Paul Blaisdell, Monster Maker: A Biography of the B Movie Makeup and Special Effects Artist

by Randy Palmer

  Blaisdell experimented with different approaches to the design of his extraterrestrial interloper, eventually settling for a humanoid outline with an oversized, exposed brain that would represent the creature’s advanced intellect. Once the pen-and-ink preliminaries had been completed, Paul went to work with his modeling clay, building up the Beast’s abdominal structure in successive quarter-inch layers. The elongated head was shaped almost like an upside-down teardrop, the cerebral striations and eye sockets delicately gouged out of the clay with an artist’s knife. When all sculpturing work was completed, the figurine was allowed to stand overnight to give the clay time to harden. It was then coated with liquid latex, a substance which slowly congeals into rubber when exposed to the air. Later, the dried latex rubber was slit up the back and carefully removed from the sculpture. This then became the “positive mold” which would be hand-painted and outfitted with various latex appendages to be brought to life as the slave of the title monster of The Beast with a Million Eyes.

  Blaisdell dubbed the finished figure “Little Hercules.” A pair of eyes were made from small plastic spheres obtained from the Frye Plastics Company, one of the largest suppliers of plastic goods in Southern California during the 1950s. Reptilianlike irises were painted directly onto the plastic, which was bound to the latex skin with a strong contact-bond cement. Above each eyeball was added a drooping antennae. Although for later projects Blaisdell would use materials such as candles to create this sort of fleshy protuberance, in this instance he utilized the tails of rubber lizards which were sold in many magic shops as joke items. The lizard tails proved to be just the right size for Little Hercules and were as flexible as anything that might have been fashioned by hand. Paul glued them directly to the latex and allowed the “antennae” to dangle freely.

  Also added were a pair of lobsterlike pincers on either side of the mouth and a pair of curved horns attached to the Beast’s elbows, all of which were fashioned out of rubber latex painted over positive clay molds. Flexible batlike wings were made by bending ordinary wire hangers into the desired shape and coating them with numerous layers of liquid latex. When dry, the wings were bonded into place on the back of the model’s shoulders. The wings could be bent into various positions, as long as care was taken not to rupture the latex skin or snap the metal joints. These, along with the creature’s elongated head, exposed brain, pointed ears, (plastic) fangs, and antennae foreshadowed future Blaisdell creations such as the She-Creature and the “little green men” from Invasion of the Saucer Men.

  Paul added a black vinyl spacesuit to the figure to cover the torso, arms, and knobby, five-fingered hands. (The hands, incidentally, were sculpted by Jackie Blaisdell.) A metal band encircled its waist. Since the Beast would only be seen from the waist up, there was no reason to design any of the lower extremities. A shield made of vinyl surrounded its neck and covered most of the chest. Glitter was glued to the vinyl so it would shimmer under the harsh movie lights. Blaisdell even designed an ornamental, otherworldly jewel for his brainy buddy to wear. This eight-pointed star was made from tiny pieces of colored plastic that were glued to the center of the shield and highlighted with silver modeling paint. Lastly, manacles and chains were added to the creature’s wrists—a detail intended to convey its servile status—and a metallic-looking ray gun (a customized dime-store toy) was placed in its right hand.

  In addition to the Beast, Blaisdell was asked to design the spaceship’s “automatic” airlock door. Built to the same scale as Little Hercules, it consisted of a single sliding panel made out of corrugated cardboard. When the film began rolling, a hidden assistant pushed the cardboard panel up by hand while Jackie Blaisdell, also hidden from view behind the cardboard “airlock,” furiously shook a couple of hand-held movie lights to create a weird stroboscopic effect. Paul was sandwiched in between the two, operating Little Hercules as best he could under the rather congested circumstances. A floating eyeball and hypnotic spiral were later superimposed over the footage of the Beast, obscuring it further.

  Blaisdell was also asked to design the rocketship briefly seen in the picture’s conclusion. Actually, Paul had to build two ships because someone on the film crew neglected to do their homework. ARC had given Blaisdell carte blanche to design the miniature spacecraft however he chose. “Whatever you want to do is fine with us, just so long as it looks as if it’s from outer space.” Meanwhile, the second-unit crew made their own life-size version of the alien ship and carried it into the desert to shoot inserts for the picture. Nobody ever thought to touch base with Blaisdell to find out what he was doing.

  Not surprisingly, Paul’s finished model didn’t match the full-scale mockup in the slightest. According to Blaisdell, the full-size ship was a hodgepodge of materials pieced together from a junkyard in Indio, California: an airplane fuselage and nose, some Model-T Ford mufflers, garbage cans, and a bunch of iron rods and plastic teacups. Someone decided it would be easier for Paul to rebuild his miniature than it would be for the crew to try and build a brand-new matching mockup, so Paul set aside his meticulously designed egg-shaped starship and started work on a second model, undoubtedly grumbling under his breath the whole time.

  As an adjunct to his spaceship, Paul built a realistic-looking miniature landscape of the California desert, complete with its own impact crater. Scores of tiny rocks and bits of shrubbery were glued to the sand-coated surface, and the entire set was constructed on a wooden platform with a false bottom which allowed the model ship to rise up out of the crater on cue. The spaceship scenes were shot at the studio owned by Lou Place, who helped Paul rig the wires used to maneuver the miniature ship. According to some sources, the first time they set up the shot, Place’s assistant, John Milani, strolled into the room and casually tripped over the wires, sending the ship into orbit well ahead of schedule. It was painstakingly repositioned and rewired the following day, and the shot was finally captured on film without Milani’s unexpected intervention.

  Blaisdell’s attention to detail was mostly lost on audiences who saw the finished feature in theaters in 1955 or caught it on television years later. Because Roger Corman wanted to get The Beast with a Million Eyes in the can as quickly as possible, none of Little Hercules’s inbuilt talents were utilized on camera. Paul Blaisdell recalled that the crew was pretty impressed with the Beast—so much so that everyone wanted to be on hand during the shooting and try to get their fingers into the pie. By the time the cameras were ready to roll, Blaisdell was surrounded by so many people he barely had room to turn around. Consequently, Little Hercules’s debut was severely restricted. Although the flexibility of the model could at least allow for varied arm movements, the director was in too much of a hurry to let Paul experiment with obtaining the best possible effects. The end result was a flatly lit, unimaginatively staged shot of the opening airlock and a quick cut to the Beast positioning his ray gun, along with one or two close-ups of the monster’s snarling face before it inexplicably falls over dead. According to Blaisdell:

  When the film was shot everybody was climbing all over the mock-up of the spaceship and trying to light the Beast, and everybody wanted to get in on the act. And that’s just what they did, until the Beast was so choked up he could hardly move. Unfortunately, that shows on the film, along with the wrong camera angle—after all, Paul Birch was supposed to be looking up at the spaceship, not at it. Those scenes were all shot within the space of about ten minutes, and unfortunately, it shows.

  When he saw the finished monster footage, Paul was horrified to discover that not only had the cameraman filmed the Beast at a totally inappropriate angle but a ghostly floating eyeball and hypnotic spiral had been superimposed over the scene, which made it look even worse. The scene played so quickly and was shot so poorly that the Beast’s devil-bat-wings, the chains and manacles, and even the ray gun could barely be discerned at all. A unique closeup of the Beast with smoke pouring out of its nostrils was totally obscured by the ill-advised superimposition of the eyeball
and spiral, but the effect can clearly be seen in some extant color footage of the scene currently in the hands of private collectors. (Blaisdell achieved the smoking nostrils effect by inserting a tube into the back of the model and blowing cigarette smoke through it. The smoke slowly seeped out of the only openings facing the camera—the creature’s upturned nostrils.)

  A model shot of the extraterrestrial spacecraft seen in The Beast with a Million Eyes. For this photo, human figures have been added to show the craft’s relative size. The impact crater constructed by Paul and Jackie can be seen briefly in the film’s conclusion as the starship departs Earth for destinations unknown (courtesy of Bob Burns).

  The scenes which followed, showing the liftoff of the alien craft and its flight through space, came off a bit better, though by today’s standards the presentation can only appear somewhat archaic. But curiously enough, the sheer unearthliness of the craft, coupled with the harried and hurried nature of the photography, infuse the scene with a delicious sense of surreality.

  Corman and Place spliced the new monster footage into the climax of the film and turned the project over to Sam Arkoff and Jim Nicholson, who were able to convince their regional exhibitors that The Beast with a Million Eyes had been “rescued.” The monster didn’t look anything like what the advertising campaign promised, of course—but at least now the picture had a monster. And that made enough of a difference to get the film out the studio door and into the nation’s theaters.

  Most adult viewers considered The Beast with a Million Eyes a lackluster Hollywood dud. In its review of the film, the trade paper Variety labeled it a “tedious science-fictioneer for less discriminating program spots.” (Was that a kind way of saying that the picture would be laughed off the screen in regions like New York and Los Angeles?) Variety warned its readership that the film’s premise became “lost in a maze of drawn-out situations and tiresome dialogue which leads to a confusing windup not likely to be readily understood by general audiences.” In fact, the conclusion of the film remains somewhat open to interpretation.

  According to Paul Blaisdell, the Beast was a “malevolent molecular cohesion,” a form of energy that could not be killed. If the host was destroyed, however, the Beast had to burrow into another body immediately or it would be doomed to drift forever through the cosmos, a consciousness without form or substance. When Paul Birch confronted the alien creature in the spaceship airlock and shot it with a 30-30 Winchester rifle, he merely destroyed the alien’s current physical home. (Recall that the monster in the ship is a creature from another star system which has been enslaved by the real Beast.) The real Beast escaped into the body of the closest living creature—a rat scurrying across the desert floor.

  That’s the story according to Blaisdell. But what seems to happen in the climax of the film is that the combined mental efforts of Allan, Carol, Sandy, and Larry overcome the creature in the ship. Although Allan is carrying a rifle, we never see him point it at his extraterrestrial adversary. When the Beast leaves its host, the alien slave falls over dead. There is the suggestion that the Beast has invaded the body of the nearby rat, but when Carol points at an eagle soaring through the sky we realize that the alien intelligence could just as easily have “climbed aboard” the eagle. (Why didn’t it take over the mind of one of the human characters? That’s something only scriptwriter Tom Filer knows for sure.) To add even more confusion to the mix, there are several lines of dialogue spoken between Paul Birch and Lorna Thayer that seem to suggest that the Beast was destroyed by the intervention of God.

  The pictures Paul Blaisdell worked on during the 1950s, which were panned by many critics during their original theatrical run, began to be reevaluated by fans in the 1980s, who learned to look at them in an affectionate and nostalgic light. The Beast with a Million Eyes was no exception. Phil Hardy, in his monumental Encyclopedia of Science Fiction Films (1984, Woodbury Press), writes that the film was “clearly intended as an allegory about a malevolent God. The film remains interesting, for all its flaws, if only for its unusual central idea.” As Hardy implies, circumstances surrounding the production were so bizarre that the overall mood of the finished film bordered on the surrealistic. Scenes depicting hypnotic flashing lights emanating from the alien craft and Blaisdell’s “whirligig-bullet” spaceship rising into the desert sky like a refugee from George Melies’s 1902 silent fantasy, A Trip to the Moon, only add to the dreamlike quality of the film.

  No matter what anyone else may have thought of the picture, Paul Blaisdell was proud of his contribution to The Beast with a Million Eyes. Although the rushed nature of the film schedule severely restricted his ability to utilize his monster to full advantage, Roger Corman knew what Little Hercules was capable of. Recognizing the good return he got on a measly $400 investment, Corman promised to give Blaisdell a call whenever he started work on another science-fiction picture.

  To Paul’s surprise, the phone call came through just a few weeks later. (Corman worked really fast in those days.) It seemed the world was coming to an end, and Roger wanted Paul Blaisdell to create the ultimate doomsday monster.

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  The Mutant of Topanga Canyon

  In Day the World Ended, I was supposed to be a mute mutant, able to use only hand gestures to try to explain to Lori [Nelson] that I had no intention of harming her and that I’d just come back to find her.

  —Paul Blaisdell

  Jim Nicholson and Sam Arkoff made money with The Beast with a Million Eyes, but not nearly as much as they would have liked. One problem was that the picture was booked as a second feature in double-bill situations. In those days the top half of a double-feature package always got the lion’s share of ticket sales. All Nicholson and Arkoff could hope for was a standard flat weekly rental rate of $100, $200, or, if they were really lucky, perhaps as much as $300. To get better payoffs than that, ARC would have to supply their own tailor-made double features.

  Jim Nicholson had recently come up with another sure-fire hit film title—Day the World Ended. Although he hadn’t yet worked out the details, Nicholson knew the story should deal with nuclear weapons and the threat of atomic annihilation, which would play on the public’s preoccupation with the cold war. In the 1950s the spectre of Communism reared its totalitarian head nearly every day as Americans read one report after another in their newspapers about nuclear weapons tests conducted by the USSR and the U.S. Fearing that another world war was imminent, many families started building backyard bomb shelters. School children practiced “duck and cover” safety routines in their classrooms during biweekly air raid drills. The possibility of atomic destruction was on everyone’s mind, and Day the World Ended was one of the earliest exploitation films to tap into the terror of the nuclear threat.

  Nicholson described his concept of the film to Lou Rusoff, a brother-in-law of Sam Arkoff, who was destined to write numerous scripts for ARC/AIP during the 1950s and 1960s. To keep production costs to a minimum, Nicholson decided the aftereffects of a nuclear world war would not be shown. Instead, a narrator would simply explain that the world had been disastrously blown up. Rusoff’s script would concentrate on the aftermath of “TD-Day”—Total Destruction Day—and its impact on a handful of American survivors. The picture’s single special effect would be a monster created by radioactive fallout.

  Like The Beast with a Million Eyes before it, Day the World Ended proved to be an inspired appellation. Who could resist a title like that? And this time ARC’s promotional campaign would feature an imaginative (rather than imaginary) title monster. Given the opportunity to pen the screenplay, Lou Rusoff concocted a fantasy formula that would serve as a kind of blueprint for later entries in the low-budget “atomic monster” sweepstakes. The action was straightforward, the plotline moved steadfastly from point A to point B without meandering aimlessly about, and the story even had a moral for warmongers of the 1950s. For its time, the film offered a chilling message that must have seemed well within the realm of near-future possibilities o
r probabilities. There were even a few crisply delineated characterizations, hackneyed though they might be. (But at least the film had characterizations, unlike The Beast with a Million Eyes, whose cast had seemed to be sleepwalking through the shallowest conceptualizations of Man, Woman, Girl, and Boy.)

  Day the World Ended was produced by Alex Gordon, a young movie fan who ran the Gene Autry British Fan Club while working in the publicity department of Renown Pictures in Great Britain.* Gordon moved to New York in November 1947 to work as an assistant booker for the Walter Reade chain of theaters and eventually became involved in the production end of a picture called The Lawless Rider. That film ran so far over budget Gordon required legal help to extricate himself from the monetary mess that threatened to squelch his newfound career as a feature film producer. His search for a lawyer who specialized in the entertainment field led him to Sam Arkoff’s doorstep. With Arkoff’s help, Gordon managed to get The Lawless Rider released through United Artists, eventually making enough money to pay off the film’s investors and resolve his legal differences.

  Coincidentally, Gordon met Arkoff’s future film production partner, Jim Nicholson, when he tried to interest Realart Pictures in a script called The Atomic Monster written by the infamous Edward D. Wood, Jr.† Someone at Realart appropriated Wood’s title and slapped it on a rerelease of the 1941 Lon Chaney Jr. film, Man Made Monster. When Gordon found out about it, he threatened to sue the company, which led to a meeting with Arkoff and Nicholson (who was still working for Realart at this time). Presumably all legal differences were resolved because Gordon was subsequently invited into the newly created ARC fold, which is how he got involved with Day the World Ended.