There Must Have Been Some Magic in that Old Fake Set They Built: Artificial Exteriors in Jack Frost

I’m helplessly fond of ’80s & ’90s Hollywood films with animatronic puppets created by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, and large fake snowy landscapes constructed on soundstages. Which is why, during the holidays, I finally watched Jack Frost—yes, Jack Frost, the 1998 children’s movie starring Michael Keaton as a hideous animatronic snowman.

And I survived to tell the tale! Jack Frost isn’t as terrible as some (like Roger Ebert) have made it out to be, but at the same time it isn’t great, either—it’s mediocre. So I’m not writing this to recommend that you watch it. It’s hardly as good as true classics like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Batman Returns. But at the same time, it has its charms, which I will spell out in extravagant detail after the jump.

First, a brief synopsis of the plot. Michael Keaton plays Jack Frost (his actual birth name), an aspiring blues rock singer whose devotion to his career means he’s never there for his twelve-year-old son, Charlie. (He’s also never there for his wife, played with admirable grace by Kelly Preston, but interestingly she says she’s OK with that.) A recording session leads Jack to miss one of Charlie’s hockey games, and a label tryout takes him away on Christmas Day—you get the idea. Feeling suddenly remorseful, Jack Frost tries driving to the cabin in the Rockies where his son and wife are spending the holiday, but he drives off the road in a snowstorm, R.I.P. One year later, however, thanks to a magical harmonica (?), he comes back to life as that hideous snowman, which allows him to reconnect with his kid, and be the father he never was.

As you’ve by now no doubt gathered, the script is more or less awful. It’s peppered, however, with random Xmas spices. Three of Frank Zappa’s four kids have bit parts, and Henry Rollins plays a hockey coach with anger-management issues.

(None of them play any music, however.)

Much more impressive are three of the film’s exterior sets, which were constructed, according to Warner Bros.’ production notes, inside the Spruce Goose Dome in Long Beach, CA. The first set, the Frost family home, “was loosely based on a real home the production found in Truckee, California.” The film used that house for a shot early on, when Charlie comes home from school:

After that, the movie employs a reconstruction built by production manager Mayne Berke inside the Dome, alongside “400 feet” worth of street, “about 200 trees from an Oregon tree farm,” and “1,000 tons of chipped ice plus 60 tons of flocking.”

(Note that you can click on any of these images to see larger versions. And forgive me if I post too many screenshots, but these sets deserve to be seen!)

You may not know to look at it, but Jack Frost was shot by the legendary cinematographer László Kovács, who lensed numerous classic films, including Easy Rider; Five Easy Pieces; What’s Up, Doc?; Paper Moon; Shampoo; New York, New York (which features wonderful self-consciously fake sets); Ghostbusters; and Say Anything…. Shooting in the Dome enabled him to switch between night and day as desired:

“It took about 20 minutes to change over the look. We designed a system so that every single light was on dimmers and was all computer programmed. We just pushed a button, and the setting changed to whichever time of day we required.”

(Note how in the daytime images you can see the edge of the set, which ends in a matte painting.)

The second exterior was a frozen pond:

The pond, constructed 25 feet above the main stage, includes an ice skating rink, 95 feet long by 40 feet wide. Huge “snowbanks” run along the ice and 30 Ponderosa pine trees dot the landscape. The idyllic scene is complete with a frozen waterfall, sculpted of fiberglass resin.

Man, that resin! This set appears very briefly, in only one scene (1:07:29–1:10:10), and is even more fake looking that the Frost home, to the point where it looks almost like something out of Batman & Robin (made one year prior):

(According to the film’s IMDb trivia page, George Clooney was originally supposed to play Jack Frost, but decamped to make Batman & Robin. I suppose it’s arguable that the hideous snowman looks more like Clooney than Keaton?)

It’s obvious that the film’s director, Troy Miller, wanted the film to have some kind of fairy-tale sensibility. The problem is that this atmosphere comes and goes. We see the fake Frost home before Jack Frost dies, and even after he comes back, we get scenes set in actual bits of nature, which creates a jarring contrast.

It also looks cheap. Meanwhile, other scenes, staged at the Warner Bros. backlot, have a slightly different fake aesthetic:

For the town square, Berke added a real ice rink for skating and erected a 60-foot white fir, blanketed with flocking and adorned with Christmas ornaments and 4,000 twinkle lights. Faux “ice sculptures” and red-cheeked extras dressed in heavy clothing gave the illusion of a frosty chill.

It’s too bad Miller didn’t build the film around a stronger design principle, the way Tim Burton did when making the glorious Batman Returns.

Well, it is what it is. The final Dome set is the mountain cabin that Jack Frost died trying to reach, and where the film concludes. Before we get there, though, Charlie and Jack slide down a fake snowbank, a holdover from the 1980s “slide craze”:

As for the cabin itself, it’s a conversion of the Frost family home set:

“It was a major transformation, and we only had 10 working days to finish it,” Berke explains. “I covered over most of the Frost neighborhood, including part of the Frost house, with framework and foam. By doing that, we were able to create the snow-covered mountain ranges. We then rolled the prefabricated cabin in on wheels, four feet off the ground, and snowed the whole thing in.”

You have to admit, that final sunrise is some kind of wonderful, even if the film’s website mistakenly calls it a sunset. (“A 275-foot scenic painted backing of a majestic mountain sunset completed the setting.”)

And even after the movie ends, there’s more fakery afoot: the end credits roll over a tracking shot through a miniature landscape that’s embellished with video compositing and CGI snowplows:

Well, there you go! Again, I’m not saying Jack Frost is a great film. But it nonetheless contains elements of greatness.

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