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

by Randy Palmer

  But Out of This World never got past the conceptual stage. It was talked about a great deal, and everyone was geared up to do it, but somewhere along the line someone (probably Sam Arkoff) decided it was too risky a venture. The projected series was quietly killed, and with it went the promise of solid, long-term employment for Blaisdell. Instead of making a TV series, AIP’s new television subsidiary decided to finance a series of ultracheap independent films, produced solely to inflate the “Chiller” and “The World Beyond” creature-feature packages. Blaisdell was never involved in an AIT (American International Television) production.*

  There was another TV series AIP wanted to do that was called Beyond the Barriers of Space. This was to have been a more traditional sci-fi show, with continuing characters and interconnected storylines à la Star Trek or The X-Files. The science-fiction theme of the show would encompass faster-than-light time travel, alien civilizations, and mutiny in outer space. AIP paid Blaisdell to do a full-color painting for its Beyond the Barriers of Space promotional brochure, which was used to help sell the idea for the series to prospective backers and commercial time buyers.

  Although Beyond the Barriers of Space was one more project that never got beyond the preproduction stage, a couple of the series’ basic ideas turned up in a low-budget feature released by AIP called Beyond the Time Barrier. Directed by Edgar G. Ulmer, the man responsible for the 1935 version of The Black Cat starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, the film circumvented its low-budget heritage with brisk pacing and an interesting story line. But how many of the film’s plot threads were unraveled from projected synopses of Beyond the Barriers of Space? At this point there is no way of knowing, but since AIP would never abandon an idea it had paid for, it clearly seems possible that Beyond the Time Barrier was cobbled together from discarded drafts of the projected TV series.

  Blaisdell later commented on some of the changes taking place at AIP:

  Jim Nicholson was the artistic half of American International Pictures, and Arkoff was the business half. Jim had teenaged children of his own, and he liked to get together with them and pal around with them and talk to them about movies because Jim was a movie buff himself. He would always ask them what they would most want to see in movies. And he really listened to them. He did not go on down the same old tired line, making detective movies that would bore you to death and stuff like that. Nick was very astute and very responsive to what the kids wanted to see, and he acted accordingly. And me being half-juvenile myself, I kinda liked the idea too, so I went along with it.

  Now then, when it came time for a change, which happened around 1960 or 1961 for AIP, that was because Jim was still listening to his kids. They were still telling him what they wanted to see, but their tastes were changing, as was most of society’s at that time. I really think we all were getting fed up with the cold war type of movie and thinking about building bomb shelters in the backyard and wondering how soon the world was going to come to an end. And I honestly believe that’s one reason why AIP began making different kinds of pictures. The Poe movies, for example, were so gothic and so far removed from the average person’s experiences, they were more fantasies than horrors. So it was all right to move in that direction because the audience didn’t have to think about what was going on in the Soviet Union or China or even in the U.S. They [AIP] didn’t abandon science-fiction altogether—they still made the occasional thriller like Panic in Year Zero—but those pictures were few and far between anymore. It was nothing like when they first started out, making pictures like Day the World Ended.

  With the continued diversification of its film product, AIP offered less and less work to Paul Blaisdell. Although the dialogue of his cameo in The Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow probably didn’t seem particularly prophetic just yet, by 1962 Paul couldn’t help but notice that the types of movies he had been making for American International and other film companies were fast disappearing. Only five years earlier he had segued from one picture to another with barely a break in between. With Voodoo Woman, The Amazing Colossal Man, Invasion of the Saucer Men, and Attack of the Puppet People all produced in 1957 alone, Paul and Jackie had their hands more than full. Now there were only minor assignments and periodic requests for production illustrations. Neither of them could know that the future held more spare time than anything else, but as the months crept by with less and less work coming their way, at some point the Blaisdells must have realized that the glory days were already behind them.

  But Paul still happily involved himself in his own personal projects. With more free time on his hands than ever before, he began work on a brand-new type of monster of his own invention. It wasn’t a foam rubber or latex costume, it wasn’t a hand-puppet, it wasn’t a stop-motion model, and it wasn’t a figure controlled by wires. Yet it could “act” in front of a camera in 15- and 20-second takes. Perfecting this creature was taking a long time, longer than Paul had anticipated, but in the end it would be worth it. Bob Burns had finally come home from the army, and Paul was eager to introduce him to the newest fiend of the family.

  * Blaisdell did have a kind of peripheral connection to some of the pictures produced by American International’s television subsidiary, however. Details appear in Chapter 15.

  14

  Black and White and Bled All Over

  I never thought horror movies or monster movies could be harmful to the younger members of our society as long as the parents of the youngsters had the intelligence to teach them the difference between enjoying fantasy and living in reality. If I had, believe me, I would never have gotten involved with producing a magazine like Fantastic Monsters, which we knew from the beginning was going to be read mostly by kids.

  —Paul Blaisdell

  As soon as Bob Burns got back to California, he got in touch with his old friend and made a date to drop by Blaisdell’s reclusive Topanga Canyon homestead. The first night they got together, time seemed to contract; the years between visits melted away like the wax skin of Aunt Esmerelda in How to Make a Monster. There was a lot to catch up on, and the four of them—Paul, Bob, Jackie, and Kathy—stayed up almost until dawn shooting the breeze.

  Burns had brought with him several of the latest monster movie magazines. That field was expanding almost exponentially. After Famous Monsters made its debut in February 1958, the first wave of would-be usurpers appeared: World Famous Creatures, Monster Parade, Monsters & Things. Now there was a second wave of monsterzines edging into FM’s terror-tory: Horror Monsters, Mad Monsters, Thriller, Monster Madness, Modern Monsters, Monster Party, Shriek!, and the only worthwhile competitor, Castle of Frankenstein. Blaisdell thumbed through the lot of them. “Hell, we could do better than these guys,” he snorted.

  Burns had to agree. Most of the new monster film magazines were poorly researched, lazily written periodicals barely worth their 35¢ or 50¢ cover prices. “We could do one so much better. Give the fans real information about movie making,” Burns suggested. Neither of them pursued the idea further just then, but that night Burns kept mulling over the idea of starting their own publication. Was it possible? The following day he called Paul to ask, “Were you serious last night when you said we should publish our own magazine?”

  Blaisdell admitted he had made the statement half in jest. True, he thought the field was overrun by mediocrity, but he had never given much thought to actually trying to publish something of his own.

  Burns had. “Let’s think about this some more, Paul.”

  In fact, they both thought about it a lot more, and finally they decided to do something about it, as Burns later explained:

  What we wanted to do with Fantastic Monsters was to give the readers the “inside dope” on movie-making. We wanted it to be a “behind-the-scenes” kind of thing, and that of course was what Paul was good at, and what he was going to write about. But the printer [who helped finance the magazine and thus was able to call at least some of the shots] wanted a more traditional kind of magazine. We weren’t going
to call it Fantastic Monsters; our title was Fantastic Films. But it had to have the word monster in the title or it wouldn’t get distributed, so that’s how it became Fantastic Monsters of the Films.

  Once Burns and Blaisdell decided they were going to tackle the magazine project for real, they started getting themselves psyched up for it. There were dozens of meetings at Paul’s house that lasted late into the night—sometimes all night—with Jackie serving round-the-clock doses of coffee to keep the guys on their toes. Both of them were determined to avoid the pitfalls that plagued most of the other monster fan magazines. One thing they decided early on was not to use too many puns or funny captions underneath the photos. Both Paul and Bob felt that the genre deserved a modicum of respect, and up to now it hadn’t been getting any. Why publish a magazine that was going to make fun of its own subject matter?

  But in fact, humor became an integral part of the magazine’s prescription for success. By confining the humor to specific pages or articles, they could continue to talk about the films they were going to cover thoughtfully and respectfully. The magazine would end up with single- and double-page humor pieces with titles like “Dead Time Tales” and “How to Become a Vampire Victim in One Easy Lesson.” “Dead Time Tales” were the ever-popular photos with funny captions (the Marvel Comics Group had begun publishing a magazine called Monsters to Laff With that was nothing but captioned photos), but “Vampire Victim” was a refreshingly perverse twist on the usual puns and gags. With obvious faith in the intelligence of their audience, the authors invited their readers to push two straight pins through the life-size fangs of a vampire’s portrait (“make sure the sharp points are facing you”) and slowly bring the magazine toward their necks (“all the while moaning and groaning softly, for effect”).* Then, “quick like a bunny, jab the page into your neck.”

  “Wasn’t that fun?” the editors snickered. “Try it on the members of your family. They’ll die laughing.” Obviously, this magazine was going to offer something a wee bit different.

  Most of the editorial content was of a serious nature. Blaisdell didn’t want to be an editor, but he knew what the magazine should look like, and he knew what he wanted to see in it. He and Burns were determined to give their readers more than mere fantasy fluff; they were going to provide facts and behind-the-scenes information for the serious film student, while making sure to provide plenty of pictures for the small fry who thrived on portraits of messed-up faces and bogeymen.

  Still, there was more to it than facts, figures, faces, and funny stuff. To give their magazine an edge of sophistication over the competition, Paul and Bob outlined a plan to acquire material from respected writers in the fantasy fiction field like the late Robert Bloch, who had begun writing stories of suspense and horror in the 1920s and 1930s under the epistolary tutelage of the twentieth century’s foremost master of the macabre, H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937).

  Short stories by established genre authors would go a long way toward beefing up the magazine’s text, but Blaisdell and Burns wanted to do something similar for the pictorials. The obvious thing to have done with pictures would have been to print them in color, but a full-color layout would have been prohibitively expensive. As it was, the magazine was going to carry a premium cover price of 50¢, and the only other publications that cost that much were special hundred-page editions of Famous Monsters. Eventually it was decided to tint some of the photos, which would at least give the magazine a unique look and sense of novelty. Lastly, they decided to make the first issue of the magazine a little extra-special by including a “giant full-color pinup.” If Playboy could have girlie foldouts, why couldn’t they have ghoulie foldouts?

  Blaisdell wanted the first monster pinup to be the Karloff monster from James Whale’s 1931 Frankenstein. But no matter how hard they searched, a color photo just didn’t seem to exist. Finally it was decided to make the She-Creature the pinup because Paul had several outstanding color transparencies of the costume on hand.

  Once the direction and overall content of the magazine had been decided, Bob hired two writers named Ron Haydock and Jim Harmon to do most of the article writing. Blaisdell was going to write a how-to piece on making a film monster; Burns would write and help with layout. By the time everyone had finished their assignments, the name of the magazine had been changed—not once, but twice, as Bob Burns later noted:

  The very first idea Paul had was to do a magazine called The Devil’s Workshop. He was going to exploit his own talents and techniques, and basically it was going to be a magazine about how to create your own monsters and props and things like that. Eventually we realized this was too narrow a focus, so we changed the name to Fantastic Films and made “The Devil’s Workshop” a column in the magazine. Then the printer came in and said, “well, you have to put ‘monster’ in the title; otherwise it won’t sell.” So that’s how it became Fantastic Monsters of the Films.

  Most of the monster magazines of the 1960s featured artwork by staff artists—some good, some not so good—on the cover. Blaisdell obviously could have provided Fantastic Monsters (or FanMo, as the readers soon nicknamed it) with original cover art, but he and Burns both preferred to use photographs of the real thing. Sitting side-by-side with the competition, FanMo theoretically would “jump out” at the newsstand browser—provided, of course, that Paul and Bob were able to get hold of some pretty nifty color photographs.

  As it happened, Burns had in his possession a clear, sharp color slide of Christopher Lee in all his sanguinary fury from Hammer Films’ Horror of Dracula. Surprisingly, an actual publicity photo of the snarling, crimson-eyed, bloody-lipped countenance of the Count didn’t exist. Burns had lucked into the shot when a 35mm print of the movie being shown on his army base broke at a crucial point in the film. Burns extracted a frame from the film’s famous library scene and kept it in his collection for several years until it ended up being used as the cover of the first issue of Fantastic Monsters.

  No matter how much time and sweat was put into it, the magazine couldn’t have existed without the financial support of the printer. Getting a national magazine written, laid out, typeset, printed, and distributed cost big bucks. Without outside advertising to subsidize the expenses involved, such a magazine could have easily cost as much to produce as an early AIP film. (For comparison, it cost approximately $45,000 to produce an issue of Famous Monsters in the early 1980s. FanMo was printed on better paper than FM, had tinted photographs, and a full-color pinup.) To get Fantastic Monsters off the drawing board and onto newsstands across the country, Bob Burns anted up $6,000 of his own savings; Blaisdell sunk in more than double that amount. The rest of the bill was absorbed by the printer, an unnamed individual who operated out of Iowa. FanMo was the printer’s only national publication; all the other titles published by his outfit were regional and local titles—an important point to keep in mind as the Fantastic Monsters drama unfolds.

  With editorial assistance from Jim Harmon and Ron Haydock, Burns and Blaisdell finally got the premiere issue of their fantasy film magazine completed. One of the last things to be readied for the printer was the She-Creature poster. For this, they used a color photo taken of the costume outside of Blaisdell’s home before the film went into production. For some reason the laboratory that made the transparency for the printer could never seem to deliver a sharply focused image. When Blaisdell saw the lab work, he exploded. The content of the first issue was due to be shipped to the printer in just a few days, and they had no satisfactory color shot of the She-Creature.

  With a deadline staring them in the face, Blaisdell decided to touch up the photo with an airbrush to get rid of the unfocused edges. All the detailing in the costume, especially in the face, had been lost. Painting in the minutia would be too troublesome, and besides, anyone who saw the photo would realize they weren’t looking at the real thing. In exasperation he decided to accentuate the individual features. This is how the She-Creature ended up with pouting, full-bodied, blood-red lips in her
FanMo debut. Blaisdell later described the incident:

  The foldout photo of the She-Creature was from a photo Bob Burns took of me on the Alpine suspension bridge in front of [my home] studio, right after The She-Creature was finished. He did it with a flash gun and how in the hell both of us managed to stand still on that crazy bridge, I’ll never know. Considering the circumstances, it wasn’t bad at all. Unfortunately, the guy in the agency didn’t seem to know how to enlarge a 35mm to an 11"×14" print. His developing technique made it look like a bleached bedsheet. That’s when I had to snatch the proof and lay on the airbrush, like I was painting a billboard. No time to be artistic—the printer was snapping at my heels with a deadline. (P.S.—We made it.)

  The first issue of Fantastic Monsters of the Films hit newsstands early in 1962. The startling Horror of Dracula cover wrapped around to a full-color, photo-montage back cover, which included a rare color sho××t of Blaisdell’s original sculpture of Little Hercules from The Beast with a Million Eyes. There were also color stills from a recent Bert I. Gordon fantasy called The Magic Sword (another film with giant monsters) and a duo-tone photo of Blaisdell himself as Count Downe, a character created as a kind of mascot for the “Tombstone Times,” a hodgepodge of information, pictures, artwork, and humor set up in a newspaper format.

  Behind the cover were the first “colorized” (tinted) interior pages ever seen in an American horror movie magazine. Hot pink, lemon yellow, aqua-marine, and sky blue hues hit the reader full in the face as the pages were turned. Articles on vampire movies, the “Eye of the Beholder” episode of The Twilight Zone, the Wolfman of Lon Chaney, Jr., prehistoric monster movies, and Bob Burns’s look at two science-fiction classics, The Day the Earth Stood Still and Destination Moon, rounded out a diverse and impressive first issue. In terms of fiction, Jim Harmon contributed a short shocker called “The Two-Tale Heart,” and Robert Bloch was represented by “Black Lotus.”