A.V. CLUB
FOUNDED BY BOB NEWBY—remember that name, it’ll become important later—the Hawkins Middle School Audiovisual Club, or A.V. Club, is the perfect place from which to launch a curiosity voyage. Members Mike, Dustin, Lucas, and Will meet regularly with science teacher Mr. Clarke (Randy Havens), the cheerful mustachioed genius who sometimes shares a little too much of his expertise with the gang. “Mr. Clarke is the science teacher I wish I had had, but I never did have,” Matt Duffer says. “I didn’t really get into science for the longest time because my science teachers weren’t exactly inspirational. How do you make this stuff, which is so interesting, so dull? I found it all so boring, until I was in college and I was exposed to Cosmos and Carl Sagan. Mr. Clarke was really inspired by Carl Sagan, who seemed to me sort of like the ultimate science teacher.” Like the Duffers, Mr. Clarke enjoys the early films of John Carpenter (as he’s hanging with a lady friend one evening, they’re watching The Thing on TV). “We love Mr. Clarke,” Ross Duffer says. “He’s just pure nerd.”
When the boys aren’t together at school or in Mike’s basement, their preferred mode of communication is via walkie-talkie. Many of the walkie-talkies used for filming were picked up by property master Lynda Reiss. “I actually got booked for the show two months before I started, and when I’m not working, I’m in California,” Reiss says. “I was at the Long Beach flea market, and I saw two of the many walkie-talkies we ended up getting, and I bought them. I sent pictures to the Duffers, and they loved them. We wanted these big walkie-talkies next to the smaller kids’ faces with the big antennas and everything.”
Reiss also found Jonathan Byers’s camera, which she selected based on a model she herself once owned. “I went to Hong Kong in 1979, I think, and I bought myself a thirty-five-millimeter camera. It wasn’t high-end, but for me it was an expense at the time. So I picked a camera that I had used in that era. With Joyce working two jobs to pay the bills, there wouldn’t have been money to buy that camera. But a couple of years prior, maybe before the father left, there might have been money, like at Christmas, to get the camera.”
