February | 2015 | Robert K. Maxfield

How I came to work on the most prolific show in television history!

Did you know that chiggers don’t actually burrow under your skin?! Nope, they actually grab onto a hair follicle, and inject a digestive enzyme into your skin cells. That ruptures the cells so that they can drink the fluid which has a protein they need to grow. Your skin hardens around that area, forming a nice big red volcano-like sore. That volcano acts like a straw, so that they can suck out the skin cell fluids. One big red enzyme-filled volcano keeps you itching for a good three to four days! That’s so awesome! The bad news is, you almost never get bitten by just one! I came by this intimate knowledge of chiggers in the early Fall of 2011 when I was invited to go down to Atlanta for three weeks to boom a show I’d never heard of called The Walking Dead. It was in the middle of Season Two, and I was told that another guy would come in after me and finish the last five weeks of the schedule. It’s not a good sign when you take over in the middle of a season, much less when they’ve already scheduled another person to come in after you. Somehow, I couldn’t stop thinking that I was just another piece of raw meat for some zombie’s lunch. Also, I wasn’t the slightest bit interested in working nights on a project with blood, guts and gore, and I’ve never taken well to B rated horror movies. So, my first reaction was to say, “No thank you.” Besides, the more I thought about working with slimy creatures, the more I remembered my sappy experience back in the early 90’s on the TV series, Freddie’s Nightmares. It was an experience that was…well, yucky. So, after a short deliberation, I told the sound mixer, “Thank you for inviting me, but I’m going to have to pass.”

Well, seven days went by and I still hadn’t booked anything for the following week, so I thought, “Heck, three weeks with a bunch of rotting corpses in sunny Georgia couldn’t be too disgusting, and it’s not like I have to eat lunch with them.” So, like any Boy Scout film worker during lean times, I called the Sound Mixer back and asked, “…still looking for a good Boom Operator?” He said “Yes, come on down.” So I thought, “Oh well, they’re paying me housing and per diem, plus a box rental and rental car…I’m outta here!” After I hung up I couldn’t help but think, “…he can’t find a local boom operator

TWD Entertainment Weekly PHOTO so he hires me out of Los Angeles, and it’s three days from needing someone and he hasn’t lined anyone else up?! This is odd!”

Three days later I was driving my rental car down a pitch-black country road at 6 o’clock in the morning, just outside the tiny rural town of Senoia, Georgia. The stages are situated in an old chemical plant on a dead-end road, one hour south of Atlanta in a thickly forested area that only chiggers could love. It’s shrouded by trees, stagnant ponds, railroad tracks, and all of the little creatures that make for a great horror flick. I fought off the feeling of this being my worst nightmare.

I arrived to some good news. They told me that I was the ninth Boom Operator on the show, since its inception one year prior. “You mean that in only 19 filmed episodes, you have been through nine Boom Operators?!” “Yep”, the Sound Mixer said. This was not sitting well with me. And it turned out, by the end of that same Season Two they reached the milestone of 11 boom operators!… a really bad sign. To this day they call me “Number 9, Number 9, Number 9….” Oh, and it turns out, I did have to eat with those zombie things. Nothing like lunch with a gooey corpse sitting across the table from me, spoon feeding itself through displaced dentures into it’s black and blue prosthetic face… yummy. But, it’s those little tufts of half dead hair that really creep me out.

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