AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
It's that time of the year when a lot of us are settling in to rewatch favorite holiday movies. And what would holiday movies be without snow? Fake snow, to be precise. NPR producer Danny Hensel looks into the history of this very tricky special effect.
DANNY HENSEL, BYLINE: Even before the movies, fake snow has existed for hundreds of years.
MARC WANAMAKER: All the special effects came from the theater.
HENSEL: That's Marc Wanamaker, a Hollywood historian. He says the industry has experimented with many different materials to find the perfect snow.
WANAMAKER: Feathers, cotton, breakfast cereal. And a really good one was potato flakes.
HENSEL: But early on, Hollywood settled on more chemical concoctions.
WANAMAKER: A lot of the time, if they were lucky, they were using borax flakes and even ammonia. That wasn't as dangerous as that they were starting to use asbestos, would you believe?
HENSEL: Like in the famous sledding scene in "Citizen Kane."
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "CITIZEN KANE")
BUDDY SWAN: (As Charles Kane - Age 8) Come on, boys. The union forever.
AGNES MOOREHEAD: (As Mary Kane) Be careful, Charles.
SWAN: (As Charles Kane - Age 8) They're falling back (ph).
GEORGE COULOURIS: (As Walter Thatcher) Mrs. Kane.
MOOREHEAD: (As Mary Kane) Pull your muffler around your neck, Charles.
COULOURIS: (As Walter Thatcher) Mrs. Kane, I...
HENSEL: But gypsum, ammonia, asbestos were unsafe for actors. Legend has it, Lon Chaney, the silent film star who appeared in the "Phantom Of The Opera," died after the fake snow that lodged in his throat exacerbated his cancer. For Wanamaker, the best fake snow appears in Frank Capra's 1946 classic, "It's A Wonderful Life."
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE")
JIMMY STEWART: (As George Bailey) Yeah. Hello, Bedford Falls.
HENSEL: Jimmy Stewart, saved by his angel running through his snow-swept town.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE")
STEWART: (As George Bailey) Merry Christmas, movie house. Merry Christmas, Emporium.
WANAMAKER: So this guy, Russell Shearman, he created a fake snow from - it's called Foamite - soap, sugar and water. Now, what happens is the mixture was then released from high-pressure cans.
HENSEL: Wanamaker says that makes the snow especially realistic.
WANAMAKER: Actors could clump the mixture in their hands - safely, I might add, without worrying about breathing it in. And then they can leave footprints.
HENSEL: The fake snow industry has modernized a lot since "It's A Wonderful Life." Now the main ingredients are paper for snow and wax for ice.
LUCINDA PERRETT: If it's got snow in it, it was probably us.
HENSEL: That's Lucinda Perrett, the CEO of Snow Business based out of the U.K.
PERRETT: We've done "Band Of Brothers," "James Bond." We've done "Mission Impossible."
HENSEL: Snow Business has a small army of lab scientists testing their snow right outside the company's offices in Gloucestershire. Their paper snow is made of plant material for outdoors and fire-treated indoors. And many of their clients create new challenges.
PERRETT: You know, they might want a romantic snow, so you know you need to achieve a really light flurry. Or they want a blizzard, so you're going to need to have wind machines moving snow across the floor to create that sort of whiteout effect. Or it needs to be slippery because there's going to be a car skidding scene.
HENSEL: Those scientists figured out how to make snow look like it's melting.
PERRETT: We also have gel products. So they're made of a wax material, but when they heat, they can then start to melt.
HENSEL: Snow Business began in the 1980s, just when computer-generated imagery was beginning. Now it's a major competitor but also a partner.
PERRETT: Almost every job we've worked on, I would say, in the last five to six years, there has been a VFX company working alongside us.
HENSEL: Snow Business often makes the fake snow close to the camera while CGI fills out the rest of the screen. But as for whether digital effects will take over her industry, Perrett is optimistic about the future.
PERRETT: I think there will always be a place for physical effects. A lot of the new directors and producers and art departments want to use the old-school way of making film.
HENSEL: Because those techniques have lasted hundreds of years in the theater and on screen and remain what Perrett calls Hollywood's best-kept secret.
Danny Hensel, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF PAVEL DOVGAL'S "NIBIRU") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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