Quarantine Series: The Long Kiss Goodnight
This is a follow up to our recent post about the movie business. I wrote about renting and selling to to movie business, but I left something out. I thought I would do a post about what happens when things go wrong. 99% of the time everything operates smoothly with the movie folks, but not always.
These days the movie folks mostly buy rather than rent. Rentals still happen, a show called Nurses rented a few things things this past week. But every year we are getting fewer and fewer rentals and more and more purchases from the movie folks. This change has happened for two main reasons. First, the movie folks mostly come to us for antique pieces and antiques used to be so expensive they couldn’t afford to buy them, they had to rent. They would even work out shooting schedules so that they would only have to pay one week rental instead of two. Second, movies made for theatres used to be the main thing. They often had short shooting schedules and than the production would shut down. Now the main thing is TV series often for streaming services, so productions often go on for years. Renting items for years doesn’t make sense. Rentals are great for us, but they have caused some problems over the years.
A couple of years back we had a magnificent Victorian dinning room table and eight chairs. Murdoch Mysteries wanted to rent just four of the chairs. The whole set wasn’t within their budget. They used to get a budget for a block of episodes and sometimes by the time they got to the last couple of episodes in a block, money got tight. They were such good customers and we knew they could be trusted to take care of the chairs so we agreed. The problem occurred when somebody stole the truck that had the chairs and a few more of our items inside. The police found the truck about a week later but its contents were long gone.
Another one that didn’t work out so well was a Benjamin Moore paint commercial from decades ago. They had rented a bunch of expensive reproduction Canadianna pine pieces that could be easily damaged. The items we rent more than 80% of the time are antique pieces. So a minor scratch from time to time doesn’t make much of a difference. However sometimes they want to rent new pieces. We always warn new customers in advance that they have to return items in the same condition as they receive them. Otherwise they have to buy the pieces or pay for the repairs. The Benjamin Moore folks said they understood and that the pieces were going to be lightly used so it wouldn’t be a problem.
When the pieces came back, they looked like they had been through a war. I particularly remember a large dinning room table that had deep gouges the entire length of the table. What’s more they tried to tell us that this was the same condition in which they had received the pieces.
The funny part of the story is that a few months later I was watching TV one night and saw the Benjamin Moore paint commercial with our furniture in it. Not only did they drag paint cans across the table in the commercial. But they also had dogs run across the table. And a child crash into a sideboard while driving a toy car. And there was paint spilling everywhere. The commercial was about painting in a chaotic house. Basically saying if your painting project gets messed up by the chaos, we can fix it. Lightly used!
The worst situation we ever had was a movie called The Long Kiss Goodnight staring Geena Davis and Samuel L. Jackson. In 1996 when the movie was shot, it was the biggest budget production that had ever come to Canada. They rented an entire cube van full of expensive antiques including an enormous French bedroom suite, which I remember for some reason. This was before the collapse of the antique market when prices were high.
They picked everything up late one day, just as we were closing. The next morning I’m driving into work and I hear on the radio that the historic 127 year old Windermere House in the Muskoka’s had burned to the ground during the filming of a movie called The Long Kiss Goodnight. We knew our furniture was going to the Windermere House. But we thought they didn’t have time to get the furniture up there and unload before the fire. It turns out that was exactly what happened. They unloaded everything just in time for it to burn.
Movie companies are responsible to pay for lost or damaged or destroyed items and they knew that. The problem arose because this was an American production and they informed us that they were going to pay in U.S. dollars at an exchanged rate that was very favorable to their insurance company and not to us. We eventually got paid in Canadian dollars, but it took ten weeks.
What we found out later was that The Windermere House resort had an iron clad insurance contract with the production and they had to pay to have everything rebuilt brick by brick. We were told that it cost the insurance company eight million dollars for the restoration.
Normally we get set decoration buyers for the movies in The Barn nearly every day this time of year, and they always snap up some hard to find items right away. But with the movie business just getting up and running again we have items in stock that we normally wouldn’t. So grab them while you can!
Check out a few photos below of some of this week’s new arrivals.
