It was a sweltering L.A. day in 1945 when Mel Tormé and Robert Wells cranked out the line “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire, Jack Frost nipping at your nose.” On a recent holiday Saturday, the sun was shining as a crew of men in waterproof gear filed up a driveway in Studio City to build a sledding hill. The team, led by a former magician named Adam Williams, had brought shovels, fir trees, a dumpster-size ice crusher, and twenty-two tons’ worth of ice blocks. Williams, who is forty-three, with brown hair and a blinding smile, gives off the self-assured vibe of a yoga instructor. But he seemed anxious as one of the giant trucks filled with ice backed up noisily, skirting an expensively manicured lawn. “Sometimes half the work is just getting into position,” he said, gesturing toward the twisting gated driveway.
Williams’s company, MagicSnow, arranges “interactive snow experiences” in such high-S.P.F. locales as Malaysia, Brazil, Barbados, Hawaii, and Southern California. (In November, he made it snow over the Santa Monica Pier.) When the producers of “The Bachelor” need a blizzard, or if John Legend wants flurries onstage at a concert, they call Williams, whose fee ranges from ten thousand to a hundred thousand dollars.
“It’s the goal of the magician to create something out of nothing,” he said. Business is highly seasonal. “That’s the struggle at the moment,” he added. “We do a year’s worth of work in six weeks.” That day, Williams had six gigs. At a house in the Hollywood Hills, his trucks hadn’t been able to fit in the entranceway, so his crew had had to shovel the snow into wheelbarrows and then wheel it up to the property.
The host of the sledding party was a sitcom producer. In his driveway, a big metal ramp, like a fairground super slide, stood next to the pool, waiting for its blanket of pulverized ice. Workers scurried around, hanging lights and setting up a d.j. booth, a doughnut machine, a hot-chocolate dispenser, and a tent for “aura portraiture.” The MagicSnow crew switched on the crusher’s tractor engine and fed ice blocks the size of photocopiers down a chute into the machine’s metal maw. On a past gig, a pair of giant ice tongs fell into the machine and jammed up the gears. A backup crusher (Williams owns four) was rushed over.
Once the crusher was full, it was time to make snow. An employee pressed a button, and a fellow crew member, named Jake Montiel, gripped a long black hose as a surge of white streamed out in a fifteen-foot plume toward the sledding ramp. The hose shook violently and Montiel struggled to keep it steady. At one point, a chunk clogged the flow. “This always happens,” Williams said, as Montiel pummelled the hose with a sledgehammer, breaking down the blockage. Jessica Goldklang, a party planner, crouched nearby and recorded the spectacle on her phone, while icy spray grazed some carefully potted citrus trees. In forty-five minutes, the twenty-two tons of ice coated the driveway and the ramp, a modest spread of white. Williams admitted to being disappointed that the client had opted for a static snow scene rather than also ask for the company’s signature snowfall effect. (This involves a secret “water-and-foam-based method.”)
The crew began to carve sledding lanes into the hill. Then they brought in the fir trees, scattered pinecones around, and got to work on two snowmen. Instead of employing the classic method of rolling a snowball along the ground to make a larger and larger sphere, they packed snow into plastic molds, producing pristine, stackable globes of white. “Adam doesn’t like them too perfect,” Montiel said, giving one of them a few dings. He fashioned eyes and a mouth with shards of spray-painted lava rock that he had in his pocket, and popped on a nose. (“We prefer a natural carrot to a more uniform one,” Williams said.)
An hour later, guests started arriving. “Real snow!” a little girl cried, stepping onto the ramp. As the adults drank cocktails on the lawn, kids took runs down the hill. “Is it safe?” one child asked, positioning herself on a metal sled. “Eww! It’s wet.” A snowball fight began, and soon a little boy ran to his mother in furious tears. One of the MagicSnow guys shook his head and said, “That’s the kind of crying you do when you wanna get another kid in trouble.”
On Monday, a crew would scrape off the ramp and truck it away. The snow gets left behind. Eventually, in a simple disappearing act, it melts. ♦
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