Episode 1064 - Rick Baker
Guest:Lock the gates!
Marc:All right, let's do this.
Marc:How are you?
Marc:What the fuckers?
Marc:What the fuck buddies?
Marc:What the fucksters?
Marc:What's happening?
Marc:I'm Mark Maron.
Marc:Mark?
Marc:Did I just say Mark Maron?
Marc:You know, I shouldn't be mispronouncing my own name, but I guess I'm Mark Maron today.
Marc:And this is my podcast, WTF.
Marc:How you doing, Mark?
Marc:Pretty good, Mark.
Marc:There you go.
Marc:What's Mark up to?
Marc:I guess he's doing a show without you.
Marc:Without who?
Marc:Without Mark.
Marc:So this is Mark?
Marc:Yup.
Marc:I want to say today on the show, sort of a unique show for us.
Marc:I think it is.
Marc:I guess in a way, maybe not.
Marc:I can talk to anybody.
Marc:But Rick Baker is the makeup artist genius.
Marc:He's the makeup artist that all the other makeup artists look up to.
Marc:He's done all of the stuff.
Marc:He worked on The Exorcist a bit.
Marc:He did this amazing thing.
Marc:I remember when I was a kid, the autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman.
Marc:He did some work on Star Wars.
Marc:He did The Howling.
Marc:He did Videodrome with Cronenberg.
Marc:He did like two or three King Kongs.
Marc:I think he did Dino De Laurentiis' King Kong, and then he did Peter Jackson's King Kong, and then he did Joe, the other one.
Marc:What's that one called?
Marc:Mighty Joe, Mighty Joe Kong, Mighty Joe Young.
Marc:A lot of apes.
Marc:There's a lot of apes involved in makeup.
Marc:He did How the Grinch Stole Christmas, the Nutty Professors movies, Men in Black stuff.
Marc:The guy is the guy.
Marc:He's a fucking genius.
Marc:And he's got this amazing, huge two-book set out that covers his entire life in pictures and in prose.
Marc:And it's just phenomenal.
Marc:And I'm not like you know me.
Marc:I'm not a fantasy guy.
Marc:But I've seen most of those movies.
Marc:So it was kind of an interesting opportunity.
Marc:And I'm glad I took it.
Marc:So you will hear me talking to Rick Baker and a few.
Marc:So a couple of emails I'd like to address, perhaps.
Marc:Can I?
Marc:This is the subject line, Episode 1063, Chocolate-Covered Coconut Cookie Snacks.
Marc:Hi there.
Marc:I was just listening to Mark's opening monologue of Episode 1063 when he mentioned the vegan snacks for Woody Harrelson that Frank had left behind.
Marc:The, quote, chocolate-covered coconut cookie snacks, unquote.
Marc:As you can probably tell from my email address, I work for Emmy's Organics, an organic coconut cookie and treat company based in Ithaca, New York.
Marc:I was hoping you could tell me if the snacks Mark mentioned in this episode were in fact Emmy's products pictured below.
Marc:And if so, if you like them, would he like us to send some more for Mark to enjoy and share with his podcast guests?
Marc:Now, right out of the gate, like, is there a lot of competing chocolate covered coconut cookie things?
Marc:That seems like four words.
Marc:The only word that wasn't right on the money was snack.
Marc:Right?
Marc:So I'm glad that you thought that there was a question.
Marc:It's like, I don't know if he's talking about our bites or not.
Marc:I mean, we make the chocolate-covered coconut cookie bites, but he might have gotten our competitors the makers of the chocolate-covered coconut cookie snack.
Marc:Those fuckers.
Marc:It was indeed Emmy's chocolate-covered coconut cookie bites, not snacks.
Marc:But they are snacks.
Marc:But you got it right.
Marc:And this isn't even a paid plug.
Marc:I don't think I should have any more.
Marc:As good as they were, I appreciate your offer, but I don't want them in my house.
Marc:Is that mean?
Marc:Very good.
Marc:I love them.
Marc:I love them.
Marc:Don't want them in the house.
Marc:That's how that goes.
Marc:And I think it's also important that I just say this at least once a show.
Marc:President Donald Trump is a scumbag.
Marc:He's a fucking morally bankrupt douchebag.
Marc:He's a weak piece of shit.
Marc:And it's like, is that just name calling?
Marc:Yes, it is.
Marc:But I've grown to believe that I did not just make a political statement.
Marc:I think it's time to reframe the conversation.
Marc:Here's what it is.
Marc:That wasn't political.
Marc:That was observational.
Marc:That was a regular person.
Marc:Hey, let's make an observation about this guy.
Marc:Doesn't matter even what he's doing.
Marc:Like, let's say, hey, that guy's name is Don and he's selling cars.
Marc:That guy's a fucking scumbag.
Marc:He's a morally bankrupt fucking corrupt douche.
Marc:Don, you just having that first reaction to him?
Marc:Yeah, I don't even know that guy.
Marc:So that is the regular reaction.
Marc:So that's observational, not political.
Marc:Just happens to be the president.
Marc:Anybody who's saying like he's doing the right thing and he's a good guy and we really love him, that's delusional.
Marc:See, there's a difference between neither are political.
Marc:One is observational.
Marc:The other one is fucking nuts.
Marc:Like nuts.
Marc:I'm not talking about the upper tier.
Marc:They have their own reasons for doing things because they don't live in the world with the rest of us.
Marc:I'm just talking about us.
Marc:There's observational comedy and delusional defensive reactions to that.
Marc:Here's another email.
Marc:Hey, Mark, subject line, kid havers response.
Marc:I appreciate you apologizing for hurting some people's feelings when calling people kid havers, but you are literally the only prominent voice in my life that doesn't make me feel bad for not having kids.
Marc:Actually makes me feel good about it.
Marc:Every commercial, every political speech, every job pitch is always, think about your kids.
Marc:Well, I don't have any, and I'm still a person that wants to matter.
Marc:I just want to say thank you for being a voice for the children.
Marc:Thanks.
Marc:I appreciate you calling me out on that, being considerate to people that made the horrendous mistake to bring children into the world.
Marc:And maybe that didn't come out right.
Marc:You're right.
Marc:I shouldn't apologize for who I am.
Marc:And I was just trying to be polite.
Marc:And good luck with your kids.
Marc:And you and me, Carlos, the guy who wrote the email, you know, it's pretty comfortable, isn't it?
Marc:It's nice.
Marc:Are you feeling pretty free today?
Marc:Like you worried about your kid?
Marc:No, you're not.
Marc:Is the kid, oh, you don't have one.
Marc:What about the future?
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:I'm probably gonna be dead.
Marc:You too, Carlos?
Marc:Yep.
Marc:Wow.
Marc:Breathe easy.
Marc:But anyways, I hope everyone's kids are okay.
Marc:And I'm sorry I don't want to be grim, but I think Carlos is right.
Marc:I don't need to apologize for him, but I was just trying to be respectful.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:He's a bit erratic, a bit drunk at times, a very unique, a very dark type of guy, but a very cynical, but cutting and smart dude.
Marc:And some of his books are some of the best books I ever read.
Marc:Among them, Dino, Living High in the Business of Dreams about Dean Martin.
Marc:I love that book, Hellfire, an earlier book about Jerry Lee Lewis, which I loved a lot.
Marc:He did a book called The Unsung Heroes of Rock and Roll, which was a real education for me.
Marc:The Devil and Sonny Liston, which was a great book about Sonny Liston.
Marc:Tosh was great.
Marc:He lived hard and now he's gone.
Marc:I think he was like 69 years old.
Marc:And Dino is, you know, whether it's accurate or not, is one of the best books about show business I've ever read.
Marc:Rest in peace there, Nick Toshas, if that's possible.
Marc:I imagine he's going to be difficult wherever he goes.
Marc:So, great time in Nashville and Atlanta.
Marc:I've been watching Ken Burns' country music, and what an amazing treat it is.
Marc:And I was in Nashville, and a lot of that stuff happened in Nashville.
Marc:The day after I leave Nashville, I'm watching, I think I'm up to the fourth episode.
Marc:They're like two hours apiece.
Marc:But then I was actually...
Marc:I was walking through a part of Nashville called, I think, Music Row or whatever.
Marc:And I didn't really know what it was.
Marc:It didn't look like much.
Marc:And this morning, way too late, I learned what it was and why it was called that.
Marc:But nonetheless, I've been watching it and things sort of were syncing up.
Marc:I do know a little.
Marc:You guys listen to me bullshit my way through knowing things here all the time.
Marc:But I know a bit about rock.
Marc:I know a bit about blues.
Marc:I know a bit about jazz.
Marc:I mean, I can sort of track it.
Marc:And historically, all three of those things, really.
Marc:I don't know a lot of the jazz performers, but I have a sense of the history.
Marc:I had zero sense of the history of country music.
Marc:And I have a lot of the records.
Marc:I didn't grow up with country music.
Marc:It was around me.
Marc:I grew up in New Mexico.
Marc:I remember the State Fair, the rodeo, the acts coming through, Waylon, Willie, Roy Clark, Buck Owens.
Marc:Who else do I remember from when I was a kid?
Marc:Freddie Fender.
Marc:Freddie Fender.
Marc:Wasted days and wasted nights.
Marc:Come on, huh?
Marc:I'll be there before the next teardrop fall.
Marc:I think he might have lived in Albuquerque.
Marc:He seemed to be there all the time.
Marc:But it wasn't in my household so much as it was around me, but I'd grown to love country music.
Marc:I just didn't know anything about it.
Marc:And the Ken Bernstock is just blowing my fucking mind.
Marc:You know, the way he frames things, he gives you context.
Marc:And I was listening to, I meditated all day on, I think Saturday, the day I got to Atlanta after being in Nashville, I listened to the Carter family all day long.
Marc:I was mystified.
Marc:And I never knew, I knew who Jimmy Rogers was and I had the cover record, but I didn't know how important he was.
Marc:I didn't know that it was all about
Marc:Jimmy Rogers and the Carter family that is the Rosetta Stone of modern country but you go back to their influences and there's definitely some you know blues in there and there's some uh you know other stuff but that was sort of they were the template according to Burns and according to people he talked to but to me that's just fucking fascinating and now I got a place to start and kind of arc out and I've got the records
Marc:I guess the whole point of me talking to you right now is to just give a plug to Ken Burns' country music documentary and also to tell you I have a lot of records.
Marc:I just want you to know I have a lot of records and many of them are country records.
Marc:But here's what I learned.
Marc:In Nashville, I had a learning moment.
Marc:I want to share it with you.
Marc:And I always love going to Nashville.
Marc:But I learned something about myself there, and I want to share it with you.
Marc:And I think I'm going to stick to this, okay?
Marc:I'm old, right?
Marc:I'm 56 years old.
Marc:And I know that's not old, old.
Marc:And I know that other people in their 50s get really defensive when you say that.
Marc:You're old and you're 50-something.
Marc:But folks, I didn't assume I would live this long, okay?
Marc:Okay.
Marc:And and now here I am.
Marc:All right.
Marc:It's great.
Marc:But sometimes I don't always know what to do with with life.
Marc:Like, you know, what makes it fun, worthwhile, exciting?
Marc:Huh?
Marc:What?
Marc:I mean, historically, for me, it seems to be doing things that aren't great for me, but feel really good.
Marc:And I've had to move away from those things.
Marc:All right.
Marc:Change them up a bit.
Marc:OK.
Marc:I have my moments where I think, and I think many of you can relate to this.
Marc:We all have these moments where I'm just like, fuck it.
Marc:Fuck it.
Marc:You only live once, man.
Marc:Fuck it.
Marc:I'm doing it.
Marc:And I decided, I decided, and it was in Nashville, right on time actually, that it's not necessarily a bad philosophy if you manage it.
Marc:Like I decided that I could only apply it to one decision a day max, if at all.
Marc:You don't have to, every day doesn't have to have a fuck it, you only live once in it because then you're probably not gonna live long.
Marc:So,
Marc:is what I did.
Marc:I was in Nashville and I said, fuck it.
Marc:I only live once and I ate at Arnold's Country Kitchen, right?
Marc:It's Arnold's, it's a meet and three and I've been wanting to go there for years, but for some reason, they're closed on weekends and they're only open for lunch and it was just never open.
Marc:And they always seemed closed when I was there.
Marc:And I was dying for some chess pie, which you can only get down south and not too many places there have it either.
Marc:But it's specific and they have it at Arnold's.
Marc:All right.
Marc:So I went to Arnold's.
Marc:I said, fuck it.
Marc:I'm going because, you know, I'm pretty healthy guy.
Marc:I had a plate of fried catfish, cauliflower casserole, corn pudding, turnip greens, cornbread and a slice of chess pie.
Marc:They actually had meringue on it.
Marc:There were options.
Marc:I had you go meringue or no meringue.
Marc:I don't care.
Marc:Fuck it.
Marc:I only live once.
Marc:Now, I'm glad that was where I allotted my one daily use of that philosophy because right after I ate at Arnold's, I walked like across the parking lot.
Marc:It's right there to Carter's vintage guitars, okay?
Marc:And for some reason, Carter's was where the estate of Ed King, I think his wife, Ed King being the original guitar player, one of the original guitar players of Lynyrd Skynyrd, the guy who wrote Sweet Home Alabama, the guy whose signature picks I use.
Marc:his wife was selling his guitar collection through Carter's vintage guitars.
Marc:And I found out later that Jason Isbell had bought one, but that's another story.
Marc:So I'm in there and I'm looking at guitars and I'm looking at Ed King's mint 1953 Les Paul deluxe gold top.
Marc:It was fucking stunning.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:I didn't need it, but I didn't need the Arnold's either.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:My point is,
Marc:I said fuck it at the right place because the difference between me saying fuck it I only live once at Arnold's and not at Carter's was about $39,980.
Marc:All right.
Marc:Thank God I stuck to my allotment.
Marc:Now, I'm not saying that I have that kind of money to spend on a guitar, but fuck it, man.
Marc:I could have.
Marc:I could have.
Marc:You know, I don't know if I would have felt good about it.
Marc:Chest pie was amazing.
Marc:I don't know if I'd be sitting here with my 53 gold top after spending $40,000 on it because I said, fuck it, that I would be like, yeah, man, I'm so glad I bought that guitar.
Marc:I'd probably be like, what the fuck is wrong with me?
Marc:Maybe I'm wrong, though.
Marc:But I think that was a smart use of my new fuck it limit.
Marc:All right?
Marc:My fuck it, you only live once limit.
Marc:I don't feel great about the chess pie.
Marc:But again, I think I feel better about it than how I would feel if I would have spent $40,000 on a guitar.
Marc:So I'll be at the Masonic in San Francisco, October 26th.
Marc:That's this Saturday.
Marc:It's the last show of my tour before I do my special.
Marc:Come out to that.
Marc:I'll have 100 posters, and I prefer cash.
Marc:But Rick Baker, this was sort of an interesting thing for me because I learned a lot.
Marc:I met a genius.
Marc:I met a guy that did something in a way no one else had done before him, set standards, created ways of doing things in makeup that still stick now, changed an industry.
Marc:won like seven i think or maybe eight oscars uh and it was a it was an honor actually you know like i said i'm not a fantasy guy but this is a skill set it's a it's a an often celebrated or at least talked about job and entertainment but you know he talks about the struggles of getting accepted even as a makeup artist for doing what he was doing it was just a it was a unique conversation to have here and i'm glad i had it this was a me and rick baker uh
Marc:And his book, which is amazing, Rick Baker Metamorphosis, is available wherever you get books.
Marc:It's going to be out tomorrow, October 22nd.
Marc:Preorder it now.
Marc:It's huge.
Marc:It's two huge books, but stunning photographs and beautifully written.
Marc:And this is me talking to the genius, the makeup artist genius that is Rick Baker.
Rick Baker
Marc:So, you know, it was funny.
Marc:I'm looking at the book.
Marc:Massive.
Marc:It's a massive book.
Marc:And metamorphosis.
Marc:It's got the arc of your entire life in pictures.
Marc:And we were talking in the kitchen before.
Marc:It's odd to you to look at that thing?
Marc:Well, it is weird.
Guest:It's kind of like your life passing before your eyes, you know?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But you had all the stuff.
Guest:you know i i save stuff uh you know i think creative people do that you know it's like my wife's always on my case because i'll you know save old yogurt containers well that's a little nuts well because i use them to mix paint you know i like to reuse it it's like recycling you know right but i mean you know it's like that looks like i could use that someday you know so i have boxes full of stuff that i've had for 50 years that i never use again right but pictures though too right and all that stuff yeah no so that came in really handy yeah i
Marc:Like what is some of the, what are the, because there are pictures of some pretty early stuff that you worked on.
Marc:When did, you know, when did that start?
Marc:When did you start making masks?
Guest:Well, I started doing makeup when I was 10.
Guest:I decided that's what I wanted to do with my life.
Guest:How does that, now let's go, where'd you grow up?
Guest:Covina, which is like east of here.
Guest:You grew up in Covina?
Guest:Yeah, I was born in New York in Binghamton, but my parents left when I was not even one.
Marc:So you're out in Covina, you're 10, and what do you see that plants that seed?
Guest:Well, like so many people, my generation was born in 1950.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:I grew up in front of a television.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Every weekend, and I think in every state across the union, there was a monster movie and a horror show host on the weekend.
Marc:That's right.
Guest:And I love that stuff.
Marc:You know, Paul Thomas Anderson's dad was one of those guys.
Guest:No way.
Guest:Who was he?
Marc:Goularty.
Guest:Was he?
Guest:In Cleveland.
Guest:I had no idea.
Guest:Yeah, that's Paul Thomas Anderson's father.
Guest:Oh, that's cool.
Guest:That's good information.
Guest:Well, you know, there's Sven Gouli now.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:There's a channel called MeTV, and I watch Sven Gouli.
Guest:And there is still a guy.
Guest:Yeah, there's still a guy.
Guest:And I faithfully watch it.
Guest:You know, I've seen all the movies a million times.
Marc:Sure, but you like the guy.
Guest:I just like the fact that it still exists.
Marc:And you knew who Goularty was.
Marc:Uh-huh.
Marc:So you knew some of the local, the different regions, because those stations were like, they were local.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:So everyone had a local guy.
Guest:But they had the same movie packages, the shock theater package.
Guest:So everybody across the United States who was like my age was watching that stuff.
Guest:And there was a magazine called Famous Monsters of Filmland.
Marc:My brother used to get it.
Marc:I was never the horror guy, but it landed with him.
Marc:And he had those magazines, and he was sort of obsessed with it.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Guest:I was too and it was you know it was a film magazine you know I mean it talked about all aspects of the monster movies yeah not just the directors and the actors but Jack Pierce who did the Frankenstein's monster yeah makeup and and all that and I and I went this is what I want to do I mean I used to say I wanted to be a doctor right my parents were very excited about yeah at 10 yeah you know I wanted to be Dr. Frankenstein yeah yeah right but but I mean but that's interesting because somehow or another because unlike
Marc:It's not delusional in a sense like, you know, acting when a kid wants to be an actor princess or something.
Marc:You know, it's like I want to be a movie star.
Marc:You don't know how that happens.
Marc:But I mean, you look at something and because of that magazine, you're like, there's a there's a job here like this.
Marc:This guy does that.
Marc:And I've seen a lot of these movies.
Marc:So this is it's an employment opportunity there.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And but more than anything, I just wanted to do it.
Guest:You know, I mean, I just like I just wanted to make stuff.
Guest:And I mean, I when I was 10, I didn't decide I was going to do it for a living.
Guest:I was just like, this is what I want to do.
Guest:So I started making myself up and I made my first mask when I was 13.
Guest:Who was it?
Guest:It was actually the very first one was Frankenstein from Curse of Frankenstein, the Christopher Lee Hammer film version.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Which I was not the biggest fan of that makeup.
Guest:Yeah, but I did it because I figured I could do it because it was kind of doable.
Guest:Yeah, it seems kind of sloppy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And did you do it?
Guest:I did.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it just never stopped after that.
Marc:But when you read the magazines, did you have did you know certain processes or did you just kind of wing it?
Marc:Were you how much of it was sort of your own invention?
Guest:There was a little bit of information.
Guest:There was the occasional article on that stuff.
Guest:But fortunately, my father was a very creative guy.
Guest:But growing up in Binghamton, New York, it was discouraged.
Guest:You know, you don't want to stop drawing, do something you can make a living at.
Marc:Sure, what did he end up doing?
Guest:Well, he dropped out of high school to help his family.
Guest:You know, when he moved to California, he just had a bunch of crappy jobs.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Worked at Sears for a while, drove a truck for a while, you know.
Guest:And when, but he always had, he took like a correspondence course of, you know, how to draw, you know, and even though he had a natural ability.
Guest:And when I was in high school, I think it was a sophomore in high school, my mom was a bank teller.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He said, I want to try to make a living as an artist.
Guest:And
Guest:they were lean times you know i mean uh it's hard to make a living uh doing the creative things you know and especially if you're not established right so yeah he would do these uh he had no plan he was just sort of like i want to do it yeah and i mean it was the happiest i've ever seen him uh you know and thank god i mean i i had the most amazing parents in the world they were very positive thinking very supportive did he end up making a living as an artist
Guest:Well, I mean, I think one year I remember them doing their tax returns and being really excited because their combined income was $6,000.
Guest:And that was my mom's bank teller salary, and my dad sold maybe five paintings that year.
Marc:So your mom was a bank teller?
Guest:Yeah, and then eventually assistant to the manager of the bank.
Marc:So she was, she had the stable job.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And what's your dad painting?
Marc:Like what, what's the style?
Guest:He was a realist, you know, and he would do portraits of people and things, but mostly, you know, the things he sold the most were people who wanted a portrait of their dog.
Guest:You know, it was like, that's like, that's still a thing.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I know a guy, you know, Tony millionaire.
Marc:He's a cartoonist, you know, and he's done several books, but he'll hire himself out to paint your dog or your house or come over and draw your shit.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's still a real thing.
Guest:Well, it was hard.
Guest:You know, my dad would do these parking lot art shows, you know, and it's mostly people with macrame, you know.
Guest:Did you go to those?
Guest:I did.
Guest:Well, he would.
Guest:There was one that used to be on Netflix.
Guest:La Cienega and Melrose parking lot in the corner and Covina you know it was it's you know 30 or 40 miles east of Hollywood yeah I didn't have a car right you know and I would go with him and then get out and walk to like Hollywood Boulevard from there walk around you know yeah and there was a place called Projects Unlimited that did a the special effects for the Outer Limits TV show and I knew where they were so I would go and dig through their trash and stuff you know and
Guest:did you find anything i did yeah a couple times i found you know i found one little block flat mold that had cool texture really do you still have it that's the question i don't you know i had my studio was in glendale uh-huh and it was your own place yeah yeah i'm retired now but it was uh 60 000 square foot buildings huge building and about 30 000 of it was storage and i had molds from when i was a kid that i saved for like 50 years and
Guest:when i finally moved out about four or five years ago i mean i was like what do i do with all this stuff yeah and you know some of it's like movie history you know and right and what do you got you know all of it yeah but i i just thought you know i can't i can't store all this stuff you know this stuff and you know it's like some like i said some of it for 50 years yeah and eventually we filled up a 15 big roll-off dumpsters with molds uh
Guest:And I saved a lot still.
Marc:Really?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Like these are faces?
Guest:Yeah, faces.
Guest:But, you know, we, you know, the process is, you know, take a cast of the person's face, you sculpt with clay.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, you're making a mold of that.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So like, for example, the Grinch, you know, Jim Carrey, Jim Carrey's makeup, I saved that mold, you know.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But some stuff I just threw out and it was like,
Guest:Why did I say this for 50 years and then throw it out?
Marc:Because you made it.
Marc:Yeah, well, that's it.
Marc:And it's like it means something.
Marc:I mean, it's weird.
Marc:What I was going to try to find, some guy who used to be, I don't know in what capacity he was a makeup artist, but he's got a bunch of molds.
Marc:I don't know if the studio was going to throw them out or what, but he sent me...
Marc:David Bowie's face.
Marc:I think it must have been a mold from Man Who Fell to Earth, maybe, or The Hunger.
Marc:I don't know, but he painted it as Ziggy.
Marc:So I have it downstairs, and it's very eerie.
Marc:I mean, now that he's passed, I've got almost like this death mask.
Marc:But he seems to have a business of it.
Marc:I don't know where he got them all, but it sounds like they throw that stuff away eventually.
Guest:They do, or, you know, there's a lot of, I mean, a lot of them you can get online.
Guest:I don't have a David Bowie.
Guest:I have a bunch of life masks with people that I've taken.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And I've traded with people and stuff.
Marc:Oh, really?
Marc:So it's kind of a fun world of life masks?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:You know, but it's cool.
Guest:I mean, you know, because, I mean, faces were my business, you know.
Guest:Sure, man.
Guest:And, you know, you see different things on different life masks.
Marc:And you have them, yeah.
Marc:He sent me a Robin Williams one, too.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Which is kind of like...
Marc:Heavy, man.
Marc:Yeah, he just sends you dead people.
Guest:Yeah, that's all.
Marc:Just dead people.
Marc:Everyone's going to be dead soon.
Guest:Eventually, yeah.
Guest:Well, I had my first mask taken when I was 13.
Guest:Of you?
Guest:Yeah, my dad helped me.
Marc:Because you were experimenting?
Guest:Well, I wanted to make a mask.
Guest:I mean, my very first masks I made, there was a model kit called a visible head.
Guest:It was like a clear plastic head that had...
Marc:I remember you could see the eyes and the brains and everything.
Guest:Yeah, and I had that from my doctor days, wanting to be a doctor.
Marc:Yeah, sure.
Guest:And I sculpted my first masks on that, but they didn't quite fit.
Marc:Oh, and you used that as the base?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then, so, you know, I needed a life mask, and actually I had, I think it was my seventh grade science fair project.
Guest:I had to do a science fair thing, and I was like, uh-huh.
Guest:all right, making a mask is kind of like science.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Definitely science.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So I did a, you know, how to make a mask, science fair project.
Guest:And I thought, okay, this is the time to do the life mask.
Guest:There's actually pictures in the book of, we cut a hole in cardboard and put it, so it only went this far in my face.
Guest:And, you know, my dad put plaster on my face and straws in my nose.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Which is amazing.
Guest:Every actor who you ever see on TV, when they talk about having a life cast, they say they had plaster on my face and straws in my nose.
Guest:That's it.
Guest:But we don't do that.
Guest:Not anymore?
Guest:No.
Guest:I mean, I did that when I was 13.
Guest:And I realized how you don't want to do this to somebody.
Guest:Pulled out my eyelashes, my eyebrows.
Guest:We put Vaseline on my face.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:It didn't work?
Guest:It still pulled out a lot of stuff.
Guest:And the straws in the nose just get in the way.
Guest:I mean, we work around the nostrils.
Guest:It's a lot easier that way.
Marc:Oh, so in big show business, no straws in the nose?
Marc:No.
Guest:No, but I swear, and maybe you know this because you act and stuff, but I swear there's a book that they give to actors.
Guest:They say when you go on Jimmy Fallon or whatever, you say that they put straws in my nose and plaster on my face.
Guest:I don't know anybody that does that, but every actor says that.
Marc:Maybe that's what they sense.
Marc:Do you not stick anything in the nose?
Guest:No.
Marc:Just work around the nostrils.
Marc:That's it?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Even John Hurt...
Marc:An elephant man?
Marc:I'm sure they didn't put straws in his nose.
Marc:Well, I don't want to just jump into asking trivia questions.
Marc:So what's the arc of it?
Marc:Because you've done the makeup in these major movies that have defined all of our lives, right?
Marc:I mean, literally, your creations have haunted, enlightened.
Marc:It's a very odd thing.
Marc:Because I'm not even a horror or sci-fi guy, but I've seen a lot of the movies that you've done.
Marc:Mm-hmm.
Marc:And it's just sort of mind-blowing because there's a couple of things that you've done that I think disturbed me for long periods of my life.
Marc:Good.
Marc:So what is the arc of how do you begin to study?
Marc:You committed when you were 10, but you went to regular life after that, right?
Marc:You went to elementary school and high school and then that was it?
Marc:Did you get into film after that?
Guest:You know, I...
Marc:Do you have siblings?
Guest:No, I'm an only child.
Guest:My mother had a bad heart and they said to her that she really shouldn't have children.
Guest:And I mean, that's why I always felt loved and wanted because they said to her, you know, you could die or something bad can happen to the kid.
Guest:And I didn't realize until I got older and started to talk to people how...
Guest:Not everybody has great parents, you know.
Guest:That's true.
Guest:And I had very loving and very supportive, positive thinking parents.
Guest:And, you know, when I said I didn't want to be a doctor anymore, I wanted to make monsters, you know, instead of sending me to my room without my dinner, you know, they said you can do anything that you set your mind to.
Marc:Well, if you got one kid, you don't want them hating you for the rest of the time.
Marc:Yeah, I suppose so.
Marc:You know, make that kid as happy as possible.
Marc:Everybody's happy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And, you know, the good thing was, again, because the creativity was discouraged in my father's lifetime, he encouraged it in mine.
Guest:So I benefited from that.
Marc:Well, what do you think about that, about only childness?
Marc:Because, like, I know Robin Williams was also an only child, and he sort of was kind of fond of, you know, action figures, soldiers, like, you know, creating worlds.
Marc:Do you think that some of that was based on a kind of loneliness?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, I also was painfully shy as a kid.
Guest:I mean, I could not speak to an adult.
Guest:You know, I basically stayed in my bedroom and made stuff.
Guest:My bedroom was my workshop.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And that again was something that fascinated me about makeup.
Guest:The first time I just even smeared grease paint on my face.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, I put white grease paint on my face and black around my eyes.
Guest:And then when the face in the mirror wasn't me anymore and it was freeing, I could do things that I couldn't do as little Ricky Baker.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it showed me the power of makeup as well.
Guest:It's a really strange thing to look out of your eyes and just see a different face looking back at you.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I imagine some people experience that every day for the wrong reasons.
Marc:Who am I?
Marc:What am I doing?
Marc:I notice it as I get older.
Marc:It's weird that when there's a consistency to looking at yourself, which you do every day, you don't really see it until one day you're like, when did that happen?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Oh, and I know it's looking in the mirror and there's this old man looking back at me and I go, where'd he come from?
Marc:You know, is this a makeup?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:So how, what is the, how do you get started in show business?
Guest:Well, it's hard.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Uh, I, again, in Covina isn't, it isn't like living here in the Valley, you know, there's no film people out there, you know, and, um,
Marc:But it sounds like by the time you went to high school, right?
Marc:I did.
Marc:And did you do theater in high school?
Guest:I did a drama class and I did makeups for plays and stuff like that.
Marc:You did?
Marc:Did you do anything spectacular?
Guest:Not so spectacular.
Guest:I mean, there wasn't the time or the money or anything.
Guest:I mean, I think the biggest thing I did, we did Camelot.
Guest:And I did, you know...
Guest:Made some beards and, you know, did a Merlin and, you know, things like that, you know.
Guest:But yeah, and we did an Arsenic and Olay, so I got to do kind of a Frankenstein-like.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But you knew all these classic monsters.
Marc:You knew, like, Karloff's Frankenstein and Chaney's Wolfman, right?
Marc:Right.
Marc:Oh, yeah, and I love that stuff.
Marc:And the classic Cheney Sr.
Marc:one with the sharp teeth and the top hat.
Guest:London After Midnight.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Yeah, one of my favorite makeups.
Guest:Cheney's original, I mean, The Phantom of the Opera.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:London After Midnight.
Guest:I mean, all of Cheney's stuff is brilliant.
Marc:Wasn't there, there was some, it was in a book how he went about doing his stuff, right?
Guest:Yeah, there's Cecil Holland, who was an old makeup artist around, and I think Cecil actually helped Cheney.
Guest:Cheney did his own makeups, but I believe, you know, when you, that type of makeup especially...
Guest:You know, with putty and stuff.
Guest:Doesn't last and needs constant touch-up.
Guest:And as an actor, you know, acting, he was concentrating on his performance.
Guest:So I'm sure, you know, he probably put it on, he probably had Cecil maintain it.
Marc:Well, I think that was the interesting thing about Channing.
Marc:My recollection as a kid was that he did his own makeup.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:Right?
Marc:That he, you know, and there was, I remember there was some sort of photographic essay of him transforming himself.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:and there's pictures in with makeup kid yeah yeah right right no and he was great he was great at making great faces you know and i there's a movie called man of a thousand faces i don't know if you've ever heard of it yeah it's the story of him uh james oh yeah james cagney played him right but i mean not that he was a bad actor yeah physically just was so wrong wrong for that and the makeups were done again with the new modern techniques of rubber and stuff and they don't compare to what cheney did out of the kid
Marc:Right.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So you're in high school and you're just doing basic stuff, but in the back of your head, you know about this other stuff.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, I mean, I met when I turned 13, my parents, because I was going to be a teenager, they said, you know, is there something, we'd like to do something special for your birthday.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I said, can you, this is when Universal first opened up the tour.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:oh wow and i said can we go on the universal tour and in my head i was gonna hop off the tram and run to the makeup department get a job you know and a plan yeah and also i knew that there's a there was a mask making company called don post studios that was in burbank it was near universal who made these universal classic monster masks that sold for 35 which was you know astronomical you know never bought one but i
Guest:You could buy them?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:They sold them at Disneyland and different places.
Guest:Were it like apes and stuff?
Guest:No, it was Frankenstein, Dracula.
Guest:Oh, the classics.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But I knew that they were near Universal.
Guest:So when we got near Universal, I asked my dad if we could stop at a phone booth and look up Dom Post Studios.
Guest:And again, I had him call because I was shy.
Guest:And he said, you know, my son, Ricky makes masks and we're in the neighborhood.
Guest:Is there any way we can come by?
Guest:And they said, yeah, come on by.
Guest:And they gave us a tour, which was great.
Guest:And on the wall, there was a picture of this guy, Bob Burns, who I read about in my monster magazines.
Guest:And he had done some makeup stuff.
Guest:He had a gorilla suit and a mummy and was a film editor and it had his phone number.
Guest:So I wrote it down.
Guest:And again, being too shy to call him, eventually I got, you know, I asked my dad if he would call Bob, who lives in Burbank, and they invited us over.
Guest:And he became a friend and like a mentor.
Guest:And he introduced me to a makeup artist that he worked at CBS, the local CBS station, who did the newscasters and stuff.
Guest:Didn't do the kind of stuff I wanted to do, you know, but he was really impressed by what I had done.
Guest:And he said, I want to take you to the union, the makeup union.
Guest:How old were you?
Guest:I was 15 then.
Guest:Went to the makeup union, the business rep.
Guest:At that time, it was all nepotism.
Guest:You had to be born into the business.
Guest:And I went there with a box full of stuff, photos, heads, all kinds of stuff.
Guest:I thought I was going to get a job.
Guest:And he told me to give up that I was never going to get in.
Guest:And he said, you basically have to be born into the business.
Guest:You don't know anybody in the business.
Guest:You don't have any friends in the business.
Guest:You're never going to.
Marc:Was he nasty?
Guest:He was nasty, but I also think he was being realistic because that's the way it was at the time.
Guest:And he said, to get in, you have to serve an apprenticeship.
Guest:You have to be 21 years old.
Guest:I was 15.
Marc:That's good information.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he said, and the apprenticeships, there's only a few of them, and they're going to go to a Westmore or the brother of a Westmore's uncle.
Marc:Westmore's a big name.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, there's a lot.
Guest:At one time, all the Westmores, every studio had a Westmore.
Guest:It was a department head.
Marc:No kidding.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So, I mean, that was a little bit discouraging.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:When you were a shy kid, it must have hurt your feelings.
Marc:You got to walk out with your box of stuff.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:With my tail between my legs.
Guest:But it was kind of like, you know, fuck you.
Marc:I'm going to show you.
Guest:And it gave me that much more motivation.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:But the union fought me my career, my whole career.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah, because I did...
Marc:I mean, you won seven Oscars.
Guest:I know.
Guest:And I got hate mail from the union and I got Oscars because they were saying, you're not a real makeup artist, you know, and it's like, what are you talking about?
Guest:And they go, you know, real makeup artist.
Guest:Well, let me cut to there was an open period.
Guest:The producers association who said there's no new blood in the industry.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:All this nepotism thing isn't working very well.
Guest:It was like a lot of people that weren't very good at their jobs.
Marc:Must be stifling innovation.
Guest:It was, yeah.
Guest:And they said, we want to have this open period so that if you have 30 days on a non-union film, we'll accept you as a union member.
Guest:At that time, I was working on King Kong, the Dina de Laurentiis King Kong.
Marc:You've done two Kongs.
Marc:That's crazy.
Guest:I know.
Guest:I was King Kong and I killed King Kong.
Guest:And yeah, I actually cut the two together at one time.
Guest:You did for fun?
Guest:Well, I actually did.
Guest:I always planned on cutting it together.
Guest:But...
Guest:And miraculously, they both were on two different TV channels and they lined up almost perfectly.
Guest:So I would.
Guest:Jackson's Kong and, you know, yeah.
Guest:So I would flip between me getting shot and then me shooting Kong.
Guest:But anyways, I had this.
Guest:I thought, OK, I'm at I call it the union.
Guest:I said I'm at MGM.
Guest:I'm working in the old makeup lab, which was built when they, you know, when they were doing Wizard of Oz.
Guest:Yeah, things.
Guest:and I want these days to count.
Guest:And the business rep came out and he goes, well, what you're doing isn't makeup.
Guest:And I go, what do you mean it isn't makeup?
Guest:And he goes, it's not makeup.
Guest:I go, this lab has been here since the 30s.
Guest:What were you doing, building a monkey?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Which traditionally had been done by makeup artists.
Guest:Charlie Gamora was a great ape actor guy who was a makeup artist who built the best gorilla suits ever.
Marc:How did they define it?
Guest:Well, that's what I said.
Guest:I said, what is makeup then if this isn't it?
Guest:He says, buying a product and putting it on someone's face.
Guest:And I went, okay, I have black makeup and I paint around my eyes black.
Guest:So these days should count.
Guest:And he says, no, in that case, you're an actor doing his own makeup.
Guest:So he wouldn't count my days.
Guest:So you were actually playing the ape?
Guest:I played the ape.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And built it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But you played the big ape?
Guest:Yeah, I mean, it was all blue screen.
Guest:You know, I mean, the whole publicity was about this 40-foot robot, which is in less than six seconds of the movie.
Marc:And you're Kong and the rest of it?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Sweating my brains out, you know, this was, you know, all blue screen photochemical, blue screen compositing days where you needed so much light.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it was during the summer.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:The whole crew's in, like, shorts and T-shirts or nose shirts, and I have a suit made out of bear hide with, you know, six inches of foam rubber on.
Guest:oh my god and that was your construction yeah i had to do it uh it was a combined uh dino wanted this guy italian guy carlo rimbaldi to to work on it as well uh-huh car it was carlos artist not what he did like effects and it was carlos idea to build a big robot and they he said this robot can do the whole movie and they did you know like the robot
Guest:Well, it was good publicity.
Guest:You know, it sounds much better than some joker wearing a monkey suit, you know.
Marc:Classic.
Marc:Classic monkey suit.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And they were, you know, they were keeping me under wraps.
Guest:And one day, you know, I would put the suit on in the morning.
Guest:I had hard scleral lenses I put in my eyes, you know.
Guest:The black ones?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, they just were full eye, hard plastic lenses.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:that I put in in the morning, take off at lunch, put them back in.
Guest:Anyways, I'm sitting on the set, totally dressed like an ape, and John Gillerman, the director of the film, came up to me and goes, Time Magazine's going to be doing an article on the movie.
Guest:We don't want them to know that you're playing King Kong.
Guest:So if that...
Guest:reporter asks you, don't tell him.
Guest:It's like, John, I got a fucking gorilla suit on.
Guest:I mean, what am I going to tell him?
Guest:And what they did, they stupidly did, was they showed him like 20 minutes of footage, all of it me.
Guest:And then he'd go, now we're going to take you and show you the big robot, which wasn't finished at the time.
Guest:So it's in the mill at MGM, and it's in pieces and being constructed.
Guest:And they go, here it is.
Guest:And he goes, well, I want to see the finished robot.
Guest:And they went...
Guest:He goes, I'm going to see the robot that did all the stuff that I just saw.
Guest:And they went, um.
Guest:That guy.
Guest:How stupid were they?
Guest:So that's where it came out that I played King Kong.
Guest:Otherwise, I probably never would.
Guest:Nobody would know.
Marc:That's crazy.
Marc:So when Jessica Lange's in the hand, that's the robot.
Guest:The mechanical hands were great.
Guest:And that was actually built by Glenn Robinson, who was an old effects guy.
Marc:So it's different than the robot.
Marc:That's just the hand.
Guest:Yeah, the hands.
Guest:And a guy named Eddie Serkin was the main guy involved with that.
Guest:And those worked beautifully.
Guest:I was involved with that.
Guest:It was based on the sculpture of my hand, the suit hand.
Guest:And I directed the people that were sculpting the big hands.
Guest:But, I mean, the only time I was ever even on the stage with Jessica, I think, was there's a scene where she's in the hands and it kind of takes her clothes off.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And there's a shot over my shoulder.
Guest:So they had me up on a big rostrum.
Guest:And they had a split diopter lens that could focus on close and far.
Guest:Oh, wow.
Guest:And so she was way down there.
Marc:In the hand?
Guest:In the big hands.
Guest:And so I was just, you know, being the back of my head.
Guest:But the rest of the time, I'm looking at a hand that isn't there that's supposed to have Jessica in it.
Guest:And she's looking at an ape that isn't there.
Marc:Oh, that's so funny.
Marc:I was talking to my buddy about it.
Marc:It's when people watch this stuff, even you as a kid, I mean, you know it's an illusion and you know it's not real.
Marc:And it's not even about, it's the effectiveness of the illusion that is what it's all about.
Marc:It's not about realism in a way, right?
Guest:Yeah, I mean, I love Ray Harryhausen films, the stop motion animation stuff.
Guest:And I knew that it wasn't real.
Guest:And also, I mean, fortunately, again, my dad was smart enough to know he knew what stop motion was.
Guest:You know, I had a friend who, you know, asked his mother how they did the E-mer from 20 million miles to Earth.
Guest:And she goes, oh, it's a they shaved a squirrel, you know, and it was like, you know, it's not, you know, it's an armatured puppet that you should frame at a time.
Guest:You know, my dad knew about that.
Guest:And I did stop motion as a kid, you know.
Marc:Yeah, sure.
Marc:Now, let's not leave that story hanging.
Marc:Now, did you argue yourself to get the time to count for Kong for the Union?
Marc:I did, but he wouldn't let it count.
Guest:He wouldn't?
Guest:No, he said it doesn't, and it was an open period, and it was the exact time I was on King Kong.
Guest:What the fuck?
Guest:Yeah, so what it was is...
Guest:They didn't like the rubber stuff, you know, because they didn't do it.
Guest:And there were very few people.
Guest:And the people who did do it, they called lab men.
Guest:They didn't call them makeup artists.
Guest:They were lab men.
Guest:They were dirty.
Guest:You know, they worked with plaster and clay.
Marc:So there was a snobbery to it.
Marc:There was.
Guest:It's a completely different world now.
Guest:I mean, they totally accept me as a makeup artist.
Guest:Makeup effects.
Marc:Good.
Marc:Well, congratulations.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And now I've retired, you know.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Only like, what, 50 years in the game?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:More?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:They accept it?
Marc:Yeah, eventually.
Marc:Seven Oscars?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Innovation?
Marc:That's crazy, the stubbornness of institutions.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, you know, I mean, they actually were changed.
Guest:They were going to change.
Guest:I did get in the union, and I got in on a lie.
Guest:What happened on King Kong?
Guest:I got a script for a movie called The Ghoul from Outer Space.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And, you know, this King Kong was my first like major picture.
Guest:And at that time it was the most expensive picture made.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I was doing non-union low budget films before that.
Guest:Right.
Guest:That's all I could do.
Guest:And I kind of thought I kind of, it's going to be a step backwards to do a movie called The Ghoul from Outer Space.
Guest:So I thought, well, I'll turn in a high bid and they probably will say no.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And I think I said it costs $10,000 to do all these things, you know.
Guest:And they said, okay.
Guest:And I went, okay, I need one other thing.
Guest:I said, I need you to post date checks so that I have 30 days as a makeup artist.
Marc:Oh, to make the window.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And they did.
Guest:So I got in on a lie.
Marc:Oh, that's great.
Guest:And a bunch of people, really good people got in during that period.
Guest:And the union called us all 30 day wonders.
Marc:And did it change the face of the industry?
Guest:It definitely changed the face of the industry.
Guest:People got in because they really wanted to be makeup artists.
Marc:And taken in a new direction.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And like I said, people are going, you know, you're the worst thing to ever have.
Guest:You know, the business reps, the worst thing to ever have in the art of makeup.
Guest:And I went, why?
Guest:I mean, I, I idolize makeup artists.
Guest:All I ever wanted to be was a makeup artist.
Guest:I want to be the best I can possibly be.
Guest:I eat, sleep and drink and live this stuff.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:What's wrong with that?
Marc:They had a problem with the... So their basic problem was prosthetics and things that were outside of the realm of something almost archaic, it seems, with makeup.
Guest:Yeah, and I think part of it was, too, I mean...
Guest:I, I had some ability and it was young and I think it was a threat thing too, you know, it's, it's, it's interesting that things get so that it's not about the creativity anymore.
Marc:It's about status quo.
Guest:Well, you know, the union's main job during that time, especially was to protect the incompetent, you know, I mean, you would, there would be guys that, you know, you couldn't, you would have to hire everybody that was in union had to be hired before you could hire somebody that was out of it.
Guest:And there were people that just weren't very good.
Guest:They were always on the bottom of the list and it,
Marc:Yeah, I guess that's still it's an interesting issue, you know, around in terms of hiring and stuff that this business in particular seems to carry a lot of people, a lot of dead weight that just keep moving around because of nepotism or or friend, you know, or relationships.
Marc:And they and they keep out a lot of people that would bring fresh eyes to and fresh.
Guest:Yeah, it's it's unfortunate.
Guest:It's a lot better than it used to be.
Marc:And I mean, mind you, anyone can do it at home in a way.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And also, though, I mean, it's a necessary evil.
Guest:I mean, you know, the producers would, I mean, as it is.
Guest:I was thinking about this the other day.
Guest:You know, I thought, God, I can't, the hours that I work, you know, a normal film day is a 12-hour day.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But when you add on top of it, a three-and-a-half-hour makeup in the morning.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And an hour removal time.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And setup time.
Guest:you know i my normal day was an 18 hour day sure i did like 50 years of that yeah right i'm surprised i'm still alive yeah you seem really well so okay so that was kong but how do you get started what's the first movies who how do you learn okay my first film was a movie called the octoman yeah i was a full-time student at a community college to basically to stay out of vietnam uh
Guest:In Covina?
Guest:It was in Walnut, out in that area.
Guest:My hobby was an expensive hobby, to make masks and stuff.
Guest:I found a place where I could buy a cord of rubber.
Guest:It was like $8.98 or something.
Guest:And I was getting like a quarter-a-week allowance when my parents could afford it.
Guest:I would mow lawns, but I have major allergies, so that was hard.
Guest:I thought, I need a job because I want more materials.
Guest:And I walked.
Guest:I didn't have a car, so I walked to every fast food place, every market.
Guest:to try to find a job.
Guest:Nobody wanted me.
Guest:For some reason in Covina, almost in Glendora, Cloakie Studios, which was a place that made Gumby and Davy and Goliath, was located out there.
Guest:My dad, when he was a truck driver delivering plumbing supplies, accidentally, it was next door to where he was supposed to deliver it, walked in by accident.
Guest:And he says, well, you know, I remember this place in Covina that did stop motion, you know, maybe you could get a job there.
Guest:for gumby yeah so i i walked there with the box full of stuff again like when i went to the union yeah uh and said i can sculpt they can make walls i do stop motion you know i paint um i'm looking for a job and they said start tomorrow and this was summer between my junior and senior year of high school really so i would walk to three three and a half miles to work every day and walk back what were you doing over there
Guest:Well, I did, mostly they called me an artist.
Guest:You know, I sculpted some of the puppets, made the molds, cast the rubber.
Marc:And you were in high school?
Guest:I was in high school, yeah.
Marc:But those are seminal.
Marc:Those are like, everyone knows those.
Guest:Yeah, no, it was really cool.
Guest:Oh, no, no, Davey.
Guest:Yeah, that's right.
Guest:God is everywhere, Davey.
Guest:I heard that voice forward and backwards every day.
Guest:Did you know the guy?
Guest:It was Hal John Smith did the voice, who was Otis the Drunk in Andy Griffith's show.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And the guy who did Pokey was actually the production manager at Cloakies.
Guest:But, uh, one of the animators was a guy named sneaky Pete Kleino.
Guest:Pete Kleino was his name, but he was a pedal steel guitar player, session pedal steel guitar player, played with everybody.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Amazing.
Guest:And he was like 30 years old and I was like 17 and I thought, you know,
Guest:this guy's cool and he's 30 years old it's nice that you could be cool when you're 30 yeah but we used to get in major like clay fights uh which was crazy you know we'd wad up gumbies and throw them at each other you know on the stage where everybody's doing stop motion you know and it's a frame at a time and it takes forever yeah we would hit a
Guest:a set, you know, days work would be good.
Guest:But Cloakies was like a magnet for anybody that was interested.
Guest:It was one of the few places that did stop motion.
Guest:So people started coming in and there was another guy a few years older than me, Doug Beswick, who worked there, who like read Famous Monsters.
Guest:He was a Ray Harryhausen fan.
Guest:We became fast friends.
Guest:He knew other people that did this stuff.
Guest:So all of a sudden there was this group that I would hang out with
Guest:that were these guys that did stop motion and special effects and go, you know, maybe someday we can work on a real movie.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And so many of us have Oscars now.
Guest:Really?
Guest:The same group of people.
Guest:And you're still in touch with them?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And Dennis Murin, who was one of them, has more Oscars than I do.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:But it was through this connection that actually got handed down my first job, this Octoman job.
Guest:Originally, it was going to be stop motion.
Guest:A guy named Jim Danforth was going to do it.
Guest:They decided it was too expensive.
Guest:He suggested they build a suit, and they hired a couple of other people that were going to do a suit.
Guest:Another film came along at the time called Flesh Gordon, which was a porno movie.
Marc:Yes, I remember that.
Marc:I remember when I was a kid, the posters for it.
Marc:It was like soft porn, though, right?
Guest:Yeah, well, it started out as hardcore porn, but when these guys... Because there weren't many jobs to make...
Guest:rocket ships and effects so i guess that's like that's the makeup artist is their trick their their their angle also was trying to draw a line between special effects and makeup well that's the thing what i do is is a gray area right you know and to me i found it as the evolution of makeup yeah that's right that makes sense you know it started out with nose putty and grease paint you know and then they went to rubber stuff and people objected the rubber stuff you know
Guest:And I, you know, when one of the things like when I did American Werewolf with the transformation, we made these prop heads that actually physically changed.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And they really objected to that.
Guest:They go, it's not on our person.
Guest:It's not makeup.
Guest:And I go, but it's I couldn't do it on person.
Guest:I carried it through, started out with makeup and ended up with this.
Guest:I see it as the evolution of makeup.
Right.
Guest:I don't like the limitations.
Guest:I mean, I started doing puppets and animatronic stuff because a makeup on a person's face, you can only build up so much.
Guest:The eyes are where they are.
Guest:You know, the noses, if you have a big nose like mine, you can't make it smaller.
Guest:You can make it bigger.
Guest:If I make a puppet head,
Guest:I can put the eyes wherever I want.
Marc:You know, I like that.
Marc:And more than two sometimes.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, so, I mean, I didn't like the limitations.
Guest:I don't like, you know.
Guest:Of the human head.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Let's make a head.
Guest:We can do whatever we want.
Guest:So, you know, I just considered it, you know, and I like making stuff, you know.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So Octoman was, did it turn out to be a stop action or not?
Guest:No, it was a suit.
Guest:And these guys were going to do it, but they went on to Flesh Gordon because it was more up their line.
Guest:So they handed it over to me.
Guest:First thing, it was designed by somebody else, a fantasy artist designed this octopus man thing.
Guest:They gave me a drawing.
Guest:They wanted me to do a maquette, which was like a little model.
Guest:So I did a maquette.
Guest:And then they said, do you want the job?
Guest:And again, I was a full-time student.
Guest:It was like the end of my second year.
Guest:uh at the community college yeah yeah and i said yeah i'll do it you know and i had like you know six weeks i think and a thousand dollars yeah and uh my friend doug beswick who i met uh at cloakies had a little workshop this is more than i could do in my bedroom you know so we actually figured out a way to make this suit for a thousand dollars it looked
Guest:it's the best thing in the movie.
Guest:I mean, the movie was shot in 10 days at Bronson Caves.
Guest:Everything was there.
Guest:We lost a day shooting because of a stupid accident that, and the director was actually tearing pages out of the script.
Guest:We don't need this.
Guest:We don't need that.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:And, you know, it was my real introduction to the film industry.
Guest:And,
Guest:in the first days filming uh you know they said it's going to be bronson caves you know we i went there with doug beswick we have our octopus man suit in his car this 57 chevy and it's like nobody there and we're like looking around looking around and go what the hell did we get something wrong so we had to go back down the hill to a pay phone this is before yeah cell phones called a production office and they go oh yeah we pushed for a day and it's like
Guest:You didn't tell us.
Guest:Well, we forgot.
Guest:It's like, the movie's called The Octoman.
Guest:You know, I mean, through my whole life, I go, you know, the movie's called Gremlins.
Guest:You know, the movie's called, you know, you're doing this thing and that seems to be the least important thing in anybody's mind, you know.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:We got the guy.
Marc:The thing.
Marc:The thing.
Marc:So you got a good foundation then of the insanity.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I saw that it wasn't what I thought it was going to be, but still.
Marc:In what way?
Marc:The troubleshooting or just the consistency or what?
Marc:The glamour?
Marc:All those things.
Guest:And I thought you're doing a movie called The Octoman.
Guest:I'm the guy that makes The Octoman.
Guest:It's important.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:At that time, I was a long-haired kid.
Guest:My friend, Doug Beswick, was a long-haired kid.
Guest:The guy who was the DP called us the girls.
Guest:And it was just like, oh, come on, man.
Guest:I just want to do this stuff and make it cool.
Marc:Yeah, right.
Marc:We're here for the... We're going to make it cool and fun.
Guest:But the good thing that happened is my second movie, which was a film called Schlock, was John Landis' first film.
Guest:I was 20.
Guest:He was 21.
Guest:I got the job because first John worked as a mailboy at Fox.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he knew John Chambers, who did Planet of the Apes.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He saw a film called Trog, which was a Joan Crawford film about a missing link that's really kind of a...
Guest:sad thing to watch right end of her career in this crappy monster movie and he was just so inspired by how bad trogg was that he wanted to make a movie like that so he did the schlock throppus which was this ape man he went to john chambers chambers said you know it'd be a hundred thousand dollars and go and all the movies only cost fifteen thousand dollars you know then he went to don post studios where i would go to buy rubber and supplies because there weren't suppliers around you know it was hard to find this stuff
Guest:And it was the only time in my life I had a business card.
Guest:Rick Baker, Monster Maker, and I gave it to him.
Guest:They wanted nothing to do with John, and they gave him a prize.
Guest:They go, there's a kid who comes in here.
Guest:Anyway, so they gave him my card, and John came out.
Guest:Again, I'm still pretty shy at this point.
Guest:He lived in Westwood.
Guest:He drove to Covina with his business partner, his producer, John O'Rourke.
Guest:But it's like, you know, where the fuck am I?
Guest:Am I still in California?
Guest:You know, it was like, you know, I've never driven this far before.
Guest:And, but he was like, he came into my bedroom, which was my sacred space with all, you know, I had masks and things everywhere.
Guest:And he's like touching and he's like, you know, he's, John's very hyper and loud.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He was flipping out, and I was kind of flipping out in the other way because I was scared, you know?
Guest:But, you know, it turned out to be, you know, one of the best things that ever happened to me because he did schlock.
Guest:He had already written American Werewolf.
Guest:He told me the whole story.
Guest:He goes, I want to do a transformation.
Guest:To me, it doesn't make sense that you would sit in a chair like Lon Chaney Jr.
Guest:and be perfectly still until you change.
Guest:I want to show the pain.
Guest:I want to, you know...
Guest:I want to do it in... The movie takes... It's real.
Guest:It takes place in an apartment.
Guest:It's not going to have a horror film life.
Guest:And he goes, I want him to be able to move.
Guest:How would you do that?
Guest:And I go, I don't know, but I sure would like to try.
Guest:He goes, what's going to be my next movie?
Guest:Cut to 10 years later, he finally got the money to make it.
Marc:Well, that's sort of the interesting thing about...
Marc:When I was going through this stuff is that there's a lot of problem solving, you know, that, you know, you have a director that has a vision like that specifically.
Marc:It seems like that request of you or whether or not you could do the transformation and show the agony of it was in a completely new interpretation of a fairly classic trope, you know, which is the Wolfman in horror movies.
Marc:It may have been seen in a million times.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Mm hmm.
Marc:So you got and it seems like in this genre in horror and fantasy and science fiction, you do have like, you know, 10 to 15 archetypes that sort of evolve that, you know, the new challenge is how do we make this alien different than the last alien?
Marc:How do we make this ape different than the last ape?
Marc:How is this wolfman going to be different?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And so that challenge, you know, that's not just makeup.
Marc:I mean, there's a sort of engineering.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:No, I mean, I, you know, it's so many times I have to invent things that have been done before in a film on in a schedule and budget.
Guest:You know, I mean, the weird thing was, I mean, prior to American Werewolf, I would have to beg people to let me do something.
Guest:Can I put a mustache on this guy?
Guest:How about a scar?
Marc:You know, it's like you worked with.
Marc:What's his name?
Marc:Dick Smith.
Guest:Yes, Dick was the greatest makeup artist ever, I think, and he helped me out a lot.
Guest:He lived in New York, and I managed to meet him when I was 18.
Marc:How'd you do that?
Guest:I had a school project where I was supposed to look up somebody in Who's Who in America when I was in eighth grade or something, and I looked up Dick Smith, and I looked up Boris Karloff and all these people, and they had his address, and I wrote it down on a piece of paper.
Guest:Again, I mean, this to me would be like writing a letter to God.
Guest:You know, I mean, I was afraid.
Marc:You knew about him.
Guest:Oh, I knew about him.
Marc:Which work of his was the most powerful to you?
Guest:Everything they did just looked so much more real than anybody else.
Marc:Well, I remember his makeup on Little Big Man, that opening up with Jack Crabb, the opening of Dustin Hoffman and that makeup with that cigarette.
Marc:That was mind-blowing at the time.
Marc:And I was a kid.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Well, I got to watch him put that makeup on because this is right when I wrote him.
Guest:Anyways, I had this piece of paper.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's a dress.
Guest:When I graduated from high school, my parents were going to go back to Binghamton, New York, so I could meet my grandmother, who was like 90 and dying.
Guest:And I was like, oh, shit.
Guest:Shit, I don't want to go to New York.
Guest:I want to make masks.
Guest:Now I'm out of school.
Guest:It's the summer.
Guest:And I went, oh, wait, New York.
Guest:I got out that magic piece of paper with it.
Guest:And I go, okay, it's now or never.
Guest:So I wrote Dick a letter.
Guest:It's in the book, actually.
Guest:My mom typed it for me.
Guest:Hoping to get a response.
Guest:And I sent him pictures of things that I'd made.
Guest:A lot of things were copies of his makeup that he did.
Guest:And I got this amazing response that he just says, I've never seen anything like this from anybody, let alone an 18-year-old kid.
Guest:I can't wait to meet you.
Guest:And I thought, it was right at the beginning of this two-week trip to New York.
Guest:And I thought it was going to be, hello, Mr. Smith.
Guest:And I spent a half an hour with him.
Guest:He sent my parents away who drove me there.
Guest:And he gave me a yellow legal pad.
Guest:And he goes, I'm going to tell you a lot of stuff.
Guest:You should write it down so you don't forget it.
Guest:It's like, okay.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Told me anything I wanted to know.
Guest:About the process.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And formulas and all kinds of stuff.
Guest:And I just couldn't wait to get back home to use this information.
Marc:So he saw you as a, he said, this is the next guy.
Marc:In his mind, he's like, this guy gets it.
Marc:And he's a repository for this information.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:Yes.
Guest:But he was that way with everybody.
Guest:He was very open because he, on the East Coast, and he was self-taught.
Guest:He talked to Hollywood people and tried to find out how to do things, and it was like, you know, it's a trade secret.
Guest:We're not going to tell you.
Guest:So he figured out his own way, and it was a better way.
Marc:What were his specialties?
Guest:Well, he did, you know, the most realistic human old age and that kind of stuff, but also invented, he was very inventive.
Guest:He invented materials and processes that nobody had done before.
Guest:So when I sent him that letter, I got this amazing reply.
Guest:I'd go to the mailbox every day, you know, and one day it was like, oh.
Guest:rick baker and it was a dick smith and it was spongy and he actually gave me a bad foam casting of this one of the makeups i copied that he did but there was also a picture of a little big man makeup a test that he did yeah and he goes you know besides saying you can't wait to meet me because we're going to be filming in the veterans hospital in westwood if you want to come watch me apply you know that would be great you know so i got to watch him put that makeup on how long did that take i think it was like three three hours yeah um so you're sitting there with dustin
Guest:Yeah, you know, I, again, I was trying to stay out of the way, you know, and just hang back and watch.
Guest:But you were in technique?
Guest:Yeah, and watch how he puts the pieces on.
Guest:And what Dick did, which people in Hollywood, in Hollywood, everybody was doing one big piece.
Guest:You know, it would have been, that would have been basically you pull it over your head and glue it around the ice.
Guest:dick made overlapping appliances and the reason being you can actually glue it you know because it's glued everywhere and if there's a spot that's not glued if you miss when it moves it does a weird buckle so he would do these separate pieces that overlapped and it was better at applying and it moved better and uh you know it was great to be able to watch him do a makeup yeah a little big man you know yeah and dustin hoffman you know he uh i have this really vivid memory of him uh
Guest:because it was, you know, this veterans hospital.
Guest:They had like a padded room with a little glass window and he went in this padded room and screamed at the top of his lungs to try to make his voice sound raspy.
Guest:So I actually, you know, I actually looked through the little window and kind of looked up and there's this 120 year old man, you know, sitting there screaming, you know, it was just, it was just like so crazy.
Guest:It's wild, man.
Guest:I mean, that's the thing is, you know, I mean, it's something I found out when I read the book, you know.
Guest:Your book?
Guest:Yeah, I complain too much about the industry, but it's an amazing industry where you get to do and see and meet people.
Guest:It's magic.
Guest:Yeah, you know, and it's unbelievable.
Guest:I mean, it's like time traveling, you know.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Like when I did The Wolfman, you know, in London, you look around and it's like you're in the 1800s, you know, when you're filming that stuff.
Marc:That was the Munizio one?
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:Yeah, I think you got an Oscar for that, right?
Marc:I did.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:That movie was...
Guest:really weird vibe they didn't in movies called the wolfman the only people that really wanted to make a movie called the wolfman is me and dave elsie and lou elsie who i did it with and benicio and anthony hopkins but the directors and the producers were like embarrassed that they were doing a monster movie you know and what the hell they do it for that's what i said you know and we were like the low man on the totem pole like the bastard children you know and i mean i had the production manager would call me in the office and go
Guest:Why are you ordering this hair?
Guest:You know, I go, what do you mean?
Guest:Why am I ordering this hair?
Guest:And they go, what this, you got a bunch of hair here.
Guest:You know, what's that for?
Guest:And behind his desk is a big sign says Wolfman.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So I got up and I covered up the wolf part and I go, we're making a movie called The Wolfman.
Guest:Without the hair, we have a man.
Guest:You know, I'm going to make him a wolf.
Guest:And you need hair for that?
Guest:He goes, yes.
Guest:It's like, you know, come on.
Marc:That's crazy.
Marc:But you worked with Dick on movies later?
Guest:I got to work on The Exorcist with Dick.
Guest:I was, again, in 20, I think.
Guest:You were 20?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Something like early 20s, anyways.
Guest:He was a one-man show.
Guest:He worked in his basement.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And the rubber stuff, you know, he has to use once and throw away.
Guest:So we call them appliances or prosthetics.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So like Linda's makeup.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He did a number of designs.
Marc:You had to do it every day new?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Ah.
Guest:You had to have a new piece every day.
Guest:But he did a number of tests.
Guest:They chose one.
Guest:He prepared all that stuff because when he's filming, he couldn't be making these things.
Guest:It takes like a day of baking the rubber before he can open it up and find out if it worked.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:So he had like, you know, 50 some sets all made the very first day that she is in her makeup.
Guest:He puts it on.
Guest:She comes out in like one of the grips or electrician or something goes, oh, look, she's got her mask on now.
Guest:And Billy Freak and the director went, it's too masky, do another one.
Guest:And Dick goes, what?
Guest:And it's like, it's too masky, do another one.
Guest:He goes, we're filming.
Guest:I worked for months.
Guest:And so his solution was, call up me.
Guest:And I came out and lived in his house and worked in his basement on The Exorcist, you know?
Guest:And how cool was that?
Marc:Because Friedkin was crazy.
Guest:Well, no, I mean, Friedkin was right, actually.
Guest:I said, you know, actually, sometimes directors are right, you know?
Guest:And that was one of the cases, you know, and I was outraged.
Guest:I mean, how could you question?
Guest:Dick Smith.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, the greatest makeup artist ever, you know.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:And I was, I was, wanted to punch Franken, you know.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And I was there when Dick was trying these different things out and William Peter Blatty and Freakin would come in and make suggestions and stuff.
Guest:Wild.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But, you know, I got to, I got to work on that film.
Marc:And you were on the set and you, you know.
Guest:I was, I was mostly in Dick's basement during filming, making, making the pieces.
Guest:I did get to go to Iraq and, and help him with the Max Vincito's makeup, which that's the best makeup in the movie.
Guest:You know, Max has an age makeup.
Guest:He's Father Marin, the priest, but people don't realize he was made up, you know.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And those are the hardest kind of makeups to pull off, you know.
Marc:Well, yeah, and you did that with, you know, I remember the autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, which was a big deal.
Marc:I mean, I was 10, but I remember my mom watched it.
Marc:I remember it was this amazing revelation of the aging makeup.
Guest:Yeah, and I was like 20, again, in my early 20s.
Marc:But you earned that stuff from Dick, right?
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:And that was like, didn't you get an Emmy for that?
Marc:I did get an Emmy.
Marc:Stan Winston and I did it together, and we both got Emmy.
Marc:Stan Winston?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:He was an old-timer, right?
Marc:Yeah, who's now passed.
Marc:He was one of the big guys.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Stan and I were the two considered the top at the time.
Marc:How old was he?
Marc:Older than you, no?
Guest:He was a little bit older than me, but he died younger than I am now.
Marc:Oh, really?
Guest:I'm almost 69.
Guest:He'd think he was 66 or something.
Marc:That's sad.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I just found it interesting that there was, in the books, which are stunning books, two volumes, all pictures, a lot of great... There's the story of you.
Marc:There's a...
Marc:Forward by Landis, is it?
Marc:Or by Peter Jackson?
Marc:Both, yeah.
Marc:Peter Jackson, John Landis.
Marc:Dick Smith does the outro, the afterward or whatever.
Guest:Right, which he wrote years ago.
Guest:Is he still with us?
Guest:No, he passed a number of years ago.
Guest:I mean, I knew I was going to do this book and I asked him to.
Marc:But it was sort of interesting to me to have that realization that you're dealing with a lot of apes.
Marc:You deal with a lot of aliens, you know, and it seems that, and then, you know, the human transformations, the work you did with Eddie Murphy on the Nutty Professor and what, Norbit, and the Nutty Professors, two Nutty Professors.
Marc:And Coming to America, too.
Marc:Coming to America, where, and then in, like, Tropic Thunder, you've made a black guy white and a white guy black.
Guest:Yeah, and a black guy in Asian.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, it's stuff that, you know, you get in trouble for now.
Guest:I don't know if you would.
Guest:Do you think you would?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:I know people who have, you know, this is true that people say, like, why wouldn't you just hire an Asian guy?
Marc:But but the whole hook of those movies with Eddie was that he's going to play everything.
Guest:I know.
Guest:I know.
Guest:It's you know, that's the thing.
Guest:He's an actor and actors become different characters.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:And that's why you do makeup.
Marc:I think in the world that you're talking about, it seems that people should be sort of encouraged to try to do these interesting and different things.
Marc:I mean, to see Eddie Murphy play an old Jewish guy, which you made him into, right?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I mean, that was sort of stunning.
Guest:Yeah, it was fun, too.
Marc:Yeah?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And, you know, the thing that my relationship with Eddie and that film, you know, I mean, Eddie...
Guest:Didn't know how he was going to play it.
Guest:You know, he kind of did.
Guest:I mean, he really wanted it to be very stereotypical Jewish guy.
Guest:Yeah, right.
Guest:Playing it for laughs.
Guest:And when I did the makeup, he said, you know, I did a test.
Guest:I demanded to test this makeup because it's pretty extreme change, you know, and very difficult makeup to do.
Guest:And when I tested it, you know, he was sitting in the makeup chair looking at himself in the mirror.
Guest:And he just said, Rick, I just don't feel that I'm doing your makeup justice by doing this thing.
Guest:stereotype i mean this looks so real he goes i i want to uh can i just have our friend come in and improvise something uh and go yeah let me film this you know so i got my video camera out filming him in in the mirror looking himself and they improvised the scene about this old jewish guy who got attacked by some black guys yeah but it was serious yeah and i went oh my god this guy's a really good actor you know but then he ended up doing
Guest:the stick yeah because it's much funnier you know and that makeup was very much based on my father-in-law Nestor who wasn't Jewish but he I liked his face and he had kind of a big nose and you know Landis said to me I don't do it I don't want a big nose you know yeah you know
Guest:Eddie's got a wide nose, and I have to counteract that width, and the only way I can do that is kind of help build this out, and it's like, you know, I have to build it a certain size, you know, but it's, you know, it was a really fun makeup to do, and it was fun just to see what Eddie did with it.
Marc:And all the fat suits?
Marc:Oh, yeah, fat suits.
Marc:Was that your technology?
Guest:I mean, people had done suits before like that.
Guest:I mean, I tried to make it a little more organic.
Guest:What I did with the gorilla suits as well is a lot of times they'd make just hollow padding that you have a lot of room inside, but I tried to make it more like muscles and I have bony parts, you know, like shoulder blades and things.
Marc:Was it weighted?
Guest:The Nutty Professor stuff was.
Guest:The suit itself is very light, but we actually had water balloons we'd put in when it would show up, when it was needed, and when it didn't, we'd take them out.
Marc:I forgot to tell you, the thing that destroyed my brain when I was younger was from Live and Let Die.
Guest:Oh, yeah?
Marc:Did you do that stuff?
Guest:You helped along with it.
Guest:I did.
Guest:I started out, I was going to do Yafakoto's makeup, and he didn't like me.
Guest:And because I didn't agree with the thing.
Guest:He had some really ridiculous ideas.
Guest:I've always been very vocal if I don't agree with something.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:If it's my work.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And he eventually said, you know, you don't know anything about black people.
Guest:I want a black makeup artist.
Guest:And I lost that part of that job.
Guest:But I did do Jeffrey Holder's.
Guest:There's a head where Jeffrey gets his head shot.
Guest:Right, and he looks up?
Guest:Yeah, I made that head.
Guest:What about the exploding outfit Cotto?
Guest:I did the inflated head of him, yeah.
Guest:So I kind of got my revenge and made him kind of a Fat Albert-looking thing, you know.
Guest:But it blows up.
Guest:Yeah, you know, but it's funny how... And he was right.
Guest:I mean, I didn't grow up in a neighborhood that had black people.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:I did know my mom, you know, because...
Guest:I was like a latchkey kid, you know.
Guest:Sometimes I had to go to the bank with her and there was a janitor who was a black guy who became a friend, you know, and he kind of watched me, you know.
Guest:But I didn't really know a lot, but I don't know a lot about aliens or other things either.
Guest:I do the research and I figured out, you know.
Guest:So in a way he was right, but also...
Guest:I did Cicely Tyson a few years later and won an Emmy.
Guest:I did Eddie Murphy.
Marc:So you learned.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:What set him off exactly?
Guest:Do you remember?
Guest:Well, he wanted this disguise.
Guest:First of all, I told him, again, I'm a kid when I'm doing this, but I said, he's miscast.
Guest:I said, you cast him because he looks like the character that should be the makeup.
Guest:the makeup is it's character called mr big who's supposed to be this gangster this big scary black guy which job it was the the he was the makeup was supposed to be the guy named kananka i think it was who was more like an african delegate kind of guy he was more sydney portier looking you know kind of guy and well first of all i didn't like that because i kind of said that to him you know yeah but he goes you know i want him to have red hair and i want him to have a head shape like a bullet and uh
Guest:who's just naming off all this ridiculous stuff and i go this is going to give this away as a makeup instantly if you have a pointed head with red hair you know you're supposed to look natural and stuff like that and i mean i argued with him i was i've never been a yes man you know if it's affecting my work and i don't agree with it i fight for it right and in this case i uh you know and my fight turned out to me not getting that job you know right yeah
Marc:But you moved on.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:It's sort of astounding.
Marc:Like American Werewolf, that was another one that was life-changing because Griffin Dunn's slow decomposition was what you made the heads for.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Well, it was appliances on him.
Marc:Oh, appliances.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Except for the last stage, which was a puppet.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Because he was supposed to be basically a talking skeleton.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:right right right but that was so disturbing when he's just sitting there the comedy of that and the horror of it what it was uh that was a unique mix oh it was and it still holds up really well i gotta watch it again yeah and you know griffin was like when i did the makeup on the first test yeah you know he started as he was putting his stuff on he was just getting more and more upset looking and like sinking down in the chair and it's like obviously upset and it's like griffin what's the matter and he goes
Guest:What's the matter?
Guest:Look at me.
Guest:And I go, yeah.
Guest:And he goes, nobody's going to look at me.
Guest:And I go, did you read the script?
Guest:He's like, yeah.
Guest:Doesn't it say that your neck is torn out and half your face is off?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he goes, but I didn't think it was going to look like this.
Guest:And I go, I did.
Guest:So I called up Landis, who was in location.
Guest:And I go, you got to talk to Griffin.
Guest:Griffin turned out to be great.
Marc:What do you think was going to happen?
Marc:Of course they're going to look at him.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, but, uh, you know, and I, I think Griffin's probably known for that part more than anything, you know?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And, and he was terrific to work with, you know, but the first thing was a bit of a shock, you know?
Marc:I bet.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So what did you do on, uh, on the star Wars or first star Wars?
Marc:The cantina scene where they go in the cantina and there's all these aliens.
Marc:Sure, that's so memorable.
Marc:All the different aliens?
Guest:Yeah, it originally was done in England by Stuart Freeborn, who did the Wookiee, and it was his film.
Guest:But George wanted to embellish on that scene and wasn't really crazy about some of the stuff that was in there.
Guest:And again, because of my friends, I met at Cloakies.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:who are doing the visual effects of action guys yeah who but they were dennis muir and ken ralston yeah we're doing the visual effects of the spaceships and all that stuff and george they'd already finished nobody knew that star wars was going to be star wars right and george said i need some i want to add some stuff do you know anybody that can make a mask and it's like yeah we do you know so they called me and this was a valjean over there by the the airport in van nuys and yeah and he showed me on a flatbed editor this scene as it was and i just went
Guest:this is so cool you know and he goes we don't have any money you know we don't have much time but i really wanted like to add to this and it's like i'm there i'll do it add characters yeah and i said i have a bunch of masks i made for myself that we can use besides making specific things right so a great artist you just had a bunch of weird aliens on yeah and things like on the shelves or not even aliens i had one devil mask right i remember that guy i kind of wondered why he was i know well you know why not you know
Guest:You know, childhood's in, there's a whole thing.
Guest:There's like these devil, the animals look like devils.
Marc:But I just remember that stood out.
Marc:Like, that looks like just a devil guy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And there's also a werewolf mask that I did that was a, I did as a mass production, a limited mass production mask.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I thought these things were going to be just stuck in the background.
Guest:George focused on them.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But all the aliens you see in the very beginning opening shot are mine, and then the band is mine.
Guest:It was my design.
Guest:But it was shot on a different continent by different people months later, and you would never know.
Guest:The band is never really there when Harrison Ford's there.
Guest:But because movies are magic and are cuts, you see the band, and then you see Harrison Ford sitting there with Greedo, and the band's playing, and you think they're there.
Marc:Yeah, and that band became like this sort of modern, it's like it was a, what would you call it?
Marc:It was iconic.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And people made fun of it for years.
Guest:Oh, yeah, he did a Richard Pryor special where they made fun of the Star Wars canteen.
Marc:That's what he did.
Marc:You worked on that.
Marc:You had to make Richard have no sex work and no cock.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Took you a while to get that out.
Marc:Blank.
Marc:You had to make him blank.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, that was fun.
Marc:I remember that.
Marc:I watched that special.
Marc:Oh, did you?
Marc:What else did you do on that?
Guest:Well, we supplied the aliens for the canteen.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But yeah, that was, you know, that whole thing was a comedy special.
Guest:And you started out on a close up saying, you know, I thought I was going to have to give up a lot to do this show.
Marc:That's right.
Guest:And they start pulling back.
Guest:And then you see they just got nothing.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Now, Ed Wood, you won an Oscar for.
Marc:Now, I have to assume that there must have been something emotionally deep about having to kind of like.
Marc:I'm just assuming that as a kid you loved Dracula.
Marc:Yeah, and Bela Lugosi and me and Boris Karloff were my idols.
Marc:Right, so what did it feel like to be in that world?
Marc:It seemed very kind of human.
Guest:Well, I'm also an Ed Wood fan, and when I heard that this was happening, I contacted Tim.
Guest:I met Tim when I did Thriller.
Guest:There was a...
Guest:one of the costume people, Kelly Kimball.
Marc:You did the Michael Jackson video.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:That was all you?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Uh-huh.
Guest:Yeah, yep.
Guest:And I'm in it as well.
Guest:I'm one of the zombies in it, too.
Marc:Not dancing, but... Yeah, a non-dancing zombie.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, get yourself in there.
Marc:My whole crew's in it.
Marc:How are you feeling about the zombie apocalypse?
Marc:Well, it's going to happen.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But, I mean, like, this resurrection of zombies over the last decade, is that something, when you look at that, could you anticipate that that would be the dominant monster?
Guest:No, no, no.
Marc:Because it's always been around.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And, you know, the thing is now, you know, with Walking Dead, which I have to admit I don't really watch, I've tuned in a couple times to see some of the zombies, but they've pretty much explored every possibility that there is.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:But, you know, I always...
Guest:enjoyed zombies yeah so but the ed wood thing yeah i mean so when i heard that you know i had met tim previously when he was just out just out of um cal arts him and rick heinrichs and this costume lady on thriller said you have to meet these two kids are really talented yeah they were doing a frankenweenie or something at disney so i went and met him and we talked about a number of projects but they never happened
Guest:when I heard about Ed Wood, I go, I have to do this.
Guest:So I called up Tim or wrote him or something.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I go, I'll do this for free if I have to, which he pretty much took me up on.
Guest:But, and then when I read the script, I mean, also a Martin Landau fan, you know?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Oh, great.
Guest:And when I read the script, I thought the script was brilliant.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I just said, you know, I, I really have to do this movie.
Guest:And,
Guest:It really, to me, you know, Lugosi was so... It had to be real.
Guest:I didn't want him to be a rubber face.
Guest:And I wanted to get the essence of Bela but not pile a lot of rubber on him.
Guest:And I think when I wasn't as...
Guest:I experienced of a makeup artist.
Guest:I might have put too much on him.
Guest:That happens a lot, I think.
Guest:And it's really choosing where to put it and what to put and what not to put.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And I really wanted him to be real, and I think it worked out quite well.
Marc:Yeah, it was definitely moving in a lot of ways.
Guest:Yeah, I think it's Tim's best movie, and it's the least Tim Burton movie that he's made, but I think it's really a great movie.
Marc:I think that might be... I'd have to really weigh that.
Marc:I just talked to DeVito about... What was that, Batman Returns, where he plays the penguin?
Marc:The penguin, uh-huh.
Marc:And I thought that was kind of a genius thing.
Marc:But it is the spectacle of Tim Burton is very specific, whereas Ed Wood seemed he got out of the way a little bit.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And you could see more of the heart of him in a way.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So is it great working with Landau and sort of kind of getting to know Bill through that?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, it was, it was really cool because, you know, he, uh, Martin Lando was also the makeup guy on, on, on mission impossible, you know, and he's in the outer limits, a couple of outer limits episodes, you know, so I was just like a geek, you know, as being a geek fan boy.
Guest:I try, I try not to be, you know, but, you know, sometimes it happens.
Marc:Oh yeah.
Guest:You know, you got to ask those questions eventually.
Guest:Sure.
Marc:And you work with Cronenberg, too, on the Videodrome, which is a weird-ass movie.
Guest:No, really weird.
Guest:Something I started saying before, I used to have to try to convince people to let me do something.
Guest:When American Werewolf came out, they thought we could do anything.
Guest:And Cronenberg's movie was one of the ones right after American Werewolf.
Guest:And it was like, how the hell are we going to do this?
Guest:And that's the thing.
Guest:What makes me mad about contractors who are working on your house, they can never give you an accurate bid, time and money and stuff.
Guest:Though I actually have a contractor now who's really good.
Guest:But it's like- The really good ones are always expensive.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But here I have to do something that nobody's done before on a schedule that they're giving me and figure out a budget that I have to stick to.
Guest:And I do it.
Guest:How come you can't put-
Guest:you know there's every 16 inches is a two by four how can you how come you can't figure that out you know but there was some weird in video drama and i said to david said i don't know how i'm going to do some of this i don't think some of it i can do by putting the tape in his stomach or whatever yeah that was easier than some of the other things but i mean he i i but i said you know i i if i can't do it i'll come up with a an alternate version of the screen that pushed out yeah we did all that stuff yeah yeah i mean you have to figure out machinery
Guest:Yeah, and all kinds of crazy illusions.
Marc:And you got a team of guys you usually work with?
Marc:And they were kids.
Guest:You know, when I did American Werewolf, I mean, now there's hundreds of makeup people that are good.
Guest:There weren't then that do this kind of stuff.
Guest:Right.
Guest:American Werewolf, I hired fans who sent me fan mail.
Guest:I sent a kid out from Texas, brought him out who sent me fan mail.
Guest:Another kid from Connecticut.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The average, I mean, the average age of people working for me were 18 on that movie.
Guest:No kidding.
Guest:And they hadn't worked in a movie before.
Marc:But they were total nerds for it?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And I was 30.
Guest:And I spent some time showing them how to do stuff.
Guest:And we did stuff that still, I mean, however many years later this is.
Guest:It was 1980 when we were doing it.
Yeah.
Guest:It still holds up pretty well.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I got to watch it again.
Marc:I remember being profoundly disturbed by it.
Marc:And when you do something like the Grinch where you got to honor the Seussian vision.
Marc:I mean, that must have been like challenging because like there there's an innocence to Seuss, you know, even in his most sinister characters.
Marc:And now you're going to have full detail.
Marc:You've got to make these things real monsters in a way.
Guest:Yeah, and try to be true to it.
Guest:And then, you know, they're very simple drawings, too.
Marc:Yeah, I know, yeah.
Guest:And there's things that you can't do, you know, the long neck and this thing.
Guest:And then, I mean, I almost originally, when I first got the call about that, envisioned what I thought the Grinch should be, but my first question was, well,
Guest:what the hell are the who's?
Guest:I mean, when you look at those things in the book, they're like these weird, like bug people or something, you know?
Guest:And then I go, how are we going to do Cindy Lou Who?
Guest:I mean, you're going to hire a kid.
Guest:A kid can only work so many hours.
Guest:You can't do a three hour makeup.
Guest:So, I mean, that part of it was a challenge to come up with the right concept.
Guest:And I still think the who's are scary.
Guest:I mean, it's hard to do a strange looking human and not have it be scary.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But the Grinch, I mean, I had to fight to do the makeup that I did.
Guest:They wanted their attitude was we're painting Jim Carrey.
Guest:We want to see his face.
Guest:We want to see his face and you paint him green.
Guest:And it's like, no, it's wrong.
Guest:It's going to ruin the movie.
Guest:You know, how the Grinch stole Christmas, not how green Jim Carrey stole Christmas.
Guest:And I did something which I talked about in the book, which it was a secret at the time, but I mean, they were not going to let me do this.
Guest:I did a makeup on myself and shared it to them.
Guest:They go, no, it's too much.
Guest:I talked to, there was a website at the time called Ain't It Cool News that was...
Guest:They reviewed movies and had quite a following.
Guest:And I knew the guy who ran it was a fan.
Guest:And I said, listen, I want to save Universal from themselves.
Guest:I said, I'm doing How the Grinch Stole Christmas.
Guest:I did a makeup test on myself that's what it should be.
Guest:They want me to paint Jim Carrey green.
Guest:Is there some way that you can...
Guest:tell a little fib and say that you saw that test and that universal is making a big mistake yeah he goes i'm all over that yeah sure you know so they did and there were like thousands of responses so at the very last minute universal changed their mind and let me do the thing and you did the leak and yeah and you know and ron you know ron and brian who i sent the tape to as well i go
Guest:somehow this guy saw this tape.
Guest:And I said, well, you and Brian are the only ones I sent it to.
Guest:And I had to keep my mouth shut at that point.
Guest:But now it's like, I frankly think I'd save the movie.
Guest:I think if it was Jim Carrey.
Marc:Did it do all right, the movie?
Guest:It did.
Guest:And it's a holiday classic.
Guest:It shows up all the time.
Marc:That's great.
Marc:Good job.
Marc:But then you do these other ones.
Marc:You do The Ring.
Marc:You do all these horror movies.
Marc:And I got to assume that Men in Black, that's got to be just a free-for-all where you just make up weirdos.
Guest:You know, it was hard in that we didn't really know what Men in Black was when we were making the movie.
Marc:Sure.
Guest:And they said, which they say to me all the time, we want to see aliens like we've never seen before.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:That was a lot easier before Star Wars.
Guest:And, you know, after we did the cantina scene, every movie had a cantina scene.
Guest:you know, with space movie with a bunch of different alien designs and stuff.
Guest:And I, you know, my approach was, why don't we make aliens that look like ones we've seen, but better, and even say that it was like someone actually saw this and did, you know, a drawing, you know, but this is what it really looks like.
Guest:No, no, we don't like that idea.
Guest:But I happen to like retro aliens.
Guest:So every time I did a man in black movie, I did three of them.
Guest:I pitched that idea.
Guest:The last Men in Black, Men in Black 3, there's a time travel thing.
Guest:You go back to the 60s.
Guest:So it made sense.
Guest:So I finally got to make the retro aliens that I like.
Guest:But Men in Black didn't have... It was a movie about aliens on Earth.
Guest:There wasn't very much in the script.
Marc:Right, but it just seems to me that like, you know, there's some of them where you just went to town, where you just sort of like, why not just push the limit?
Guest:Well, because I did, because I couldn't, I didn't accept, you know, Will's introduction to Aliens on Earth took place in the original script in a bar.
Guest:And he's with Tommy Lee Johns, and Tom says, aliens are everywhere.
Guest:The bartender Chucky's an alien.
Guest:And the script says, Chucky lifts his neck and light comes out.
Guest:And I go, I'm sorry, but this is a missed opportunity.
Guest:This should be the coolest fucking thing you've ever seen.
Guest:And we saw that in Cocoon, and it wasn't that exciting.
Marc:So was that the one where you shot his head off?
Guest:No, we had his face open up and have a little green man.
Marc:Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:We came up with that idea.
Guest:And they go, we love that idea.
Guest:So we actually made a head for this bartender.
Guest:We did the whole thing.
Guest:Producers come in one day, and they go, oh, we forgot to tell you we're not going to do that anymore.
And I went...
Guest:I thought you love this idea.
Guest:And they go, oh, no, no, we do love it.
Guest:We love it so much we're going to put it in a different character and we're going to give them dialogue.
Guest:And then, you know, the guys, I go, dialogue?
Guest:And I go, his mouth is this big.
Guest:His mouth is like an eighth of an inch, you know?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So we had to make a big version of it that did the talking.
Marc:It's so funny because it's so ridiculously Rube Goldberg-y kind of thing where it's just such a comedy play, you know?
Guest:But, I mean, I'm sure a lot of producers and directors hate me because...
Guest:If I don't agree with them, I fight or I'll suggest things, you know.
Marc:It's just weird because, you know, but it sounds like a lot of times eventually you win because like you're creating something spectacular that they couldn't envision at all.
Marc:So they're naturally nervous.
Marc:But it seems like sometimes they're like, holy shit.
Marc:And other times they're like, I don't know.
Marc:But like, you know, you're giving them something they couldn't visualize and takes it to a whole other level.
Marc:And I would imagine most of the time the fight is is right.
Marc:Right.
Guest:Well, I think it is.
Guest:And they eventually come around.
Guest:I think a lot of it is like, okay, he's not going to shut up until we just let him do it.
Guest:But yeah, I think because of the ideas I've come up with and things like that, I've made some of the movies I've worked on better.
Marc:And what about, have we leveled off on apes?
Marc:I mean-
Guest:You know, well, I mean, it was my, I liked fooling people with makeup when I was a kid.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And a little kid Frankenstein didn't fool anybody.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You know, they would go, oh, isn't that cute?
Guest:Ricky looks like Frankenstein.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:They're supposed to run in fear.
Guest:So I went through a blood and guts phase.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Where I made, when the first time I did a wound on myself, my mom freaked out.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I made up all the kids in the neighborhood.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Wasn't allowed to play with them anymore.
Guest:You know, did some things.
Guest:Now as a parent, I would have killed this kid if they would have done it to me, you know.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I wanted to find something else that I could do.
Guest:And I thought an ape is like a real life thing and it's kind of monstrous.
Guest:So I started doing research on ape suits that had been done before and real gorillas and found out, just became fascinated with the animal.
Guest:I mean, Hollywood did them injustice.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Gorillas are very pacifistic and quite amazing.
Guest:But I thought, this is something I can do.
Guest:So it was a quest from the time I was a kid to make a realistic ape suit.
Guest:I made a number of them.
Guest:When I finally did Gorillas in the Mist, I thought, okay, I'm done.
Guest:I did a gorilla that was intercut with a real animal and nobody knows.
Guest:The whole movie is real gorilla, fake gorilla, real gorilla, fake gorilla.
Guest:i said you can't do that you can't compare mine to a real one yeah and they did and it worked right so i thought okay i can check that off i made the ultimate gorilla yeah then then i got i did mighty joe young because it was like the other big ape movie that i loved as a kid and so you did king kong twice and mighty joe yeah and planet of the apes i had to do yeah and you kind of updated that too
Guest:Yeah, well, I mean, I wanted, and again, when I talked to Tim about it, really wanted to do the film, but I said, I don't want to do Tim Burton apes.
Guest:You know, I don't want to do crazy stylized, you know, white face with dark circles around the eyes, you know, swirly things on it.
Guest:I want to do realistic apes.
Guest:If you don't want that, then I don't want to do it.
Guest:He goes, no, I do want real apes.
Marc:Yeah, I think you really reimagined the whole, and then they stuck with that with the other newer eight movies too, right?
Guest:Which they're all done CG, but I think they're done really well.
Marc:Well, that's an interesting question.
Marc:Do you feel like on some level the craft that you spent your life doing is being phased out?
Guest:You know, if you would ask me that 10 years ago, I would have said yes, for sure.
Guest:I mean, definitely it took away the animatronics part of our work and a lot of the effects part of it.
Guest:And clay.
Guest:Yeah, well, yeah, we still do some clay stuff, but yeah.
Guest:But it became the go-to solution for everything, you know, when I think there's a lot of things we could do better in real world.
Guest:10 years ago.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And it did look like it was dying out.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But now I think there's more makeups being done than ever.
Guest:And I think some of the best makeups that have ever been done are being done now.
Guest:So there's a mixture.
Guest:There's so many markets now.
Guest:You know, a lot of it's being done for TV or for streaming and stuff.
Guest:So, I mean, a number of makeups are just mind-boggling now.
Guest:I mean, I never would have imagined that this many makeups would be going on and this many good makeups would be going on.
Marc:So you're saying that the CGI thing is still limited to big budget, you know, specific type of movie making?
Guest:Well, I mean, people also have just decided, okay, this should be makeup, too.
Guest:I mean, I don't know what the decision making is.
Guest:Oh, okay, I see.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:I mean, I think one of the reasons, because for me, what really changed when I did American Werewolf, everybody said, what's the new material that allowed you to do things that had never been done before?
Guest:and i said i was given adequate time and money yeah i've never gotten it before when john asked me when i was 20 about what it would take i was gonna say i said it's gonna take a lot more time a lot more money than when i'm getting on schlock right you know and you know it changed i uh when i did gremlins too i mean mind you we made hundreds of gremlins and mogwais and stuff but i had a year on that film i was on a film for a year
Marc:I love gremlins.
Guest:As opposed to two weeks and something else.
Guest:So you can definitely do better work in a year.
Marc:Did you have a lot of gremlins at your house?
Guest:I have a couple, yeah.
Guest:But my whole point of this was, for me, I needed the answer when a director isn't really ready to give an answer.
Guest:starting a year before the movie's being made the director's usually on another movie right and i go i need to know what this is gonna you know what side you're gonna see you know this and they don't want to make the decision they eventually give you some answer when it comes to the day it's like oh you know i've changed my mind i really want something else you know it's like uh but and it happens all the time you know but it's and after you put a year into it that's a little shitty
Guest:Well, you know, I mean, I think I've made more things that aren't on film than I have.
Marc:Is that true?
Guest:Well, no, but there's a lot.
Guest:For example, Men in Black, one of the big challenges on that, there was the Vincent D'Onofrio makeup, you know, which is the human skin with the inside sucked out that's bugs wearing.
Guest:Yeah, right, right.
Guest:It doesn't matter.
Guest:And I kept trying to come up with logic for things.
Guest:And the reality was it didn't matter.
Guest:But it was a design nightmare in that we had Steven Spielberg, who wanted to be involved.
Guest:We had Barry Sonnenfeld.
Guest:We had Walter Parks.
Guest:They all wanted to look at design.
Guest:So we'd do designs.
Guest:I'd send off copies to them all in different places.
Guest:They go, you know, I like the head on A4, and I like this body on C6.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:And the feet on three, you know, whatever.
Guest:Why don't you do one like that?
Guest:And I would say, because it would look stupid.
Guest:That's why.
Guest:And then they go, okay, let me rephrase that.
Marc:Do one that looks like that, you know.
Marc:Right.
Guest:But the bug, the big Edgar bug, which was one of the biggest things we made,
Guest:The design they chose, I said, doesn't look bug-like enough.
Guest:It doesn't look to me like a bug.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It looks more like a reptile.
Guest:And Stephen said, who says space bugs would just look like Earth bugs?
Guest:There you go.
Guest:And I said, Earth people, who are the ones that are going to be seeing this movie.
Guest:It says bug, bug, bug, bug, bug.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You know, I said, let me put an exoskeleton on it at least, you know.
Guest:Anyways, cut to, you know, we're on the set at MGM.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:With our giant mechanical bug, all set up with all these puppeteers ready to go.
Guest:And the director comes up to him and goes...
Guest:You know, we decided this doesn't look enough like a bug, so we're just going to do it all CG later.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:And this was where we put most of our effort and work, you know.
Guest:I've done movies.
Guest:I did a movie called Isobar that we worked on for 10 months that was canceled.
Marc:And what do you do with the monsters?
Guest:Well, that got put in storage somewhere.
Guest:I have no idea where they are now, you know.
Guest:But a lot of times you'll do things, you know, something that you think is the main thing ends up being an incidental thing, and something that's like an incidental thing becomes the main thing.
Marc:And you have pictures, at least.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So my question, too, in closing here is like, you know, I sort of have a fascination with the Todd Browning's Freaks.
Marc:And you have that bust of Zippy in the book, which is like... Schlitzie, actually.
Marc:Oh, yeah, Schlitzie, yeah.
Marc:And it's a silicon, and it looks like real.
Marc:What compelled you to...
Guest:i i love schlitzy you know i love freaks too yeah yeah you know uh i always felt like one of them you know yeah yeah and i loved schlitzy i mean you know i do love protest things you know i don't like gore you know i mean people always i'm squeamish i pass out when i see blood really yeah even fake blood no no if i do it it's okay i mean but if it's well done in a movie it affects me so
Marc:But that's interesting what you just said, though, that there's something about being a shy, maybe only child, the awkwardness that is inherent in that.
Marc:Because I've thought about this myself.
Marc:What makes me gravitate towards and find sort of empathy and be moved by human anomalies is that they function in the world proudly as people who are completely unusual.
Marc:And there's something inspiring about that.
Mm-hmm.
Guest:Well, again, I mean, I, you know, I say I love monster movies and stuff, but it's like Frankenstein, you know, Hunchback.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:The Charles a lot in Quasimodo.
Guest:Oh my God.
Guest:It makes me cry when I watch it.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Brilliant performance and brilliant makeup.
Guest:And, but you know, as a kid and especially an odd kid, you know, you know, I,
Guest:you you relate to them you know because you're like them you know and i think that's part of what they attracted you feel so different and weird but you know it's funny i mean now you know and my wife sylvia is responsible a lot for me being i had no social skills yeah and i didn't like going anywhere yeah i still don't like going anywhere you know but she's brought a lot of things out in me that that didn't exist before
Marc:That's nice.
Marc:Yeah, so you don't feel like a monster anymore.
Guest:No, not so much.
Marc:It was great talking to you, Rick.
Guest:It was nice talking to you, Mark.
Marc:Thanks for having me.
Marc:All right.
Marc:Well, that was cool.
Marc:I thought that was very interesting.
Marc:The book, Rick Baker Metamorphosis, is available wherever you get books tomorrow, October 22nd.
Marc:You can pre-order it now if you want.
Marc:It's two volumes, 736 pages long.
Marc:It has more than 1,600 images from Rick's career.
Marc:And don't forget about the Adult Swim podcast.
Marc:If you like Rick and Morty,
Marc:Robot Chicken, Aqua Team, Hunger Force, Too Many Cooks, Tim and Eric, or any of the Adult Swim shows, then the Adult Swim podcast is for you.
Marc:Go behind the scenes with the creators, cast, and crew of the Adult Swim shows you love.
Marc:Listen and subscribe to the Adult Swim podcast for free wherever you get your podcasts.
Marc:I'm going to play a guitar right now that did not cost $40,000.
Marc:It sounds pretty fucking good.
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Guest:Thank you.
Guest:Thank you.
Marc:Boomer lives!
Guest:All right.