Stranger things have happened, but finally after almost 20 years, a film for which Todd did art work and design is going in premier— after a fashion. George Sluizer’s Dark Blood, which was the last film of River Phoenix, has been cobbled together from loose footage and some strategic narration to form an interesting bit of filmmaking. The NRC Handelsblad calls it “a curiosity”.Todd tells us, “Dark Blood was one of the first films on which I started making actual set designs for Ben van Os. Of course Ben put me to work in any way that suited him, so I also drove his car, wrote his correspondence and ran his errands. But chiefly I was hired to paint art and sculpt props. I made all of the wooden Indian figures in the film. I was also put to work as River Phoenix’s “whittling coach”. We sat for hours on the edge of a dessert mesa just carving on wooden blocks.”
