ShareThisAt this week's cast and crew premiere of the new James Cameron film "Avatar," most of the audience was probably caught up in the action and characters on the distant fictional moon, Pandora, a lush rain-forest-like world.
Jodie Holt was looking at the plants.
Holt, 57, chairwoman of the botany and plant-sciences department at the University of California, Riverside, worked as a consultant on the sci-fi fantasy film, advising actress Sigourney Weaver on how to behave like a field botanist and developing background material on much of the plant life that appears in the movie.
A good deal of that work can be found in a companion book now available, "Avatar: An Activist Survival Guide." Along with material on Pandora's geology and the indigenous Na'vi people, the book is filled with paintings and sketches of plants and animals from the planet. Each specimen is identified by scientific name and there are details on its characteristics.
Sitting in her campus office last week, Holt thumbed through a copy of the book. Unaware the book was even in the works, she'd run across it in a local bookstore and picked it up.
"Oh, there's the thing about invasive species that I wrote," she said, smiling. "I'll be darned. This is really fun to see."
Holt, a specialist in weedy and invasive plants in wild and agricultural environments, has been at UC Riverside for 27 years. She said she was contacted 2-1/2 years ago by producer John Landau, who was looking for a field biologist to consult with on "Avatar." The film tells the story of the clash between a human mining operation and the native inhabitants of a moon circling a gas giant planet in a distant solar system.
"I thought, 'Oh sure, I can answer a few questions,' " she said.
Instead, she ended up deeply involved with the film, spending time with both Weaver and Cameron and eventually developing the descriptions and characteristics of the plants imagined by Cameron. She was surprised when she saw the initial footage of a Pandoran world where all the plants were blue.
"I said, 'How do you photosynthesize?' " said Holt. "I was probably just one of many people that went, 'Eww!' "
The "blue" idea was scrapped and the plants went to traditional green.
To provide the background sought for the movie, Holt told the crew she needed more information. She was surprised by the depth of detail the director had devoted to creating his imaginary world.
"I said, 'I can't write about the plants unless I know what's in the air and what's in the soil,' " she said. "James Cameron ... had thought of all this stuff. He said, 'We want some of these plants to be part plant, part animal.' We created a new -- on Earth it would have been a new kingdom -- zooplantae."
Or, in layman's terms, planimals. These include spiral plants that can collapse, similar to the contraction of a sea anemone, and others that can communicate and even one that can sense the heat from animal prey, turn toward it and shoot poison darts. This is, after all, a hostile planet.
Much of the material Holt developed also is incorporated into the "Avatar" video game released recently.
"I'll be really thrilled if I play the game and this plant turns and shoots me with a dart," she said.
Scientists are known for sometimes getting creative with scientific names of new plants and animals -- new species of spiders have incorporated the names of Neil Young and Stephen Colbert. But Holt said she stuck to the traditional Latin in doing her work on the movie plants, although she sometimes used modern references.
"I would study the image and say, 'What the heck does that look like?' " she said. "There's a plant that's tall and has little balls on it. It looks like that French dessert called croquembou, and so I gave it that name."
As fun and challenging as the work was, Holt said she realizes few will even notice her contribution.
"I'll be sitting in the movie saying, 'That's a banshee,' or, 'That's a war bonnet.' But the plants are really the backdrop," she said. "Most people, except my friends, aren't going to think much about it."
Following the cast and crew premiere Tuesday, Holt said it was exciting to see the result of all the work that went into the film.
"You know how you feel when your child's on stage?" she said. "I thought, 'There they are! There they are!' It came across beautifully. What probably will jump out at people the most is when night falls and so many of the plants start to luminesce. That's when they really jump out."
Glad for the experience, Holt isn't expecting a flood of fame.
"My dad calls me 'botanist to the stars,' " she said. "I'm hoping (movie) people will say, 'Wow, the plants are so great, we need to call that botanist again.' But I doubt it."
Still, there was a brief thrill at the after-party Tuesday evening.
"A grad student from UCLA came up to me and said, 'You're the botanist,' " she said. "So I even got recognized by one person."
(Reach Mark Muckenfuss at mmuckenfuss(at)PE.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
Must credit The Press-Enterprise of Riverside, Calif.
