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

by Randy Palmer

  Manning’s fiancée, Carol Forrest (Cathy Downs), learns of the accident and rushes to the hospital to be by his side. But when she arrives, an army spokesperson tells her that Manning has been moved to a different location for “security reasons.” Repeated questions only result in typical army stonewalling, so Carol tracks down the surgeon in charge of the case. Under pressure to reveal the truth about Manning’s condition, Dr. Lindstrom finally admits that radiation from the explosion has caused Manning to mutate into a giant. In effect, Manning has developed a bizarre form of cancer: his cells have started reproducing exponentially and his body is manufacturing new tissue even while the old cells refuse to die. The result is that Manning is growing proportionately at the rate of several feet per day. While Lindstrom’s team of medical experts feverishly search for a way to halt the process, they learn one unexplainable fact: Glenn’s heart is growing at only half the rate of the rest of his tissues. It will eventually collapse from the strain of supporting an ever-expanding body, and Manning will die.

  Manning at last regains consciousness. At first he is unable to understand why everything around him appears disproportionately tiny. When he picks up the receiver of a diminutive telephone and hears the operator’s voice on the line, Manning abruptly realizes that the telephone and everything else around him are not miniature replicas, but normal size objects. As the terrible truth dawns on him, Manning begins screaming in abject terror at his surroundings.

  Carol tries her best to offer her fiancé hope for the future, but the giant is rapidly succumbing to a madness induced by latent effects of radiation poisoning. Housed in a circus tent like some kind of grotesque sideshow freak, Manning eventually escapes and ravages the countryside. While Dr. Lindstrom organizes a search party, his assistant, Dr. Coulter (Larry Thor), announces his discovery of an antidote that should be able to reverse Manning’s condition. By injecting a sulfur-hydrogen compound directly into the giant’s bone marrow, one can short-circuit the growth process. A return to normal dimensions could later be effected by high-frequency stimulation of the brain’s pituitary gland, but in order for the treatment to be successful it would have to be administered without delay.

  Coulter begins making the necessary rescue mission preparations, which include supervising the construction of an oversized hypodermic syringe which will be used to inject the growth antidote, while a helicopter reconnaissance team begins a systematic search for Manning over the Nevada desert. Now standing nearly 60 feet tall, and with his mind deteriorating almost by the minute, Manning begins destroying Las Vegas landmarks. Finally he is distracted by the buzz of the approaching choppers, which lure him into the Nevada desert.

  Dr. Lindstrom tries to reason with Manning as Major Carter (Scott Peters) readies the enormous hypodermic syringe which will be used to inject the sulfur-hydrogen solution into the ankle bone. Balancing the huge device between themselves, Lindstrom and Carter rush toward Manning and jam the needle home. Manning rages at the pain. He plucks the stinging syringe from his ankle and strikes back, throwing it like a spear at his tormentors. Carter is killed instantly when the needle pierces his heart. A moment later Manning reaches down and scoops up Carol into his palm, carrying her in the direction of Boulder Dam.

  The Amazing Colossal Man (Glenn Langan) may well wonder who did the redecorating during his enforced hospitalization. Most of the miniature knick knacks were manufactured by Paul and Jackie Blaisdell.

  Dr. Lindstrom radios word to the ground troops, who station themselves strategically around the dam. As soon as Manning puts Carol safely down, the army sharpshooters open fire, mortally wounding the giant, who topples into the churning waters of Boulder Dam and is quickly lost from sight forever.

  “Forever” isn’t quite the right word to use, because AIP brought the Colossal Man back in a 1958 sequel, War of the Colossal Beast, also directed by Bert I. Gordon. This time around Dean Parkin took over the role of Col. Manning, who escapes apparent death in the waters of Boulder Dam and turns up across the border in Mexico, looking rather bruised and battered and a helluva lot more pissed off than before. Although Paul Blaisdell did not contribute to War of the Colossal Beast during production, a few of the props he designed for The Amazing Colossal Man turned up in the sequel’s flashback sequences.

  Designing and manufacturing serviceable miniature props, Blaisdell discovered, could result in just as many headaches as the construction of a typical movie monster costume. According to The Amazing Colossal Man script, only a handful of props would be required because Bert I. Gordon was planning on executing the majority of special effects himself in postproduction. As he was reading through the script, however, Blaisdell suddenly realized how much of a headache designing the props from scratch was going to be. Because the story’s hook was that the Colossal Man suffered from rapid, unending growth, the relative sizes of the miniatures would constantly be changing. That meant making not just one version of each prop, but two, three, four or more. Once again it seemed AIP was reaching for more than what might be possible, given the tight budget and schedule.

  As it turned out, there was really no need to design different configurations of each and every prop. The economy-minded Gordon thought it would be effective enough to simply tell the viewer, via secondary character dialogue, how much bigger the Colossal Man was growing each day. This meant that Blaisdell would only be required to produce a single version of each prop. Still, it took nearly six weeks for him and Jackie to finish everything the assignment required.

  Blaisdell had been a model airplane enthusiast for years and owned quite an extensive collection of World War I and WWII replicas. His ability to piece together the miniature frameworks that were the basis for such high-end model kits would come in handy while working on Gordon’s film. Since so much of the picture consisted of dialogue, there were really only two major sequences which called for the use of miniatures. The first sequence would begin with Manning discovering his colossal predicament and escaping from the army base; the second sequence would come near the conclusion of the film, with the giant stalking the streets of Las Vegas.

  For the first sequence, Blaisdell designed a number of miniature replicas of everyday items such as a newspaper, telephone, pillow, sheets, chest of drawers, water pitcher, barrel, and “big top” circus tent. The tent was merely a piece of tarpaulin cut to size and shape and used as a background for the actor to play against. Most of the other props were made either from plastic, balsa wood, or pine. Paul especially enjoyed working with pine because of its softness and its natural tendency to yield easily to his sculpting tools. The miniature chest of drawers and barrel were both fashioned from pine, as well as the desktop telephone, which was painted flat black and shellacked to give the appearance of plastic.

  Existing miniaturized versions of the Bible and a water pitcher were located at local novelty shops, but Blaisdell did make the diminutive newspaper which carries the banner headline, “Man Lives Through Plutonium Blast!” The typeface was produced by using press-on letters—the kind available at many art supply shops—which were affixed to tiny sheets of real newsprint paper.

  The bed on which Manning slept was actually a cot mattress, but Jackie supplied pillows made from standard cloth material stitched over pieces of foam rubber which had been trimmed to the appropriate size and shape.

  For the Colossal Man’s rampage through the streets of downtown Vegas, Paul and Jackie built miniature versions of famous casino landmarks which the actor could destroy on cue. Renditions of the revolving high-heeled Silver Slipper, the Royal Nevada King’s Crown, the Sands Motel sign, and the Frontier Cowboy were all designed to be appropriately manhandled by Glenn Langan during the picture’s climax. The Silver Slipper and Royal Nevada crown were, like many of the props that came out of the Blaisdell workshop, fashioned out of pine, coated with latex rubber, and given a paint job to match the real thing as closely as possible. The crown contained reflective bits of colored plastic which were added to suggest jewels.


  The construction of the Sands sign involved significantly more work. Using pine wood, each letter was painstakingly carved to shape and buffed to remove sharp edges. They were then coated with a special reflective paint that mimicked the color and intensity of a neon light display. The letters stood between two and three feet tall and were screwed onto vertical support beams arranged in a latticework and painted gray to simulate cement struts. The whole thing was prescored so that when Langan took a swipe at it, the display would collapse. An added sense of realism was achieved by scoring only the top portions of the letters so that when the sign was destroyed, portions of the lettering would remain standing. (Incidentally, the cream-colored convertible which the Colossal Man tosses through the air like a metallic frisbee actually came out of a commercial kit. Blaisdell only customized the model car for the film; he did not create it from scratch.)

  The Frontier Cowboy proved easier to build than the Sands Hotel sign because the entire display could be carved from a single piece of balsa. By painting the image directly onto the wood, the actual Vegas landmark could be convincingly realized. Like the Sands miniature, the Frontier Cowboy was prescored so that it could easily be torn apart by Langan.

  For the scene where Manning unearths a palm tree and throws it at a crowd of onlookers, Blaisdell created a miniature that stood more than five feet tall. This remarkably realistic-looking prop was developed around a balsa-and-pine base that was covered with foam rubber painted to resemble tree bark. Leaves were fashioned out of pure latex because the consistency of the rubber made a convincingly “leafy” illusion. (Blaisdell’s recipe for fashioning tree bark from a simple concoction of foam and latex would be put to good use in an Allied Artists horror picture also made in 1957.)

  Director Bert I. Gordon is responsible for this composite shot of the Amazing Colossal Man (Glenn Langan) and a seven-person “crowd” cringing in terror outside the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada.

  The single most impressive prop Blaisdell designed for The Amazing Colossal Man was the oversized hypodermic syringe used to inject Col. Manning with the chemical antidote near the film’s finale. Blaisdell later recalled:

  I designed it in such a way that the needle would slip back into the barrel when it impacted against anything solid. When Bert Gordon said it was time to shoot that scene, I shut my eyes and hoped the darned thing would work the way it was supposed to.

  As described in the script, the super-syringe stood nearly as tall as an average-sized man and measured about 20 inches in diameter. Blaisdell did even better: his finished prop was over 6 feet in length and measured 25 inches in diameter. The entire mechanism, consisting of an outer shell and sliding interior plunger, was constructed from Lucite plastic and plastic tubing which Blaisdell obtained through his usual contacts at the Frye Plastic Co. Together, both pieces barely weighed over three pounds.

  Blaisdell scored the outside of the syringe and added hand-painted calibrations which counted off units of measure—a typical Blaisdell detail that can’t clearly be seen in the finished feature. The two-foot-long needle was made from a hollow aluminum rod that telescoped into the barrel on contact with a solid surface.

  The giant hypodermic actually worked. According to Bob Burns, it could hold 5 quarts of liquid and was able to shoot a stream of water 25 feet. Although the effect was not used in the film, Blaisdell went the extra mile to make the hypo operable because, if nothing else, it gave him personal satisfaction. He, Jackie, Bob Burns, and Burns’s wife, Kathy, took turns using the the Amazing Colossal Syringe as a kind of super water pistol, hosing each other down back at the Blaisdell home after the filming was over. Paul eventually made a present of it to Bert I. Gordon, who maintained a collection of props from his pictures.

  Unfortunately, no matter how realistic or detailed Blaisdell designed his props to be, they—along with the majority of the film’s photographic effects—suffered from budgetary constraints and Gordon’s insistence on cutting corners when it came time to do the all-important in-camera effects. According to Mark McGee, author of Fast and Furious: the Story of American International Pictures, Gordon created the Colossal Man’s rampage through the streets of Las Vegas by interweaving three separate elements: slide photographs, live actors, and superimpositions. Because there was not enough money in the budget to rope off sections of downtown Vegas for the purpose of setting up special shots for the film, Gordon simply had photographs taken of those Vegas streets that looked the emptiest during early morning hours. The slides were then enlarged through a photographic process and rear-projected onto a special screen. A small crowd of extras was hired to stand in front of the screen and react in mock terror to the figure of the Colossal Man, which was superimposed into the frame as a separate element. This method of sandwiching the Colossal Man between a crowd of extras and back-projected stock shots resulted in a final photographic montage that, although lacking in quality, at least managed to get the point across. It is one of the oldest photographic tricks in the book. (Gordon also cut corners by using only one traveling matte for scenes combining the giant Col. Manning with normal-size live actors. This resulted in a semitransparent image of the Colossal Man whenever he was placed against a dark background. The same problem plagued Gordon’s follow-up, War of the Colossal Beast, as well as The Cyclops, a film he directed for Allied Artists which beat The Amazing Colossal Man into theaters by a month.)

  The Amazing Colossal Man had strong box-office “legs.” It was destined to become one of American-International’s biggest money-makers when it was released in September 1957, just in time to take advantage of the new school season. Teenagers wanted a nice, cozy place to take their dates on Saturday nights—preferably someplace where they could do a little making out without being noticed. What better place than the local drive-in which happened to be showing the latest AIP double feature?

  Colossal Man’s cofeature was a little something called Cat Girl, one of AIP’s early coproductions with Great Britain. Lou Rusoff envisioned it as a low-budget spinoff of the famous 1944 Val Lewton production starring Simone Simon, Cat People. The picture probably would never have been made if AIP hadn’t had an eye on the growing foreign film market. Sam Arkoff had determined that by loaning out a scriptwriter or director and perhaps one or two actors to make a film overseas and agreeing to finance a portion of the budget, AIP would be able to claim 50 percent ownership of the finished feature, giving the company distribution rights throughout most of the Western Hemisphere. This translated into a minimal monetary risk for AIP and promised eventual returns that far outweighed the original investment. This method of coproducing new feature films would eventually result in some of the genre’s most highly regarded foreign-made features, notably Mario Bava’s Black Sunday and Black Sabbath. (It would also result in an avalanche of seedy sword-and-sandal schlock imported from Italy during the early years of the 1960s.)

  As part of their first coproduction deal, AIP sent Rusoff and his Cat Girl script to a British production company run by Nat Cohen called Anglo-Amalgamated. A budget was approved and the film was made with British actress Barbara Shelley in the lead role and Alfred Shaughnessy directing. AIP’s expenditure was about $25,000.

  Rusoff’s original script was an out-and-out thriller about a woman who takes on the form of a leopard when provoked, and AIP was expecting the finished film to pretty much resemble their typical mid–1950s output. According to Barbara Shelley, Shaughnessy decided to rewrite the script, however, turning the lead character from a “were-cat” into a run-of-the-mill psychopath who only thought she could change into a fanged, feline fiend. Shelley thought that Shaughnessy’s changes improved Rusoff’s script immeasurably. Her character became a great deal more complex, and the story itself gained a certain respectability it had been lacking, at least in the director’s opinion. (No doubt it also made Shelley feel as if she was working on a more important film. Cat Girl was her first English feature. Previously she had worked only in Italy.)

 
By changing the focus of Rusoff’s screenplay and dispensing with many of the horrific elements, Shaughnessy made the story into nothing more than a psychological nightmare. His revision of the script wreaked havoc with AIP’s plans to get the picture released in a hurry, though it’s doubtful he knew or cared what AIP thought. In the rewritten version, Leonora Brandt (Barbara Shelley) believes herself to be the victim of an ancient family curse that extends back through time 700 years. When her uncle dies, the terrible legacy is activated, and Leonora sees herself taking on the characteristics of a leopard. She learns that her husband has been unfaithful and mentally wills his death at the claws of a great cat. The following day his mutilated body is discovered by police.

  Dr. Brian Marlowe (Robert Aryes) tries to convince Leonora that the family curse she fears is so much hogwash. “This is all in your mind,” he admonishes. But when an escaped leopard is killed by an automobile in the film’s climax, Leonora perishes simultaneously. Was she the victim of a hallucination or an actual curse?

  Shaughnessy’s Cat Girl is appropriately moody but too low-key and slow moving for its own good. When Arkoff and Nicholson saw a print of the finished film, chaos erupted. Arkoff had been expecting to see a standard monster melodrama, but there were only shadowy psychological shudders instead of the good old-fashioned “creature” comforts to which he was accustomed. No one was interested in subtlety from Shaughnessy, and Arkoff told him so. “We can’t even release this picture, it’s so awful,” Arkoff complained. “Where’s the monster?” (Arkoff’s insistence that every horror movie produced by AIP ought to have a monster in it somewhere prevailed at least through 1960, when Roger Corman directed his first Edgar Allan Poe adaptation. House of Usher featured Vincent Price, cobwebs, fog, and lots of foreboding atmosphere, but—“Where’s the monster?” Arkoff wanted to know. Corman added a line to the script to appease his boss: “The house lives!” Price whispers at one point in the film, thus making the house itself the story’s “monster.”)