The Quest to Find All that Shredded Paper

Cassie and Alex in her mind palace of trying to piece together what those shredded pieces of paper mean.

In episode 4 “Conspiracy Theories” of The Flight Attendant, after Cassie stole the shredded paper remains from Janet Sokolov’s office in episode 3, we see her wrestling with all this new and puzzling information in her mind palace space/subconscious with Alex. They are back in the hotel suite but now it is is COVERED with shredded paper.

Cool idea. But when set decorators read a scripted idea like that we think “!!! going to need to find or make tons of shredded paper!”

One of the cool things about set decorating is, it is translating a scripted idea from the writers or design idea from the production designer into an actual physical reality. And sometimes it is the simplest things that are the most challenging. Honestly often it is.

Shredded paper: sure anyone knows how to find that. You go to Staples, you buy a home office paper shredder and shred some paper. Done.

But once you start getting into larger quantities, the kind of quantities to make a cinematic effect and really
”read on screen” like in the shot above, it becomes a lot more challenging. Quantity is a big thing when finding things for sets—I could write a whole thing on that but I won’t right now.

I often say it is being able to buy things in the quantity needed, on our crazy production timelines (need it yesterday), with a limited budget that makes set decorating a profession versus someone who is good at shopping, has a knack for interior design, or is resourceful.

In this case, I’m going to walk you through what a challenge it was.

Jess (THE set decorator for The Flight Attendant) and I talked about how our dream situation was we would find a vendor who already dealt in industrial quantities of shredded paper we could buy mass amounts of shredded paper from (I’m talking 1000 pounds of shredded paper to be exact) that we simply picked up or they dropped-off.

I believed deep down inside that I must be able to find this dream vendor.

little snapshot of the calling journey I took from my work notebook (on the other side was my list of things I was buying for an entirely different set. We are usually working at multiple sets at a time concurrently).

So I started googling and calling around all the shredded paper vendors in the NYC tri-state area. Quickly I discovered this was going to be tougher than I realized because what these companies sell their customers is security and peace of mind re: disposing sensitive documents. All of them said flat out no way were they going to sell me their old shreds—that would violate their whole confidential promise to their customers.

Think about it, why do you want to shred something? Because you have a document you want safely and simply destroyed. (Why did Janet Sokolov shred those documents in her office? To destroy evidence!)

Cassie uncovering the shredded documents in Janet Sokolov’s home office in Episode 3 (another set Jess and I worked closely together on!)

Okkkkk. So we discussed the possibility of renting some industrial size paper shredders, bringing them to our set dressing shop, buying obscene amounts of new paper, and then asking for the manpower hours required to have a few set dressers going to town shredding all that new paper.

We didn’t love this plan for three reasons:

1. omg why waste all this NEW paper (and squander the lives of millions of trees in the process) when the world and certainly New York City is already filled abundantly with people disposing of already used paper?!

2. New paper would lack the texture and dimension that used paper with writing and graphics and different color has. This plan costs way more money (renting the machines, buying the material, and budgeting for the manpower).

3. And lastly, renting an industrial shredder is possible but not as easy as we had hoped. Nowadays most companies who hire one of the paper waste companies get a service where someone comes to pick-up paper meant for shredding which then gets hauled and shredded in an industrial paper shredder truck.

I asked a few companies, what if I provide all the paper, could I hire you guys to shred it in your truck, but the truck just parks outside of our office and when it is done shredding we just take the contents? They all said no to this option citing that the trucks are often filled with multiple client’s paper so they can’t just give us our paper and anyways they don’t do that.

Feeling a bit stumped I even called a few other set decorator friends working on other productions to see if they had done something similar before and had any vendors they’ve used. They all said no and thought the best option was the DIY method (the one we didn’t love for the reasons stated above.)

…I really believed there MUST be the right paper shredding vendor out there. You know maybe a smaller firm less bound by all these corporate contracts, someone with a little more flexibility to cater to this very specific situation…

And just as I was giving up hope I got the call back from a vendor with whom I had left a message on their voicemail. He heard my message, googled this new show “The Flight Attendant” and saw that Kaley Cuoco was starring and his wife loves Kaley! He’s the owner of his paper shredding solutions company in New Jersey, had that can-do spirit that small business owners do, and believed he could deliver what we were hoping for. YAY!!!!!!!!

[I wanted to embed the GIF of Ari Gold from Entourage doing his “I LOVE THIS TOWN"!” celebratory dance after realizing he could negotiate with an intransigent school principal once he realized the principal’s son was interested in working as an agent, but I couldn’t make it work with this website’s interface]

THE HIGH. THE BEST HIGH. When that crazy quest you’ve been on finally sprouts a good lead. I’ll never forget how pumped Jess and I were in the office after I got off that phone call that evening.

I worked out all the price and delivery logistics with my Paper Shredding Guy, his company was going to deliver 1000 pounds of shredded paper to our stage two working days before we needed to film. Great, I can check that off my list.

But of course it is never that easy.

Friday Feburary 14, 2020 I was on location working on the set for Diana’s office (another set I was in charge of) and it was surprisingly a pretty chill day considering the high stress few months proceeding it. (Also little did we know what a calm before the storm it was considering what was about to engulf all of our realities COVID wise in just a few weeks).

Literally kicking back on set at Diana’s Office (Annie’s boss at the law firm) which we were dressing the morning of Feb 14, 2020 and which I was using as my desk to get some work done.

The actual intended use of the desk in the show. (I would like to note that all those awards in the background were custom engraved with the character’s name all sorts of fake honors I made up for her.)

Jess came to set, we were both relaxed in a way we hadn’t been in weeks. We even had time to go do some fun smalls shopping together for the finishing touches of Diana’s office at NYC’s most fun office supply store Goods for the Study.

We are all enjoying life cracking jokes with the set dressers dressing Diana’s set with us, and then we get The Call.

Sara the Production Designer calls us from the stage where they are dressing in the 1000 pounds of shredded paper that have been delivered from our Paper Shredding Guy. Sara says with slight panic, the shreds are not the right shape. It is Friday afternoon, and we are filming this first thing Monday morning.

The shreds the props department created for what Cassie stole from Janet Sokolov’s Office are straight shreds—the kind you get from a simple home office paper shredder. The kind of shreds we currently had 1000 pounds of were cross-cut shreds.

Knowing very little about the details of the paper shredding Jess and I honestly didn’t understand this distinction until Sara sent us a photo. OH. This distinction was something that was never specified to any of us and not one we even knew to ask. (I learned so much about the paper shredding industry that week).

I called my Paper Shredding Guy to see if he could help us. He said “That is the industry standard you know: cross-cut. Cross-cut shreds are what most effectively obscure and destroy sensitive documents because they are much harder to piece together.”

Yeah, exactly. If the shreds were actually cross cut, maybe it wouldn’t have been so easy for Cassie and Max to reconstruct the strip shreds they stole from Janet Sokolov’s office:

The strip shredded paper Max and Cassie were able to piece back together in Annie’s apartment on her shower door (I had to find this unique custom curve shower door but that’s a whole other post)—this is exactly why you don’t strip-shred—its too easy to piece back together—and the industry standard is cross-cut.

And like with so many vendors I’ve had this talk with before I pleaded with him: “I know this doesn’t make sense in real life or in how it actually works in your industry, but can you help us make a bunch of strip shreds to support the fake cinematic world we are creating? Could you also make 500 pounds more and deliver it by Monday morning at 5am?“ (we thought we could layer some of the crosscut under the strip shred for bulk—a little movie magic.)

Like I said before Paper Shredding Guy is a can-do guy and for the right price he said sure he could help us out.

But considering our thin time margin of working hours left, we were going to be cutting it very close (haha paper shredding pun!). We all agreed we needed a Plan B. Because relying on a third party to deliver something we needed to make the shot on Mon at 5am was a risky Plan A. Any number of things could go wrong and we needed a back-up.

So now Jeanelle, the other assistant set decorator joined our little Paper Shredding Crisis Task Force to try and figure out how we were going to come up with 1000 pounds of strip shreds before Monday morning. Did I mention it was late Friday afternoon by this point? The Friday of Valentines Day when many people have plans with their dearest loved ones and are not planning on working a minute later than absolutely necessary?

We revisited some previous plans and I called the places we had inquired about renting industrial paper shredders. Turns out any industrial size paper shredder only cuts cross-cut. Strip shreds are only for little amateur home paper shredders. AGHHHHHH.

I called a bunch of Staples around the city to find out how many strip-shred home paper shredders they had in stock now, and it turns out VERY FEW. Most of that is sold online now, and as anyone who has had experience with a dinky home paper shredder they are not that durable.

In order to make the quantity of shreds we needed, we needed a bunch of these dinky little shredders so that if one died from exhaustion (sorry paper shredder) we had another waiting in the wings. Also we needed enough so that we could have a small army of set dressers shredding all at once. I mean, 2 guys and 2 shredders was not going to cut it (HAH! another paper shredding pun!) Thankfully production agreed to let us pay a handful of set-dressers a 6th day rate to staff the Paper Shredding Crisis Task Force Paper Shredding Factory.

Online though, wasn’t going to be fast enough. We needed these shredders now. So that first thing Sat morning the Paper Shredding Army could get to work.

In the end Jeanelle found a guy who sold on Amazon but had a warehouse of 20+ strip shred home office paper shredders in New Jersey (NJ to save the day again) and could deliver them all in a van to Brooklyn that evening. Katie our set dec shopper was able to procure the obscene amount of paper we needed for the Paper Shredding Crisis Task Force Paper Shredding Factory.

Here is a video of Jeanelle coming into the office at 7:04 pm (you can see the rest of the office is dark and everyone else has long gone home) with one of the paper shredders that had been delivered just to test that it would work.

The huge sigh of relief we all breathed.

In the end my Paper Shredding Guy DELIVERED. He showed up Monday 5am with the 500 pounds of strip-shredded paper as requested and together with the shreds from the Paper Shredding Crisis Task Force Paper Shredding Factory we were able to create the beautiful quantity required to make the shot in time for camera.

PHEW

The Quest + the Intense High Stakes Problem Solving are two things I actually love. So even though they are less about beautiful objects and the design aesthetic side of set decorating (which duh is the best part), they are processes I really enjoy and which keeps me loving set decorating.