Mike Denering’s brushstrokes are everywhere as one of Hollywood’s last scenic painters. He’s tried to retire, but the movies keep drawing him back.
Sometimes reporting a story is like shaking a tree: You rattle one branch and an entirely different limb swings into view.
Last year, Denering was ready to retire. Then he got the call to do one last show. It was HBO’s “Deadwood” movie. It was 1976 and Denering was bored. He was working as a graphic designer at an advertising agency when someone came into the office with a calendar. A single page stopped him flat. It depicted a giant 100-by-50 foot wall at Paramount Studios filled with clouds. “I thought, my God, somebody actually painted these beautiful clouds,” he said. “I want to do that.”
He landed as an apprentice at CBS Television Studios. “I went from $20 an hour to $4.75 an hour,” but he said, “I wanted to follow the trail of the big cloud paintings and I knew that in the future it would pay off … but you had to pay your dues.” For a time, Denering restored historic MGM backdrops, giving him another window into the masters of the craft. “He learned through ghosts,” said Maness.
While such backdrops transported filmgoers into new worlds, the scenic artists who made them remained behind the scenes. “We knew that if it did blend in, and if you couldn’t tell, then you achieved what you wanted to,” Denering said. Denering’s time in Hollywood’s trenches has given him a jaundiced view toward celebrity. “I don’t get star-struck very often,” he said.
In 1989, Denering bought a house in Sun Valley, a drowsy rustic community at the base of the Verdugo Mountains about 15 miles north of Hollywood. It was the same year he worked on four blockbusters, including the sequels to “Lethal Weapon.” Denering built a studio out back. He still likes to mix his color palettes here and it’s where he goes to create his own artwork.
The 2001 remake of “Planet of the Apes” was one such movie . “We did all this wonderful jungle,” he bemoaned. Then the director of photography came on set. “He was this little French guy and he goes, ‘I have been to the jungle. Everything is dark, turn off all the lights.’ So all that work is never seen because he decided he didn’t want to light it. That was disappointing.”
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