INDUSTRY NEWS

Holy fog bank, Batman!

James Foley might know how the fictional Bruce Wayne feels when he dons his black bat togs and slips into the Gotham City twilight. No, he's not a millionaire by day who fights crime by night. By day, Foley sells industrial gases for Praxair's service subsidiary UCISCO. "By night, he's a Hollywood special effects guy," says Eric Jones, a spokesman for the company known for its UHP gases and chemicals. Not just your garden-variety moonlighter, Foley led a team of three Praxair employees who created the artificial fog used in the film Batman and Robin.

The sales rep and his two colleagues—Charles Converse and F. Edward Gardner—received a Technical Achievement Award on February 28 from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for their concoction. Foley and colleagues worked with Matt Sweeny Special Effects to create a recipe for the "liquid synthetic air" used as low-lying fog in scenes starring the villainous Mr. Freeze, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger. Hollywood and the Oscar folks appreciate that the Praxair mixture of oxygen, nitrogen, and steam creates the proper film ambience while still enabling actors and others on the set to breathe. Traditional phony fog made of dry ice and liquid nitrogen can trigger fainting spells caused by a lack of oxygen.

Foley took note that his filmmaker bosses certainly knew how to make use of oxygen: "I got yelled at more in one week in Hollywood than I ever did before."

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