by Randy Palmer
Two other “exclusives” offered for sale in the pages of Fantastic Monsters were Hollywood Monsters and Filmland Monsters. These were color slides and black-and-white film footage of Blaisdell’s highest-profile movie monsters. Hollywood Monsters was a combination of slides from The She-Creature, It Conquered the World, The Spider, Invasion of the Saucer Men, It! the Terror from Beyond Space, Voodoo Woman, The Beast with a Million Eyes, and How to Make a Monster. Each 2"×2" slide was in full color, a novelty at the time because Paul’s monsters had appeared only in black-and-white motion pictures.
Filmland Monsters was a blend of new and old film footage from Day the World Ended, It Conquered the World, The She-Creature, and Invasion of the Saucer Men. AIP gave Paul permission to excerpt scenes from the films’ original theatrical trailers as long as he didn’t use any footage of the actors, so Filmland Monsters contained only monsters and animated titles (“A Ghost of a Ghost … Growing into a Massive Murdering MONSTER!”). Paul took the opportunity to incorporate never-before-seen footage of all the creatures except Marty the Mutant, who had perished during his Day the World Ended promotional tour. Unused footage of Beulah from It Conquered the World was included that showed off the malevolent mushroom’s ability to roll its eyes and gnash its fangs, and there was a brief interlude of one of the Flying Fingers as it fluttered to life in front of Beulah’s face, operated by Paul using his standard fishrod method. This was followed by scenes from The She-Creature trailer and a brand new close-up of Cuddles from The Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow, looking slightly the worse for wear but displaying some interesting dental work for the camera.
The trailer title from Invasion of the Saucer Men was followed by new monster footage that included close-ups of the extended hypo-nails, the seeing-eye claw, and a mug shot of a Saucer Man as it wrinkled its nose and stroked its chin thoughtfully. For the shot of the seeing-eye claw, Blaisdell devised a new crank mechanism that allowed him to manipulate the eyeball while keeping his hand inside the glove.
Both Filmland Monsters and Hollywood Monsters sold briskly and are highly prized and expensive collector’s items today.
As time passed, Fantastic Monsters began selling better and better. Fan mail was running at a 98 percent approval rate. The readers overwhelmingly liked the interior tints and the full colors of the Monster of the Month, and almost everyone thought the staff was doing a very good job with the content as well. By the time the fourth issue rolled around, circulation had more than doubled. “It was going great guns,” remembered Bob Burns. “The response was so good we all thought the magazine was going to last forever.”
The fourth issue featured a cover shot of Beulah and an article on the making of It Conquered the World. Actor Vincent Price wrote a one-page piece entitled “In Defense of Horror Films,” and Blaisdell contributed another article on prehistoric monster movies, “Dawn Age Beasts Strike Back.” He also did an illustration of a gigantic spaceman rampaging through a futuristic alien city for a short story by Redd Boggs called “The Monster of Planet X.” And this time around, “The Devil’s Workshop” focused on the amazing talents of a young makeup artist named Bill Malone, who demonstrated the art of mask-making for the readers. Bill was only 13 years old at the time he wrote this piece for Fantastic Monsters. Now, like Bob and Dennis Skotak, he is an award-winning Hollywood professional.
By now the masthead credits had been updated to include Contributing Editor Larry Byrd (who had been writing freelance articles for the magazine for some time), and a “crumbling” editor, the “Mad Mummy,” an invention of Bob Burns. In the “Tombstone Times,” Burns appeared as Major Mars, a character he had invented during the 1950s as the host of Saturday afternoon movie matinees. There was an announcement that Paul’s alter ego, the sinister Count Downe, was down for the count after an angry mob of villagers drove a stake into his heart. Contributing Editor Larry Byrd became Downe’s successor.
In the early 1960s, Blaisdell created an intricately detailed, 18-inch model of a tyrannosaur as a companion piece to another model he called the Cliff Monster. Both were actually miniature automatons capable of performing a variety of movements that Blaisdell could program into them via an internal clockwork mechanism of his own design (courtesy of Bob Burns).
To this point Blaisdell had been cautious about allowing his name to turn up in places other than the masthead. That policy changed with the publication of the fifth issue, which finally included a full feature on Blaisdell and his movies by Associate Editor Jim Harmon. Here at last was the first in-depth look at “the man with no face,” as Paul sometimes jokingly referred to himself. The last time a genre publication had even mentioned Blaisdell’s name was in 1958, when Famous Monsters published an article on the making of Invasion of the Saucer Men.
But there was still more Blaisdell in FanMo #5. In “The Devil’s Workshop,” Paul demonstrated the steps involved in creating It! the Terror from Beyond Space. There was a picture of Chester Morris and Cuddles in “Dead Time Tales.” The caption read, “You act like a smile would break your face!” but since Morris was frowning as hard as Cuddles, it was impossible to know to whom the caption was referring. There was another fantastic close-up of the She-Creature emerging from the ocean with sunlight glinting in her eye, and the cover featured a beautiful color close-up of the monster with a black cowl draped over her head. Unfortunately, there was a boner of a caption: “American International’s Voodoo Woman.”
Paul Blaisdell (left) offers a giant brain to the obviously famished Bob Burns in one of the pair’s many gag photos, taken during a weekend get-together in 1957. The brain was a fiberglass prop created for a series of behind the scenes photographs published in the first issue of Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine, which appeared on newsstands in February 1958 (courtesy of Bob Burns).
The “Tombstone Times” ran a short feature called “Meteor Monster,” about a couple of fans from Rosemont, Pennsylvania, who made their own home horror film starring the illegitimate daughter of Beulah the Mushroom. Filmmakers Walter and Peggy Shank and their friend Chuck Hodgkinson built their own papier-maché version of Paul’s monster from It Conquered the World, and it was a respectable rendition of the real thing. It must have made Paul feel good to know that there was someone out there who dug his crazy cucumber.
As Fantastic Monsters continued to reach new readers month after month, far away in Iowa the seeds of destruction were slowly being sown. Printing problems had begun to show up as early as issue #3, but became especially noticeable in later issues. There was half a blank page in #5 where there should have been a photograph, and some of the pages were marred by vertical lines that ran through the pictures and text. Blaisdell had become so preoccupied with ironing out problems with the printer via long-distance communications that he had no free time left to write articles for his own magazine. Both issues #6 and #7 (the final number) were written entirely by the other staff members.
Bob Burns describes the decline in the quality of printing in this way:
“We were both concerned about what was happening. The first couple of issues looked so good, but later some of the photos looked splotchy and washed out, and things just got worse and worse as time went on. I think we both felt that something was about to happen, but we had no idea what. And then—BOOM!—all of a sudden, it happened.”
When copies of Fantastic Monsters #7 were received from the printer, there was a brand new name on the masthead—Jiro Tomiyama, who was credited with “Art and Production.” The trouble was, nobody had ever heard of Jiro Tomiyama. Technically, Blaisdell was the publisher and even he didn’t know who Tomiyama was. Obviously this was someone involved with the magazine at the printer’s office in Iowa.
In fact, the printer admitted as much. Rather than pay an independent team of layout artists to set up each issue of the magazine, which had been the procedure until that point (in fact, FanMo used the same production team that Famous Monsters used in its early years), Tomiyama had been brought in to handle every
thing on his own. Coupled with the inferior printing techniques that had been employed on the later issues, Fantastic Monsters seemed to be taking a quality nosedive.
As much as Paul and the rest of the staff hated the look of the latest issue, there was nothing they could do. Tomiyama was now the magazine’s official art director. Maybe he’ll get better in time, thought Blaisdell.
But there was no time. The articles and photographs that made up the interior of FanMo #8—a special edition devoted to the films of Boris Karloff—were forwarded to the Iowa office. Blaisdell and the rest of the staff started working out the contents of the next bimonthly issue, expecting to receive the brown-lines for #8 any day.
But weeks passed with no word from the printer. When Paul tried to put a long-distance call through, he found out the phone had been disconnected. Stunned and not quite knowing what to think, he called in Bob, Jim, and Ron and told them what had happened. Panic set in. The printer had thousands of dollars worth of film photos, lobbycards, posters, and pressbooks that belonged to the FanMo staff. Rare stills from Karloff’s Frankenstein and The Bride of Frankenstein were on loan from Bob Burns’s collection—items that were irreplaceable.
The materials were never recovered. Everything that made up the contents of Fantastic Monsters #8 went up in smoke when the printer suffered a fire that destroyed the entire building. Blaisdell learned about the fire from associates in the business who heard about what happened through the grapevine. No one ever got to speak with the printer, or Jiro Tomiyama for that matter; both seemed to have vanished into Never-Never Land.
That fire sent Fantastic Monsters to an early grave. There was no way to recover the one-of-a-kind materials that had been entrusted to the Iowa printer, and there was no way to recover the monetary losses incurred by the magazine’s destruction. Together Paul and Bob lost nearly $20,000—their combined investments in the magazine. Neither of them could afford to lose that kind of money. Burns was still working at CBS, which had secured his job when he was drafted into the army in 1958, but the FanMo loss wiped out his entire savings account. Paul’s bank account had been bigger, but he had invested more money in the magazine—almost twice as much as Burns. With no new film work forthcoming from American International—or indeed, from anywhere in Hollywood—Blaisdell had no way to recoup his losses.
In reality the fire that destroyed Fantastic Monsters also destroyed Paul Blaisdell’s dreams of the future. By the end of 1964, he must have realized that if AIP hadn’t encouraged him to contribute to their current crop of film projects, they were hardly going to remember him even further down the road.
Years later, suspicions about the origin of the fire were confirmed, as Burns recounts:
We were able to find out that the whole thing had been a setup. Paul and I had our suspicions, but we could never be sure until one day when we talked to somebody who knew something about it. The whole thing was a scam. This printer must have had the place torched as part of an insurance fraud. He had never made much money because he only printed local things, Iowa farm magazines or whatever. Fantastic Monsters was his only national publication. And evidently he needed a national publication to make this insurance scheme work. It made his operation worth a lot more, having a national magazine like ours. Maybe he had to have a national title going for a year before the insurance kicked in, who knows? We figured this guy collected his money and retired to a private island or something. Besides losing all those thousands of dollars, I lost almost my entire still collection. I’d say 80 percent of my collection was destroyed along with everything else in that fire because the printer hadn’t returned many of the materials that had been used in the earlier issues. But the truly sad thing is, Fantastic Monsters was doing so well! The readers loved it, and the circulation kept going up and up and up. And it really hurt Paul, not just in terms of finances, but in terms of his whole life. He was so embittered by the whole experience, and coming on the heels of the way he was treated by AIP, it helped drive him into a hermitlike existence. Paul and Jackie had never gone out much to begin with, but now they hardly ever went out.
Unfortunately for the people who loved Paul and the people who loved his work, the end of Fantastic Monsters magazine signaled the end of Blaisdell’s professional career. As the years crept relentlessly by, the name Paul Blaisdell receded farther and farther from the public consciousness. Many of the older AIP films began showing up on “Chiller” and “The World Beyond,” syndicated successors to television’s original spook show, “Shock Theatre.” The pictures played again and again, and Blaisdell’s name was listed in the credits alongside Corman, Cahn, Rusoff, Griffith, Gordon, Cohen, Arkoff, and Nicholson, but no one seemed to take much notice. Young fantasy fans weaned on Famous Monsters (which remained the best-selling magazine of its kind) were occasionally reminded that it was Jack Pierce at Universal who devised Boris Karloff’s makeup in Frankenstein and The Mummy, or that Lon Chaney, Sr., created his own monstrous makeups, but that’s about as far as it went. Shamefully, in FM’s short-lived series “The Men Behind the Monsters,” the name Paul Blaisdell was never mentioned. A long-running but erratically published competitor, the clinical Castle of Frankenstein, occasionally reviewed Paul’s films when they made their television debuts, but CoF liked to think of itself as an “intellectual” film magazine not given to feelings of nostalgia. Consequently, the editors rarely had a kind word for any of the AIP pictures.
Now, with Fantastic Monsters gone from the scream scene, it would be many years before the next generation of monster fans finally learned a few of the details about Hollywood’s “forgotten” monster-maker. They would not read about Blaisdell in Famous Monsters, as he noted:
Insult by omission doesn’t bother me. But just because I was the managing editor of a rival magazine? It’s a shame, because the Blaisdell name did appear in the first issue of James Warren’s magazine [Famous Monsters]. I met him at Forrest Ackerman’s house, and he begged me to do that article, complete with the original photos. I was always ready to give “King James” credit for almost anything; the trouble is, I can’t think of anything to give him credit for. You may not know this, but in fact I wrote the text for that article. It was subsequently rewritten in “Ackermanese.” Actually, I like your writing better. Come to think of it, I even like my writing better. Come to think about it, they have a trained chimpanzee at M.I.T. that … aw-w-w, let’s just forget it.
* The vampire was Baron Meinster (David Peel) in Hammer Films’ 1960 classic, Brides of Dracula.
15
Travesties and Tributes
In the Year 2889 was a good science-fiction yarn by George Worthing Yates, but it never got made. The title had been registered by American International, and they slapped it on an unbelievably miserable remake of Day the World Ended. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that Day the World Ended deserved an Academy Award. Far from it. All I’m saying is that horrible remake was ten times worse!
—Paul Blaisdell
Once Fantastic Monsters bit the dust, there was nothing for Paul to do except retreat to the security of his secluded Topanga Canyon home and keep busy with some of his favorite hobbies. Blaisdell never lost his enthusiasm for model airplanes (his favorites were the World War I biplanes), fencing, science-fiction, art, inventions, and handicrafts. He shut himself off from the world of Hollywood make-believe, and that bothered some of his friends but they couldn’t say they didn’t understand. After so many years of dedicated service, giving his all to people like Jim Nicholson, Alex Gordon, Roger Corman, Eddie Cahn, Bob Kent, and others, it must have hurt to know his services were no longer needed. He might have felt otherwise if things had worked out differently, but in fact Corman et al. were as active as ever. It was difficult to understand why they couldn’t make room for him on some of the movies they were making at this point.
But Paul was a proud man, and refused to let the wounds show. He kept things to himself, and if someone were to ask his opinion of Jim Nicholson or Roger
Corman, Paul had nothing but nice things to say. Even Harry Thomas, who had pulled a fast one on everyone with his zero-budget Voodoo Woman mask, was spoken of only in the most respectful of tones.
There are some obvious questions that beg honest answers, but I don’t think we will ever get them. Why couldn’t American International keep Blaisdell employed during the 1960s and even the 1970s? Why didn’t Jim Nicholson look out for a long-term AIP employee whose career had begun almost concurrently with his own? These questions are ones that undoubtedly Paul asked himself, and like the rest of us, he probably couldn’t think of a good answer.
While Paul and Jackie remained sequestered in Topanga Canyon, AIP was throwing a little money (very little money) at a film director named Larry Buchanan, who worked out of Dallas, Texas. In the 1950s, Buchanan had worked in front of and behind the camera in several legitimate Hollywood productions, including The Marrying Kind (1952) and The Gunfighter, starring Gregory Peck. But after almost ten years kicking around tinseltown without lucking into the big time as either an actor, producer, or director (he didn’t care which), Buchanan drifted back to Dallas and settled into the exploitation niche.
Buchanan made a film called Free, White, and 21 which caught the attention of American International. AIP distributed the film, and it made enough of a profit that Arkoff and Nicholson decided to bankroll a series of super-low-budget films for their television subsidiary. By making the films in Texas, production costs could be minimized. With Larry Buchanan directing, AIP knew they wouldn’t be getting any Oscar-calibre work; but at least they were assured of receiving exposed film with images on it. When it came to making film sales to television, sometimes that was all that mattered.