If you know monster makeup, you already know the name
Jack Pierce, who created the makeup for
Frankenstein's monster,
The Wolf Man,
The Mummy, and
many others. But Pierce's career with Universal Studios, for whom he created these masterpieces, came to a sudden, and unexpected, end when, in 1945, he and his entire staff were fired.
The trouble? Pierce's methods were time-consuming and painstaking, involving, among other things, building up his creatures features with cotton and
collodion, a process that took many hours. Universal had
fallen on hard times, with mergers, sales of its catalogue, and the loss of its 1,500-screen theater chain bringing the bean counters to the fore. They wanted to cut back on Universal's grand-spending ways, and out with the bathwater went the baby.
The sorts of makeup men the bean-counters like were
George and
Gordon Bau, two brothers from Minnesota who had worked at
Rubbercraft and brought with them a knowledge of how to make reusable appliances from cheap, lightweight
foam latex. Their major accomplishment was
House of Wax (1953) and they revolutionized the industry (Dick Smith's work in
Little Big Man would be unthinkable without it, as would the entire career of
Rick Baker. Best still, it's now possible to buy
monstrous and
gruesome rubber appliances right off the shelf.
posted to MetaFilter by Astro Zombie
at 10:51 PM on June 18, 2006
(27 comments)
