scratch. Apartment interiors, an office, a spa. Several of those sets went up on stages and in warehouses right there in San Rafael. When you are dressing that many rooms, somebody has to go find the furniture, and a kitchen needs a refrigerator whether or not it ever gets plugged in.
That somebody walked into our shop.
I was proud of it. I told my family. I told a few friends. Lucas’s crew came into our store and rented our appliances for a movie. That is a good story to have.
Then it came out
Howard the Duck hit theaters on August 1, 1986, and it did not go well. The film cost somewhere north of thirty million dollars and took about sixteen million at the domestic box office. Critics took it apart. It picked up seven Golden Raspberry nominations and won four of them. For years it was shorthand for a Hollywood disaster.
What I thought might be a claim to fame turned into a trivia question. I will admit I was disappointed.
Forty years later, I still have not watched the whole thing. I have only ever seen the opening, which takes place in Howard’s apartment before the chair he is sitting in launches him off his planet. He comes home and goes to the refrigerator for a beer, and for a few seconds the camera is sitting inside it looking out at him. That is the part I care about.
Here is my favorite wrinkle in the whole thing. That opening shot, the one where the armchair goes flying, is the reason a technique exists that every action movie now uses. ILM had to get rid of the wires yanking the chair, so an artist there painted them out frame by frame on a computer. It was the first digital wire removal in a feature film. Then, at the Razzies, ILM won Worst Visual Effects for this movie. They invented something the whole industry still depends on and got a trophy for being bad at it.
After that I usually smile and turn it off. The fifty dollar rental made it into a Hollywood production. That is plenty.
What I actually take from it
The joke that has stuck with me for forty years is that the appliances did not have to work. In this trade, working is the whole job. Somebody’s refrigerator quits on a Friday with a week of groceries inside and there is nothing charming about it. Nobody has ever called us and asked for a fridge that just lights up.
But it is a good reminder that you never know which ordinary Tuesday turns into the story you are still telling decades later. We have been doing this since 1975, first in Marin and then up in Sonoma County, and most of it is exactly what it looks like. Diagnose the problem, order the part, fix the machine, go to the next house.
Every so often somebody walks in wanting the worst appliance you own, and you end up in the movies.
Mark Kelly
Owner, Kelly’s Appliance Center
