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

by Randy Palmer

  Making the eyes “blink” on camera involved the use of tiny lights attached to the headpiece at the corner of each eye. Connecting wires ran around the head and down the back of the costume to a portable battery. At the director’s cue Blaisdell switched the battery on and off, causing the lights to flash. The low-wattage bulbs provided just enough light to reflect off the white paint of the Ghost’s plastic eyeballs. With Blaisdell stationed in a darkened hallway or closetlike secret entrance of the mansion, the flashing lights made it appear that the creature was opening and closing its eyes. The effect worked remarkably well.

  The blinking eyes were the only special effect Blaisdell built into the Dragstrip Hollow Ghost, but director William Hole was much more open to suggestions for trick shots such as the blinking eyes. Had he been at the helm of The She-Creature or Invasion of the Saucer Men, there is little doubt that the attributes Blaisdell had built into those costumes, such as the lunch hooks, the slapping tail, and the seeing-eye hand, would have been featured more in the final cut of the film.

  The filming of The Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow turned out to be much less arduous than was the case for most of AIP’s other films. It was made in seven days. The director didn’t want Paul to swim out in the ocean or have the monster do things it wasn’t capable of, no one came down with the flu, no one asked just who the hell Blaisdell was, and no one asked him to change the size of the creature’s cranium. The only objection Paul had to the picture came during the showdown, when the Ghost’s identity was revealed. Hole wanted Blaisdell to act just the opposite of his movie monsters. Instead of coming on strong with a big, booming voice, he wanted Paul shrunk down inside the costume, speaking like a browbeaten worm in a whiny voice that sounded as if it had “loser” written all over it.

  Bob Burns still finds the film disturbing:

  I can’t stand to watch the end of that picture because it really was prophetic. The lines they gave Paul hit too close to home. It wasn’t ad-libbed; that’s exactly how it was written in Lou Rusoff’s script. While they were making it, I don’t think anyone was really conscious that an era was ending. And I don’t think Paul realized at the time he made the film just how true those lines he recited would turn out to be. In a way, AIP really did discard him. The Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow was his last movie, and it saddens me to watch him reciting those lines of dialogue, all in the spirit of good fun, in the spirit of just making one more monster movie, and never knowing that they were really through with him. I think later on Paul realized what had happened, and probably felt that, in a way, they were making fun of him. I mean, what Lou Rusoff wrote in that script was just too true to life. He had made all these pictures for AIP, and they didn’t use him in Horrors of the Black Museum or anything else that came out after that. It’s really terrible to watch.

  By the time Paul went to work on The Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow Bob Burns had been drafted into the army. He was stationed in San Antonio, Texas, where he did some television appearances at the local CBS affiliate. Having picked up the rudiments of monster-making from Blaisdell over the years, Burns was able to construct his own budget monster costumes and props, which he put to good use at CBS. Like most other big-city stations across the U.S., Channel 9 in San Antonio was running Universal’s syndicated “Shock Theatre” package of fright films, and Burns would turn up during Shock’s commercial breaks, taunting the viewers with wisecracks about the movies while wearing one of his newly made costumes. “If they were running Werewolf of London or one of Lon Chaney, Jr.’s Wolfman pictures, then I’d come out dressed as a werewolf,” Burns explained. “If they ran a mummy movie, I’d come out wearing a mummy costume. It was pretty straightforward stuff, but it went a long way toward keeping me sane while I was in the army.”

  It was while Burns was in San Antonio that he heard about Paul’s latest film project. Blaisdell often sent his friend “care” packages of monster-related goodies, including photos from the latest films being made at AIP. Burns opened a package from “Cuddles” and, seeing the 8x10 glossy photo of Paul in his Dragstrip Hollow Ghost garb, figured that AIP was making a sequel to The She-Creature. Paul’s accompanying letter disabused him of that notion pretty quickly, however. “If you get a chance to see this stinker on base, don’t tell anybody you know me,” Blaisdell pleaded. Burns could only shake his head when he found out Paul had pulled Cuddles’s costume out of mothballs once more at Sam Arkoff’s request.

  The Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow was panned by both the critics and the public. The fans thought they deserved better. Within a year AIP would reply by giving them better movies, but audiences wouldn’t be seeing Paul Blaisdell any more. At least not for a long while, and never again on the silver screen.

  Blaisdell at least had some kind words for Jim Nicholson:

  I never thought The Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow was as bad as most people seemed to think. Hell, there were lots worse pictures made, but some of the critics sounded like Judith Crist, that snotty critic who reviewed films for TV Guide. If the critics could have seen some of the budgets we had to work with, they would’ve flipped. And if they had been film producers trying to work with those kinds of budgets … forget it.

  One thing that Jim Nicholson tried to do at AIP was keep in mind Shakespeare’s axiom of “a simple story, simply told.” That was a general kind of motto, if you will, for all of the AIP films, and Jim tried to make sure that his producers and directors and, really, just about everybody involved with motion pictures at AIP in those days kept that motto in mind day by day. If you think back on it and look at some of the pictures that were made at American International, you’ve got to admit that they tried. And in spite of all the work I did myself on the monster designs for those pictures, I wouldn’t have looked half as interesting if I hadn’t had the help of a helluva lot of good teammates, both on stage and off.

  13

  Beyond the B’s

  Young people didn’t want monster movies anymore. They wanted movies that they were more oriented to—beaching, surfing, stuff like that. The whole style changed. And styles do change. They change in the motion picture industry just like they do anywhere else. You went from something like Day the World Ended to something like The Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow. It became a comedy, a semimusical, it started featuring young people more and more, and finally you went to movies like Beach Party and stuff like that. Little by little, the monster movie was phased out.

  —Paul Blaisdell

  American International didn’t stop making scary movies as society entered the turbulent new times of the 1960s; it just started making them differently. The new science-fiction and horror productions were more colorful and enjoyed healthier budgets. Pictures like The Angry Red Planet and House of Usher took the place of It Conquered the World and How to Make a Monster. The days of the humanoid monsters at which Blaisdell excelled were dying. They wouldn’t return for almost twenty years, until 1979, when Alien single-handedly resurrected the entire monster movie genre.

  But AIP expected to keep Blaisdell employed. It had a number of exciting projects on the drawing board—bigger-budgeted, full-color productions that held the promise of new work, new horizons. George Worthing Yates, who had worked with Bert I. Gordon and wrote The Spider, Attack of the Puppet People, and War of the Colossal Beast, was now a head producer at AIP. Yates had been playing around with a story idea that combined space travel and time travel with early American colonialists who are discovered living in the future on Mars. These “Martians” decide it’s high-time to return to Earth and take possession of the motherland. A futuristic war breaks out between two peoples descended from the same stock, each battling it out for inter-planetary supremacy.

  Jim Nicholson asked Paul to do a series of concept sketches for the film. “I consulted with George, I consulted with Nick, and I went to work on the production illustrations,” Blaisdell recalled. “Everyone was happy with them because I had designed things in such a way that nobody in the prop department or the costume depar
tment would have any trouble reproducing them down to the last detail.” Some of the sketches were done in full color because AIP’s new sci-fi extravaganza was going to be filmed in color and wide-screen. Many of Paul’s illustrations depicted futuristic kinds of fighting equipment such as atomic-powered guns, nuclear tanks, and enormous machines that would be used to take over the world.

  AIP had been doing coproductions with England for several years now, releasing pictures like Cat Girl, The Headless Ghost, and Circus of Horrors, and before long it would import Mario Bava’s directorial debut, Black Sunday, as well as a host of Italian-made, sword-and-sandal fantasy epics, including a series of Goliath films. There was even a Danish deal for a picture called Reptilicus. Japanese coproductions were just around the corner, with pictures like Godzilla vs. the Thing (Godzilla vs. Mothra) and Destroy All Monsters from Toho studios. The film written by Yates was to be the first such Japanese coproduction. “Contracts were drawn up, and everybody seemed happy with the arrangements,” said Blaisdell. But the picture was never made, and Paul never found out why. He later commented:

  The way George wrote it, and the way I discussed it with him, this wasn’t going to be just a science-fiction “slam-banger” with ray guns; it involved the psychology of a people that had remained in the same environment versus people who had learned to live with a harsh environment. It was more like a Ray Bradbury story, in spite of all the things that I designed for it. George really wrote a little feeling into it, and of course I did the Buck Rogers bit, but that was just the trimming. Although, frankly—I’m not going to put myself down—I thought the trimmings looked pretty darned good. Unfortunately, no one ever got to see them.

  AIP had already registered the projected film’s title as In the Year 2889. Rather than discard that title after the production was canceled (Arkoff couldn’t stand the thought of paying for something and not using it), AIP slapped it on a completely different picture made a few years later by hack director Larry Buchanan. (Buchanan’s tenuous connection to Paul Blaisdell is discussed in Chapter 15.)

  Another picture American International had on the production slate was Strato-Fin. By this time AIP had already released Roger Corman’s House of Usher and The Pit and the Pendulum, as well as a bigger-budgeted picture called Master of the World, which was actually a combined adaptation of Jules Verne’s “Robur the Conqueror” and “Master of the World.” The returns on these new productions were better than Arkoff and Nicholson could have imagined, and now they were thinking big. Strato-Fin was going to expand on the central idea of Master of the World by turning its flying airship into a submersible as well. According to Blaisdell, the concept of the film was supplied by two young men who were trying to break into the film business.

  “They had the help of an artist friend of theirs, and they commissioned Jackie and I to make a three-dimensional model of the Strato-Fin,” said Blaisdell. “It was really a kind of rocket-submarine that was capable of going underwater, sailing on the surface, or soaring clear into outer space.” In fact, Jackie did most of the work on the model, which was sculpted out of pine and balsa wood. Blaisdell thought the finished product resembled nothing so much as an enormous shark. “It was sleek and gray, complete with a gray topside and white underbelly,” he described, “and when it ‘came to life’ it released rockets and guided missiles.”

  A cutaway view of Paul Blaisdell’s model for AIP’s unmade fantasy film, Strato-Fin. Interestingly enough, a few years after AIP scuttled the project, the Toho Company of Japan produced a picture using a very similar concept called Atragon (courtesy of Bob Burns).

  Paul also designed a second version of the Strato-Fin model which could be photographed underwater. “It was done with a light box and a smaller model of the ship. It was very detailed and looked really nice,” he said, “but the whole time we were designing it I kept thinking to myself, this just ain’t gonna fly. Let’s face it, undersea submarines that turn into rocketships are as old as Flash Gordon and Big-Little Books. There was really nothing new about it, except the concept that it would look like a shark.” In fact, AIP pulled the plug on Strato-Fin before it got off the launching pad, but at least Paul and Jackie got paid for the work they put into the project. They even got to keep the finished models for their own collection after AIP decided to abandon the film.

  A few years later, AIP did in fact coproduce a film with Toho that was strikingly similar in concept to Strato-Fin. Entitled Atragon, this 1965 release concerned an ancient underwater civilization that wages war with modern man. Japanese scientists develop a super rocket-submarine that can fly, float, dive, and burrow underground, and it becomes the “nuclear weapon” that ends the amphibious assault once and for all. All the trademarks of Strato-Fin were there. Blaisdell never saw the Japanese film but admitted the concept sounded suspiciously similar to the picture he was supposed to work on.

  On the Italian front, AIP began importing a series of sword-and-sandal fantasies to cash in on the strong-man phenomenon that had sprung up with the U.S. release of Hercules and Hercules Unchained, starring Steve Reeves. AIP named their muscle man Goliath, and he appeared in the guises of Mark Forest and Gordon Scott in pictures like Goliath and the Vampires and Goliath and the Sins of Babylon. Jim Nicholson asked Blaisdell to produce a concept painting for the first in the series, Goliath and the Dragon (1960). Paul, not knowing that the title character would be played by Mark Forest, based the look of his barbarian on the face of Steve Reeves. His green-scaled behemoth, with its razor-edged fins, fangs, snakelike eyes, and horned “sideburns,” combined elements of traditional dragon designs with typical “Blaisdellian” features that made the creature uniquely his own.

  Goliath and the Dragon proved popular enough to generate two sequels, but Blaisdell was involved with neither. He did do a production illustration for another straightforward fantasy film, this one inspired by the success of Ray Harryhausen’s 1958 classic, The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad. While Harryhausen was busy working on a follow-up (Jason and the Argonauts), the young Jim Danforth, a very talented stop-motion animator in his own right who suffered through years of perpetual obscurity in Harryhausen’s shadow, brought to life the fantasy figures of Jack the Giant Killer (1962). Although it was condemned by many as a blatant rip-off of the earlier Harryhausen film (Kerwin Matthews and Torin Thatcher appeared in both pictures as the hero and villain respectively, and Nathan Juran directed the films), no one could argue the fact that Jack the Giant Killer held its own when it came to stop-motion effects. Blaisdell was brought on board to deliver several concept sketches for the film’s fantasy figures, such as the double-headed giant, but the studio had also commissioned artwork from Marcel Delgado and Wah Chang. Delgado, of course, was most famous as the designer of King Kong. Chang had cut his teeth on low-budget pictures like The Black Scorpion and would eventually create some of television’s most memorable monsters in episodes of The Outer Limits and the original Star Trek. In the end, Delgado’s and Chang’s designs for Jack the Giant Killer won out over Blaisdell’s.

  At least Blaisdell was well paid for his work:

  Speaking of the production stuff I did for Jack the Giant Killer and Goliath and the Dragon and one or two other pictures in the 1960s, those paychecks ended up being bigger than I ever thought they were supposed to. Did someone fall asleep in the bookkeeping department? Did somebody fail to communicate with somebody else? I dunno, all I can tell you is what I was advised in my early movie days—“Don’t ask questions, Paul, just grab your money and run like hell.’’

  During the early 1960s, Paul had maintained an ongoing correspondence with Bob Burns, who was still stationed in Texas and nearing the end of his tenure with the army. In several letters Paul mysteriously referred to a “Project X,” which was actually the aborted original version of In the Year 2889. There was another “special” project that Blaisdell was about to get involved in, however, a little something called Out of This World, which would have the distinction of marking American In
ternational’s debut in television. The concept, as Jim Nicholson explained it to Blaisdell, was that Out of This World would be much like an hour-long mini-movie shown once a week in syndication. There would be no continuing characters; the tales would be totally unconnected except for their preoccupation with the unnatural, like ABC’s The Outer Limits. Nor would there be a host in the tradition of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone or Boris Karloff’s Thriller, each episode of Out of This World would stand or fall on its own merits.

  Blaisdell did a number of production sketches for motion pictures in the early 1960s, including this concept painting for the Italian-made Goliath and the Dragon (courtesy of Bob Burns).

  Nicholson wanted Blaisdell involved with Out of This World from the beginning. Paul was to be responsible for all sorts of effects, from miniature work to full-bodied monster outfits. It sounded like an exciting project. AIP was expanding its production schedule and beginning to make different types of movies for a broader range of audiences. It was only natural that it should expand into television as well.