LOS ANGELES — The New York backlot of Paramount Studios, where fake brownstones and townhouses mimic city streets, has been invaded by aliens before. But it has never seen anything quite like the bright green serpent that winds all the way from a “SoHo subway station” up through several apartment windows.
The snake isn’t scary — but has alarmingly low production values, being handmade out of papier-mâché and studded with colorful aquarium pebbles. And the artist behind it, Trulee Hall, has underscored the unsophisticated nature of her beast in an accompanying claymation video, complete with that horror-movie trope of a screaming woman in a bathtub.
“I love the fakeness of it all,” Ms. Hall said cheerfully this week on the SoHo set, where Paramount workers on a cherry picker were securing the creature, which she called “phallic and umbilical,” to the fire escape of a cast-iron building. “The entire Paramount lot is beautifully fake in a really safe way, like an adult Disney World.”