William Tuttle, Dick Smith, and John Chambers
by Jordan Prejean
by Jordan Prejean
William Tuttle with his makeup creations |
The
suggestion, however, that such excellent achievements in special makeup effects
on television are a recent development is wholly mistaken. Television has
been a showcase for innovative makeup designs from its earliest days and the
medium has often displayed exceptional work from the most revered names in the
industry.
If you were to only take three television anthology series from the early years 1959-1963 and
examine the three makeup artists who made each of these shows memorable for unusual,
inventive, and highly influential makeup designs, you would have three of the
most significant makeup artists in the history of the film and television industries. Between them, these
men would claim four Academy Awards and a slew of Emmy, Saturn, and BAFTA Award
nominations and wins over the course of long and fruitful careers. In fact, one
could likely trace the entire lineage of special makeup effects artists
of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries to the three men
responsible for this early television work: William Tuttle on The Twilight Zone (1959-1964), Dick
Smith on ‘Way Out (1961), and John
Chambers on The Outer Limits
(1963-1965).
I. William Tuttle
I. William Tuttle
In early 1959,
Emmy Award winning writer Rod Serling, fed up with his confrontational scripts
being censored by fearful corporate sponsors, developed a science fiction and
fantasy television program with the CBS network, intending the science fiction
genre to mask the controversial style of drama he was determined upon writing. Serling
called his series The Twilight Zone and
the West Coast production utilized the vast resources at Metro Goldwyn Mayer
Studios.
A publicity photo of Tuttle's work on "The Masks" |
William Tuttle had
been the head of the MGM Makeup Department since 1950. When Serling and company
arrived at the studio to produce their unique anthology series, Tuttle sensed
an opportunity to contribute makeup designs that would set the series apart
from television’s relatively crowded science fiction and fantasy landscape. After the show’s
fifth and final season, when the series began its eternal existence in
syndication, the aesthetic of Tuttle’s inimitable makeup designs would see
reproduction and reinterpretation in a variety of marketing material, from
comic books to board games to lunchboxes to toys to posters and art prints, not
to mention the memories of any viewer who happened upon the show.
Tuttle was born in
Jacksonville, Florida in 1912 and was forced to leave school early in order to
support his mother and younger brother after his father abandoned the family. He
gravitated early to art and music, trying his hand as both a comic performer and as a violin
player in Vaudeville before completing the required schooling to gain entrance into the University of Southern California
in the spring of 1930. Tuttle focused on art and developed a talent for molding
and sculpture, skills he later utilized as an innovator in creating life masks
to fine-tune the application of prosthetic appliances. Tuttle’s time at USC
would direct the entire course of his professional life. He returned to the
university to teach from 1970-1995, beginning a year after he vacated his position
as head of the MGM Makeup Department due to a change in ownership of the studio.
A permanent collection of more than 100 of Tuttle’s creations for film and
television reside at the university.
Pioneering makeup
artist Jack Dawn arrived at USC in early 1934 seeking a recommendation for a
sculptor and a painter to assist in his increasing workload at nearby MGM. Dawn was
directed to Tuttle and Tuttle’s colleague, a highly talented sculptor named Charles Schram. Dawn took both young
artists under his tutelage and put them to work as assistants on film productions. It was at MGM
and the 1935 production of Tod Browning’s Mark
of the Vampire that a simple yet convincing bullet hole effect in the forehead of Bela
Lugosi persuaded Dawn that Tuttle was capable of work beyond ordinary assistant
procedures.
Two years later, Tuttle
was applying Dawn’s innovative flexible appliances to transform white actors
into Chinese farmers for the 1937 film The
Good Earth. 1939 brought a career defining moment for Jack Dawn with The Wizard of Oz, likely the most
intensive production in terms of makeup design and application in feature films
to that point. Tuttle and Schram applied Dawn’s improved prosthetic appliances as well as
their own makeup designs to create the rigorous production’s iconic characters.
Among the other uncredited makeup artists toiling on the set of the film was Fred
Phillips, who fell under the guidance of Tuttle and who would later work
extensively with makeup artist John Chambers on properties such as The Outer Limits (1963-1965) and Star Trek (1966-1969).
For Tuttle, The Wizard of Oz was the beginning of a long
climb to the top of MGM’s Makeup Department, earning the position after it was
vacated by Jack Dawn in the fall of 1950. Tuttle became as renowned in the 1940's
and 1950's for beautifying MGM’s contract stars (in part leading to a marriage with Donna Reed
from 1943-1945) as he would become for his strange creations of the 1960's and
beyond. By the time Rod Serling and The
Twilight Zone came along in 1959, Tuttle had applied his skills to dozens of
genre productions including Forbidden
Planet (1956), North by Northwest
(1959), and television’s Alcoa Presents:
One Step Beyond (1959-1961).
Tuttle's work aging Kevin McCarthy for "Long Live Walter Jameson" |
Tuttle's designs for "Eye of the Beholder" |
Prosthetic piece for male nurse in "Eye of the Beholder," which went to auction late in 2018. Asking price: $10,000-$15,000 |
Tuttle also
displayed his ability for traditional stage makeup with the third season
episode “Five Characters in Search of an Exit,” which required makeups for a
traditional clown and hobo among others archetypal characters. Even when
Tuttle’s makeup design was not particularly effective, such as in the second
season’s “Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?,” he is capable of producing an
iconic image, in this case a man with a third eye in the center of his
forehead. This effect was initially to be achieved by optical means, projecting
the eye onto the head of the actor, only to be abandoned as unfeasible at the
last minute, forcing Tuttle to scramble to create a workable application.
Tuttle's design for the Morlocks in George Pal's "The Time Machine" |
After vacating his
position as head of makeup at MGM in 1969, Tuttle concentrated on teaching and
occasional, but memorable, freelance film and television work. He created the
makeup effects for the Mel Brooks film Young
Frankenstein in 1974 as well as contributing makeup to the futuristic
design of Logan’s Run in 1976. Tuttle’s
last great work was as supervisor of special makeup effects for director Brian
de Palma on The Fury in 1978, for
which he shared a Saturn Award with Rick Baker. Tuttle’s last film work was for
Zorro: The Gay Blade in 1981 for
Twentieth Century Fox and director Peter Medak.
In 1989, Tuttle established
his own makeup company, Custom Color Cosmetics, and was the subject of a 1968
MGM documentary short titled King of the
Duplicators, in which he discusses his techniques alongside frequent
collaborator Charles Schram. Tuttle died at his home in Pacific Palisades on
July 27, 2007, age 95.
II. Dick Smith
II. Dick Smith
Dick Smith with his creations |
David Susskind,
like Rod Serling, was committed to producing intellectually engaging material
for the young medium. Two years before, in the formative year 1959, which
marked the beginning of both Alcoa
Presents: One Step Beyond and The
Twilight Zone, NBC passed on Susskind’s idea for a series of macabre half-hour
plays, partially due to the unreliability of a genre anthology series to garner a
dedicated viewership. The idea stayed with Susskind, however, and he pitched
the idea to CBS as a possible replacement for the Gleason show. CBS, in a more
receptive position, gave Susskind the green light and a hurried production
began in New York on the series Susskind titled ‘Way Out.
Susskind hired British author Roald Dahl to host the program as well as provide the script for the premier
episode, "William and Mary," about a disembodied brain. At the time, Dahl was best known for his macabre and darkly humorous short stories
published in the pages of The New Yorker,
a half-dozen of which had been adapted for Alfred
Hitchcock Presents during the three years prior. Dahl's 1953 short story, "Lamb to the Slaughter," with its combination of humor and horror, was, in fact, the initial inspiration for the Hitchcock's series, and Susskind desired much of the same quality for ‘Way Out. It quickly became apparent to
Susskind and his production team that the nature of the show required a
talented makeup artist to achieve the bizarre effects indicated by several of
the scripts for the series. Susskind recruited a makeup artist he’d previously
worked with at NBC named Dick Smith.
Smith was a native
New Yorker, born in Larchmont in 1922, and initially set out on a path in
dentistry. He was admittedly not a traditionally talented visual artist but was
inspired to try his hand at makeup from the discovery in his late teen years of
Ivard Strauss’ 1936 book Paint, Powder
and Make-up: The Art of Theater Makeup from the Amateur and Class Room
Viewpoint. After his discharge from the Army in 1944, Smith repeatedly tried but failed to land a position at a Hollywood
studio and so began submitting his work to the emerging arena of television. Smith eventually landed a position at NBC in 1945. The New York station began as a very small outfit which broadcast only two days a week. By 1950, however, the industry had grown to the point that Smith had twenty additional artists working for him in the art department crafting makeup for a variety of programs.
By 1961 and the
beginning of production on ‘Way Out,
Smith had mastered a technique for sectional prosthetic appliance to
allow an actor greater freedom of facial expression. Despite the participation
of Susskind, Dahl, and a host of talented stage and television actors, ‘Way Out is best remembered today
for Smith’s shocking makeup effects.
‘Way Out lasted a mere 14 episodes from late March
to the middle of July, 1961, where it directly preceded The Twilight Zone, airing at 9:00 P.M. EST on Friday nights. Despite
such brevity, the series provided enough material to showcase Smith’s
prodigious talent for makeup effects.
Dick Smith erases half of Barry Morse's face |
Smith's Quasimodo makeup on Martin Brooks |
The seventh episode, “False Face,” written by cult film director Larry Cohen, draws particular attention to the art of film and stage makeup. It concerns an arrogant actor (Alfred Ryder) who uses a hideously deformed man (Martin Brooks) as model for his stage makeup for the role of Quasimodo, the Hunchback of Notre Dame. After his performance, the actor is horrified to discover that he cannot remove the makeup, which has somehow fused with his own flesh. For the episode, Smith admirably recreated Lon Chaney’s makeup design from Universal’s 1923 historical epic The Hunchback of Notre Dame on both Ryder and Brooks, adding more defined elements (exaggerated lips and nose) made possible by the advancement in prosthetic appliances, allowing for several hideous close angle shots.
Smith's makeup on Alfred Ryder |
For the
claustrophobic and frightening eighth episode, “Dissolve to Black,” Smith
created a believable pallor of death across the faces of several actors using
heavy black around the eyes and a withered, textured composition on the skin. “Side
Show” is the memorably chilling twelfth episode which required Smith to craft a
horrifying old hag makeup using a fright wig and appliances to exaggerate the nose
and lower portion of the face while creating a wrinkled, aged appearance which
would become a trademark of his skill set. Smith completed the effect by adding
stitching where the head had been sewn to a beautiful body.
Smith's aging makeup on Jonathan Frid for Dark Shadows |
Though Smith,
working with Ben Nye, then head of the makeup department at 20th
Century Fox, created the makeup effects for 1959’s The Alligator People, starring Beverly Garland and Lon, Chaney,
Jr., his first significant film work was again with producer David Susskind,
for Columbia’s production of Rod Serling’s Emmy Award-winning Playhouse 90 drama Requiem for a Heavyweight in 1962, starring Anthony Quinn, Jackie
Gleason, and Mickey Rooney.
Once given the
production values of a feature film, Smith would create some of the most
enduring special makeup effects in the history of the medium. In 1970, he aged
a thirty-two year old Dustin Hoffman into a 121 year old man in Arthur Penn’s Little Big Man. With a custom dental
insert, he gave Marlon Brando the sagging jowls of an aged Mafia don in Francis
Coppola’s The Godfather in 1972. A
career watershed arrived in 1973 with The
Exorcist, from director William Fiedkin and author William Peter Blatty.
Smith, assisted by a young Rick Baker, turned cherubic Linda Blair into the
gaunt, lacerated figure of a demon-possessed girl and should have been given an
Academy Award for the astonishing results.
The film brought
Smith an bevy of offers to create makeup effects for technically challenging
productions in the horror and science fiction genres. In 1980, he crafted the
most effective full-body prosthetic suit since 1954’s The Creature from the Black Lagoon to affect William Hurt’s
physiological changes in Altered States,
creating a unique situation a year later when two of Smith’s films fostered a
tie for the Saturn Award for makeup effects as voters could not decide between
awarding his work on Altered States
or his work on David Cronenberg’s Scanners,
the latter for which he served as makeup effects consultant, working with
future Academy Award winners Chris Walas and Stephan Dupuis. Four years
earlier, Smith was recruited by Martin Scorsese to fit Robert De Niro with a
menacing Mohawk hairstyle and compose the blood-splattered conclusion to Taxi Driver.
Smith’s highly
accomplished makeup effects appeared in The
Sentinel (1977), Ghost Story
(1981), and The Hunger (1983) before
garnering an Academy Award, with Paul LeBlanc, for his work aging F. Murray
Abraham’s Salieri in Milos Forman’s 1984 Best Picture winner Amadeus. Smith would be honored with a
special ceremony, “A Tribute to Dick Smith: The Godfather of Special Makeup
Effects,” hosted by Rick Baker, from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and
Sciences in 2009 before being awarded a second Academy Award in 2012 in
recognition of his astonishing career and his remarkable influence on the
makeup effects industry.
Smith was always
willing to teach artists interested in the industry and freely divulged the
many secrets of his methods, something which was highly unusual at the time.
Smith’s final film work was designing the makeup effects for House on Haunted Hill in 1999, after
which he concentrated on Dick Smith Special FX Makeup Training, a series of
courses for developing up-and-coming special effects artists. He was the
subject of Scott Essman’s 1998 documentary short A Tribute to Dick Smith and died in Los Angeles on July 30, 2014,
age 92.
III. John Chambers
III. John Chambers
John Chambers with his ape creations |
Chamber's makeup for "The Sixth Finger" |
The heavy lifting
in the special effects department was accomplished by Project Unlimited, a
freelance company established in 1957 by technicians Gene Warren, Wah Chang,
and Tim Baar, designed to handle a multitude of special effects procedures for
film and television productions.
Chamber's makeup for "The Man Who Was Never Born" |
John Chambers was
brought on board for episodes which required more intricate makeup effects as
well as for simpler applications, such as the manipulation of the eyes, nose, or
chin of an actor. Once he began to find steady work in feature films in the
1960's, Chambers became particularly well-known for his ability to change or
exaggerate a feature of an actor’s face or hands, undoubtedly resulting from
earlier time spent in government service crafting dental and body prosthetic appliances.
Like William
Tuttle, Chambers used life masks to create molds in order to insure makeup
appliances not only fit the unique contours of an actor’s face but also allowed
the actor to be recognized beneath the makeup. Chambers worked on The Outer Limits with frequent
collaborator Fred Phillips, who served as makeup supervisor for the series, and
had a hand in a number of first season episodes, most notably “The Hundred Days
of the Dragon” in which the face of an Asian spy is physically manipulated to
resemble a murdered presidential candidate, and “The Man Who Was Never Born,”
which sees Martin Landau changed into a malformed human from a bleak future
Earth.
John Chambers was
born in Chicago in 1922 and became interested in art at a young age, finding early
work as a commercial artist and jewelry designer before serving in the Army
first as a dental technician and later crafting prosthetic appliances to repair the faces
and bodies of wounded veterans. Chambers decided to apply his artistic skills
in the entertainment industry, sensing an opportunity when his work with
wounded veterans became a point of emotional stress.
In 1953, Chambers
landed a position creating makeup for NBC’s live television programs. By 1959,
Chambers had moved into regular feature film work under Bud Westmore at NBC’s
parent company, Universal Studios.
Chambers soon
became dissatisfied with the burdens inherent in being a contract artist for
either a network or a studio and retrofitted a garage adjacent to his Burbank,
California home to function as a freelance makeup laboratory. He remained
firmly entrenched in the television industry, however, since by the early 1960's
he had begun to receive positive recognition for his makeup effects on a number
of programs. He created ghoulish makeups for Boris Karloff’s horror anthology
series Thriller (1960-1962), working
alongside longtime NBC makeup artist Jack Barron, who himself handled makeup
duties for Alfred Hitchcock on both the director’s television series and films (Psycho (1960), Marine (1964) and Torn
Curtain (1966)) and would later assist Chambers with the makeup effects on
the Planet of the Apes films. For
Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek
(1966-1969), again working with makeup supervisor Fred Phillips, Chambers
created numerous bizarre alien makeup effects as well as famously designing Mr.
Spock’s pointed ears.
It was Chambers’
work creating disguises for the espionage television series Mission: Impossible (1966-1973) and I Spy (1965-1968) that drew the
attention of the Central Intelligence Agency, who recruited Chambers in the
early 1970's, along with makeup artists Tom Burman (who became a frequent
collaborator) and Michael Westmore, a member of the Westmore dynasty of makeup artists, to create disguises for government field
agents. The declassification of CIA documents in 1997 revealed Chambers to be a
crucial part of a 1979 operation that successfully freed six American diplomats
during the Iranian Hostage Crisis. Chambers was portrayed by actor John Goodman
in Ben Affleck’s Academy Award winning 2012 film about the operation, Argo.
Chambers continued
to stay busy with television projects, working with Ben Nye on Irwin Allen’s Lost in Space (1965-1968) for CBS, and
with Bud Westmore on Rod Serling’s Night
Gallery (1969-1973) for NBC. It was Nye, then head of makeup for 20th
Century Fox, who approached Chambers about working on a project adapting Pierre
Boulle’s 1963 novel Planet of the Apes.
The resultant 1968
film marked a significant turning point not only in the career of John Chambers
but in the area of special makeup effects as an industry. Chambers, who spent much
of pre-production time on the film studying primates at the Los Angeles Zoo,
would use life masks of the principle actors to craft pliable prosthetic
appliances which would allow the actors an impressive range of facial movement
beneath the heavy ape makeups. Chambers supervised nearly sixty makeup artists
for the film, many of whom were non-union workers, in an effort to battle time
and the required workload.
Many of the artists
working under Chambers on the film were recruited from the Don Post Studios, a
California-based producer of high quality masks and props for commercial
consumption as well as for the entertainment industry. Chambers had previously
assisted at the studio on mask designs pertaining to apes and primitive man. Noted
mask designer Verne Langdon was hired to create the realistic ape masks worn by
the many background performers. Langdon, who followed career paths ranging from
professional wrestler to recording artist, became a legend among collectible
masks hobbyists for his revolutionary work with sculptors Pat Newman and Ellis
Burman (father of makeup artists Ellis Burman, Jr. and Tom Burman) at the Don
Post Studios in the 1960's, crafting highly detailed masks based on famous
monsters from film and television, as well as his own unique designs, including "The Zombie," a prototype design never mass produced as a mask and likely the most sought after monster collectible from the 1960's era. Langdon,
Newman, and the Burman brothers all used the time spent on Planet of the Apes as a springboard into regular work in the film
and television industries.
For his work on Planet of the Apes, Chambers was given a
Special Achievement Academy Award at the 41st Ceremonies in 1969. Chambers
and William Tuttle were the only two makeup artists to receive such an award before
1981, when the award became standard.
Though Planet of the Apes was unquestionably
the pinnacle of his career, Chambers continued to create impressive makeup
effects in the years following. He worked with director Brian De Palma on the
1974 cult film Phantom of the Paradise and
again worked with artist Tom Burman to create the beast-men in the 1977 film
version of The Island of Dr. Moreau.
His final
television work was for the short-lived series Beyond Westworld in 1980. He finished his film career on two high
notes, however, by creating makeup effects on John Carpenter’s Halloween II (1981) and prosthetic appliances for
Ridley Scott’s future-noir Blade Runner
a year later, after which Chambers quietly retired.
He is the subject
of Scott Essman’s 1998 documentary short A
Tribute to John Chambers and died in hospital on August 25, 2001, age 78.
It stands to
reason that without the early television work of Tuttle, Smith, and Chambers,
as well as the film work which followed, the special makeup effects industry
would have evolved in a very different, and likely less interesting, way. To
simply take an account of the young artists that each man took the time to
mentor and teach would alone define the successive progression of the industry
and continues to stand as a defining monument to three pioneering titans of
special makeup effects.
Grateful
acknowledgement is given to the following for providing information used in the
text:
-Bergan, Ronald.
“William Tuttle: Eminent Hollywood Makeup Artist Who Worked With the Glamorous
and Great,” The Guardian, 23 August 2007.
-Essman, Scott.
“John Chambers: Maestro of Makeup,” Cinefex, issue 71, September 1997.
-Fox, Margalit.
“William J. Tuttle, Master Makeup Man, Dies at 95,” New York Times, 4
August 2007.
-Gilbey, Ryan.
“Dick Smith: TV and Film Makeup Artist Who Transformed Hollywood Idols into
Misshapen Grotesques,” The Guardian, 5 August 2014.
-Nelson, Valerie J.
“William J. Tuttle, 95; Pioneering Film Makeup Artist Was First to Get an
Oscar,” Los Angeles Times, 3 August 2007.
-Nelson, Valerie J.
“Dick Smith Dies at 92; ‘Exorcist’ Makeup Man Won Oscar for ‘Amadeus’,” Los
Angeles Times, 31 July 2014.
-Yardley, William.
“Disc Smith, Oscar-Winning Makeup Artist, Dies at 92,” New York Times, 1
August 2014.
Visit the Hugh M. Hefner Moving Image Archive for William Tuttle's collection here.
Watch William Tuttle in “King of the Duplicators” here.
Watch William Tuttle in “King of the Duplicators” here.
What a fascinating article! I really enjoyed reading it. I had a magazine when I was young that supposedly showed you how to do Dick Smith's monster make up secrets. I always imagined I'd be able to do it but I don't think I ever actually tried.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Jack! Glad you enjoyed it. You owned Dick Smith's one-off mag in 1965 titled Famous Monsters of Filmland Do-It-Yourself Monster Make-up Handbook. Smith also published a book in 1985 titled Dick Smith's Do-It-Yourself Monster Makeup Handbook.
DeleteHere's a great blog post on it from the Collecting Classic Monsters blog: DickSmithMonsterMakeup
DeleteYes! That's the magazine! I got it for Christmas sometime in the 1970s.
ReplyDelete