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Hollywood sweeps up broom maker’s work
Hollywood is sweeping up Warren Olney’s brooms.
Olney, whose Grants Pass, OR workshop is in the confines of his dining room, has been making brooms of all sorts — but especially historically correct American brooms — for a dozen years.
By EDITH DECKER
Daily Courier
Last year, he received a call from a company looking for a very special broom: a copy of the Nimbus 2000, Harry Potter’s personal choice for riding to play the wizardly game of Quiddich.
The folks at Clean Fun in Los Angeles had been charged by Warner Brothers with finding someone to make some Nimbuses to be given to the Harry Potter film’s VIPs as an unusual token of appreciation.
They found Olney’s Web site and his phone number. http://www.broomshop.com
"These are now hanging in somebody’s trophy room," says Olney as he holds one of the finished Nimbus brooms that the marketing company sent.
"Who they were who got them, I don’t know."
The company added engraving on the wooden handle and the all-important gold "Nimbus 2000" sticker.
"Best I know, the movie broom — the Nimbus 2000 — was a manipulated plaster model of a broom which they put into a computer and then manipulated to look like it was flying," he said.
Olney was sent a photo of the model and "a drawing that looked a lot different," he says.
After some negotiation on the details and some samples sent back and forth, they reached agreement on a long-straw broom with a wooden riding handle and leather-lace finish tying the straw to the handle.
He had a local furniture company, In the Woods, build the handles.
Before long, he was packing up 25 of the brooms for Hollywood.
No sooner had he waved goodbye to the UPS man than he got a call from Disney Studios. They told him they were making a movie called "Pirates of the Caribbean."
They were looking for an authentic 1800s broom for a scene where an old woman sweeps up. Olney and his father, Bud Olney, who taught him the business, started doing research. They found that palmettos were used as brooms in Florida and points south — but the set designers didn’t like that idea. So they settled on some good old American-style 1800s straw brooms instead.
"We made six or eight — that were different styles so they could pick."
That done, Olney settled back into his usual business of putting brooms on the fine handles made by blacksmiths from around the country, and making brooms for everything from actual work to fireside decor.
But Hollywood called again. Warner Brothers, which made the "Harry Potter" movies, was working on a period movie about an American who goes to Japan.
Japanese brooms? Why not. More research. More samples. Another shipment sent just before Christmas.
"Then just the other day — I just got off the phone with them — there’s a studio in Santa Fe that’s putting out a horse opera," he said.
This set decorator, though, wanted to order out of the catalog for his movie, tentatively titled "The Missing," and starring Tommy Lee Jones and Suzanne Pleshette.
The local broom maker had another brush with fame — though not of the Hollywood sort.
Martha Stewart’s "Weddings" magazine features one of Olney’s brooms in a story about the Southern tradition of "jumping the broom" at weddings. In this case, the broom is dolled up in lace and finery.
Olney hasn’t rubbed shoulders with Martha or Tommy Lee or Johnny Depp or Harry Potter. But doing this much work for Hollywood is giving him mixed feelings.
"It hasn’t been a lot of money, but it’s been a lot of fun," he says of his connections with Hollywood.
But he’s not really looking for more work. He’s supposed to be a retired U.S. Forest Service worker taking it easy, after all.
At one point he considered taking a tiny ad in "Sunset" magazine, but rethought it.
"What would happen if someone came along and said, ‘I want 10,000 of them’? You’d pass out!"
The new Hollywood connection may have the same effect. Still, he’s contemplating the licensing and legalities required to make the Nimbus 2000 for Harry Potter collectors and add it to his catalog.
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