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

by Randy Palmer

  Paul thought it would be neat to add some life to the inanimate saucer in some fashion, so he inserted a tiny rotor under the plastic dome and wired it to spin a rod attached to two small circular mirrors. (The rotor was a commercially available novelty item advertised in youth-oriented publications of the time such as Boy’s Life and the Marvel and DC comic lines.) The spinning mirrors were designed to reflect the studio lights, giving off a stroboscopic effect.

  A duplicate spaceship was to be substituted for the pine model in a scene in which the craft self-destructs. This model was actually made out of painted cardboard and was scored to come apart in sections. Blaisdell planted a handful of cardboard “computer consoles” and bits of “machinery” inside, so that when the model was destroyed, there would be a scattering of debris to give the scene a greater sense of realism.

  Prior to the scheduled shooting of the saucer effects, Paul practiced maneuvering the pine model until he could get it to arc and glide gracefully using the fishpole and wire rig. With materials acquired from a model railroading hobby shop, he put together a miniature cow pasture, complete with orchard, trees, shrubbery, and a surrounding wooden fence. This was to become the saucer’s landing site.

  The manta-shaped spaceship that helped launch the Invasion of the Saucer Men was carved from pine and coated with over 100 layers of paint. The jeep parked in front of the saucer was added to this specially posed photograph (taken by Blaisdell) to give the craft a sense of dimension.

  But the day the scenes were scheduled to be shot, the designated special effects man decided he was the person who should handle the effects. This fellow insisted that while it was okay for Blaisdell to make monster costumes and spaceships, it wasn’t okay for him to do anything else. Naturally, Blaisdell objected—how was this guy going to learn to fly the saucer in a matter of minutes when it had taken its creator days to perfect the effect?—but the protest fell on deaf ears. It didn’t matter how much personal time Blaisdell had spent practicing, the bottom line was that the special effects person on this production was going to play pilot.

  Blaisdell threw up his hands and walked away, leaving “Mr. FX” to his own devices. Paul’s meticulously crafted farmland set was set aside because FX decided he had to build his own miniature. He yanked up fistfuls of ferns from the studio grounds, glued them to a piece of plywood, and covered it with a layer of dirt. “See how easy that was?” Mr. FX remarked proudly.

  There was virtually no time left to practice using the saucer’s wiring rig, but the effects specialist figured, How difficult can this be anyway? As the shot was being set up, the cameraman, Howard Anderson, noticed how uncoordinated Mr. FX appeared to be at handling the saucer. Anderson decided he had better overcrank the film to slow the image down; that would help eliminate some of FX’s more spastic movements. Unfortunately, while the high-speed filming smoothed out the saucer’s flight pattern, it also severely diluted the strobing effect caused by the rotating mirrors Paul had inserted in the plastic dome.

  Blaisdell (right) and Bob Burns with props from American International’s Invasion of the Saucer Men. Burns is holding the dismembered “seeing-eye hand” which had working hypodermic-fingernails and rotating eyeball. The Martian spaceship appears in the foreground (courtesy of Bob Burns).

  The final insult came when FX set the charges to blow up the cardboard saucer. There was no backup model, so the shot had to be done right the first time.

  “He was loading it with way too much explosive powder,” Bob Burns recalled, “and Paul told him so.” But FX refused to listen. While the effects coordinator was busy priming the model saucer for the explosion, Burns and Blaisdell decided they had better take cover. “With the amount of powder this guy was using, there was no telling how big that blast was going to be,” Burns said. They found some plywood containers in a corner of the studio and pushed them together to form a kind of fort in which they could hide.

  Bob Burns parties with one of the alien survivors of Invasion of the Saucer Men in this gag photo taken by Jackie Blaisdell at the Topanga Canyon home that served as Paul’s workshop for so many years. That’s Paul inside the creature costume, of course.

  When the film began rolling, Mr. FX set off the charges. The saucer was obliterated. It was blown apart along all the right seams, but the force was so powerful that all of the little “extras” Paul had tucked away inside blew past the camera much too quickly to be seen.†† Blaisdell later recalled that moment: “The special effects person planted the bombs and pulled the switch, and I can still remember the canopy going sky-high and landing on the other side of the room. I thought we’d never find it, and as a matter of fact I never did locate all the miniature consoles and electrical equipment I had put inside that thing.” Ruefully, Blaisdell remarked: “Everybody makes mistakes. Some people just seem to make more of them. Then again, there are some people who just don’t care.’’

  After it was decided to turn Saucer Men into a comedy, AIP asked Blaisdell to design some light-hearted, cartoon-type illustrations that could be used as background for the main titles. Paul went a step further and made up an entire book that opened to reveal the film’s title, with the stars’ names and the names and titles of the crew on subsequent pages. When the book is closed at the end of the film, the audience sees for the first time that the seeing-eye claw has been turning the pages all along.

  Perhaps because of the dubious way it portrayed American teens of the 1950s, with beer bottles and tongues alternately shoved between parted lips in parked cars, mainstream critics panned Invasion of the Saucer Men, sometimes vehemently. Some found the combination of twisted humor and horror bewildering. Were monsters that pumped their victims full of alcohol supposed to be scary? Were teenagers necking in the woods supposed to be funny? Even Variety cited the film’s “poor use of attempted comedy.” (How could anyone outside AIP’s inner circle know that the picture had not originally been intended as a spoof?)

  But the proof was in the pudding. Paired with AIP’s I Was a Teenage Werewolf, the film was a box-office winner from day one.

  Although the critics were not enthusiastic, the film remained one of Blaisdell’s favorite projects:

  I really liked Invasion of the Saucer Men. It was funny and goofy and it really took off once we stopped taking it so seriously. Years later I was able to use the Saucer Man head and the hand with the eyeball on it in a featurette I made called Filmland Monsters. When we did that, I was finally able to show off the seeing-eye claw and I was also able to add a little more “life” to the face of the Saucer Man. I just wish I’d been allowed a little more time to work with these things in the original picture because it would have made it that much better.

  * Blaisdell made the comment in a 1979 letter to the author. Possibly the intervening years had clouded his memory.

  † Filmland Monsters was an 8mm collection of “coming attraction” trailers from AIP films of the 1950s, interspersed with new footage of Blaisdell’s monsters, which was offered for sale to fans and collectors through Fantastic Monsters. Details appear in Chapter 14.

  ‡ In fact, Blaisdell created just such a device several years later when he produced a homemade horror movie called The Cliff Monster. See Chapter 14.

  ** Animal lovers, take cover: to induce the real bull to buck as if it were trying to dislodge the body of the Saucer Man, a “bucking spur” was attached to the animal’s abdomen. The burr irritated the bull’s flesh, which is what made it buck. (The device is routinely used in rodeo shows for “bucking bronco” stunts.) When the bull dropped to the ground as if stunned by juice from the Saucer Man’s needle-tipped fingers, it had been drugged. (Look closely and you can see its eyes roll back in its head.) These kinds of tricks could not be employed by today’s filmmakers, of course, but in 1957 the SPCA did not closely supervise the use of animals in independent films such as those made by AIP.

  †† Interested viewers will be able to spot a glimpse of these miniature “computer consoles” by fram
e-advancing a video copy of Invasion of the Saucer Men.

  9

  Bert Gordon Strikes Back

  Attack of the Puppet People—man oh man, what a nightmare that was, in its own lovely way!

  —Paul Blaisdell

  Bert I. Gordon never seemed to tire of making movies about macroscopic monsters. Whether they were enlarged insects, overgrown arachnids, or plain ol’ pumped-up people, Bert’s big guys continued trampling drive-ins from coast to coast. And as long as the formula worked, why fiddle with it?

  When Gordon decided to produce a picture called The Fantastic Puppet People, the prescription wasn’t really being changed, it was just being inverted. Look through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars and the Colossal Man would become the Puppet People.

  AIP liked Gordon’s latest brainstorm. It was simple, it was formulaic, it was easy for Sam Arkoff to comprehend. With the company’s backing, Gordon hired George Worthing Yates to write a screenplay based on Gordon’s original outline. Yates had built a respectable track record in the sci-fi and horror film field, developing the story line for Warner Bros.’ 1953 gi-ant picture Them! and writing screenplays for producer George Pal (The Conquest of Space), Ray Harryhausen, and Charles H. Schneer (It Came from Beneath the Sea, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers). Gordon liked Yates’s work so much he would reemploy the writer to work on his next creature-feature, The Spider, as well as an off-the-wall ghost story called Tormented.

  The Fantastic Puppet People, retitled Attack of the Puppet People by Jim Nicholson prior to its release as part of a standard double-feature package from AIP, eschewed the traditional etiologic “presto change-o” culprit, atomic radiation, in favor of something new—a shrinking ray developed by a doll manufacturer whose products are incredibly lifelike.

  Mr. Franz (John Hoyt) runs a one-man business called “Dolls Inc.” He hires Sally Reynolds (doll-like June Kenny) to replace his departed secretary Janet (Jean Moorehead), who is actually one of a half-dozen real human beings who have been shrunk down by Franz’s incredible invention. Sally befriends Bob Westley (John Agar), a St. Louis–based distributor of doll equipment. He takes Sally on a date (they go to a drive-in theater to see The Amazing Colossal Man), and before long they’re discussing marriage. The morning they plan to leave for St. Louis, Bob tells Franz that he and Sally are getting hitched; she won’t be returning to work. When Bob fails to turn up at Sally’s apartment, she stops by Dolls Inc., where Franz sadly informs her that Bob has already left for St. Louis by himself. Later Sally discovers a ten-inch replica of Bob, perfect to the last detail, encased in a plastic preservation tube. She becomes convinced that this is the real Bob, and that Mr. Franz has somehow made him into a real living doll.

  For Attack of the Puppet People, Paul and Jackie were asked to provide numerous realistic props that were either six times larger or six times smaller than life-size in order to maintain the miniature illusion as the camera’s point-of-view switched between normal-size humans and the Puppet People. Here members of the cast (left to right, Hal Bogart, Laurie Mitchell, Jean Moorehead, Ken Miller, June Kenny, John Agar) are surrounded by a number of oversized Blaisdell props. (The telephone was not created by the Blaisdells but was provided by the phone company.)

  She visits the police station and tells Sgt. Peterson (Jack Kosslyn) about Dolls Inc., Franz, the Bob-doll, and a host of similar dolls kept in a locked case; but when Peterson checks out her story, Franz obligingly displays a container chock-full of plastic Bob-dolls. “I make all my dolls in the likeness of people I know,” Franz explains. Convinced that Bob has simply run out on Sally, Peterson drops the inquiry and leaves. Franz wastes little time in aiming his shrinking ray at the disobedient Sally. Such a disappointment as a personal secretary.

  Sally regains consciousness next to a telephone of gigantic proportions. After Franz explains how he has miniaturized her with some special equipment of his own design, he wakes Bob and a host of other puppet people, all of whom he keeps in a state of suspended animation inside airtight plastic tubes. Stan, Georgia, Mac, and Janet have become used to their plight and accept it as a condition of their new life, but Bob is determined to return them all to normal size. When Emil (Michael Mark), an old vaudeville performer, stops by to see Franz, Bob grabs the opportunity to mastermind an escape plan. But there’s not enough time, and Franz returns to the workshop before they can make any real progress.

  Later Sgt. Peterson turns up at Dolls Inc. to ask Franz about the missing Sally Reynolds. That night Franz determines it’s time to get rid of his puppet people, as well as himself, before the police can figure out what’s really going on. He takes his miniature captives to a theater for a special “going away party,” but they manage to escape when Franz is distracted by a night watchman (Hank Patterson, Mr. Ziffell of TV’s mid-1960s no-brainer, “Green Acres’’). Bob and Sally escape and make their way to Dolls Inc., where they use Franz’s miniaturizing equipment to reenlarge themselves to normal size. As they leave to tell the police what’s been happening, Franz pleads, “Please don’t leave me … I’ll be alone.”

  While producer-director Bert Gordon handled all the photographic effects and matte exposures which married a normal-sized John Hoyt with miniature versions of John Agar and the supporting cast, Paul and Jackie Blaisdell assumed the responsibility for building most of the oversized props that were needed to make the puppet people appear comparatively tiny. Most of these props were single items, but there were a few that had to be reproduced twice, once for scenes with the puppet people using oversized props and a second time for scenes with John Hoyt, which required miniature versions. Maintaining the proper ratio between the two sets of props caused more than a few problems for Blaisdell. “We either had to make props that were six times larger than life-size, or six times smaller, or both,” Blaisdell observed, “because there were these scenes where John Hoyt took the props back from the puppet people. It was all a bit confusing, believe me.”

  Props that were built in large and small versions included a bottle of champagne, an accompanying champagne glass, a napkin, serving tray, briefcase, and the plastic tubes in which the puppet people slept. The “people” inside the tubes handled by John Hoyt were actually photographs. During the filming Hoyt had to make sure he kept the tubes properly aimed at the camera lens, otherwise the illusion would be spoiled.

  All the other props were oversized versions used in scenes with the actors playing the puppet people. These included scissors, typing paper (complete with a “Dolls, Inc.” letterhead) that was turned into a paper airplane glider, ball of string, ruler, knife, paper clip, cup and saucer, cans of “paint” and “glue,” matchbox, bar of “Dove” soap, coffee can, oily rag, chocolate candy box top with the legend “Miniature Chocolates by Larry,” paintbrush, lipstick, razor, pencil, several nails, and a cardboard box with a mailing label. There was also a giant version of the shrinking machine’s control box, used for a single scene in which John Agar attempts to reenlarge one of the puppet people.

  John Agar (right) and Hal Bogart prepare to write a message to signal for help in this scene from Bert I. Gordon’s 1958 film, Attack of the Puppet People. All the oversized props seen here were created by Paul and Jackie Blaisdell. The giant sheet of stationery reads: DOLLS INCORPORATED, 502 Tilford Building, Los Angeles 36, California.

  Jackie designed the bar of Dove soap, which was authentic down to the trademark. She also made the cup and saucer. Paul designed the other props, except the giant telephone, which was supplied by the local AT&T exchange.

  In addition to these props, it was necessary to construct two versions of the Jekyll-Hyde marionette which turned up in John Hoyt’s hands near the film’s climax. Hoyt actually operated the small string marionette himself. A full-size model, used for shots featuring John Agar and June Kenny, was operated by an assistant stationed up in the rafters. Blaisdell made the regular marionette out of wood; the life-size model was primarily a wire frame outfitted with appropriate garb. Both sizes includ
ed a Dr. Jekyll face which just happened to resemble Blaisdell himself, not too surprising considering that the visage was created from one of Paul’s latex “blanks.” For the large model, Blaisdell built a fiberglass Dr. Jekyll head. He also designed the Mr. Hyde mask, which can only be glimpsed fleetingly in the finished film. (A better shot of it turns up in How to Make a Monster, covered later in this chapter.)

  A composite shot from Attack of the Puppet People. Blaisdell created the giant mailing carton, complete with mailing label and handwritten address.

  There had been other movies about miniaturized people, notably Dr. Cyclops (1939) with Albert Dekker, Tod Browning’s Devil Doll (1936), and Universal’s The Incredible Shrinking Man. Even so, AIP thought the film was fresh and exciting. Bert Gordon’s effects worked better here than they had in The Amazing Colossal Man, and with the giant props provided by the Blaisdells, the film ended up looking better than many 1950s science-fiction programmers. Even Variety gave a nod toward the filmmakers when their reviewer “Powe” admitted that the effects in Puppet People—“basically a reworking of the Pygmalion legend”—were both “ingenious and intriguing.”

  For the first time, Jackie Blaisdell received screen credit alongside her husband as one-half of the team providing “special designs” for the film. Indicative of the status of the majority of effects artists working for AIP and other independent film companies in the 1950s, the Blaisdells’ credit came under that of key grip Buzz Gloson. Interestingly, Bert Gordon took bows for “special technical effects” in addition to his standard writing-producing-directing, and his wife Flora grabbed an “assistant technical effects” credit.