Aspiring actor Dr. Halloween earned his fame ‘styling for the stars’

It’s Monday afternoon in Madison Heights, a stately Pasadena neighborhood where the seasonal decor is as tasteful and predictable as a Hallmark movie.

Suddenly, like a strange wind, a U-Haul truck quietly pulls in front of an elegant home. Within minutes, a crew of black-clad workers begin emptying the truck’s contents, briskly lining the sidewalk with piles of leering jack-o-lanterns, disassembled gargoyles, bags of shredded rags and a line of gaping brown “skellys” in floozy gowns.

Dr. Halloween has arrived.

Skeleton figures are laid out in the front yard of the Bryants’ front lawn.

(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

In less than three hours, Dr. Halloween and his crew of eight will transform the broad front yard of this Fillmore Street home into a riotous Halloween fun house. It’s an annual tradition that Chris and Jasmine Bryant inherited when they bought their spacious home in 2018, and they were happy to continue after they moved in, with the help of the crew who creates a different spooky scene every year.

The job sounds fun, but this crew is all business, cranking giant bony fingers into the ground, styling the wayward hair of ghoulish girls, impaling skeletons — “skellys” — on tall garden rebar so they can be posed and wrestling with the assembly of a towering mummy, gruesome green witch and headless horseman on a rearing stead.

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They rarely talk and never stop moving, and amid them all is Dr. Halloween himself — Bob Pranga (a.k.a. Dr. Christmas after Oct. 31) — directing what goes where. Pranga, 63, claims he’s mostly a watcher these days, because he’s been decorating ritzy homes for the holidays since 1989. Also, his crew members are all pros, but really, he’s just as busy as the others, unconsciously pushing back the bangs of his blond, boy-band hair every few minutes as he rushes from the street to the yard, scrutinizing the effects, deciding the best orientation for the creatures, and sending crew members scurrying to assist another in need.

His longtime friend and business partner, Debi Staron, 67, quietly bustles around in a button-front Santa shirt (“We do Christmas too, so why not?”), pulling spooky accessories and body parts out of boxes so they can be assembled and placed. Her well-worn cycling gloves allow a peek at her perfect dripping-blood manicure, and a bulky knee pad helps steady a problem leg because she’s up and down so often.

Israel Cruz completes a stack of jack-o-lanterns while decorating Chris and Jasmine Bryant’s home in Pasadena.

(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

Cruz also assembles a giant warty-faced witch that looms nearly 12 feet tall.

(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

“I’m basically the nuts-and-bolts partner, especially when we do Christmas,” she says. “When we started, Bob was the one decorating inside the lovely house, and I’d be outside on a ladder in the driving rain, trying to hang lights in the bougainvillea. I also know how to fluff a tree properly after it comes out of a box. Most people just put up their artificial tree and wonder why it doesn’t look as good as it did at the store. They don’t realize you have to fluff out the branches — it usually takes at least an hour.”

Staron doesn’t linger long to talk. She makes sure all the crew keep hydrated, and then she’s back trying to install a brighter light in a giant plastic cauldron. Meanwhile, Pranga is all nervous energy.

A headless horseman looms above headstones and mouthy skeletons, big and small.

(Jeanette Marantos / Los Angeles Times)

“I’ve been doing this home so long, maybe I’m losing track,” he says, casting a critical eye at the headless horseman rearing above him. “I think it’s different this year? Did we have him before?”

“No, no,” his client Jasmine Bryant reassures him, pulling out her phone to show photos of last year’s underwater-themed display of ghostly divers, flirty mermaid skeletons and adorable baby shark “skellys.” “And before that, “ she says enthusiastically, “we had the creepy babies …”

“Oh yeah,” Pranga says, brightening. “We had a baby riding a giant spider! That was great.”

The Bryants aren’t the only ones smiling by the time the last strips of white and purple tulle are wrapped around the mummy and the giant warty witch is securely tied against a tree. Shortly after the work begins, pedestrians stop to admire and passing cars slow to a crawl, with cellphones poking out the windows for photos.

“And so it starts,” Pranga says, rolling his eyes, but clearly, this is attention he enjoys.

Bob Pranga stands near the outdoor Halloween display at the home of Chris and Jasmine Bryant in Pasadena, which Pranga, business partner Debi Staron and their crew of seven transformed into delightfully spooky Halloween decor.

(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

It may not be the audience he expected when he moved to New York City to become an actor in 1984, but he and Staron’s work creating holiday fantasies for well-heeled clients has nonetheless resulted in tons of applause as the “Tree Stylists to the Stars,” from regular appearances on local TV shows, decorating homes, hotels and TV/movie sets for everything, from “Elf” to “The Brady Bunch”; creating their own book, “Christmas Style,” in 2004; and 10 years later, their own TLC Christmas special, “Deck the Halls with Dr. Christmas.”

It’s not like any of this was planned, Pranga says. He was just a Midwestern boy from Sturgis, Mich., (“Not the famous one with the motorcycles — we’re the other one”) who fell in love with the idea of Hollywood and all its celebrities by watching TV shows as a child in the 1960s and 1970s.

“We were basically middle class so there weren’t a lot of big to-dos throughout the year, but Christmas was always a big deal,” he says, “Christmas by the pound. My grandparents always had a big Christmas Eve party and the weekend before there was always the American Legion Christmas party. We always had a giant blue spruce in the living room that my sister and I got to decorate. And on Christmas morning, we took forever to open presents because we didn’t want Christmas to be over. “

At Hope College in Holland, Mich., he studied theater and got an internship in New York City the summer before his senior year. Typically, theater interns swept stages, he says, “but I told them I wanted to work with a network, so I was assigned to work with Lorne Michaels on ‘Saturday Night Live.’”

Bob Pranga sneaks up behind crew member Susan Bratton while she dresses a line of gaping “skellys” in witch hats and satin floozy gowns. “I call them my party girls,” Pranga says, while in the background another crew member, Vicki Dimitri, arranges a tombstone in the display.

(Jeanette Marantos / Los Angeles Times)

Susan Bratton arranges a lacy shawl on a friendly “skelly” — Dr. Halloween’s shorthand for skeleton.

(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

His job mostly involved getting coffee and running errands, but the experience was everything a celebrity seeker could ask for, he says. Many years later, he actually decorated the homes of some of the celebs he met on “SNL,” such as Carrie Fisher and her mother, Debbie Reynolds. His most memorable moment though, he says, was accidentally walking into the dressing room of “SNL” cast member Gilda Radner while she was sitting inside.

“The rules were, if the celebrities were in the room, you couldn’t go in, and I was terrified,” he says, “but she said, ‘Honey, sit down and have some fruit. I have this big fruit basket and I can’t eat it all myself. You look tired, and you’ve got to take care of yourself in this business because otherwise, it will kill you.’”

He says he hesitated, worried about breaking the rule, but Radner insisted. “She said, ‘If you have any problems with them, tell them I asked you to help me, because after all, honey, I’m the star,’” Pranga says. “She wasn’t being egotistical. It was very businesslike, a moment of power, and I was like, ‘I want to have that power.’”

The following year, after he finished his degree, Pranga moved to New York with $100 in his pocket. One of his friends found an apartment “in a crack-whore neighborhood called Red Hook in Brooklyn. It’s gentrified now, but then, you walked over junkies in the morning to get to the bus,” he says. “People always ask me, ‘Weren’t you scared?’ and the answer is: ‘No, because I was in New York and I was starting this great adventure’ — I was trying to figure out how to be an actor.”

Vicky Dimitri fixes a black veil on one of the yard’s ghostly apparitions after creating hairdos for the other ghosts’ matted locks.

(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

As it turned out, the acting gigs were rare, but at least it’s how he met Staron, another aspiring actor who, like him, was attending Bob Collier’s Commercial Acting School. To pay the rent, he found work at Macy’s famous flagship department store working in various departments until he finally landed on the Christmas floor, finishing trees.

In the 1980 and ’90s, Macy’s was so prestigious “when I’d go home for Christmas, all people wanted was a Macy’s shopping bag,” he says. During his five years in New York, he worked other jobs too: window dressing at Bergdorf Goodman and leading tours around the city.

“It was all survival work, but being a city tour guide also taught me to hustle,” he says. “Hustle has a negative connotation, but it helped me figure things out. My foundation came from the Midwest, where you work hard, learn how to be nice to people and be happy with what you get. Being a New York City tour guide taught me how to survive.”

Debi Staron calls herself the “nuts-and-bolts” partner of Dr. Halloween and Dr. Christmas, usually wearing fingerless gloves and a bulky knee pad to make it easier when she’s assembling gear or “crawling around under Christmas trees,” but she still takes time for snazzy seasonal manicures from Paris Nails near her home in Chatsworth.

(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

By the end of 1988, Pranga and Staron were ready for a change. As he recalls, “She came to my Christmas party and said, ‘I’m thinking of moving to California in April,’ and I was like, ‘Well, I’ll go with you.’ And that’s pretty much how my life has been, all just happenstance. Nothing was planned.”

They found a small apartment in West Hollywood in the spring of 1989, which they shared with another friend to keep their costs low. “I came to L.A. with $300, so I felt like I was making progress,” Pranga says jokingly. Within weeks, he was working again as a tour guide, this time on tour buses in Hollywood. “I was literally making everything up,” and it became another kind of survival job, he says, since he had to keep changing tour companies until he found one whose paychecks would reliably clear.

Then in the fall of 1991, Pranga spotted a want ad for a Christmas shop manager at the Glendale Galleria.

“I called and said, ‘I have experience at Macy’s doing Christmas,’ and they literally gave me the job sight unseen over the phone because experience at Macy’s had so much clout,” he says. “Then I told them I had an assistant I worked with, and they hired us both over the phone. So I went home that night and told Debi, ‘I got this job over the phone to run a Christmas store, and you’re my assistant. Do you wanna?’ And she said, ‘Yes, I’ll help you,’ and that’s how it started.”

Mark Ilvedson, on the ladder, wraps raggedly strips of purple fabric and white tulle on a 12-foot-tall mummy, while Charly Sam, below hands him fabric and keeps his ladder secure. Debi Staron recommends adding shredded bits of cheesecloth, tulle or other lightweight fabrics to all Halloween displays because the movement gives the decor a spookier vibe.

(Jeanette Marantos / Los Angeles Times)

Things really started humming when businesswoman Bette L. Smith, then-owner of Completion Bond Co., walked into the store. “She said, ‘I love that Christmas tree’ and asked me if I knew anybody who decorates. ‘I do,’ I said, and that was my first job,” Pranga says. “I had no clue what that meant other than bringing a Christmas tree to put up for her. There were no guidelines to being a Christmas decorator in Los Angeles. I had to make everything up.”

Later, Pranga and Staron worked for a Christmas store that was bought by Paris Hilton’s mother, Kathy Hilton, who opened the door to many other celebrity introductions. “I remember Kathy pulling me aside the very first year and saying, ‘Honey, if you want to make it in this town, you watch me,’” he says. “I will always be grateful because I learned so much working for her.”

By then, Pranga was calling himself “the Christmas Guy.” That changed after he told someone he worked 24/7 during the holidays, “and they said, ‘Oh, like a doctor? You’re like a doctor of Christmas!’ So then I started calling myself Dr. Christmas,” he says.

Jasmine and Chris Bryant have been hiring Dr. Halloween to create spooky scenes in their Pasadena front yard since the bought their home in 2018. The displays are pricey, and attract hundreds of trick-or-treaters, but they keep doing the decor, Bryant said, “because it’s so much fun.”

(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

As his clientele grew, Pranga says he knew “if you want to make any money in California, you have to have a little bit of fandom, which meant getting on television, so I just started calling around. Nobody told me I needed an agent.”

It was part luck and part chutzpah that landed him a spot on the “Leeza” syndicated talk show. “I just called and said, “This is Dr. Christmas and I’d like to speak to Leeza Gibbons,‘” he says. “The receptionist thought I was her real doctor and put me right through. Leeza said, ‘Who is this?’ and I said, ‘I’m Dr. Christmas and I think it would be fun to be on your show,’ and she went, ‘… OK,’ and that developed into a lasting friendship. She always called me when she needed a holiday fluff piece.”

Ultimately, he and Staron collected so much holiday decor, they opened a prop rental business called Dr. Christmas Rents in Burbank and began decorating sets for movies, TV and commercials. Around 2015, they noticed all the interest in Halloween and branched into spooky decor as well.

Now their season runs from mid-September to mid-January. For some clients, that means taking down their Halloween gear and putting up Christmas the same week.

His fees vary from $5,000 to $50,000, depending on the location and amount of decor. “Some people even do their bathrooms — I had one house where we put a lit Christmas tree in a beautiful glass shower stall. I’m more than happy to decorate whatever room they want to do,” he says.

He never quotes prices over the phone. “I meet with people and ask what kind of experience do they want — a Honda, a Lexus or a Rolls-Royce? “ he says. “They never choose the Honda experience. The majority of the folks choose the Lexus, and a lot choose the Rolls-Royce, but each client is different. We have a lot of corporate clients, but we also have people who want to have their home done while they go shopping. And what really sells it is, once we give them the movie-set experience, we come back and take it all down. And if it needs any maintenance, we come back and make it right. It’s all part of my Midwestern ideals.”

A cyclist ogles the Bryant’s fully Halloween decorated home, just a couple hours after Dr. Halloween’s crew began. Here’s the finished look of the Pasadena home.

(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

Chris and Jasmine Bryant — he a software engineer, she the director of Caltech’s Center for Teaching, Learning, & Outreach — were cheerfully mum about what their Halloween extravaganza cost. “A decent amount,” Chris Bryant says, smiling.

They keep things simple for Christmas — just a string of lights around the outside of the house, but their Halloween decor “goes into our annual budget because it’s so much fun,” Chris Bryant says. “We probably got 2,000 trick-or-treaters last year, an endless stream. It seems to make people very happy, and that’s something we enjoy. It’s a big part of why we do this.”

Those kind of comments are music to Pranga’s ears, a win-win for his business and his Midwestern “be nice to folks” ideals. His goal is always to make people happy, he says, even with a client load that, after Halloween, will likely have he and his team decorating at least one house or business every day until Dec. 25. But don’t let that stop you from calling, he says, laughing. He’s the doctor, after all, a master at making things work, “and I’ll keep taking money until I fall down.”