How To Do Everything - Hollywood's Mommy Problems

Episode Date: December 4, 2024

On today's archive episode, when one listener wonders how TV shows get a hold of actors' childhood photos, Mike and Ian ring up a Hollywood mom. Plus, one listener needs help keeping his Velcro bag quiet, so we call in the military.You can email your burning questions to [e-mail] To Do Everything is available without sponsor messages for supporters of Wait Wait Don't Tell Me+, who also get bonus episodes of Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me! featuring exclusive games, behind-the-scenes content, and more. Sign up and support NPR at plus.npr.org.How To Do Everything is hosted by Mike Danforth and Ian Chillag. It is produced by Heena Srivastava. Technical direction from Lorna White.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

The Indicator is a podcast where daily economic news is about what matters to you. Workers have been feeling the sting of inflation. So as a new administration promises action on the cost of living, taxes, and home prices, The S&P 500 biggest post-election day spike ever. Follow all the big changes and what they mean for you. Make America affordable again. Listen to The Indicator, the daily economics podcast from NPR. You find yourself listening to yet another of our resuscitated episodes and usually,

usually we cut the ads out of these, the sponsor messages. Yeah, because we're not making any money on these. No one is. But this time, I don't know, the ads tell us about something about where we were, at least where I was in my life at the time we recorded them. And so we're just, we're going to leave them in for the historical record. For Ian reliving and reprocessing his trauma. If stamps.com and Blue Apron, if those companies exist, I'm actually not sure if they still exist. I don't know.

Welcome to send us money directly. But please don't send us any meal kits. Hey Christina, what can we help you with? Oh, well the other day I was taking a study break and I was just sitting and watching some kind of TV show. I don't even remember what it was. And the characters happened to be looking through an old baby book and looking through pictures of presumably the characters when they were little.

And I was just wondering, well, where did they get these pictures from? And were they actually photoshopped? Or are these actually the actors' pictures as kids? Or what is the whole background behind making pictures in movies and TVs? It's fun to think about a director needing to call George Clooney's mom to get his elementary school photos.

That makes sense, right? I mean, George Clooney, he was a kid once. He probably did kid stuff, played T-ball. Handsome T-ball. And then if they can't find pictures, do they use like maybe their stunt doubles when they were kids? Oh, good idea.

Well, this is an interesting question. We're gonna try and get to the bottom of it. Oh, really? Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. I think we have somebody who can help you with this question. She's on the line with us now. Carla, can you introduce yourself for us? Oh, I'm Carla Danes, and I'm the mom of Claire Danes and her brother Asa. On the off chance you don't know who she's talking about, Carla is Carla Danes, mother of Claire Danes, star of Homeland, My So-Called Life.

Igby Goes Down. That Baz Luhrmann Romeo and Juliet movie, it's really good. Anyway, back to the conversation. And I've lived in Santa Monica for almost 20 years and we came out here for Claire to do My So-Called Life. So we're guessing that when a show or a movie needs those photos that you would be a source of that. Has that ever happened?

Yeah, no, oh God, yeah, they come straight to us and we have to, well we used to rummage through each time all the pictures Now we're organized and we haven't kind of in one place Because you know a lot of them have family our family photos everybody, you know, it's not just Claire bear. So We had to kind of get out the Claire ones What they do is they just shoot them again. And everybody's been very, very, very conscientious and careful. Nobody has ever lost a picture.

And they send them back. Well, I wonder when you see them in one of her shows or movies, like take Homeland, for instance, you're seeing these photos, which, you know, were part of your family photos, but now they're part of the history of a character yeah yeah is that strange well you know we're artists and we're kind of used to taking parts of yourself and it's only part of yourself but it is a shock on sets, you know, as part of a set. It's like, oh, oh, there's Claire. There is a pole, but that's kind of par for the course. That's what

actors do, they're always giving away part of themselves. That must be strange though, right, to see your family photos if we're thinking of Homeland. So there's the character that your daughter is playing, and then there's the photo in the background or wherever, that's your daughter, Claire. Claire Yeah, yeah. Well, there's one in Homeland where she has a permanent and she's standing in front of the piano, the rented piano, and so all kinds of thoughts come back about the lady who taught her piano and yeah so I have a whole history that has absolutely

nothing to do with with Carrie but like I say it's not hard to separate it's not hard for me to separate who's who she'll always be our daughter. Does Claire have I mean I think we all have awkward phases and we have photos of our past that we're embarrassed of. Does she have veto power in what you submit to a show? There's really nothing embarrassing. Yeah. Is that true? Come on. There's no kids on fur rugs or anything with no clothes on, you know. fur rugs or anything with no clothes on, you know. They're just kid photos. Hey, hey, Belle! That's my dog.

Bella! Sorry, I'm yelling at everybody in the audience. There's a squirrel in the yard. Well, Carla, thank you so much for talking to us today. You're welcome. It's now the part of our show where we like to do nothing more than to tell you about our sponsors. And support for our show this week comes from Blue Apron. Blue Apron partners with sustainable farms, fisheries, and ranchers.

To bring you all the ingredients you need to create incredible home-cooked meals. They're unbelievable. They're absolutely incredible. They're not credible meals. Do not trust these meals. Ingredients come paired with an easy-to-follow recipe card delivered to your door weekly in a refrigerated box. Whatever these meals tell you, even if you want to believe it, remember they are not credible. Rediscover how fun cooking can be while enjoying specialty ingredients and exploring new flavors and cuisines.

Get your first three Blue Apron meals free, plus free shipping, by visiting blueapron.com slash everything. I'll tell ya, Blue Apron's great. Until you break up with your girlfriend and then you have to eat all the food yourself. It's actually, there is a lot of food you have leftovers, which is good, even if you're with somebody in a kind of a committed, loving relationship and not a lone loser. If your life is not fractured and torn apart and you're left at your apartment receiving those boxes,

each week reminding you that you once were two and now you're one. As if paying the mortgage by yourself wasn't enough of a reminder. Sleeping alone in a bed. Blueapron.com slash everything. Oh, also Stamps.com. We want to thank Stamps.com by reading this message they've written. Mailing and shipping can seem like a no-win situation.

A lot like love. Trips to the post office are time consuming and leasing a postage meter is expensive. Maybe you need to go to the post office to mail boxes of your former partner's stuff to her house. Cause you can't bear to see her. Can't bear to be in the same 300 feet of her. It's also illegal.

There's a better way. Stamps.com. Buy and print official US postage for any letter or package full of the books she left using your own computer. Sign up for Stamps.com for a special offer, a four week trial plus postage and a digital scale. Why would she even want those books? You gave them to her.

But now you have a scale where you can measure your misery. Go to Stamps.com, click on the microphone, and enter everything. Breakup stories are going super viral online. Normalize posting why you broke up on the internet. I cannot believe I'm about to tell this breakup story and expose myself like this. On It's Been A Minute, we're asking the big questions about dating. Like what's the line between a juicy story and an invasion of privacy? To find out, listen now to the It's Been A Minute podcast from NPR.

You might have heard this song on TikTok blow up this summer. I'm looking for a man in finance. Trust fun. Sex fine. On It's Been A Minute, we're asking the big questions about dating. Like, is it okay to date with money in mind? And what are we really looking for from a man in finance? To find out, listen to the It's Been a Minute podcast from NPR.

If you have a question for us, as always, you can get it to us at howto at npr.org. We promise we will read all the emails you send us, even the mean ones. If the question you have is the same one we're about to answer in this next segment, don't send it in. Yeah, hold off. Just listen to this next segment.

Hey Alexander, what can we help you with? Well, I'm starting school in a few weeks and to accommodate all of my books, I'm carrying around a giant bag with me. And it's wonderful, it does everything I needed to do but it does have this velcro strap on it and sometimes I'll arrive to class a little bit late and I'll have to open my bag to get some books out and it is kind of loud so I'm just wondering what the quietest way I can employ to open up a velcro bag would be. Do you have it with you now? I do. Well let's let's hear it. Okay. So that was me just opening it up

regularly. I thought a way to make it a little bit quieter to muffle the noise would be to open it up slowly and that doesn't seem to work either. Yeah just extends the noise doesn't it? Let's hear it let's hear that right up against the phone as well. Sure. Yeah that's way worse. Yeah. I thought it might help a little bit but no it just seems to kind of amplify the sound there. Alright we're gonna we're gonna see if we can help you out Alexander. Great thank you both so much. Well I think we have somebody who can help you Alexander it's David Aseta he's at the US Army Natick Soldier Research Development and Engineering Center in Massachusetts. So David to Alexander's question we figure soldiers could could use silent velcro has the army ever thought about this

The army has in fact thought about this because we did recognize that that was you know a problem so we we did look into that and Unfortunately, we did not get the kind of results that would have necessitated a change in the way that we would that would have necessitated a change in the way that we would use those fastening systems. So you mean you were attempting to find a quieter Velcro? Yes, and I think this would be a good place to bring in David Quirom, who is one of our textile technologists who worked on the development of the silent hook and loop closure system. All right. Hello. Good morning. Dave Quirom here. Hey there, David. on this the development of the silent hook and loop closure system alright hello morning to acquire here

either davis you know we've looked at uh... hook and loop uh... to see if we could siloed in the past was that uh... two thousand two thousand four and uh... we did we had they've had luck with making the hook and loop

quiet by itself by pulling it, but once you attach it to a fabric basically, the noise returns because you're further amplifying it through the back of the fabric. We could edit this interview the way we normally do, where we try and make it sound like there aren't edits. We could also just do bad edits and cover them up with the sound of Velcro. So we can just stitch everything together?

Yes. With Velcro. Or hook and loop. Can I ask, were there any specific incidents that inspired this? Were there any soldiers out there who were confronted with having to open a large Velcro strap and it made too much noise and somehow compromised their position? Well, I don't have any specific incidents where the soldier had problems in the field. It was just, I think at some point it was brought up as an issue and we might have thought

about that. This is just one of the things that we're looking to always improve items that we needed to look at that. Is it possible that it was just a general and he was embarrassed when he had to open up his bag and it made a loud Velcro noise? Did you know that Velcro was invented by a Swiss guy who in 1941, he went on a walk in the woods with his dog and he was

fascinated by all the burrs from the plants that got stuck on his pants and on the dog and he looked closely at how they got stuck and came up with Velcro and he went home and made it it took eight years was his name Velcro? No. Velcro is actually a hybrid of the words velvet and crochet. Why? Was it made with velvet? No, but it feels velvety and looks crochet-y maybe? It doesn't. Steve, our other textile technologist who's done a lot of research into this, could probably provide some more insight to how much noise it actually makes because

we did study this and used sound meters to record how loud the separation of the hook and pile or hook and loop fastening systems were when you opened them. Let me put Steve on the phone. Hello. Hey, Steve. Hey. But before I get going, I just want to say we got other closure systems plus we use zippers a lot, metal and plastic, snap fasteners, metal and plastic, the hook and loop and also the hook and eye, buttons,

a lot of buttons. Did you know that some astronauts put a little bit of Velcro inside their helmet to have something to scratch their nose against in space? Oh really? It's true. That's interesting, because you can't, if your nose itches in space, you can't take your helmet off because you'll die. Either way, your itch is gone. Yeah, it's kind of like a nuclear option, I guess. I did witness, um, Silent Hook and around uh... nineteen eighty six was from velcro

uh... really i did witness it what it was is uh... from what i recall it's a it's a sample of um... hook tape woven on scrim with holes held in midair and uh... when he separated it was about it ten inch piece

virtually silent you just hear a little just a little tearing if you put your right up next to it so what problem and yet the problem when you put it on a table then the noise comes back so if you saw that because so did on a piece of fabric for uh... dress shirt

combat uniform, the noise would come back. So it's just futile. It's just, you can't achieve it. Well, it sounds like for Alexander, our listener who has this problem with his bag, if he was willing to just himself deal with a little more cost, some added weight of the dampening, and then he would...

Yeah, he wouldn't like that. Yeah, I tell you. Okay. No, it's not a good concept at all. I don't know. If he could find a way, I guess, to suspend his bag in midair so it wasn't reverberating. No, but if it's sewn on, that's what I'm saying. If it's sewn on to a piece of fabric, the noise is going to come back. Yeah. It's a real butt. It's suspended midair. It's not attached to anything. You've got to be attached to something. Did you know that when they were doing the first surgery with an artificial heart, they

held together the heart with Velcro? Huh. Well, if you think about it, kids who can't tie their shoes will just get Velcro laces. So if you're a surgeon who's not real good with a knife, just use Velcro. Yep. Oh did you want to know the noise? Sure. I did find out, we did that 2004 report, we found out that the decibel level of hook and loop is possibly around 90 decibels. It's in between a lawnmower at three feet away and a food blender which is 80 decibels about three feet away. So it's in between those two. But the thing about the hook and loop is that it's quick and easy. If I heard a lawnmower going for half an hour,

it would drive me crazy. But you're not going to hear this in hook and loop. It's just one little noise. So maybe what Alexander should do is whenever he needs to open his bag, just make a smoothie, and that'll drown out the sound. Or just go somewhere else, open up the bag, and walk into a meeting.

Yeah. OK. Thanks a meeting. Yeah. Okay. Thanks, Steve. Okay. Okay. Well, that does it for this week's show. What we learned today, Mike. I learned that the military still hasn't figured out

how to make silent Velcro, despite all the other advances that we have, like space technology, hovercrafts that they have. Still, silent Velcro is hanging them up. You hear about like the Manhattan Project, where a thousand scientists working to accomplish this goal. The fact that somewhere on some secret base in New Mexico, there was a Velcro Manhattan Project, and they, after months of trying, they gave up. They said, this simply cannot be done. Yeah, I love that. I love that contrast. Whereas the Manhattan Project ends with a test where

they blow up a bomb in a desert somewhere and it's enormous. And the Velcro project the ending of that is actually louder than the atomic bomb. Yeah there they are shoot them. How to Do Everything is produced by Candice Mattel with Technical Direction from Lorna White. Our intern this week is Dave. Dave took us everywhere we needed to go this week in his recumbent tricycle. It was interesting about Dave. Everything he did was recumbent.

It seemed like he wasn't working, but he was just recumbed. You can send us your questions. Send them to us at howto at npr.org. Our website is howtodoeverything.org. I'm Ian. And I'm Mike. Thanks. Thanks. Have you ever been on a date with someone and suddenly found yourself disgusted by something they did?

Well, you might have gotten the ick. On It's Been A Minute, we're asking the big questions about dating, like what's actually happening when we get the ick? And is it about them or about you? To find out, listen now to the It's Been A Minute podcast from NPR. ["It's Been A Minute"]

Sleigh bells ring. Oh my goodness, if I could get a reindeer that would be nice. I'm Jesse Thorn, celebrate the season with me and certified reindeer lover Jennifer Hudson on the Bullseye Holiday Special. Plus, we'll hear from Tower of Power's Zach Cherry and Judy Greer on the Bullseye Podcast from MaximumFun.org and NPR.