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

by Randy Palmer

  Most of Osborne’s scenes involved straightforward interaction with Terrell and Gloria Castillo, although in the climax of the picture the script called for him to be subdued by alcohol injections from the aliens. But like some of Hollywood’s greatest stars and starlets, Lyn Osborne believed that “his face was his fortune,” and he did not want to risk getting it damaged by being poked with any “hypodermic-fingernails.” Paul demonstrated how harmless the rig was, emphasizing that no one could possibly get hurt because the hypo-nails retracted into the interior of the claw as soon as they touched a solid surface. “Your fortune will remain secure,” Blaisdell promised.

  But Osborne wasn’t having any. “I don’t care, you’re not coming near me with that thing.” He walked off stage and refused to come back. Blaisdell grabbed the hypo-nail rig and chased Osborne down. “Lyn, look how easily this works,” he said, turning around and pushing the retractable claw into Burns’s face. “Doesn’t hurt a bit, does it, Bob?” The surprised Burns shook his head.

  “Okay, fine,” Osborne said, looking at Burns. “You do it.” And he walked away.

  Eddie Cahn, who had been standing by watching, threw up his hands in exasperation. “Fellas, you’ll have to find some way to cover Lyn during the insert shooting.” That was the extent of Cahn’s input into the problem.

  Close-ups of the hypo-nails penetrating Osborne’s flesh weren’t 100 percent crucial to the completion of the scenes they were shooting that day, but Blaisdell wanted to get the effect on film. Rather than cheat the audience by using a cut-around, Blaisdell suggested that Burns stand in for the actor during the insert stage. With the proper camera angle, some dramatic low-key lighting and a little quick cutting, no one would be able to tell it wasn’t Lyn Osborne. Burns agreed to do it.

  Several shots of Martian claws slashing through the air were intercut with close-ups of Burns, his head cocked away from the camera, while the alcohol-engorged fingernails of the Martian claws “penetrated” his cheekbone, neck, and chest. When it was pieced together during the editing stage, the sequence turned out to be very effective. And Blaisdell was right: nobody ever noticed that Lyn Osborne was MIA.

  Burns also doubled Steve Terrell for scenes with the disembodied hand inside the police cruiser. Gloria Castillo was also doubled by a stand-in during most of the effects shooting. Since all of the insert footage was shot at the Howard Anderson studios, AIP did not consider it necessary to award their two young stars an extra day’s pay. Both characters would only be seen from the back while the camera was trained mainly on Blaisdell’s rubber latex handiwork, so any reasonable-looking stand-ins could do the job.

  Working side by side, Blaisdell and Burns managed to pull off most of the seeing-eye claw shots without a hitch. To this day the scene remains effectively creepy—one more tribute to Blaisdell’s talent for devising innovative yet inexpensive movie effects. “Paul Blaisdell was just brilliant when it came to doing special effects, special makeups and costumes for these pictures,” noted producer Alex Gordon, who first worked with Blaisdell on Day the World Ended. “It’s too bad he was so vastly underrated for so long.” Bob Burns agreed:

  To be absolutely realistic about it, Paul did most of these things for very little money and with very little time. AIP and other independent film companies were never able to give him the kind of luxuries other artists routinely got at Universal or Warner Brothers or the other major studios. Under those kinds of conditions, the work that he turned out was just amazing. To this day I still marvel at some of the things he was able to accomplish almost single-handedly.

  In its original cut, the film contained significantly more group footage of the Saucer Men. Many of these shots were eliminated before the film went into general release. Because Angelo Rossito was the shortest of the four actors who played the aliens in long shots, Blaisdell and Burns thought it would be funny to designate him the Martian leader. Thereafter, whenever there was group activity among the monsters, little Angie led his bodacious brethren on their nefarious rounds. He actually scored a round of applause from the crew after one performance because they thought he made a marvelous Martian. The distinctive, warbly sounding Martian tongue heard sporadically throughout the film was actually the voice of Lyn Osborne. “Osborne was a real character, and he was actually a lot funnier than Frank Gorshin, who was kind of quiet and kind of moody,” Bob Burns observed. “Occasionally we’d hear laughter coming from a corner of the set, and invariably it was Lyn, drawing a crowd with one of his funny stories. He was good at ad-libbing, so he did the voices of the aliens.” During the recording, Osborne spoke as quickly as he could with a nasally whine, and the sound was speeded up and further distorted in the studio.

  Eddie Cahn wanted to add an extra gruesome touch to the scene in which Frank Gorshin touches the dead body of the alien stuck underneath Johnny’s car. He asked Blaisdell to devise some “alien ichor” which would be used to coat Gorshin’s hand. Blaisdell came up with the idea of using “Wild Root Cream Oil,” a supergreasy hair preparation for men, mixed together with chocolate syrup, lime jello, and a little bit of glitter. Having already completed his scenes, Gorshin had departed the production, so Cahn’s camera photographed Blaisdell’s hand reaching out to touch the slimy concoction. Thanks to the wonders of modern movie magic, not a soul was able to tell this wasn’t really Gorshin’s hand.

  The first major order of on-screen business for Blaisdell’s disembodied Martian mitt was a sanguine scene in which the claw detaches itself from the still-quivering arm of a dead Saucer Man, crawls across the pavement, and punctures the tire of Johnny’s car. The effect required a five-stage setup. Following an establishing shot of a “dead” Saucer Man lying beneath the framework of the car, Cahn cut to a close-up of the mutilated arm to show the claw working itself free of the wristbone. The claw was loosely attached to a specially prepared latex and foam rubber wrist outfitted with the same material that made up the aliens’ bodywear. To give the scene an even grislier slant, Blaisdell attached a mass of latex ganglia and an exposed “bone” (actually a length of painted plastic) to the end of the wrist. Since the camera was tightly focused on that section of the wrist which was constructed to separate into two pieces, Blaisdell was able to hide below the frame line and operate the claw with his own hand. With the cameras rolling, Blaisdell wiggled the claw until it separated and dropped to the ground. Appropriate sound effects added in postproduction made it seem as if the claw was noisily tearing away from the tendons and tissues of the arm. (It’s interesting to note that this sequence was filmed by the same director who had objected to the idea of the “lunch hooks” in The She-Creature just one year earlier.)

  A quick close-up of the rotary eye was used to establish that this claw was not merely alive, but sentient. For the following low-angle shot showing the fully functioning appendage approaching the car tire of its own accord, a small trough was built to accommodate Blaisdell’s arm as he stretched out on the floor of the set. With his hand inserted into the claw-glove, Blaisdell “walked” the alien claw toward the tire. Since the unit fit over his own hand by means of a slit in the latex rubber near the bottom of the palm, the apparent severed wrist actually rested on top of his own forearm. Careful camera panning followed the movement of the claw and helped to insure that the viewer’s attention was directed toward the wriggling fingers and away from the wrist. Another close-up—this time of the engorged, dripping hypo-nails striking the tire—segued into a final shot of the disembodied hand as it scurried past the camera.

  Although Cahn utilized numerous close-ups of the working hypo-nails throughout Saucer Men, the crawling hand was featured in only one other important sequence. Just before Johnny and Joan steal the police cruiser, there is a brief shot of the claw climbing through an open side window. This setup involved the use of the film’s single optical effect, a simple superimposition accomplished by filming a black-garbed Blaisdell operating the claw against a solid black background. Although the juxtaposition of elements i
s good, the shot is not perfect. Close inspection of the scene reveals a vague outline of Paul’s forearm on the underside of the claw, caused by a reflection of light off the material during the shooting.

  The budget of Invasion of the Saucer Men didn’t allow for use of a breakaway car, a routine Hollywood prop used in just about every picture that ever required filming the interior of an automobile. When it was time to shoot footage of the claw attacking Johnny and Joan inside the police car, the crew had to thread cables and lights through the windows of a real auto in order to light the scene, while Fred West aimed his Mitchell camera straight through the back window, which had been removed. Steve Terrell’s and Gloria Castillo’s stand-ins were seated up front, and Paul Blaisdell was hiding on the floorboards between the front and back seats. “That was the only way they could get the scene filmed,” explained Bob Burns, “because AIP was too cheap to spend the money on a breakaway car.”

  Blaisdell, once again dressed in black and now wearing a black hood, remained in the shadows while “walking” the disembodied claw up the backseat cushion. Altogether the crew spent some 3½ hours setting up and shooting the scene. “Poor Paul was twisted up like a pretzel in the backseat the entire time,” recalled Burns. “With the cameraman shooting through the windows, and all the criss-crossed cables running through the car, it was almost impossible for Paul to squeeze himself between the front and backseats. And the lights were so hot, I think we both lost several pounds that day.” There was one minor snafu: part of Blaisdell’s black-clothed forearm became visible midway through the first shot. It was included in the final cut of the film anyway because AIP thought no one would notice.

  Blaisdell also performed as the seeing-eye claw in a minor scene with Lyn Osborne. When Osborne’s character spots the claw on the floorboard of the police cruiser, he attempts to photograph it with a flash camera, and it goes up in a blast of smoke. To give the appearance of the claw evaporating, a standard Fourth-of-July smoke-bomb hidden underneath one of the latex rubber gloves was ignited. The heat scorched the hell out of the rubber claw (Paul, recalling his Voodoo Woman experience, did have the foresight to remove his hand from it first), but the sacrifice of one Martian claw wasn’t too high a price to pay to capture the effect on film. (At least that’s what Eddie Cahn told him.)

  Once Art has seen incontrovertible proof of the existence of the Martians, he, Johnny, and Joan try to escape Pelham Wood in Joan’s car, but with its dead battery they can’t get very far. Art whips out a pistol and begins shooting at the advancing aliens, but the creatures aren’t fazed in the least. “Bullets don’t hurt ’em!” Art mutters incredulously.

  Bullets might not penetrate alien flesh, but they have a decidedly different impact on mere humans. A standard moviemaking item called a squib, used to simulate the impact of a bullet, was attached to one of the Saucer Man heads so that Eddie Cahn could show the bullet’s impact on the enlarged brain. Generally, squibs are attached to pieces of background scenery, trees, clothing, etc., and are set off by a remote-controlled electric charge. Nobody had tried setting one off on a monster mask before.

  Once the headpiece was rigged, Blaisdell strapped it on and filming recommenced. At a prearranged signal, the charge was set off by one of the film’s two designated special effects technicians. The squib exploded on cue, leaving behind a blackened hole, a wispy trail of smoke, and one rather shaken up monster-maker. While things looked pretty good from Cahn’s perspective, inside the fiberglass alien head Blaisdell could hear bells ringing. “He didn’t know the blast of the squib would reverberate inside the fiberglass head,” said Bob Burns. “None of us did. Paul couldn’t hear anything for the rest of that day.”

  Fortunately, there were no such mishaps during the staging of the fight between a Saucer Man and “Old Walt,” Larkin’s pet Brahma bull. A little more than half the shots that make up this sequence were photographed on indoor sets at the Howard Anderson studio, using the Martian hero head and accessories as well as a phony bull’s head mounted on a metal rod. The rest was filmed on the Lionel Comport Movie Ranch with a real bull and a prop body. (Comport had previously assisted in the making of The Beast with a Million Eyes with the loan of numerous farm animals for scenes in that film.) The dummy Martian was wired to the real bull, and footage was shot as the animal tried to shake it loose. These scenes were later intercut with close-ups of the Saucer Man hero head and the hypodermic fingernails penetrating the bull’s hide (actually a piece of cowhide provided by studio property master Karl Brainard).

  In the middle of the bullfight, the Martian’s eyeball is gouged by the bull’s horn. To pull off this illusion, Blaisdell and Burns took on the roles of the Saucer Man and steer, respectively, using the Martian hero head and the studio’s rod-mounted bull head. For this scene Blaisdell prepared a special alien eyeball which had a cone-shaped wedge of material cut out to accommodate the tip of the bull horn. A small hole was drilled through the center of the Styrofoam sphere so that the nozzle of a grease gun could be inserted into the back. The grease gun was loaded with chocolate syrup, which was being used to simulate blood. The front hole in the eyeball was filled in with wax, and the finished orb was painted and popped back into the eye socket, ready to be blinded on camera without a cutaway.

  When the film began rolling, Burns rammed the horn of the prop bull into the wax center of the Styrofoam eye. At the same time, Blaisdell, hidden from view on the other side of the hero head, squeezed the grease gun trigger, letting fly a stream of chocolate syrup which gushed gorily out the front of the eyeball. Burns began rocking the bull head from side to side to make it seem as if the animal was trying like mad to gouge out what was left of the eye. The juxtaposition of live elements, combined with judicious navigation of the camera, made for a convincing effect which was magnified by the intercutting of location footage with the actual Brahma bull. (Incidentally, the prop was not a Brahma bull head, but no one ever seemed to notice.)**

  After the shot was spliced together, Eddie Cahn made a comment which had a very familiar ring: “Uhm, we can’t use this, Paul. It’s too horrible.” He eventually decided to include a trimmed-down version in the final cut of the film, as Blaisdell later noted:

  We went through a lot of preparation just to get that scene set up, and then it got cut. The actual shot of the blood gurgling out of the eyeball was removed because Eddie thought it was too gory. He told Ron Sinclair [the editor] they were going to have to do a cut away. So when it comes back, you can see the blood all over the eye, but that’s all. There was so much more originally. The blood really shot out! For its time it was a really wild scene. Frankly, I don’t know which one of us was the bigger dummy—me or Bob Burns, the guy who played the bull. Sometimes I wonder if we didn’t have better days fighting the bull in the producer’s office!”

  Burns also helped Paul with the close-up of the Saucer Man who is blinded at the end of the picture. The constricting pupil effect had already been dropped because it was too costly and time-consuming, so all that needed to be captured on film was a close shot of the hero head with a pair of claws attempting to shield its eyes, as if the monster was trying to shut out the light. The choreography of the scene was simplicity itself: Blaisdell would stand behind the head and work the mouth and eye controls to give the features a little bit of animation; Burns would sit in front of Blaisdell wearing a pair of claws. On cue, he would bring the claws up and back, covering the huge orbs in the hero head.

  The only problem was, with Burns facing the same direction as Blaisdell, he had to guess where the eyes were. (Burns couldn’t sit the other way around because the right and left claws would be reversed.) Every time the camera was fired up, Burns missed his mark. Sometimes he knocked the lens shield askew (the camera was very close to him); other times he had the claws covering the Saucer Man’s chin, or nose, or cheeks—anything but the eyes. The harder he tried to get it right, the worse it turned out, and the funnier it seemed to get. Burns was single-handedly burning up the
film stock, and no one was able to stop him.

  Burns eventually got the claws lined up correctly, but by that time he and Blaisdell were laughing so hard their stomachs hurt. “It’s a good thing

  we didn’t do that scene on a day when Sam Arkoff visited the set,” Burns said, “because he definitely would’ve pulled the plug after a couple of takes. It took me at least five tries to get it right.”

  Along with the Saucer Man costumes, the hero head, the hypo-nails, and the articulated claw, Blaisdell designed and built the aliens’ interstellar hot rod. He produced two different model saucers, one rigged to hover over a miniature set and one made specifically to be blown to bits.

  The flying version of the saucer—model 1—was made out of solid white pine. While Paul gained most of his monster costuming experience during the years he worked for American International, learning as he went along and pulling rabbits out of hats on the fly, he had many more years of experience building detailed model airplanes. His devotion to the hobby was repaid on film projects that required specialized props such as the teleportation device seen in Not of This Earth and the Las Vegas miniatures of The Amazing Colossal Man.

  Blaisdell’s wood-carving expertise allowed him to manufacture easily a sleek, manta-shaped flying saucer that looked appropriately otherworldly, while at the same time recalling the minimalist design elements of modern art. The ship’s gently sloping, parabolic perspective was offset by twin exhaust fins and a central dome made of transparent plastic. The finished model measured about 36 inches in diameter. The exterior finish consisted of over one hundred coats of silver paint.

  The Martian saucer would be filmed against a miniature background as it descended from the sky to land on Larkin’s farm. The model was rigged with wires, and Blaisdell operated it with the fishpole device he previously used on It Conquered the World to put the Flying Fingers through their aerial paces.