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

by Randy Palmer

  The monster suits for The Giant Leeches finally were supposed to be made by Ed Nelson, who had starred in American International’s The Brain Eaters. Nelson had the responsibility for coming up with the leechlike parasites for that film, but in the finest Harry Thomas tradition, all Nelson did was buy some wind-up toy bugs he had seen at a novelty shop and cover them with scraps of fur to make them appear more menacing. The effect on-screen was embarrassingly laughable.

  According to Bruno VeSota, who costarred with Yvette Vickers in The Giant Leeches, Nelson was forced to turn over the making of the leeches to someone else when he was signed to play in another picture. Rumor has it that it was the producer’s wife who volunteered to make the costumes. Whether it was she or someone else entirely, the fact remains that Blaisdell’s expertise is sorely missed in The Giant Leeches.

  Only two costumes were made for the movie, and if they weren’t customized raincoats they obviously weren’t much better. (There was even a rumor that the outfits were made from plastic garbage bags.) Whoever designed them forgot to leave room for the airtanks that would be required for the actors to film the underwater scenes, and the suits kept tearing. “Whenever you get someone who doesn’t have a track record of making monster suits, you’re taking an awful chance,” VeSota cautioned. “Those leech suits were splitting all over the place, and they ended up pinning them together with paper clips, needle and thread, anything that was available. They looked so phony that in the final cutting the director only left in six- or twelve-frame takes. If you got any better a look, you’d laugh your head off.”

  The combination of A Bucket of Blood and The Giant Leeches failed to capture the hearts and wallets of the nation’s youthful moviegoers, but if nothing else it provided some serious food for thought for Arkoff and Nicholson. Recently, Britain’s Hammer Film Company had inaugurated a series of gothic horror pictures—remakes of the old Universal classics—photographed in flamboyant Eastman color and starring credible actors like Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. The company was reaping fantastic financial rewards and had already started making sequels and spinoffs. Warner Bros. and Universal were backing all the company’s latest products in exchange for exclusive distribution rights, so certain were they that Hammer had its finger on the pulse of future fantasy filmmaking.

  Arkoff and Nicholson realized that something had to change at AIP. Perhaps it was time to do something besides low-budget science-fiction and horror. Maybe—just maybe—audiences had grown tired of the black-and-white movie monsters that had buttered AIP’s bread for so many years. Perhaps they ought to follow Hammer’s lead, shifting to color film stock and making their own classics. Roger Corman began thinking along similar lines around the same time and would eventually convince AIP to produce a single higher-quality fright flick for the amount of money they usually spent on two black-and-white cheapies. Roger also had an idea where they could get original material for next to nothing. The works of Edgar Allan Poe were in the public domain. And since Poe’s material already enjoyed classic status among the literary elite, an adaptation would automatically generate an air of respectability for the filmmakers and distributor. If they could only hire an actor with the talents of a Lee or Cushing …

  Between film assignments Blaisdell experimented with makeup coloring techniques and used a variety of home implements to produce different kinds of textures in latex rubber. He often would turn these experiments into one-of-a-kind gifts that he presented to his friends and business associates during the holidays. He created two different versions of a monster ashtray—a traditional version that was colored “Frankenstein green,” with two open eyes and a snarling mouth, and an executive version that mixed together shades of browns, yellows, and various earth tones and had one open eye and one squinted eye. He also made claw paper-weights. Jim Nicholson kept a display of Paul’s unique handiwork in his office at AIP.

  Paul also experimented with 35mm still photography and 16mm movie-making. In his home-made horror spoof The Cat Man, he had gotten a chance to reuse his Cat Girl mask before it ended up going down in flames during the filming of How to Make a Monster. In other homegrown projects, he took on the persona of a Lugosi-ish vampire, a menacing tiny-eyed Saucer Man, or a space-helmeted rocket ranger brandishing a toy ray-gun. Eventually Blaisdell would spend his leisure time developing a much more serious amateur film production using a wholly original monster never before seen on the screen, but this was still a few years away.

  Paul spent a lot of his free time putting together intricate model aircrafts from high-end hobby kits. He was especially fond of replicas of aircraft from the WWI era and often spent weeks working on a single kit. Before Bob Burns was drafted into the army in 1958, he spent almost every weekend at Paul’s hideaway in Topanga Canyon. Paul and Jackie were always involved in some kind of fun and games. Bob got a kick out of watching Paul put together the intricate models that could, and often did, frustrate many younger model enthusiasts.

  Blaisdell was also a fan of Errol Flynn’s movies. He loved to watch Flynn in action and even took special classes to learn “movie-fencing.” He owned a large collection of knives and fencing equipment and sometimes invited Burns to square off with him. Burns knew nothing about fencing, so Paul would try to teach him some of the simpler moves. “But usually I ended up tripping over my own feet,” Burns laughed. “I never made a good fencing partner. Paul ‘killed’ me every time.”

  Paul liked old radio shows like “The Shadow” and “Inner Sanctum” and he also enjoyed a good comedy now and again. He and Bob used to work out spoofs of some of the old shows. Together they would work out a series of gags and situations and build them up into regular routines. When they were satisfied with their “scripts,” Paul would hook up his reel-to-reel tape recorder and the two would perform in front of the microphone. Jackie and Kathy Burns laughed at the gags along with the men, but the recordings were mainly “boys’ toys.”

  Blaisdell was surprisingly good at mimicking voices and inventing wild characters for their radio spoofs. “There was just no end to his talents,” Burns remembers enthusiastically. Bob held onto copies of the tapes that had been made during those long-ago weekend fiestas and continues to enjoy them to this day. “Some of the stuff we came up with was pretty silly,” he admitted, “but there’s no doubt that they show off some of Paul’s other talents. There were things he could do that would surprise you, unless you really got to know him. The voice he used for his cameo at the end of The Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow is just one example.”

  Whenever Paul wasn’t busy working on a film assignment, there was ample time to make funny recordings and photographs. “We’d do just whatever popped into our heads,” Burns explained. One time Bob decided he wanted to try making his own monster mask, so Paul gave him a rubber latex blank and a few good tips, and before long Burns had conjured up a pretty decent werewolf mask. The girls took photos of Werewolf-Bob attacking Paul; then Paul would grab one of his monster masks and menace Burns. They were the kind of youthful antics that could virtually define the expression “goofing around.”

  “Whenever Paul got an idea, he would start whistling,” Burns recalled. “He didn’t whistle a tune or anything, he just whistled. For example, one time he got the idea to create a ‘crowd’ effect by playing a tape back and forth between two recorders, each time adding more voices to the background, so by the time it was finished it sounded like there was a whole theater full of people clapping and yelling. This was back when there wasn’t such a thing as overdubbing on a portable recorder.” Obviously Blaisdell used his “low-budget ingenuity” at home as well as on the job.

  Few tapes survive from the Blaisdell/Burns recording sessions, but copies of the stills, some of which were photographed in 3-D, are extant in the hands of a few lucky collectors. Some of the 3-D pictures were printed in Fantastic Monsters of the Films magazine in the early 1960s, and color slide sets were offered for sale to the readers. Undoubtedly, many of these products were either los
t or tossed out with the garbage as the young readers grew out of their monster-collecting phase, making them all the rarer in today’s inflated collector’s market.

  Although Blaisdell never imagined that his leisure-time activities might be offered for public consumption, there is little harm in revealing a down-to-earth side of the artist that most fans never got to see or even knew existed. For those interested, and with Bob Burns’s blessing, an appendix has been added at the back of the book which includes transcriptions of some of Paul’s radio and movie serial spoofs.

  * Corman tried the same tactic in the early 1970s when he set up New World Pictures, the most successful and influential independent production company to enter the market since the halcyon days of American International. He captained New World throughout the ’70s and ’80s, providing filmmaking opportunities for fledgling directors with names like Ron Howard, Joe Dante, and George Lucas. Corman eventually sold New World and used the profits to start up another independent film company, Millennium/New Horizons, which specializes in producing exploitation fare for the home video market.

  11

  Mars Needs Hemoglobin

  Early on in the shoot I tried to check in with the assistant director [Ralph E. Black] to see if he had gotten the extra monster arm that I had built for Ray Corrigan, so Ray wouldn’t have to put on the whole suit just to push his claw through a hatch. The A.D. came crawling down out of the spaceship and barked, “Yeah, I got the extra arm, and who the hell are you?” There wasn’t any of the sort of “M*A*S*H”-like comradery there had been on the AIP films, I can tell you that!

  —Paul Blaisdell

  Although the majority of the decade’s budget-conscious boogeymen were promulgated under the auspices of American International, Allied Artists, and other independent film companies, there were occasional freelance producers, like Ed Wood (Plan 9 from Outer Space) and Al Zimbalist (Monster from Green Hell), who made pictures on their own time and with their own (mostly meager) resources, only later ferreting out the all-important distribution deal. Another producer was Robert E. Kent, who convinced Ed Small at United Artists that making a typical AIP-style monster movie would be a sure box-office bet. Monsters were “in.” Life magazine had devoted a cover story to the genre, and Famous Monsters hadn’t even reached its third issue before it had to face down at least a half-dozen imitators, all encroaching on FM’s “terror-tory.” Why should AIP, Allied Artists, and Universal be the only film companies mining gold from the fantasy film field? Kids and teens were dying to toss fistfuls of dollar bills at Hollywood to be shocked senseless. It was time for UA to grab a piece of the pulse-pounding pie.

  Small took the bait and green-lighted Kent’s monster project. The first thing Kent did was look up a couple of AIP alumni—director Eddie Cahn and monster-maker Paul Blaisdell. Kent figured that with their participation, his picture would almost surely be a guaranteed winner. Cahn’s reputation for getting film in the can as quickly as Roger Corman—who was already on the brink of legendry as the fastest camera in the West—meant that Kent’s movie would come in at or even under budget. And Blaisdell’s ability to create imaginative and original monsters on a shoestring meant that Kent wouldn’t have to worry whether his movie would be able to deliver the ghoulish goods.

  But Blaisdell’s participation hinged on the screenplay. He wanted to see it, hold it in his hands, read it. And he wanted to get Jackie’s opinion. As the years had gone by, he had become more and more cautious about accepting jobs that required a major commitment of time and resources. Recent events at American International had forced Blaisdell to reconsider some assignments and bow out of others altogether. He was determined not to be exploited by AIP or anyone. The only way he could successfully avoid being taken advantage of, he decided, was to read a finished film script to see exactly what would be expected of him and not just assume that what the producer or director said was gospel.

  Kent agreed to show Blaisdell the screenplay, but it was a long time coming—mainly because Kent’s writer, Jerome Bixby, hadn’t finished it yet. Bixby was a writer of numerous sci-fi stories and in fact had worked with H. L. Gold on Galaxy. He also edited Planet Stories (1950–51). But in actual fact, even with over 300 sci-fi stories to his credit, the majority of Bixby’s work was done outside the sci-fi and fantasy field. Probably his best-remembered genre offering was “It’s a Good Life,” written in 1953, which was later turned into one of the most memorable episodes of television’s original “Twilight Zone.” (The same story was updated by director Joe Dante for the “Twilight Zone” anthology film produced by Steven Spielberg in 1983.)

  When Bixby’s finished script was finally delivered to him, Blaisdell looked through it, liked what he saw, and decided the job shouldn’t be too much of a headache. There were none of the multiple monsters that had bogged down his work on Invasion of the Saucer Men; there were no outlandish props to be made, as there had been for Attack of the Puppet People and The Amazing Colossal Man; and no one expected him to redress the She-Creature and cheat paying audiences by pretending to be something else. Best of all, United Artists had no problems meeting Blaisdell’s salary requirements. In fact, UA paid him more money for It! the Terror from Beyond Space than AIP had ever offered for any of its projects, even after five years of dedicated service.

  Blaisdell told Kent he would accept the job and settled down to work on a series of production illustrations depicting the Martian monstrosity. Although Martians were getting to be just a wee bit hackneyed by this time (George Pal’s trilobed invaders that started The War of the Worlds in 1953 had already been followed by the disembodied voice from the Red Planet Mars and Blaisdell’s own Saucer Men), Mars still exuded an air of mystery and menace with its strange geographical features and angry, red hue. If there were any other life forms patrolling our solar system, most people thought they would probably hail from the red planet.

  So Mars it was.

  The story begins with the rescue of a stranded astronaut on the surface of Mars. The commander of the rescue ship, Van Heusen (Kim Spalding), believes that Lt. Eric Carruthers (Marshall Thompson), the only survivor of an earlier exploratory voyage to Mars, murdered his crew in order to hoard food supplies to keep alive until help arrived. Despite Carruthers’s warnings that some hideous form of Martian life was responsible for the deaths of his crewmates, Van Heusen wants to see the lieutenant court martialed and shot. Van shows him a human skull that was found half-buried in the Martian soil. It has been fractured by a bullet. “This was one of your crew, Carruthers. What kind of a monster uses a gun?” Van Heusen scoffs.

  Unbeknownst to Van or the other members of the rescue team, the Martian monster that Carruthers spoke about has climbed aboard the ship and is hiding in the compartment below. When the rocket blasts off to return to Earth, with it goes a hostile and nearly indestructible form of alien life that has acquired a taste for human flesh.

  Carruthers is exonerated by a cruel twist of fate when Keinholz (Thom Carney), one of the rescue crew, turns up missing and a search of the ship uncovers the monster Carruthers has been talking about. Keinholz’s ravaged body is transported to the sick bay for an autopsy by Dr. Royce (Ann Doran). Meanwhile, a second crew member disappears without a trace. Major Perdue (Robert Bice) locates Gino’s (Richard Hervey) bruised and battered body stuffed inside a claustrophobic air duct. Perdue tries to reach him, but the monster appears and forces him back. Carruthers, Van Heusen, and Lt. Calder (Paul Langlon) rig up a booby trap using a string of hand grenades, then rush topside and listen on the ship’s open intercom as the beast triggers the explosives.

  Van Heusen and the others cautiously descend to the lower level to see if the creature is alive or dead. As Van opens the compartment door, the hulking form of the beast rises up before them. It grabs Calder’s rifle and bends it as if it were the rubber it was. The crew retreats to the upper level as the seemingly unstoppable monster rips through a steel door. Van secures the hatch lock that seals the only passagewa
y between It and them. Carruthers suggests trying to choke the thing with gas grenades, but when Calder opens the hatch door, It reaches up through the opening and claws Van Heusen’s boot to shreds, drawing his blood in the process. Carruthers tosses several of the gas grenades through the opening before the hatch is relocked, but the fumes merely irritate the creature.

  The autopsy on Keinholz reveals that he died from acute dehydration. Every bit of moisture in his body and every molecule of oxygen have been sucked out. Even the bone marrow and glandular secretions are gone. Since there are no puncture wounds anywhere on his body, Dr. Royce surmises that the creature derives nourishment from its victims through some weird kind of osmosis process.

  While Ann Anderson (Shawn Smith) attempts to control an infection that has started to spread through Van’s body, the others track the creature’s movements on the ship’s open intercom. Royce has an idea: if they can get to the deck immediately below the monster, they can set a trap for it. Carruthers suggests using the ship’s airlocks as a way around the thing, and he and Royce suit up to make a space-walk.

  When they get to the lower level, Royce and Carruthers set about wiring the ladder that runs between the floors of the ship. The plan is to make enough noise to arouse the monster’s curiosity, and when it comes down the steps to investigate, switch on the current and electrocute it. “There’s enough voltage in these lines to kill thirty human beings,” Carruthers mentions. “The only drawback is, the thing isn’t human.”

  Carruthers’s fears are well founded. The barrel-chested beast has such a thick hide that the shock merely stings it. It lunges at Calder, who falls backward between two induction pumps, breaking his ankle in the process. He is able to keep the creature at bay with a blowtorch, but the torch has just three hours worth of fuel. With his broken leg, there is no way he can get back to the upper deck, so Carruthers promises to send help as soon as they can figure out a way to get him out of there.