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Muralist fears best work will never see light of day
When Kent Twitchell was asked if he wanted to create a giant mural of a well-known superstar, he was delighted. Now, however, "It's all a mystery to me if it'll ever be seen."
By Ian Gregor
Daily Breeze
Kent Twitchell has never seen the mural he's most proud of, at least not in its entire 100-by-60-foot expanse. Chances are, he never will.
Twitchell spent three years planning the piece and painting it with tiny watercolor brushes, surmounting countless logistical barriers and enduring endless frustrations during the process. Displayed in a prestigious location, it would, he believed, be the highlight of his storied career.
But just as he completed the massive work a dozen years ago, everything began to fall apart.
"It's a mystery to me if it'll ever be seen," said the genial Twitchell, 62, as he took a break from restoring two of his other murals in a Playa Vista studio. "I don't allow myself to think about it. There's nothing I can do."
The saga began in 1990 when Twitchell, whose works include the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, the L.A. Marathon Mural and the Seventh Street Altarpiece, got a call from the Hollywood Arts Council asking if he was interested in painting a mural of an important figure. A few weeks later, Twitchell learned who the subject was to be: pop icon Michael Jackson.
"I said absolutely, I love Michael Jackson!" recalled Twitchell, who lived on Clipper Road in Rancho Palos Verdes at the time. "He was probably the greatest entertainer in the world back then."
Twitchell was to be paid $180,000 for the giant mural, which was to go up on the east-facing wall of the world-renowned El Capitan Theatre in the heart of Hollywood.
"Oh, what a site," Twitchell said wistfully.
Twitchell said he and Jackson hit it off right away when they met to discuss ideas for the mural at Jackson's Westwood apartment and, soon after, at the musician's Neverland Ranch near Santa Barbara. Jackson loved Twitchell's proposal to paint him in the 1930s "Smooth Criminal" style he developed for the 1987 "Bad" album, and the two men found that they shared a love of Michelangelo and Tchaikovsky.
They spent several hours touring the Neverland estate in golf carts, and played with Jackson's chimpanzees while they watched giraffes loll about in a big enclosure.
'Just truly a regular guy'
"(Jackson) was completely unpretentious, normal, just a really good guy," Twitchell said. "Never a brag, just truly a regular guy."
Soon after this meeting, Jackson and Twitchell drove to a Hollywood sound stage, where Jackson performed a series of poses in a white "Smooth Criminal" suit and a Panama hat. Twitchell activated a smoke machine and, with a scaled-down template of the El Capitan Theatre wall behind Jackson, snapped 50 to 60 photos of him as he spun into the same pose, lips curled into a slight snarl and right arm flung out to the side, striving to get a shot where the brim of Jackson's hat and ruffles in his jacket were in just the right positions.
"He just let me run with it," Twitchell said. "The only demand he made -- he did it very softly -- he said, 'Twitch, I want you to make sure this is going to be the best mural you've ever done.' "
Twitchell promised it would be, and set out drawing cartoons from the photo they had selected. Almost immediately, the project evolved into more than a painting on a wall.
An idea was proposed for a computer light display that would create the effect of Jackson's figure emerging from smoke. Periodically, a laser beam would shoot out of Jackson's right index finger and hit the roof of Hollywood High School.
At this point, Twitchell and the noted mural restorationist Nathan Zakheim -- who had joined the project to provide technical and engineering support -- encountered their first major hurdle.
Zakheim suggested Twitchell scan his sketches into a computer and link it to a plotting machine that the artist bought for $5,000, which would print out the images onto the roughly 120 rolls of 12- to 15-foot-long paper that he planned to use for the mural.
But they couldn't get the machine to work properly. So they loaded it onto a trailer and hauled it up to the home of a computer programmer Zakheim knew who lived in the woods near Shasta. Their friend wrote a program and, as the plotter spat out paper, shipped the rolls south to Twitchell.
Painting the thing -- Twitchell used 150 variations of five main colors -- was another gargantuan task.
"It was by far the most detailed mega-mural ever conceived," Twitchell said. "This was going to be 10 stories tall."
Twitchell put out a call for artists, gave each a paint-by-numbers test, and put them to work in the back yard of his Rancho Palos Verdes home and in his Echo Park studio on Sunset Boulevard.
He modified the studio and his back yard with walls that ran down the middle of each so there would be additional space to hang the 4-foot-wide sheets of mural paper. At one time, he had 85 people working on the project, each using three-fourths-inch No. 6 watercolor brushes, each being paid according to the complexity of the panel, which Twitchell calculated using a computer program.
"I think it took altogether a couple of years" to paint the mural, Twitchell said.
Meanwhile, suspended from window cleaning scaffolding, Zakheim and his crew prepared the theater wall for the mural. They filled recessed parts of the wall with metal mesh and stucco plaster, and bolted on a steel outline of Jackson's torso. This they were able to do only after convincing local, state and federal authorities that the project would not alter the character of the historic building -- a task that required Twitchell and Jackson's representatives to fly to Sacramento and Washington, D.C., to make presentations on their plans to government officials.
About $100,000 in computerized lighting equipment was installed on the building next door to create the laser show.
"We were ready to put the whole (mural) up when all hell broke out," Zakheim said.
Twitchell said he could not discuss what went wrong because he signed a nondisclosure agreement with Jackson. Zakheim, however, did not sign the agreement and offered the following account.
In late 1992, Jackson's people suddenly brought in consultants who questioned the safety of the project. Their main concern -- one that Zakheim dubbed "The Towering Inferno Scenario" -- was that a fully loaded oil tanker crashed into the side of the El Capitan Theatre and set the mural ablaze, resulting in flaming torches of paper raining down on passers-by.
Zakheim said he pointed out that tankers are not allowed on Hollywood Boulevard. Then he invented an adhesive that would extinguish flames when they reached 450 degrees, and he and Twitchell paid to have it tested to prove that it worked.
But Jackson's people continued to express reservations about the project. A couple of dozen meetings were held -- Twitchell, Zakheim and their attorney on one side, a phalanx of Jackson's attorneys, consultants and business representatives on the other.
"We were like a fruit fly trying to gang up on an elephant," quipped Zakheim, 61.
Jackson's attorneys also would call Twitchell and ask technical questions about the painting that he would spend hours answering. They set difficult deadlines then canceled them at the last moment. The pop icon's team would also shut down the project until issues were resolved, Zakheim said.
"It was so adversarial we couldn't figure it out," Zakheim said. "They were putting all these high-powered attorneys at us."
Zakheim said he believes the attorneys were trying to frustrate him and Twitchell so they would walk away from the project. He now thinks that Jackson's people wanted to scuttle the project when they became aware of the child molestation allegations that surfaced against the singer in 1993. Jackson paid the boy's family $25 million to settle a civil lawsuit in an agreement that did not signify an admission of any wrongdoing, according to published reports.
"They were playing with us," Zakheim said. "It was like a mechanical bull -- they kept turning the dial up faster and faster but we stayed on the bull."
Communications dwindle
Delay built upon delay. Twitchell turned his attention to the chamber orchestra mural. Jackson's people then told the media that Twitchell couldn't put up the Jackson mural because he was too busy with his new project. Twitchell publicly responded that he was prepared to put up the Jackson mural at anytime.
Eventually, Jackson's people stopped communicating with Twitchell and Zakheim. Workers under contract to Jackson removed the installations from the theater wall and the lighting equipment from the building next door.
Twitchell is still owed about $75,000 of the amount he was to be paid, which was to come through the Hollywood Arts Council from money provided by a company controlled by Jackson, Zakheim said. Twitchell, he said, lost tens of thousands of dollars on the project because he planned for his profits to come from sales of posters and other images of the mural, which he was to split evenly with Jackson. He never sued to get the money owed him.
"You can't sue somebody with deep pockets," Zakheim said.
Jackson's Washington, D.C.-based public relations representative, Raymone Bain, did not respond to an e-mail and telephone call seeking comment for this article.
Neither Zakheim nor Twitchell has ever seen the mural completely assembled. Once, they laid out the upper portion on a studio floor, duct-taped the pieces together, and mounted a stepladder to look down on it.
"We were in awe," Twitchell said. "It was absolutely gorgeous. The colors were just stunning."
Today, Twitchell has the mural stored away in a location that he declined to disclose. The artist has been in touch with Jackson's representatives through a third party periodically to see if they would buy the mural or agree to him selling it, Zakheim said.
Jackson's people OK'd a sale but asked that they be allowed to match the selling price, he said. But with Jackson's fate uncertain as he fights new child molestation charges in a trial that began last week with jury selection, it's questionable whether there will ever be a commercial market for the mural.
"I pulled out all the stops to make sure this was the best I'd done," Twitchell said. "I devoted three years of my life to be buried in a tomb someplace."
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发表于 2005-2-7 00:00:00
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