The lady from the black.., p.18
The Lady from the Black Lagoon, page 18
Another problem was that because the suit was made out of foam latex, it floated. The suit wouldn’t submerge because it was so buoyant. The crew had to fix thin plates of lead to Ricou’s chest, thighs and ankles to get him underwater. The foam latex also eventually began to absorb water, making it heavier. This was good for keeping Ricou underwater, but it made it more difficult for him to maneuver in. Despite all these technical issues, no one’s calling out Jack Kevan, saying that he must have been someone’s boyfriend.124
To sculpt the suit, plaster casts of Ricou Browning and Ben Chapman were made. Most monster suits are made specifically to fit the actor playing them.125 This wasn’t always the case. In the early days of monsters, the suits would just be built to fit some sort of one-size-fits-all frame. This led to some ridiculous cinematic mishaps, though. If you watch the movie It! The Terror from Beyond Space, the alien, played by actor Ray “Crash” Corrigan, looks a little weird. Weird in more than an it’s-a-cheesy-sci-fi-movie way.
The alien was created by B-movie sci-fi legend Paul Blaisdell.126 Corrigan didn’t want to travel all the way across Los Angeles to where Blaisdell lived to get fitted and cast for the suit, a reluctance that actors and makeup artists struggle with to this day. The trouble was that Corrigan was a pretty big guy, so when the alien suit was finished, Corrigan didn’t fit in it so well. In fact, he barely fit in it at all. His chin stuck straight out of the mouth hole and Blaisdell ended up having it paint it to look like the alien’s tongue.
To avoid situations like this, plaster casts were made of Ben’s and Ricou’s feet in flippers, for Ricou’s swimming comfort and ease. Individual foam latex pieces of the suit were glued to leotards so that they would move more naturally, instead of bending awkwardly. This also made the suit more comfortable.
The designs were then sculpted with clay onto the molds of Ben and Ricou. Those clay sculptures were then cast as molds, and those molds were filled with foam latex. The foam latex was baked, dried and then painted. Once painted and assembled all together, they were ready to be worn. Finally, the suit could be submerged in the underwater tank for test footage. Ricou tried out all the different heads and one, the infamous Creature head with all its texture and flaps and gills, was chosen. Creature from the Black Lagoon was born.
Less than a month after the original suit was rejected by Universal executives (and everyone else), the makeup department, led by the design work and creativity of Milicent Patrick, created a totally new suit that was ready for shooting. This new suit would become the last monster to be known as a “classic” Universal monster, and one of the best known and well-loved cinematic monsters of all time. It was the first suit where the creativity and artistry wasn’t just on the head or the mask, but covered the entire body, head to claw. It became a part of film history.
Milicent loved her work on the Creature. He ended up being her favorite creation for Universal Studios. She described him in an interview:
He’s a complete monster... The shape he’s in now, I think he’s cute. But that’s because I worked with him so long. He’s expected to scare other people. He would probably create a sensation if he walked in here and ordered a drink, but nobody’d even look twice in Hollywood.
The film went into production in September 1953, almost exactly a year after Alland sat down and wrote a treatment for The Sea Monster. Initial shooting lasted for three weeks, but finishing touches and extra footage for the opening reel were still being worked on well into November. Up until October, the film was still being called Black Lagoon, which, considering all the other possible titles, is pretty good. But by November, the staff at Universal was instructed to call the movie Creature from the Black Lagoon and monster history was made. Alland, unsurprisingly, hated the new title. He thought it sounded cheesy and cheap. He also probably wanted the movie poster to be a picture of the Creature sitting on a window ledge, playing an acoustic guitar and looking dreamily out into the night.
In October, TV Guide ran a short blurb on Milicent. Ramar of the Jungle was still playing and the magazine described her as an artist behind and in front of the camera. There’s a beautiful press photo of her in a dress, along with a more intimate, rare shot. The second picture is of her sketching at her home studio. She’s wearing a baggy, button-up shirt with the sleeves rolled up, bent over a drafting table covered in drawings.
This period of time was the highlight of Milicent’s life as a professional artist, but even when she wasn’t working at a studio, she was busy at home. She had a dedicated room in her house that was an art studio and it was always covered in work in various stages of completion. Most of them were portraits and figures. Milicent could draw anything, but people in movement were what she loved to capture and what she excelled at putting on the page. She brought everything to life. Her business cards read simply, “Milicent Patrick: Artist.”
While the movie was in production, the publicists at Universal were already cooking up as many schemes as they could think of to market the movie. The studio heads suspected that they had something special with Creature from the Black Lagoon. After about six weeks spent working on the Creature, it was time for Milicent to get back to the sketch pad for another film. She was oblivious to the fact that those six weeks were going to change her life dramatically.
Sign of the Pagan was a historical drama about fifth-century Rome being attacked by Attila and the Huns. The film was announced as soon as Creature from the Black Lagoon was finishing up production and the makeup department got right to work figuring out what the barbarians were going to look like. Milicent designed the barbarian makeups, which mostly involved making people look fierce and their facial hair pointy. The illustrations and portraits she created for this movie were gorgeous.
For Sign of the Pagan, she got into the makeup chair herself and played one of the background barbarian women. This is not as exciting as you’d think it would be, though. Milicent got to stand around and wear a lot of brown and look like she needed to shower. What was exciting, however, was what was brewing over in the screening rooms for Creature from the Black Lagoon.
At the start of the new year, January 1954, previews started for the film. It ran seventy-nine minutes, or an hour and nineteen minutes in non-annoying-film-person talk. Right off the bat, it tested very well with audiences. The overall ratings for the picture were high, mostly “outstanding” or “excellent” or “very good.” After star Richard Carlson, the Creature was the most popular character. In the test audiences, people complained that the actors playing the Creature were not credited. Overwhelmingly, people were dazzled by the underwater scenes and the fact that it was in 3D. The comment cards were collected into a report that was distributed to executives all over the studio. They started to realize they had something momentous.
After test screenings, Creature from the Black Lagoon stayed at seventy-nine minutes. Nothing needed to be changed. It was time to figure out how to market the film across America.
The studio heads had made a promise to Joseph Breen that there wasn’t going to be any fish sex, but as soon as it was time to start planning the movie poster, things got pretty suggestive. “Monster from a Lost Age! Raging with Pent-Up Passions!”
I guess you could skate under the MPAA radar by saying that the Creature’s pent-up passion was for murdering, but we all know they’re just referencing an intense case of prehistoric frustration. You think it’s difficult getting a girl to come back to the crappy apartment you share with your roommate? Try getting her to come back to your creepy lagoon.
Besides insinuations of interspecies sexual assault,127 the publicity team at Universal was hard at work cooking up as many crazy schemes as they possibly could to promote the movie. All sorts of things were floated through the offices of Universal, from lowbrow stunts like getting pictures of the Creature taken with sexy celebrity starlets, to Creature toys, to sellable latex Creature masks, to highbrow ideas like curating an exhibit of prehistoric fossils and footprints to highlight the scientific aspects of the film. Boobs! Toys! Science! Universal was running the gamut trying to figure out how to sell this movie to the country.
This is probably a good time to talk about the Creature’s nickname on the Universal lot—the Gill Man. The Creature is the only Universal monster with so many different names. There’s of course just Creature from the Black Lagoon, Creature, Gill Man and my personal favorite—Creech. It makes me feel like the Creature and I are best buddies. In much of the Creature from the Black Lagoon promotional material, he’s referred to as the Gill Man, which sounds rather cool...until you think about it. That’s like calling Superman “Cape Man.” There are a lot of other badass aspects of the Creature, but hey, gills.
While the publicity team was brewing up promotional ideas, the makeup department was brewing up designs for another movie. Remember Milicent’s discarded sketches from It Came from Outer Space? They were pulled out of the drawer for a new film that Universal had in development, This Island Earth.
This Island Earth was another William Alland producing, Jack Arnold directing collaboration, although there was a second director, Joseph Newman.128 It was based on Raymond F. Jones’s 1952 science fiction novel of the same name. The story starts with an alien man from a planet called Metaluna appearing to earth’s top scientists, inviting them all to come to his cool Earth mansion. He wants them to help him work on a supersecret alien project, which of course, no scientist can turn down. As far as I can tell, the main reason to become a scientist is so you can make yourself available for these types of cinematic situations. The scientists quickly figure out that the alien wants to use their atomic knowledge to build a shield to protect the planet Metaluna from their enemies over at the planet Zahgon. He piles a couple of the scientists into his spaceship and brings them to the suffering Metaluna, where they must deal with, among other issues, grumpy mutants.
Compared with most 1950s sci-fi movies, This Island Earth is quality stuff. It’s generally considered one of the best films of the era, as far as craft and story go. The plot holds up, the visuals hold up. It was shot in Technicolor and besides looking fantastic, it was really dazzling to audiences to see aliens in color. It’s one thing to create an alien in black-and-white. With color, you’ve got both the challenge and opportunity to make something really stand out.
The final design of the mutant ended up as something that looks like a cross between a giant brain and a crab. That sounds silly, but it actually looks pretty cool, especially if you consider that it came inspired by Ray Bradbury’s completely nebulous description of an alien. It’s a long way from an eyeball in a plastic bag. The exact same team who made the Creature suit made the Metaluna Mutant suit—Jack Kevan and Chris Mueller. It was almost a full suit—the head looks like a gigantic exposed brain with massive eyeballs and a primitive mouth. The torso is a shiny exoskeleton, the arms end in very long pincers and the legs are just sort of waxy-looking pants. Apparently, there were legs (which you can see in some of the press photos and the poster for the film) that matched the exoskeleton on the arms, but the team couldn’t manage to get them to fit or move properly, so they abandoned them for the most alien-looking pair of pants they could find. One of my absolute favorite parts about films and filmmaking is that even with big budget films by major studios, everyone is sort of making it up as they go along.
Bud Westmore and the makeup department were immensely excited by the Metaluna Mutant. It’s a fantastic collaboration of awesome design work and a great build. Bud was hanging his high hopes on the Metaluna Mutant partly because he had low expectations for the Creature. He deeply disagreed with Alland’s vision of a sympathetic monster. In fact, he really hated the idea. And yet, the folks in the test audiences adored the Creature because they developed some feelings for him over the course of the movie, and not in the way that the MPAA was concerned about.129 They felt empathy for him and saw him as more than a monster. Alland might not have gotten the design that he wanted, but he got the message across that he wanted: the story of a beast that was imbued with humanity.
Bud thought that this was pretty lame. Even before the release of Creature from the Black Lagoon, he started disparaging the look of the Creature. In interviews, he complained that the monster didn’t look scary enough. He thought that the audience sympathizing with the monster was a bad thing. He hated that Jack Arnold shot the Creature in bright sunlight. Bud thought monsters should be kept lurking in the darkness and that the film wasn’t going to do well.
It’s strange that Bud was so ready to bad-mouth the Creature and so ready to do it on the record. One of the hardest tests to pass for special effects is to see them in daylight; it’s so much easier to hide flaws in the shadows. The fact that the Creature suit was able to be shot in bright daylight and look so damn good is a testament to the competence of the entire makeup department; the design, the build, the painting, the application. Bud should have been proud of the creation of his team.
He should have, if he was a good team leader and artist.
But the thing you need to know about Bud Westmore is that he was a dick.
Remember that Bud was always self-conscious about the way that he got his job at Universal, that he wasn’t the Westmore that Universal originally wanted. He grew up in an environment of competition and backstabbing with his father and brothers. Bud spent his career at Universal trying to prove himself, but instead of working hard and creating excellent pieces of art to outshine anyone else, he took credit for the work of others.
Bud was also tough to deal with on a daily basis. He was ego-driven, arrogant and hungry for power. He was abrasive with his team, once firing a makeup artist because he didn’t like the way that the man laughed. Tom Case, a member of the makeup team for Creature from the Black Lagoon, quit right when the movie came out because he could no longer stand working for Bud.
This was a man pulsating with insecurity. The youngest Westmore, Frank, wrote in his book The Westmores of Hollywood:
Whenever someone he had hired began to show signs of independent inventiveness, Bud would either fire him or resort to his famous “silent treatment,” making the makeup artist’s life so miserable in general that he would quit.
If he wasn’t harassing his employees, he was taking credit for their work. Bud’s time at Universal was mostly spent with administrative tasks associated with running a huge makeup department. When he wasn’t prepping for a film by reading scripts and going to production and budget meetings, he was assigning artists to specific jobs, ordering supplies, training new hires.
I’m not disparaging his work here. That’s what happens when you’re the head of a major department. You don’t do as much creative work. It’s like that with almost any industry. The showrunner for your favorite TV show isn’t writing every episode, the head of the surgery department of a big hospital isn’t in the operating room all the time.
What I am disparaging is his habit of rushing into the workshop as soon as there was a camera around so he could jump into a photo of a sculpt or a design and pretend he was the one working on it. He was notorious for this. My favorite picture of Bud Westmore is of him in the makeup workshop with a big cheesy grin, wearing a suit and tie and standing in front of the sculpture of the back piece of the Creature suit. He’s holding a paintbrush backward up to the piece.
Chris Mueller told Tom Weaver for his The Creature Chronicles book, “Westmore signed the checks and got in the pictures. That’s about it.”
This sort of stuff flew back in the 1950s. Remember, the only one getting on-screen credit was Bud Westmore. There were no detailed public lists on IMDb of who was doing what in which departments. Makeup was Bud’s department; it was his domain. He thought he had the right to claim the sole credit for the creations. It was the custom.
Studios never really know how to handle special effects makeup and monster suits. It’s a confused place in the film industry. It’s makeup, it’s special effects, it’s sort of like a prop? But it goes on an actor? There wasn’t even a category for makeup and hairstyling at the Oscars until 1981. The actors in suits rarely get recognition. Ben Chapman and Ricou Browning didn’t receive on-screen credit for playing the Creature, despite sharing one of the main roles in the movie. It’s almost a rule that if you can’t see an actor’s face in a film, they won’t be nominated for any sort of recognition, despite the incredible level of skill required to move, act and convey emotion inside of a giant rubber suit.
So, Bud’s behavior was tolerated. He was a coveted Westmore after all, and his team created fantastic work. For those working for him, it was hard to let go of a steady position in a major studio makeup department, so they stayed.
If you didn’t work for him, or if you were a beautiful woman, Bud Westmore was a completely different person than the jerk lording over the makeup department. Around anyone else, he was a charmer—funny and sweet. This is the man that Milicent was hired by and probably the man she had to work with every day. After all, she was the only woman working in the entire department. I doubt very much that Bud saw her as a threat.
Power hungry? Arrogant? Rough on the people under him? Sound familiar? Even if he was tough on her, Milicent grew up dealing with this kind of man. Putting up with this behavior was second nature to her. Bud Westmore was a Camille Rossi who knew how to work a tube of lipstick instead of a roll of blueprints. So while Bud publicly sneered at her design work and the team’s creation, Milicent was unperturbed: she loved her work at the makeup department.
Once he heard about how the publicity team at Universal wanted to promote Creature from the Black Lagoon, Bud changed his tune. He changed it fast.
