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

by Randy Palmer

  Blaisdell didn’t stand up for long, however. He started joking with Lori, growling about how no one understood monsters and just generally tickling her funny bone. She started giggling, so he kept it up. “You know, underneath this costume I’m actually completely naked.” She laughed again, harder, and every time she laughed after that she bounced against the monster’s foam rubber chest, knocking Paul off balance. About to lose his already precarious grip, he warned her they might have to take a tumble. It was possible he would even fall on her. For some reason that seemed even funnier, and Lori let out one big guffaw. She rocked against Blaisdell’s foam rubber chest, pushing him backwards. One of the mutant feet popped off, taking Paul’s sneaker with it. That felt really peculiar, and he started hobbling around, trying to regain his balance, but it was too late. Down they went, with Lori falling on top of him. Neither of them was hurt, but as Lori continued to giggle, she kept bouncing up and down on the monster’s rubber hide. Paul was afraid the material was going to rip (which is one reason why Jackie always kept a supply of contact cement handy during film shoots).

  Corman caught enough of the action on film to be able to piece the scene together during editing, so the crew assembled for the next shot. Roger had decided he wanted to include a shot of the monster swatting away bullets that the hero is firing at it from point-blank range. He called Richard Denning and Blaisdell aside and explained just what it was he wanted. Blaisdell thought the idea was ridiculous and said so. “It’s going to look like he’s swatting at flies,” he warned. “Well, I’m the director,” Corman reminded Blaisdell. They ended up shooting the scene exactly as Corman had wanted. Sure enough, it looked like the mutant was swatting at flies. Corman kept the shot in the film anyway.

  After the monster releases his human quarry at the lake, a rainstorm kicks into high gear, sounding the monster’s death knell. Although the encounter with Rick and Louise was filmed at the Sportsman’s Lodge Restaurant, Blaisdell’s death scene was shot at Griffith Park. The crew hooked up a set of water sprinklers which were used to simulate falling rain. Corman instructed Blaisdell, “Okay, Paul, you go stagger around that tree and then, after getting nice and wet, fall over and die.” It sounded simple enough, and once the camera was rolling Blaisdell performed the required action without a hitch.

  At the last minute Corman decided to add a disintegration effect. While Paul remained prone on the water-soaked ground, the crew ran a hose up the leg of his costume and hooked the other end to a portable fog machine. When Corman called “Action!” they began pumping fog into the suit. Corman thought the effect looked pretty nifty as the smoke slowly leaked out of the suit, but inside, Paul was beginning to get claustrophobic. The crew was pumping him so full of fog he couldn’t see out the mouthpiece. Not only that, but water from the sprinkler system had gotten into the suit and was combining with the special effects fog, making it difficult to breathe.

  After a few minutes, Blaisdell realized he was in trouble. By now there was so much water in the suit he could barely move. Every time he tried to sit up, the weight of the water-logged rubber held him back. That, coupled with not being able to see because of the special effects fog, caused him to panic, which made things even worse. He began waving his claws around wildly—the only part of his anatomy he could still lift. Every time his arm hit the ground the suit belched out another poof of smoke. Corman thought that looked good. “Keep it up, Paul!”

  Sensing that something was not quite right, Jackie, who was watching all this from the sidelines, said, “I think something’s wrong with my husband.” Finally somebody realized that Blaisdell might really be in trouble. Members of the crew scurried over to help him to his feet. As they pulled him to an upright position, the accumulated water in the suit rushed to the bottom and gushed out the legs. This probably looks pretty damned indecent, Blaisdell thought, but at that point he didn’t much care. When they finally got his mask off, a huge cloud of fog billowed out around his head, creating a kind of halo effect. He wasn’t feeling very angelic, however. Smoke was still coming out of his hair 20 minutes later.

  Alex Gordon remembered the Day the World Ended shoot as a particularly uneventful one. “We only had a few problems,” he said. “It was a little difficult for Paul to see at times because he was a fairly short man and he had made the monster suit so big, and occasionally one of the hands would drop off; but other than that everything worked out fine. Paul was invaluable to us. He always gave a hundred percent. He made all of AIP’s best monsters.”

  After the film was finished, ARC’s still photographer, Bill Clarey, took some special promotional photos of Blaisdell in his Atomic Mutant getup. Paul grabbed Lori Nelson, and together they did a “soft shoe” dance routine which Clarey captured on 35mm film. That photograph became a favorite memento of Paul’s Hollywood days, and he treasured it for many years afterward.

  To drum up publicity for the film, Arkoff and Nicholson thought it would be a neat idea to send Marty the Mutant out on a press tour. Theaters that were running ARC’s first double feature were shipped the costume for display. (Day the World Ended’s cofeature, The Phantom from 10,000 Leagues, was a Woolner Bros. production from a Lou Rusoff script about a radioactive undersea monster. Woolner Bros. had approached Blaisdell to build its Phantom, but he turned down the offer.)

  Most theater managers set up Marty in their lobby, where curious ticket-buyers reached out to wiggle the antennae and tug at the scales, dislodging them by the fistful. The scales became souvenirs for greedy moviegoers who thought the purchase price of a ticket entitled them to a genuine Hollywood monster movie artifact. When it was returned to Blaisdell weeks later, the costume was in tatters. He later recalled: “‘Marty’ was shipped all over the U.S. to publicize Day the World Ended in theater marquees. He would get damaged and they’d ship him back to me and I’d repair him, repack him, and reship him. The last time he was shipped back to me from Chicago, I did the repairs and reshipped him. After that he went to Hong Kong, and after that nobody could ever figure out where he finally ended up. For all I know, he’s in a Buddist temple somewhere in Mongolia.’’ It was the first and last time Blaisdell allowed one of his creations to be so mishandled by movie promoters.

  Although the ARC double bill opened in January 1956 to mostly lukewarm reviews, both pictures ended up making a respectable profit. Variety noted that Day the World Ended “packs enough novelty in its plot theme to carry off its horror chores satisfactorily, even though imagination runs away with the subject at times and the dialogue is inclined to be static and the direction slow-paced.” But sci-fi fans of the days had few complaints, lining up

  for blocks during the early months of 1956 to see the world come to a rather nasty conclusion. Super-alert fans might have spotted the Atomic Mutant again several years later in Roger Corman’s Teenage Caveman. (No new footage of Marty the Mutant was shot, however; Roger merely spliced in a clip of the monster from Day the World Ended.)

  Marty the Mutant does a soft-shoe routine with costar Lori Nelson during a break in the filming of Day the World Ended. This photograph was one of Paul Blaisdell’s favorites (courtesy of Bob Burns).

  Once the film rental profits started pouring in, Alex Gordon became interested in continuing Day’s storyline and signed Richard Denning to appear in a follow-up. But the sequel never materialized, and Gordon and Denning eventually moved on to other projects. “Touch’’ Connors, who received a total of $400 for his role in the picture, continued to work for Alex Gordon and Roger Corman and eventually returned to oppose Paul Blaisdell in Voodoo Woman.

  Before that could happen, however, Corman had set his sights on another global threat. Only this time, instead of world obliteration via nuclear weapons, there would be world domination via a grandiose Venusian vegetable.

  * Autry was a radio star before he graduated to motion pictures. He became known as the “Singing Cowboy” during the 1930s when he made a series of popular Western-musicals.

  † Wood’s scri
pt was credited to him and Alex Gordon, but it was really a solo effort by Wood. It was eventually filmed as Bride of the Monster, starring a down-and-out Bela Lugosi. Wood and Gordon were sharing an apartment in Hollywood at the time.

  ‡ Paul Blaisdell drew the sketches seen in the film.

  ** Although these films were made in black and white, Blaisdell gave each of his creations a unique color scheme to make them more lifelike. “It was also good for morale,” Blaisdell said, though he neglected to mention whose morale he had in mind—the film crew’s or his own.

  4

  Venusian Vegetable

  I told them, I pleaded with them not to have It chase anyone. The script said It was supposed to stay on a rock shelf in a cave. The actors were supposed to come to It.

  —Paul Blaisdell

  In November 1955, James Nicholson and Sam Arkoff opened up new ARC offices on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. By now the company had arranged lucrative deals with exhibitors across the country, as well as in Montreal and England. As profits continued to climb, Nicholson, feeling bullish, announced a slate of new film titles scheduled for release throughout 1956 and 1957. At last ARC was beginning to think in terms of years instead of months.

  One of the company’s newest double bills was The Female Jungle and Oklahoma Woman. The former was an actionless whodunit helmed by Bruno VeSota, who also appears in a minor role in the cofeature. VeSota, a pedestrian director hampered by budgets that were invariably tighter than Corman’s, often took on acting assignments during the 1950s and was a better actor than he was a director. He is most recognizable as Dave the shopkeeper, married to a scheming Yvette Vickers in Bernard L. Kowalski’s Attack of the Giant Leeches (1959). The Female Jungle was a “pick-up” for ARC. It had been financed by Burt Keiser, who tried to sell it to Paramount and Allied Artists—neither of whom wanted it—and eventually ended up offering it to Nicholson and Arkoff. The film is most notable for featuring Jayne Mansfield in a leading role.

  Peggie Castle played the title role in Oklahoma Woman, Roger Corman’s third Western following Five Guns West and Apache Woman. Lou Rusoff, who was by this time becoming something of a permanent fixture around the ARC offices, scripted the film, which featured Day the World Ended alumni Richard Denning, “Touch’’ Connors, Jonathan Haze, and Paul Blaisdell. Instead of creating a costume or rigging up special effects, Blaisdell appeared in a minor role in Oklahoma Woman as one of Peggie Castle’s henchmen. It was one of his very few straight acting roles. He had no lines.

  Soon after the release of ARC’s Western double feature Nicholson and Arkoff decided to change the name of the company. After all, they weren’t just releasing motion pictures any more, they were making them. So early in 1956, the American Releasing Corporation became American International Pictures (AIP). One of the first films to come out under the new AIP banner was a science-fiction-monster movie.

  Like many other films produced by ARC/AIP, the title of the new picture was conceived by American International president Jim Nicholson. Nicholson was a science-fiction fan from way back—he had worked with Famous Monsters’ editor Forry Ackerman on a sci-fi fanzine when the two were in high school—and he enjoyed getting involved in the nuts and bolts of AIP’s monster movies. Nicholson got in touch with Paul Blaisdell to discuss the creature that Paul would be building for AIP’s new movie.

  Although the general design of the monster would be left to Blaisdell, Nicholson said he wanted “something that no one had ever seen before, something that was really different.” Blaisdell wanted just a couple of particulars before he started work on the new creature: what was the monster required to do in the movie and where did it come from? Nicholson replied that according to the script Lou Rusoff was working on, it came from the planet Venus. And as for what it did, that was evident from the movie’s title, It Conquered the World.

  Like many other youngsters who grew up in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, Blaisdell had seen lots of science-fiction movie serials and had read lots of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon stories in the pulps, which paved the way for his interest in astronomy. As he got older, he began checking out books on the subject from his local library and spent quite a bit of time reading up on the cosmos. Paul told Jim Nicholson that the current thinking about the planet Venus was that it was hot, humid, and probably quite misty—the kind of environment that was not all that conducive to animal life. If something were actually to grow there, it would probably be along the lines of vegetation or plant life. Using that idea as his jumping-off point, he promised Nicholson he would develop something “truly unique” for AIP’s new science-fiction picture.

  At home Blaisdell worked out a theoretical plan for the development of a superintelligent Venusian mushroom. The belief about the physiognomy of Venus at that time led him to envision a creature that would develop slowly over many eons in the darkness and dampness of an alien world. In lieu of animal life, a mushroom or fungus might develop a kind of rudimentary intelligence that would grow exponentially until it eventually achieved self-awareness. Once that happened, it would realize that its physical limitations severely restricted its ability to conduct direct action. It would move (when it moved at all) like a perambulating plant. Because it could not go very far or fast, Nature would provide such a creature with the ability to produce offspring that could move quickly and conduct direct action for its parent whenever it needed.

  Paul Blaisdell’s miniature sculpture of the perambulating mushroom from It Conquered the World. The original design was more rounded and squat, but still significantly larger than a human being (courtesy of Bob Burns).

  Following this outline, Blaisdell’s superintelligent mushroom became an asexual creature that could give birth to small, flying, batlike creatures which Blaisdell dubbed “Flying Fingers.” He built a ten-inch model of the monster mushroom and showed it to Jim Nicholson. Nicholson loved it. “You’ve done it again, Paul,” the AIP prexy exclaimed. “There’s never been anything like this!” Although the model actually looked a little different from the final design (the model was more squat), Nicholson thought it was going to make a terrific film monster. Unfortunately, by the time Roger Corman got through with it, “It” would generate more titters than terror.

  Lou Rusoff developed the screenplay for It Conquered the World around ideas already hammered out during a meeting between Blaisdell, Nicholson, and himself. It was a pretty straightforward invasion-from-space story, one of the two science-fiction plots Hollywood seemed stuck on using at the time. (The other was the monster-created-by-radiation shtick.) Compared to the characters Rusoff created for Day the World Ended, those of It Conquered the World were more realistically drawn, the dialogue was much less hackneyed, and the action was tight and as logical as it could be within the confines of a science-fiction script.

  To be fair, however, Rusoff didn’t do it alone. Although he was given sole credit for the screenplay in the film’s credit crawl, according to American International’s own pressbook, Charles B. Griffith coauthored It Conquered the World. Some sources claim that the script was more Griffith’s work than it was Rusoff’s. Griffith had come to Hollywood shortly after graduating from military school. He began writing television scripts, but none of his scripts ever got produced. His pal Jonathan Haze, who was already working for Roger Corman, showed several of Griffith’s scripts to the producer-director, who was impressed enough to hire Griffith to write a Western, Gunslinger. He eventually became one of Corman’s favorite scriptwriters.

  When Corman read Rusoff’s script for It Conquered the World he found it disjointed and confusing, and he sent it to Griffith with a message asking for a rewrite. According to Griffith, Rusoff’s brother was dying in Canada at the time he composed the screenplay and that undoubtedly impacted on his work. Griffith rewrote the script from scratch in three days.

  The story begins with a mystery: why are U.S.-launched satellites exploding in their own orbits? According to crackpot physicist Tom Anderson (Lee Van Cleef), there is
an alien intelligence sequestered in the blackness of outer space that monitors our terrestrial activities constantly. They want to make certain we puny humans don’t screw up the cosmos as we have our own little planet; ergo, they are destroying our every attempt at extraterrestrial exploration. In a meeting with Secretary of Defense Platt (Marshall Bradford) and General Tomlinson (David McMann), Anderson tries his best to convince the government to shut down its space program, but he’s too late. The newest satellite is being readied for liftoff as they speak.

  Despite Anderson’s warnings, everything seems to go well with the launch and the satellite remains in orbit for three months. Anderson’s friend and colleague Dr. Paul Nelson (Peter Graves) and his wife, Joan (Sally Fraser), join Tom and his wife, Claire (Beverly Garland), for dinner one evening. While Nelson crows about the success of the U. S. space program (he’s in charge of the satellite installation), Anderson begins dropping hints about something much more important that he is in charge of, right here in his own home. Against Claire’s wishes (she thinks her husband is dangerously close to going off the deep-end), Tom unveils a radio-telescope setup he has built which allows him to listen to signals from the planet Venus. Nelson is unimpressed. “We’ve bounced signals off the moon, why not Venus?” he snorts. But Anderson explains that beyond the static is a voice, a voice from the stars.