by Randy Palmer
Like most children, Paul exercised his imagination regularly, but it sometimes landed him in hot water. There were occasions in grade school when, instead of studying whatever subject had been assigned, he would begin daydreaming and doodling, making sketches of whatever happened to be on his mind at the time. On especially choice days, when the teacher was feeling good, Paul would be hauled up in front of the class and told to share his private work with the other students. Sometimes his classmates laughed, but just as often they didn’t, especially if he had been sketching something the kids found interesting. If it was the instructor’s intention to embarrass or ridicule the prideful Blaisdell, the ploy failed; his artwork was invariably better than what the other students could manage.
As the years passed, Paul graduated from using only pencils and pens to working with charcoal, water colors, acrylics, and oils. As a teenager his interest in putting together model aircrafts escalated, and he began blueprinting and building his own designs from scratch. When he grew older and started to discover the opposite sex, Paul devoted less time to his usual pursuits, but his interest in imagining and inventing never waned. It was this interest, coupled with his innate talent for building three-dimensional objects from scratch, that would eventually lead to work in motion pictures as a makeup and special effects artist.
After graduating from high school, Blaisdell repaired typewriters and other types of mechanical equipment and worked for a while at a local drugstore as a retail clerk. “They stocked these green Frankenstein monster masks that sold for a few dollars,” he recalled. “ I sold quite a few of them myself. It was exactly the same mask that turned up on the cover of the first issue of a particular monster film magazine that came out in 1958.”*
Blaisdell was eventually inducted into the military. A European stint in the army may not have conjured up many pleasant memories for the 20 year old, but the GI Bill at least provided opportunities for veterans to acquire specialized education. After his discharge from the army in 1947, Paul found that jobs in the Northeast were scarce, so he took advantage of Uncle Sam’s invitation to further his education and enrolled in the New England School of Art and Design, a commercial art school where he studied techniques for creating logos, letterheads, trademarks, and the like. At times it could be rather tedious work, but since it was part and parcel of the artist’s spectrum, why complain? Besides, a degree held forth the promise of future employment in a faltering economy.
Paul spent three years at the school honing his artistic talents, and it was there that he met Jackie, the girl who was destined to become his wife and lifelong companion.
Futuristic pen-and-ink illustrations created for various science-fiction pulp titles of the 1950s. Note the design of the disc-shaped spacecraft in the top two drawings, reminiscent of the starship designed by Blaisdell for Edward L. Cahn’s Invasion of the Saucer Men (1957); the abbreviated pseudonym in one of the fallen banners on opposite page. (Courtesy of Bob Burns.)
After graduation Paul and Jackie got married and relocated to California, where Paul enrolled in another school that specialized in engineering and drafting design. This eventually led to employment with the Douglas Aircraft Company as a technical illustrator. It was not very rewarding work from an artistic standpoint, but at least Paul was making enough money to sustain himself and his young bride in a discreet new home in the secluded Topanga Canyon area of Southern California. Whenever he could, he would grab a spare typewriter and spend his lunch break working on ideas for short stories. One particular story took three lunch periods to complete. Years later it ended up in Fantastic Monsters magazine.
Each night after work Paul relaxed by sketching and painting, further honing his talents in a wide variety of media. Before long his efforts bore real fruit when he sold a painting to Spaceway, a science-fiction pulp magazine owned and edited by Bill Crawford, who ran the Fantasy Publishing Company. Over time Crawford purchased a number of paintings from Blaisdell, and he eventually hired him to be the magazine’s art editor. Blaisdell later recalled, “I wasn’t too proud of some of [the magazine covers], but I did the best I could in the time I was given.”
Crawford was also buying articles about new and upcoming science-fiction and horror movies written by a fellow named Forrest J Ackerman. Ackerman, a sci-fi fan and collector who had grown up in Los Angeles and hung out with Ray Harryhausen and Ray Bradbury when the two Rays were just starting out in their respective fields, gained fame by coining the term sci-fi. He eventually became a celebrity in his own right when he began editing Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine in 1958. He got interested in the artwork Blaisdell was doing for Spaceway and asked Crawford to put him in touch with the young artist.
Soon Blaisdell received a startling phone call. The voice on the end of the line belonged to Forrest Ackerman, and although Paul recognized Ackerman’s name from the bylines on the film articles that had been appearing in Crawford’s magazine, he was totally unaware that Ackerman was also a literary agent, representing both new and established genre authors like A.E. Van Vogt and Ib Melchior. Ackerman explained that he could help popularize Blaisdell’s work by marketing his talents more aggressively in the United States as well as overseas. In return Ackerman expected a ten-percent cut of Paul’s earnings, the standard fee charged by most agents at the time. The thought of having someone else doing the legwork when it came to selling his work professionally sounded like a pretty good idea to Blaisdell.
A variety of science-fiction scenes which appeared in Hapna and other genre publications of the 1950s. The leftmost two illustrations were rendered in full color.
A Blaisdell cover for Rocket Comics from the early 1950s. The organic flying saucers anticipate the biomechanical designs of Swiss surrealistic H. R. Giger (creator of the Alien) by several decades. (Courtesy of Bob Burns.)
Blaisdell’s full-color artwork appeared on the covers of several paperback science-fiction novels published in the early 1950s. Interestingly, the human hero has elected to defend himself with the butt of his rifle instead of going for all-out melee action with guns a-blazing. Respect for alien life forms was rare in low-brow sci-fi novels of the era. (Courtesy of Bob Burns.)
Jackie was excited by the prospect and urged Paul to accept Ackerman’s offer. He did, and before long his material was being purchased for publication in Other Worlds and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, as well as in foreign markets like the Swedish science-fiction magazine Hapna. For a time Paul also wrote and drew a serial sci-fi comic strip for Famous Funnies.
Paul later recalled: “I’d been trying to draw or make up new ideas from my imagination ever since I was six years old. Needless to say, in the beginning I wasn’t very good at it, but I kept trying. I never gave up.” His feel for the fantastic was becoming sharper than ever as he began selling more and more art pieces to the sci-fi markets of the day. It wouldn’t be much longer before his artistic ingenuity would be put to the test in a special assignment that would end up taking him permanently in a rather unexpected direction.
*Paul is referring to the first issue of Famous Monsters of Filmland. It was the magazine’s publisher, James Warren, who appeared on the cover wearing a Frankenstein Monster mask.
2
The Eyes Have It
I think [Roger Corman] got exactly what he wanted.
—Paul Blaisdell
While Forrest J Ackerman was busy marketing Blaisdell’s colorful canvasses to a clutch of science-fiction magazines, Jim Nicholson and Sam Arkoff were working hard on getting their new film company, the American Releasing Corporation (ARC), off the ground. ARC’s films—many of them older pictures with snazzy new titles dreamed up by Nicholson—were pure fodder for the exploitation market; cheap black-and-white programmers destined for quick playoffs on the drive-in and grind-house circuits.
Being the new kid on the block wasn’t easy. Established movie merchants were sweating bullets while the industry scrambled to find ways to combat television, which was doing a b
ang-up job keeping families at home, away from the nation’s theaters. Fox, Paramount, Universal, Warner Bros., and MGM all suffered fiscal losses in the early years of the 1950s, while the studios tried every gimmick they could think of to lure patrons back to the boxoffice. Widescreen images, the multiprojector Cinerama experience, 3-D “Stereo Vision” with polarized glasses (that gave some viewers headaches as well as depth-perception), more color, bigger budgets, all-star extravaganzas, “casts of thousands.” How could the fledgling ARC hope to hold its own against all this?
Some said it took guts; others intimated that Arkoff and Nicholson were being downright foolhardy. But the pair had a working plan: to market films aimed specifically at America’s youth. Teenagers were the one segment of the motion picture market that didn’t want to sit at home and watch television—especially on Friday and Saturday nights.
The risk paid off. Soon ARC would cease repackaging and rereleasing previously seen pictures and begin producing their own features. The films would be low-budget affairs to start, but the stories would be as exciting and original as they could make them.
Coincidentally, there was another newcomer to the City of Angels who wanted to make movies and who also didn’t have much money. But he did have a great deal of chutzpa and a persuasive ability to interest film investors in the unlikeliest of projects. His name was Roger Corman.
On his own, Corman managed to raise $12,000—just barely enough money to produce an ultracheap science-fiction picture called It Stalked the Ocean Floor, later retitled The Monster from the Ocean Floor. Wyott Ordung, a struggling actor who wrote and directed the film for Corman, introduced him to Arkoff and Nicholson. Each had something the other wanted, and several distribution deals were discussed. There was a bottom line from which ARC was unwilling to budge, however: the company could not offer Corman any money up front for Monster from the Ocean Floor. Nicholson suggested they release the picture on a regional basis, which meant there would be a long wait before Corman would see any substantial return on his OPM (Other People’s Money) investment.
Roger didn’t want to wait, so he sold the film outright to Lippert Pictures. That deal made him enough money to reimburse his investors and reap a decent profit besides. The profits helped fuel his second project, a race-car drama called The Fast and the Furious, which would eventually become ARC’s premiere release. Corman could boast that his new picture cost four times as much as Monster from the Ocean Floor, but that didn’t change the fact that it was still an extremely low-budget affair. He cut a deal with ARC which called for Arkoff and Nicholson to do all the legwork involved in getting up-front money for the film from regional exhibitors. This allowed Corman to reinvest in more features without having to wait for cash returns as The Fast and the Furious slowly made its way across the country.
Recognizing that he could cut production costs further by directing as well as producing films himself, Corman began developing several more projects, including two Westerns, Five Guns West and Apache Woman, and a science-fiction picture.
The production of Five Guns West was excruciatingly nerve-wracking for Corman, and not only because this was the film that marked his directorial debut. Location shooting was hampered by rain storms from the very first day, and the picture ended up running over budget—one of Corman’s worst nightmares. Because the deal with ARC stipulated that any budget overruns would have to come out of the producer’s pocket, the only way Roger could cover the cost of finishing Five Guns West was to slash the budget of one of his other pictures. Thus, what was a little picture to begin with became a very little picture with a very big title: The Beast with a Million Eyes. Beast was one of Jim Nicholson’s most outrageous film titles, and it ended up saddled with a budget of less than $30,000. (Some say the picture was made for a mere $23,000.) By this time Corman had joined the Director’s Guild and couldn’t work on the film directly—that would make it a union picture, and there wasn’t enough money left in the budget to pay union scale wages. So Corman decided to turn the script over to his production assistant, David Kramarsky, who took a producer-director credit for his work on the picture, even though most of the film actually ended up being directed by Lou Place. (Place later had his name removed from the credits, letting Kramarsky take all the credit—or blame—for the finished product.)
The Beast with a Million Eyes was scripted by Tom Filer under the title The Unseen. For a relatively early entry in the mushrooming sci-fi screen sweepstakes of the 1950s, it was a surprisingly highbrow concept. Instead of making his monster a gargantuan insect, radioactive blob, or space-helmeted horror, Filer made it a “nonentity”—a metaphysical force invisible to the human eye that preyed upon the minds of terrestrial life-forms. (A similar idea would be used to outstanding effect ten years later in a little-seen British sci-fi film of 1964, Unearthly Stranger.)
Roger Corman was all smiles after he read Filer’s screenplay because it meant he could make a monster movie without having to bother showing a monster. The upshot, of course, was an even lower production budget than had first been planned. Perhaps Corman was unaware that audiences would feel cheated when no million-eyed monstrosities showed up during the film’s scant 78-minute running time. Although it was a common practice for ‘50s monster movies to “beef up” their namesakes in publicity and advertising materials such as one-sheet posters and newspaper advertisements, no producer had as yet dared make a movie with a title like The Beast with a Million Eyes and neglect showing at least some kind of monster.
Jim Nicholson had designed a splendid promotional package for Beast before the first frame of film was ever exposed. In fact, almost all the early ARC pictures were designed in this fashion, with Nicholson first dreaming up a title and hiring an artist to design the poster and pressbook ads. Only after the advertising campaign was finalized would a script be written, based on either the poster art or the film title; it would then be turned into a movie. In the case of The Beast with a Million Eyes, the promotional posters featured a ferocious, multieyed, tentacled visage with needlelike fangs menacing a young couple on the beach. The monster was apparently so enormous that only part of its head could fit into the picture. A prominent blurb declared the picture was “filmed for wide-screen in terror-scope.” It was a textbook example of what would eventually be recognized as typical ARC/AIP overkill. Nicholson sent copies of the poster design to his regional film exhibitors to drum up interest in the picture while Corman, David Kramarsky, and Lou Place began rounding up a cast and crew.
The cast for the film was small. Paul Birch, who would work with Corman on two other Blaisdell monster pictures, Day the World Ended and Not of This Earth, took the lead role of Allan Kelly. Lorna Thayer was his bitchy wife, Carol. Dona Cole was cast as their daughter Sandy, and there were smaller roles for Chester Conklin and Leonard Tarver, who played a mute farmhand nicknamed “Him.” (“He can’t talk, and nobody knows his name, so we just call him ‘Him,’” explains Sandy.) Dick Sargeant, a decade away from taking over Dick York’s role as Darrin on CBS-TV’s “Bewitched” sitcom, turned in an embarrassingly lame performance as Larry, a deputy sheriff who falls in love with the teenaged Sandy.
American Releasing Corporation (the predecessor of American-International Pictures) distributed its very first science-fiction movie in 1955. Most of the posters and ad mats designed for The Beast with a Million Eyes featured a tentacled, multiorbed monstrosity that never showed up in the actual film.
The opening of the film, with its eerie panning shots of a desert wasteland and Paul Birch’s moody voice-over, is appropriately haunting, but the film betrays a fundamental impoverishment moments later and never recovers. An early scene with Allan and Carol serves to establish the reason behind their tumultuous relationship (Carol abhors the desolation that surrounds the ranch and feels compelled to vent her frustrations against the family) and introduces the virginal Sandy and her affectionate dog, a German Shepherd called Duke. There is also the mute farmhand, “Him,” who serves mainly as a
red herring and early victim of the alien invader.
When Allan leaves the house to irrigate his farmland, Sandy takes Duke for a walk, leaving Carol alone in the house. A shrill, ear-piercing whine bites through the air, shattering Carol’s favorite chinaware and drinking glasses. She phones the sheriff’s office to complain about “low-flying jet planes” and is reassured that Deputy Larry will check everything out. Larry is unable to confirm the existence of any jets flying over such a remote region of California, but Carol is adamant—she knows a jet when she hears one.
Of course it’s no jet, but an interstellar craft from another solar system with not just one but two alien life-forms aboard. And it has landed in the desert not very far from the Kelly ranch. Before long, flocks of birds and roving animals begin acting strangely, purposefully—as if they have acquired a kind of superintelligence. Allan is the first to be attacked when a flock of blackbirds descends on his station wagon in a nightmarish fury of beating wings and stabbing beaks. But the attack subsides as quickly as it began, and the WW2 vet dismisses the weird occurrence as just a freakish quirk of nature.