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

by Randy Palmer

  To add some visual pizzazz to Cat Girl, Jim Nicholson phoned Paul Blaisdell and asked if he could help bail them out. “This picture is in terrible shape, Paul; there’s nothing scary in it at all,” Nicholson told him. He wanted Blaisdell to give Cat Girl its requisite title monster. If AIP could film a quick insert shot of some kind of “cat-woman,” Nicholson thought the film would be salvageable.

  “How much time do I have to do this?” Blaisdell asked.

  “Two days,” Nicholson replied.

  There was a pregnant pause, then; “You’re kidding, aren’t you, Nick?”

  No, he wasn’t. The Amazing Colossal Man was finished and ready to go. All it needed was a cofeature, and that was supposed to be Cat Girl.

  Nicholson called Blaisdell with the Cat Girl assignment on a Friday. The finished product had to be ready to go before the cameras early Monday morning. Considering the circumstances, what Blaisdell managed to dream up over the weekend turned out to be pretty remarkable. He later reminisced about the assignment: “The part where the girl woke up in the insane asylum, took a look in the mirror and thought she was changing into some kind of a leopard—that was the makeup AIP wanted me to do for the movie. It involved the head and the paws and of course the rest of me had to be wearing pajamas because, frankly, when I take my shirt off, I don’t look too much like a girl.’’

  As was his custom, Paul began work on the mask using one of his “blanks” as the base. With his standard makeup materials—foam rubber, liquid latex, pine, contact bond cement, and cutting and coloring tools—Blaisdell created a “were-cat” headpiece and a pair of furry, taloned claws. The face of the cat creature was sculpted out of block foam cemented directly to the latex blank and coated with numerous layers of latex. When cured, the rubber latex was spray-painted dark brown and covered with tufts of crepe hair, a synthetic available from theatrical supply shops. Elongated ears made from cut sections of block foam were covered with latex and crepe hair on the outside but left smooth on the inside. Color highlighting made the interior of the ears appear realistically fleshy. Lastly, thin pieces of wire were inserted into the mask on either side of the nose to simulate a cat’s whiskers.

  Claws were made over a pair of normal winter gloves, as opposed to the heavy-duty gloves Blaisdell usually used for monsters such as the She-Creature, so that the finished product would appear thinner and more feline. Latex rubber was applied to each glove and allowed to dry; then the latex was spray-painted and covered with crepe hair, which was bonded to the latex with an adhesive called “spirit gum.” Talons fashioned from pine were glued to the tips of the fingers with contact bond cement.

  As he had promised, Blaisdell had everything ready early the following Monday. When he arrived at AIP, he was ushered into an empty room and told to don the cat-girl mask and claws, as well as a pair of pajamas. A camera was rolled in and set up for a couple of quick insert shots. In the first, Paul was photographed clenching and unclenching the beastly claws; in the other he held a claw to his throat as if gasping in terror at seeing “his” alter ego in the mirror.

  Both inserts were filmed so quickly that apparently no one bothered to pull focus. Although the shot of the clenching claws—seen not once but twice in the finished film—turned out reasonably well, the full-length shot of Blaisdell in his cat-mask was photographed completely out of focus. AIP used the shot anyway; there simply wasn’t any time available for reshoots.

  A second monster makeup had been designed for the film, but this seems not to have survived over the years. According to Blaisdell, there was another scene in the film to which AIP wanted additions made. “When Leonora partially changes into a cat-woman,” Blaisdell explained, “I utilized a couple of photos of Lilly Christine, the famous ‘cat-girl’ dancer who performed at Las Vegas. I did have to look up some original shots of a gal who performed like a cat-gal because I’m afraid I’m not quite that much of a gal.” Whatever scenes or makeup Paul was referring to will probably remain a mystery.

  (Incidentally, the few seconds of cat-creature screen time afforded Blaisdell in the original theatrical release of Cat Girl were later excised for TV showings when American International sold the picture to television in the early 1960s as part of its “Chiller Theatre” movie package. The footage was restored by Columbia/Tri-Star when the videotape version was released in 1994.)

  Blaisdell attended the Los Angeles premiere of Cat Girl with his wife and close friends Bob and Kathy Burns. He cringed as soon as he saw himself on screen. The cat-creature was such an obvious splice-in (at least to his trained eyes) it seemed jarringly out of place. And not only was it out of place, it was out of focus.

  “Look at that, will you,” a disgruntled Blaisdell whispered to his companions. “It looks awful.”

  “Well, maybe it’s supposed to be that way. Maybe they wanted it to be an arty, soft-focus kind of thing,” Bob suggested.

  “Oh, bullshit,” Blaisdell countered. “That’s just sloppy filmmaking, pure and simple.”

  As poorly lighted and photographed as the cat-creature was, at least it legitimized the film in the eyes of its executive producers. AIP was satisfied, even if Paul wasn’t.

  A lot more footage of the cat mask had been shot than was ever used in the movie, and Blaisdell was surprised at the brevity of his “cameo.” He suffered through another few minutes of the slow-moving, muddled melodrama before quipping, “I think we should get out of here before one of us falls into a coma.” They left a good twenty minutes before the end of the picture.

  Blaisdell had been so disappointed with the minimal amount of cat-monster footage AIP incorporated into the finished feature that he decided to put the cat-mask to further use in a homemade 16mm featurette shot with Bob Burns’s brand new Bolex movie camera. Paul donned the cat-creature makeup and chased Bob and Lionel Comport all around his Topanga Canyon home, finally “killing” Comport with his lethal cat-talons. The youthful filmmakers attempted a couple of professional effects, including an in-camera “dissolve” that was supposed to show Blaisdell changing from a human to an animal without resorting to a cutaway. But the film had to be backwound to a predetermined point perfectly to achieve the effect, and they were never able to get it to work properly.

  Burns has fond memories of making the 16mm short, entitled The Cat Man. He said, “It was the kind of thing that Paul loved to do, just fooling around and acting kind of nutty, using some of the props he had worked on for AIP.” According to Burns, Blaisdell was at his happiest during such times. Even Jackie joined in the fun.

  When they gathered together to watch the processed film footage a few days later, Paul noticed that the cat-creature mask looked a lot more realistic than it had in the AIP feature. He was so impressed, in fact, that he suggested they try out a brand new makeup technique right then and there. Lionel Comport would be the actor in the makeup chair, and Bob would be the cameraman. Lionel was the son of Lionel Comport, Sr., who owned the Comport Movie Ranch that supplied animals for use in motion pictures. He was a pretty big fellow, so Paul wouldn’t be able to use one of his ready-made “blanks” to create a monster makeup; they’d have to make a life cast of Lionel’s face first.

  AIP thought they could pump up the fear factor in the monsterless British film, Cat Girl, by splicing in a shot of Blaisdell wearing a cat-monster mask. Blaisdell was given just three days to create the mask and a matching set of claws. The result wasn’t half bad, but AIP’s blurry photography obscured the effect they wanted. Paul later wore the mask in a homemade horror movie, The Cat-Man (from which this frame blowup was taken). The mask was accidentally destroyed in the fiery finale of Herman Cohen’s 1958 production, How to Make a Monster (courtesy of Bob Burns).

  “You know, I think I know a way to create a life mask really quickly,” Blaisdell said. “Instead of using plaster and making a negative mold first, I’m going to use my airbrush to apply latex directly to Lionel’s skin. That’ll get the job done a lot faster. And when we peel it off, we’ll hav
e an ‘instant’ life mask.”

  Burns thought that sounded like a good idea. He really got Paul’s enthusiasm pumping when he suggested that Blaisdell might be on the cutting edge of a new type of makeup process. “Just think, Paul, you’ll be able to market it and everything.”

  Paul got out a jar of liquid latex, the same rubber-based compound he used to create his professional masks and monster outfits, and poured it into his airbrush equipment. “Okay now, Lionel, you sit in this chair,” Blaisdell directed. Comport eagerly followed his pal’s instructions, excited to be a part of this makeup breakthrough.

  “Keep your eyes closed and just relax,” Paul advised as he began spraying the latex on Lionel’s face. Within minutes every inch of skin was coated with multiple layers of the quick-drying rubber. Suddenly Lionel began gesticulating wildly.

  “Uh, Paul, did we make little holes for Lionel to breathe?” Burns wondered.

  Blaisdell’s eyes grew big. “Oh, shit!” He ducked down to take a look at Comport’s nose. It was completely plugged up with hardening latex. “We’re killing him!”

  Blaisdell and Burns both started tearing frantically at the latex, but it was stuck to every single hair growing out of Lionel’s skin. “Jesus, Lionel, why didn’t you shave this morning?” Paul grumbled.

  “Phmmmphh,” came the reply.

  They finally made enough progress to expose one cheek, a nostril, and part of Lionel’s mouth, but the eyes remained completely covered. “I wonder why it won’t come off?” said Burns.

  “Come to think of it, we didn’t cover his eyes with cotton or anything, did we?” Paul mused.

  Burns shook his head solemnly. The latex had solidified completely around each one of Lionel’s eyelashes.

  “I don’t know how we’ll ever get this off,” admitted Blaisdell. They finally managed to uncover most of Comport’s face (which had gone pale and blotchy as the result of either a weird skin reaction from the application of the latex or a panic attack, they could never figure out which). At last he could breathe a bit easier. “Fellas, I can’t go home like this,” Lionel complained. “What are we going to do?”

  Blaisdell conferred with Burns and finally decided the only thing to do was to cut off Lionel’s eyelashes. There was some objection on the part of the subject, but once Lionel realized the latex was not going to come off any other way, he relented. When he got home that night, he looked pretty odd. (The lashes grew back in about two weeks.)

  Later, Blaisdell confided to Burns, “I have to admit that was not one of my better ideas.” He did like to experiment, however:

  There were many times that Jackie and I tried using different types of makeup compounds, but for the kind of work I was doing at the time, latex and foam rubber offered more possibilities than just about anything else because they are so easy to work with. You were only limited by your imagination. Well, that and the budget.

  I have to admit, I enjoyed working on a lot of these films and trying to come up with new and different ways of giving the audience a little jolt. But I’ll tell you something I learned a long time ago, that most of the producers in Hollywood never seemed able to understand. Under the right conditions, the “monster” that can really scare you the most is the one that looks and acts almost human and almost familiar. A friend? A relative? A pet dog? A makeup artist, maybe?

  8

  Cosmic Creeps

  Jim Nicholson and I grew up about the same time during the ’30s and ’40s. He read the same science-fiction pulps that I did, the ones that always pictured Martians as these little guys with scrawny bodies and great, enormous heads and brains. Jim started his career as a theater usher, and he used to stand inside the door and watch the films as they played each week, and he saw all the Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon types of pictures, as well as whatever science-fiction pictures came out at the Saturday afternoon matinees. No matter how good or bad or indifferent these pictures were, one thing Jim noticed was that not one of them ever had an alien creature that looked like that sort of thing we used to see in the pulps.

  One afternoon when Jim and I were talking he said, “I’d just love to do a picture with one of those classic Martians—you know, the kind with the enormous head and little tiny body, and he doesn’t worry about a thing; you just look like you’re going to hurt him and he points a finger at you and goes B-z-z-z-z-z-t! And you’ve had it!” I’d never thought about it, but Jim was right: there had never been a motion picture using this kind of a Martian.

  I don’t know why that turned out to be the “classic” Martian, but apparently it caught on in the pulp magazines and stayed that way ever after. And that was the way I designed them for Jim’s picture.

  —Paul Blaisdell

  Blaisdell often worked on short-term projects like Cat Girl in between major assignments such as The She-Creature, It Conquered the World, and The Amazing Colossal Man. When notorious zero-budget producer Al Zimbalist, Jr., approached Blaisdell to ask if he was interested in designing the title creature for a film called Monster from Green Hell, he naturally asked for more information. Zimbalist showed him a story outline which described an experimental rocketship and a payload of insects that return to earth greatly enlarged. It was pretty straightforward stuff, another of the “big bug” pictures that clambered out of Hollywood in the wake of Warner Bros. 1954 smash, Them! Blaisdell agreed to work up a series of production illustrations depicting the kind of monster he envisioned from reading the outline.

  When Blaisdell delivered his sketches to Zimbalist’s office, he appended a note indicating that he would be available to build the title creatures for Monster from Green Hell, conditional upon the negotiation of an acceptable fee. Days passed with no word from Zimbalist. Blaisdell got suspicious. The producer was never in, according to the secretary who answered his phone, and Zimbalist never returned any of Paul’s calls. After several weeks went by with still no word, Blaisdell gave up trying to contact Zimbalist himself and turned for help to his agent, Forry Ackerman. Blaisdell was eager to rescue his production illustrations, but Ackerman also was unable to get through to the producer. The Monster from Green Hell sketches were never seen again.

  The creatures Blaisdell had designed for Zimbalist resembled “a cross between an insect and an insect larvae,” according to Bob Burns. Blaisdell himself claimed that Zimbalist only asked for “a giant,” never specifying what kind of giant he wanted for the film, but this is a curious remark to make considering that he examined the script and it is unmistakably about giant wasps.* The production illustrations were only pen and ink sketches, but Blaisdell forever regretted their loss, as he later noted:

  I designed a 30-foot giant for the producer of Monster from Green Hell, but the film company decided that giant wasps would be cheaper to make than what I came up with. They also kept my production illustrations and never paid me for them. In fact, Al Zimbalist, Jr., the producer, was such a nice guy when it came to taking off with things to make his pictures that I believe the studio finally fired him. I never heard from him after that. Knowing that he got his butt kicked out of Columbia gave me a great deal of satisfaction!

  Zimbalist finally made Monster from Green Hell with a cast toplining Jim Davis, Barbara Turner, Joel Fluellen, and Robert E. Griffin. Of the four, only Davis achieved any degree of stardom. He appeared in the horribly inept Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter (1965) and Dracula vs. Frankenstein (1971), but was most often seen in middle-of-the-road Westerns. He achieved his greatest fame in American television during the 1980s on the long-running “Dallas” series.

  The screenplay, which was written by Louis Vittes and Endre Boehm, fell back on that old standby—radiation—to account for its title creatures. The insects are exposed to radiation during a space test flight and crash-land in Africa (the “green hell” of the film’s title). Actually, the rocket contained monkeys, guinea pigs, and spider crabs, as well as wasps, but there is never any mention of what happened to the other animals. (Maybe they were stung
to death by the wasps.) Zimbalist inserted plenty of stock footage of rampaging elephants and other African wildlife from the 1939 movie Stanley and Livingstone, overlaying superimpositions of the monsterish wasps in the finest Bert I. Gordon tradition. Most of the effects work was handled by Gene Warren, although Jess Davison, Jack Rabin, and Louis DeWitt are also credited. Warren built the wasps, which were stupendously cheap, having wire skeletons as opposed to the standard ball-and-socket armatures used by animators like Ray Harryhausen and Willis O’Brien. This made them very delicate and difficult to pose, which may explain why the creatures’ movements are so stilted. The crew also designed an enormous monster-wasp head (which looked nothing like a wasp, of course) and two pincer-claws that menaced members of the cast during live action setups. The story that Paul Blaisdell built or “operated” the giant wasp head (à la Beulah in It Conquered the World) is untrue. The rumor probably stemmed from his peripheral involvement with the film during its preproduction phase.

  After the Monster from Green Hell fiasco, Blaisdell decided to think twice before agreeing to do any more work for producers or outfits with which he was unfamiliar. Just before signing up to work on The Amazing Colossal Man for AIP, he was approached by Dan and Jack Milner and asked to design a creature for their new monster melodrama, From Hell It Came. The Milner brothers had produced Lou Rusoff’s very first sci-fi screenplay, The Phantom from 10,000 Leagues, which was paired with Day the World Ended for release through American-International when it was still known as the American Releasing Corporation. The Milners had tried to interest Blaisdell in designing their Phantom but Paul, who was busy working on his first full-size monster costume for Roger Corman, had to turn them down. Now they wanted him to design the “Tabanga,” a walking tree-creature, and once again Blaisdell was unavailable—this time because he was occupied with preparations for The Amazing Colossal Man. But he did design the Tabanga on paper and show the Milners how to make realistic-looking tree bark out of nothing more than foam rubber and latex.