Understand the thinking atheist. It's not a person, it's a symbol, an
idea. The population of atheists this country is going through the rule, rejecting
faith, pursuing knowledge, challenging the sacred. If I tell the truth,
it's because I tell the truth, not because I put my hand on a
book and made a wish and working together for a more rational world. Take
the risk of thinking. Feel so much more happiness. Truth Usian wisdom will
come to you that way. Assume nothing, question everything, and start thinking.
This is the Thinking Atheist podcast, hosted by Seth Andrews. Today's podcast
is extra all right, It's a bonus. It is not part of the
regular lineup. This is just something you can take or leave, okay,
a diversion. And the reason I'm throwing it out there right off the bat
is because I'm trying to prevent indignant emails from people saying, well, I
didn't tune into the show to listen to this, You'd be amazed at the
shit that arrives in my inbox. I expect more from this channel, Seth,
you do, okay, you know I'll get I'll alert the media,
and I'm not trying to be dismissive to people who tune into the channel for
specific things. You know, I get it, you are here for a
reason, but I would like to think you don't mind the occasional distraction.
I've been doing this for fifteen years, and I know that I will possibly
be doing it for fifteen more. And because we have new people cycling into
these discussions, he will continue to debunk the Book of Genesis and Noah's floods,
Old Testament prophecy, in the Birth, Life and Death of Jesus,
the Book of Revelation. We're going to talk about other religions, Islam,
Jehovah's witnesses, Mormonism, scientology, other cults. We'll talk about the stuff
we need to talk about. But I need a break today. I'm taking
a break, Okay. One of the reasons that I started the True Stories
podcast just something to help me keep this fresh. Well, I thought maybe
you would enjoy this conversation. I'll set it up for you. Mark Shostrom
is a longtime special effects artist. I have been aware of him because I'm
kind of an eighties and nineties horror movie and sci fi geek, so I
was aware that Mark was one of the guys behind the scenes bringing many of
my favorite films to life, and on a lark, I just sort of
reached out, Hey, Mark love your work. Would you like to ever
just have a chat? Would you want to talk about forty plus years in
the special effects and makeup business, because man, I would love to pick
your brain and lo and behold. He responded. We exchanged messages and it
was awesome and he was totally game. And the YouTube link to watch our
discussion is in the description box, So if you're going to listen to the
podcast version here, that's terrific. But in the YouTube version, I was
able to add a whole lot of visuals. So when he's talking about specific
films or certain effects or whatever, I'm able to go and actually show those
on the screen, kind of a one two punch audio and video. You
pick and if this is not your cup of tea, I totally understand,
and with my thanks, I will see you next week. Big hug,
go in peace. May the Lord bless you and keep you. So have
I made myself totally clear? Extra all right, I'm done. I'm done
setting it up. Mark Showstrom has like forty years in the special effects make
up business. For film and television. On his resume, you know the
films Nightmare on Elm Street, several movies in that series, Phantasm two from
Beyond, He worked on the X Files. His Instagram bio calls him the
Julia Child of makeup effects and screenwriter of Horror with hearts. Mark Showstrom,
Thanks for coming, man, It's great to talk to you. Good to
see you. Thanks for having me. Why the chef Julia Child? Is
it? Because you're always kind of cooking stuff up back in your lair.
Now, that's actually a strange story. One of my favorite nicknames. In
the eighties, when I was doing Phantasm Too, I had to do a
lot of makeup effects on Angus scrim and he's melting in his whole stage of
makeups, and I would incorporate in addition to the foam, rubber, prosthetics
and the makeup, I would incorporate certain food products like yellow tinted yogurt,
a little yellow tinted milk, some gelatine, and when his neck is tearing
open, I used actually chicken skin which I super glued to the rubber.
So as I'm putting all this stuff on him, me, you know,
we talk and you know, what's that you're doing now is oh, it's
gelatine. And what's that you're doing now? It's yogurt, it's chicken skin.
And he paused and he goes, Mark, You're like the Julia child
of makeup effects. And so it's stuck. And I love that nickname.
Phantasm marked me. You know, I think we all, especially being a
child of the eighties and this was like late seventies. But I remember I
wasn't supposed to. I wasn't old enough to see phantasm, and somehow Phantasm
was on. I was watching unsupervised, and I felt like a grown up,
you know. But Angus s grim As the Tall Man marked me.
You probably hear that story a lot, like, oh my god, the
first time I saw that guy, he was in my dreams. Right,
actually saw the film in nineteen eighty, the first one. I don't remember
if it was in a theater it might have been, but yeah, I
thought it was like a really odd and original and slightly twisted, and never
gave it another thought after that that I'd be working on the sequel or two
sequels. Actually, I've heard that Angus scrim Is like was like the nicest
guy I guess as soon as the camera turned off and he wasn't looming and
bringing down other worldly death, he was like this genteel, old soul.
Right, It's just the sweetest man you could ever hope to work with.
I loved working with him. When he showed up at my workshop the first
time he brought his dog cap. He asked permission, it'd be all right
if I bring my dog cap inside? Of course. Yeah, he's a
real sweet guy, complete opposite of what he portrays in movies. In the
films, the Phantasm series, they are I think known, if arguably for
two things, The Tall Man and the Sphere, right, the silver blind
Ball of Death. Did you work on the Sphere? Were you involved with
that at all? No? But a couple of stories about that is.
One day I was curious, I'm working on the prep for the movie and
Don and I were having a meeting about something. I said, Hey,
there's something I'll always wanted to ask you, and how did you come up
with the idea for the spheres? And he told me he saw it in
a dream and he threw it into the movie. But as far as the
spheres, when I met with Don on Phantasm, iiO The project was very
secretive. It had a couple of different titles. It was Morningside, then
it was American Gothic and he hired me. And even before I started prep,
He's said he needed somebody to do the silver sphere effects, and I
recommended my friend Steve Patino, And I called Steve that night and I said,
Hey, I'm doing this movie, so people are going to call you.
I can't tell you what it is, but you want to do this
and what is it? It's called American Gothic or whatever, and he's an
American what. Yes, Steve Patino was an effects guy who was specialized in
fiberglass molds and he was really good at the mechanical and anything involving mechanics and
plastics and things like that, and I knew he'd be the guy for it.
What do you do in for Phantasm? Were you doing life casts?
You know, I don't know if it's late tex. You tell me what
the terminology is. What were you making? Everything involving makeup effects on the
actors? And that, of course began with life casting, which is putting
in material called alginate on the face to get an impression of the face.
Then you pour a replican plaster. With the case of Angus, I had
to do his hands, faces, expressions, and I kind of worked my
way into it with him. In other words, I started with his hands
and we put him on a table so he could watch this and see the
material, how the material worked and what we did. Then we did a
relaxed normal face so I could use that to sculpt prosthetics, and then we
eased him into the expressions, which means basically, you've got a material.
It's got like a seven minute setting time, and at the six minute mark,
somebody calls it out and I say, Angus, hold the expression.
He'd hold a scream for like a minute, and then the material sets.
So that was the life cashing. That's just the first, you know week,
and then there's all the sculpting and the making of the prosthetics, the
fake heads, the monsters, putting the mechanics in it, painting everything,
and of course going to set and doing the application. So it's the whole
thing pested with don post production like months later. You know, I thought
of a new idea. Okay, so somebody's in the you know, they're
under the plaster. I don't know what if it's actual plaster, but I
think it's it's leg it's a soft material that dentis used to cast your teeth.
Okay, all right, so someone's under it, I'm guessing the eyes
are closed, they've got the tubes coming out of the nostrils. They're encased,
no tubes, the tubes kind of out of the nostrils. I don't
know where people get that and make that mistake all the time. They used
to do that in the nineteen thirties and forties, where they literally would put
straws in your nose and use actual plaster right on the face. But with
modern materials, starting in the seventies and eighties, we switch to algenate,
which is a soft material that it mixes up. It looks like pancake batter.
It's kind of thick, and that goes on the face and it's cold,
and then it warms up and solidifies into a kind of a rubbie jel.
But because it's floppy when it's solid, if you pull it off,
it'll lose its shape. So you have to have when the alga is set
on the face, you have to back it up with plaster bandages like a
doctor would use for making an arm cast the outer plasters. Where people see
the pictures of people underneath, they think they've been plastered. Well, no,
they actually don't have plaster touching their skin. The whole thing, the
alginate and the bandages, comes off at one go, and then you pour
another type of plaster into that to get the replica of the face. So
the eyes are closed. There's no straws. What you do is you put
the material carefully around the nose and you make a mixture so that you know
it's not going to drip into the nose. And you have several people working
at the same time, and whoever's doing the face in the nose area.
As soon as that nose area in the mouth are covered, one person stays
on that area. Usually it would be me, and you talk to the
person underneath. They can hear you. You're doing fine, your breathing holes
are open. How you doing. We have hand signals, you know,
pat on the shoulder. This means I'm doing great, and this means take
it the fuck off me. You never get that nobody's ever freaked out on
you. I mean, you've been there and they're like, oh my god,
you're hot. I'm claustrophobic. Now. I've done in my makeup career.
I did a six year old girl once for Elm Street three, and
for Phantasm, I did an eighty five year old woman. Everybody's been cool
across the board, but there was one guy in Dick Tracy, who was
a stunt man. We had to make a life mask and he was underneath
it. I don't remember his name, but he's got the stuff on him
and I said, how are you doing? And he's like he was literally
shaking because he was not in control. This guy would jump off buildings,
he would set himself on fire, and he was in control. But as
soon as he was encased, we were in control. And that was it.
Really, he was actually physically shaking. I'll never forget that. So
that was the only almost freak out I ever saw. Did you tell me
we were talking before we actually set up the interview that your first life cast
or one of them, was your girlfriend? Is that right? Let's see,
yeah it must have been. Yeah, who else? Who? What
better guinea pig? You know? You know, well, what's the story
on that? I mean you're like, hey, honey, I need to
practice or what's it an actual gig or what. Actually The first life cast
I did was my mother in nineteen seventy six, but I didn't know how
to do it. I was going by this makeup book by some guy who
didn't know what he was doing. He had these Basically, when you mix
the algenate you put on the face or the head or whatever, you mix
a huge batch or several kind of staggered batches, so it essentially all goes
on at once. And this guy in the book said, well, you
mix six little batches, these tiny little spoonfuls, and then you mix your
into that you put it on, then you mix your other one. It
was completely screwed up. But I'm my poor mother's lying down on a couch
with a I guess I had a plastic garbage bag on her hair, and
I've got this book open, and I've got all the little things laid out,
and it was excruciating for her because I'd put it on and cover part
of her and then I'd have to like turn the page of the book and
mix the other stuff. And she did not enjoy the process too much at
all. So when I came to California years later, I finally started to
meet people in the business, learned how you really do it, and the
materials had improved a bit by then, so my girlfriend became number two as
far as figuring out how to do it, and I did it all at
once. It was really careful, and I said, you can't move,
you know, don't jump up, and don't run across the room. And
it came out beautifully and it actually got me my first job. The resulting
life cast looks so pristine that it got me a job on a movie.
What was the job. It was an a fi film called Violet, which
was my first movie job, and I didn't have much of a portfolio.
There was a few makeups on myself, and when I went in for the
interview, I thought, as an afterthought, I think, let me just
bring along the life cast to my girlfriend. And I brought that along like
an idiot. But the producer looked at it and he was very impressed,
and he later told me, you know, the makeup in my portfolio wasn't,
you know, superlative or anything. But he looked at the life master
and he thought, of somebody can do that. They can do the scar
for this movie. So he hired me. So I've got to ask the
college term paper question Mark. But you know, I had the opportunity to
meet Tom Savini down at a horror convention in Texas, you know, and
I'm fanboying, And you know what was your inspiration? Man? You know?
You know with Sabini, I think he talked about Lon Cheney and you
know, the Man of a Thousand Faces, a fan of the Hunchback.
He got Jack Pierce in his work on Frankenstein, John Chambers, Planet of
the Apes. So if I ask you, well, Mark Shostrom, who
was your inspiration to get into the makeup biz? All of the above?
I mean when I was a little kid, you know, I watched Frankenstein
and I had never seen a Lawn Cheney movie, but I read Famous Monsters
starting in nineteen sixty four or sixty years ago, and i'd you know,
they would show pictures of Jack Pearce and Lawn Cheney doing the makeup, and
yeah, all those guys were inspirations. And John Chambers was It was huge
in Dick Smith. Of course. John Chambers was the only sort of contact
I had when I moved to la because I'd corresponded with him in a few
letters back in nineteen seventy six, seventy seven, and he wrote me back,
handwritten letters, which I still have. And when I moved to la
I didn't know anybody in the film business, but I had his phone number
and I called him up and I said, Hey, I'm the guy that
used to write you back in Washington, Duc do you remember, yeah,
come on over. So yeah, all inspirational and seeing Dick Smith's work in
the Exorcist and Little Big Man. I remember seeing a Little Big Man in
nineteen seventy and when I was living in Hong Kong, and you know,
it blew me away. You kind of mentioned the guy who's working at that
level and he's answering his own mail. I mean, he's like, oh,
look, here's a letter from my fame. With the same with Dick
Smith. You write him a letter, he writes you back. In Dick's
case, he typed them, but John Chambers hand wrote his and his writing
was really I can't read this, you know, looking at with the magnifying
glass. Oh you know. With Dick. You know, I've got a
whole collection. I must have probably ten ten or twelve letters and a couple
of postcards from Dick. Real keepers like he said me one on Amadeas Stationery,
which is really cool. But yeah, Dick will write back everybody,
and same with phone calls. I mean he did say he will. He
did. That's why he's a legend, is he was so generous with helping
so many people. Kind of Roger Corman esque. You know. Corman would
take a lot of people in. Give him a shot. You know,
you just bring him in. Now, you work cheap, you work fast,
all right, Well here you know, here's something to work on.
Yeah, edit this film, maybe should do. All right, I'll let
you direct my next, you know, space picture or whatever. Little names
like James Cameron, you know that kind of thing. You know. I
think James Cameron sculpted the ship with the breasts on it from Battle Beyond the
Stars. Yeah, yes, and now I mean direct. Of course he
directed Piranha two, which is a classic. But you know, of course
now he's he's James Cameron. But I love to hear you. Remember I
was working on two three Corman pictures in like eighty two, Forbidden World and
Android. And to get from the makeup effects lab to the bathroom and the
other building, you had to walk through this sound stage and the Skotech brothers
and Jim Cameron, I think, had built the whole Manhattan replica for Escape
from New York. It was on the floor, so he literally'd walk in
this door, you'd step over Manhattan to get to the bathroom. But I
remember seeing Jim Cameron there a couple times and working on Android. Back to
Tom Savini, he was talking about like he worked on Romero's Dawn of the
Dead nineteen seventy eight, I think yeah, And he was talking about how
much he hated the blood he got a zombie film his blood, I mean
gallons of blood, but it looked like sort of that apple red colored house
paint, and I guess he hated it, but Romero liked it. So
Mark, you tell me, like, what's good blood? Like if you're
making blood that blood in Day of the Dead, Donald Dead, Donald the
Dead nineteen seventy eight. I remember reading an interview with Tom Savinia about it
and he said it was next tell any XTL simulated blood made by three M
three M in Minnesota. And I had read an article about that while I
was living in Hong Kong in the seventies. It said this magic blood that
doesn't stay costumes is going to change Hollywood, which is the one that Tom
used on Donald the Dead. So in nineteen eighty when I first moved here,
I ordered a bottle of it and it was like this orange red opaque
house paint. Yeah. Yeah, it didn't come out of it, didn't
stain clothing, but it didn't look like blood. So at the time,
myself and many others were using ben Nye Makeup company made of blood for stage,
which is a bit purple. A couple of companies made blood. Max
Factor had a great technicolor blood, but that was discontinued and that was only
for a technicolor film. So I would make mine out of corn syrup and
you know, watercolor or whatever. Didn't know what to use until I got
hold of Dick Smith's blood formula on nineteen eighty one. And Dick had developed
a blood formula for Midnight Cowboy. It was its first time use and that's
the same blood he used later in The Exorcist Taxi Driver all the way through
the Hunger, and that was the blood that was adopted by everyone. Rick
Baker, Rob Boteen, all of us used Dick Smith's blood formula because it
was the best and Dick had refined it on The Godfather because in the Godfather,
Copla decided to test all different types of blood formulas and movie blood.
They even tested pig blood, and the Copola at the end gave Dick Smith's
blood formula the vote for the most realistic blood and that became the industry standard
and still is today. So I went back at your recommendation and rented It's
like a buck ninety nine on Amazon. The Mutilator nineteen eighty four, which
is a film you worked on. It is the I think, one of
the quintessential eighties. It's so eighties. It's so eighties. The kills,
though, are damn good, and so I'm, you know, going back
forty years, but I'm doing this for memory. But there was a pitchfork
he came out of the barn with was it a chainsaw? I mean,
tell me about the Mutilator real fast mark. Basically, the nutshell is Buddy
Cooper decided to make a horror movie and he didn't know who to call.
So he looked. He found a Hollywood Yellow Pages and he found special effects.
Call the guy, and this guy said, oh, He'd called my
friend Anthony, and Anthony found out about the job, but he didn't have
a portfolio strong enough to get the job. And I said to him,
once you let us combine our portfolio, will send it to this guy in
North Carolina and get the job. And Anthony resisted me on that. Finally
I convinced him, let's do this. I sent my work, we got
the job, and when we did the film, Anthony and I were kind
of partners in the beginning. At some point he had problems with his personal
life and he kind of up and left, so myself and Ed Ferrell finished
the movie. As far as the the way that Buddy wanted to dispatch people,
he used phishing implements, you know, except for the acts. The
axe was an axe, but there was the big pitchfork, which I guess
for piercing tuna, I don't know. But there was the gaff, the
big hook, which is like a fish hook, only it's like, you
know, the size of a dinner plate. And that had a very famous
scene which most people remember. Essentially he was in the outboard motor, of
course, for gutting poor or morey. And you've got what the one scene
where there's a guy who's literally in two pieces like he's a torso lying on
the ground, but he's still dangerous. Yeah, he's still acting. So
is that you digging the hole for the actor? Are you the one making
the legs with the jeans on him and the intestines? Yeah, it was
Anthony and I made that and Ed Ed assisted Ed Ferrell. That was kind
of a bit of a clusterfuck because the first ad, this guy from New
York decided to switch the schedule on his We had like two weeks to go
to shoot that effect, and he just wanted to kind of bust our balls
and he said, well, no, we're shooting that, you know,
tomorrow, so you have to be ready whatever it takes. And we were
close to being done, but we still had to do the severed body.
We'd made the crude body. We had to cut it in half. I
had to finish painting the head. We had to figure a way to make
the guts really quickly. We didn't have time to sculpt and mold and paint
that stuff. So we use party balloons covered with melted gelatin and blood and
it worked great. And that was out of necessity because we had to cook
it up really quickly. I've heard stories of people just pouring like apple pie
filling and stuff onto bodies, a lot of food items. I had to
make brains on a movie once, and I went to craft service and got
some bananas and mix it up with blood paste, you know, really quick
flinging against the wall house that oh perfect. You know, well, if
you're working with food stuff under the hot lights and then this is certainly back
in the days that the hot tungsten lights burning it, you know, two
thousand degrees or whatever, think it'll go bad. Like Angus scrim at the
end of the day with the yogurt on him. He'd be wearing that for
twelve hours. He kind of you know, kind of have a bit of
an odor to it. Yeah, okay, we simply must talk Evil Dead,
and I mean the original trilogy. Okay, Mark Showstrom left his fingerprints
on the Evil Dead franchise. We're going to find out how next. Thank
you so much for listening to this bonus broadcast. A nice diversion and distraction
for your humble host, and hopefully the same for you. I'm speaking to
long time television and film special effects makeup artist Mark Shostrom. Evil Dead is
I don't know, it's another milestone film for me, and the trilogy Evil
Dead one, Evil Dead two, an Army of Darkness, which I just
learned recently that they wanted to call the Medieval Dead and they were turned down,
and I feel that's a missed opportunity. But you worked on Evil Dead
two. Is that correct? Yes? I saw a picture of you with
ted Ramie, which is Sam the director, Sam Raimi's brother. He's in
a shit ton of films, but he played the evil horror hag. Was
it Henrietta something like that? Yes. Bruce Campbell referenced in his autobiography a
scene where Henrietta is spinning from the ceiling and there's sweat coming out and apparently
you can see. And so I went back and actually freeze framed. I
don't know. You want to talk about the suit. The suit is a
head to toe sculpture. I did. It took me about a week and
yeah, that was a huge sculpture. If you go to I'll send you
some behind the scenes pictures. That was a head to toe suit. The
only part of ted Ramy that was real were the tops of his ears.
Of course they had color on the makeup, even his tongue. I made
a rubber tongue for him. In Denture's contact lenses. He was one hundred
percent covered, well, ninety nine percent except for the top of the ears,
but that has suit. It was about, you know, an inch
and a half to two inches thick in places of plastic foam, and we're
shooting in North Carolina during a heat wave and it would become I don't know,
ninety degrees on stage. Finally we got air conditioning, which helped a
bit, but still he was going through such physical rigors, you know,
I mean being in a suit, under prosthetics and a heat wave on a
sound stage for you know, ten hours up on a wire spinning around.
Yeah, he was sweating a lot every day. We had to take his
rubber feet off at the end and you could literally pour the sweat out.
It was pretty gross. Is it true that you guys had to have like
an oxygen tank for him or is that just no he had Basically when we
came it was so hot there and I knew it was going to be a
problem. I went to the production manager and said, we need to get
air conditioning. Well, we can't afford it. That's going to cost you
know, ten thousand dollars and I went to Sam, I believe Sam and
Rob and I said, look, if we don't get air conditioning, your
brother's going to die. Okay seriously, So they paid for air conditioning for
this. It wasn't a sound stage. It was actually the gymnasium of an
old school and we had many of these big tubes to direct the airflow,
and Ted had his own tube. So after every take we'd open up and
zip the back put one of the air conditioning tubes right there and just below
the cold air right in there directly. But no, he never had oxygen
or anything like that. Ash Williams, Bruce Campbell's character, the iconic Ash,
lops off his hand with a chainsaw and the hand becomes a character like
a new character in the film. You were involved with the iconic hand mark?
Is that right? Absolutely? Yeah? In what way? Creating it,
making all the different versions of it for different uses, Like we had
one independent radio controlled hand for a movement like when Cassie is holding the hand
and the light comes on on the hand is moving. There was a version
to run across the floor. There was a version which was a stump with
the palm up for being on the floor, a version with the palm down
for being on the floor, stunt versions, all these different types of hands,
and plus the ones that begin the effect with Bruce with his what happens,
I forget what happens. We had a couple of different hands for him
as the nails come out or whatever happens. I forget. It's been so
long, it's been forty years. But you know, he's the hand becomes
possessed and he decides he's going to like separate himself from the evil. And
then the hands scampering around and it's making that little sound. That little is
actually I mean, it's hysterical. It's just iconic. And the first effect
we shot was involving his hand. That was my I'd spent you know,
four months prepping, and I knew I had to deliver, and I wanted
to look good on the first thing we filmed, which was Bruce dragging himself
across the floor and stabbing his hand. So I'd worked hard to make sure
this this damn thing would stab when you would bleed when you stabbed it and
all that. So there's a lot of pressure on me. If that first
filmed defect had fucked up they might be looking at me, going, why
do we hire this guy? But it worked out great, Thank God.
So much blood in Evil Dead two, And it's funny because the tone of
the film's change, and I think it they smartly change. Evil Dead one
is pure horror with you know, there's some comedy in it, but I
mean it's it's really a It's comedy in the way that Texas Chainsaw had some
darkly funny things in it, but Evil Dad two really rams it up.
So much blood, like literal barrels of blood. When you're shooting or when
you're creating, do you make up guys think to yourself, Oh my god,
the MPAA ratings board will never go for this. Do you think like
that? Sometimes you read a script like The Mutilator or Evil Dead Too,
and you just know right away there's no way in hell that the MPAA is
going to let this one go through as an R. You just have to
accept it's going to be an X. It's funny you had mentioned the blood.
The very last thing we shot on Evil Dead two, after everything,
even all the pickup shots and everything, was the blood shooting out of the
walls, blowing Bruce Campbell around the room and they were shooting at last because
it was going to destroy the whole set. And Verne Heigh, the special
effects guy, the mechanical special effects guy from Atlanta, had this tanker truck
full of blood. It was insane. Heck hooked up to all these pumps
that were connected to the walls at different places. And I remember standing in
the ladder above the set looking down into it watching the first take where the
blood Bruce is standing there, the blood starts to shoot out. I mean
it was like a rocket blast. It was insane. There was so much
blood shooting out everywhere. Of course, just destroyed the entire set, so
it was basically a one take you get five cameras on it or whatever it
was. It was absolutely nuts. Bruce Campbell said that he was like sneezing
blood for a week because it had just I mean it came out with a
great force. Yeah, like a fire hose of blood. The blood flood
bigger, way bigger than a fire hose. Just astounding in its scale of
you know, big holes in the wall like this with blood shooting out.
I heard somewhere, I want to say it was on one of the some
of the Friday the thirteenth films, but some of the special effects guys would
go so over the top, and they planned for the fact that, well,
we know they're going to slice this out, but they were kind of
tricking the ratings board. They're like, we're going to go so over the
top that they'll slice this out, but they'll leave what we had originally intended.
I guess we're going to desensitize them. Is that a myth or is
that real? I've heard of that happening. Actually a lot with directors as
well, who shoot. They'll submit their one version, which is the MPAA
version, well knowing it's going to be cut, and they'll recent will cut,
you know, five frames and resubmit and say, well we cut that
part out, and the MPa might look and go okay. All of a
sudden, you get it passed. So you get your original intended products submitted
and approved. I guess there's a method to the madness of that mark.
Is it just a joke? I mean, come on, I mean,
who are those guys and who's making the decision? And you know, I
don't know. I have a big problem with censorship in any way, shape
or form. It's ridiculous there's a whole documentary called this Film is Not Yet
Rated, and it's about it literally is a documentary about trying to find well,
who are the people who are rating our films? And it turns out
they have almost no qualifications of any kind. I think you have to have
you have to have a kid under eighteen, and I think they have a
couple of clergy who are consulting, you know, But other than that,
it's just random people. What I don't get is, you know, here
in the United States, you can't show I remember watching American Horror Story the
first season. I've never seen it, and they're showing American Horror Story and
the Walking Dead. They're showing extremely graphic, gruesome things, people's heads being
sliced and maggots and zombies just oozing gore. And there was a scene or
a shot in the American Horror Story where it's a dream sequence or something of
a woman floating, and I noticed they blurred out her nipples and her puby
care. Okay, I can't understand the pubic hair, but you're blurring a
woman's nipples. But you can also show knives going into people neck, people's
necks, you know, the American news shows suicides. They show people getting
killed and gory stuff all the time, but they won't say shit and fuck
on the nightly news words that everybody hears every day, like excuse me,
you worked on Nightmare on Elm Street two officially two and three, But did
you work at all on one? I saw you, I saw the word
uncredited. What I did? I worked. My friend Dave Miller was doing
Freddy's makeup and he called me one day and what was that summer of eighty
four, and he said, Hey, I'm doing this thing called a Nightmare
on Elm Street, and I need some help in my garage, his garage
workshop, because they keep having me make up this guy in this burn.
I bring him to the set, I have to wait to see if they're
gonna shoot. They never shoot with him, so I'm not getting stuff at
my workshop done. So I spent a week, literally one week or maybe
a week and a half at Dave's workshop. I remember sculpting on the Ronnie
Blakeley body at the end that she kind of rises out as she's a dead
corpse. And I forget what else I did, but my daily task first
was to make the phone pieces for Freddy's shooting next day, and the moles
at dave us were these little square dental stone moles that were very thin,
and every time you bake them you had to bake the phone. Every time
you bake them at two hundred degrees they would fall apart. So my day
began, arrive at Dave shop, have coffee, super glue the fucking moles
together, run the phone, close the moles, put them in, bake
them and then pull them out at the end of the day and they'd fall
apart. Superlued together again, and then day would take the rubber pieces from
the moles, go to set the next day make up. Robert England sit
around all day and they wouldn't film him. So I was running foam,
it's called running foam, making the phone pieces. I was doing that every
day for a week, week and a half, just to keep Dave supplied
with his pieces. I heard that freaking Freddy glove was super heavy. I
mean, come on, tell me you weren't tempted to discover and put that
sucker on, or maybe it was guarded like the Holy Grail. At that
time. I didn't go to set on the first one. On the second
one, I remember I probably put the glove on to try it. I
know I had to reference it to go examine the blades because we had to
make blades from Mark Patten's effects hands, like when his fingers grow the blades
grow out of Mark's hand. I do know that the end of by the
end of the third film, we're about done shooting, is like the last
day or the second to the last day. Here's somebody announce okay, you
know, make sure you know we have the Freddie glove handy. And at
the end the last day of shooting, the Freddy glove is missing. Who
has it? Because somebody would make off with it to sell it or something
like that. But they had many, many versions of it. What did
you do on two and three? I mean it's a broad question, but
on two I did the whole transformation scene in the middle of the movie of
Freddy Mark Patton turning into Freddy Krueger, the hands, the arm effects,
the tearing open of the body and all that there was. You know,
forty seconds of screen time was ten weeks of work. And on three I
did just a multitude of different effects myself, Kevin Yeger and Greg Cannon,
lots of stuff, the good old days of eighties horror. It is more
and more a world where we see CGI. And I'm not one of those
guys who's like, you know, the kind of the hipster man back in
the day when effects real man. But I also, you know, there
is I don't know, there's a gravity to practical effects that sometimes I miss.
Whenever you see the digital seems you think, oh wow, you know,
I wonder how long that took to render, which is kind of a
different thing. And so I go back and forth. I wish I was
seeing more practical effects, or maybe I am and don't realize it. Do
you have that conversation about the old school and the new ways, et cetera.
Mmmm, well, that's a broad topic. I mean it's funny just
even the word the term practical effects. To me when I hear it,
I just kind of shake my head and just go, well, their effects
I knew them in the eighties as effects. Of course, today everybody's practical
effects CG. I have mixed feelings, but I mean CGI can do incredible
things. I think what impresses me most about CGI is the environment so they
can create. Like when I saw mind Hunter, they were creating all these
townscapes from the seventies in Pennsylvania or whatever. There was just repeated layers of
environmental effects which looked fantastic, just beautiful. When it comes to creature work,
I'm of course more critical, and they can do amazing things. But
often if you have a creature designer who's only worked at a mouse their entire
career, who has no sculpture background, no hands on sculpture or anatomy lessons,
you're not going to have the reality inside that creature. And one thing
that I've found that's always missing is weight. You can have a person in
a rubber suit, like you know, Bob Pacardo in Explorers walking through and
you can sense the weight because there's a physical person in there which has weight.
You don't get weight in CGI is very You can get the skin textures,
you can create hair and water, but to create a big creature that's
lumbering across the screen that actually looks like it's heavy to me, they've never
accomplished that, or I haven't seen that movie. And if I can do
a little, you know, just to clear the air, I'm not distancedg
for anybody who's watching, Like when I see when I see Godzilla, you
know, when I see Pacific Rim, when I see X mack in etc.
And I see the amazing you know, just a world building that is
done correctly and well there's so much imagination. Well it's it's the trick of
knowing when to use CG or practical and knowing when to blend the two.
Like Gimo del Toro does the blend perfectly in Pans Labyrinth with the goat creature
and in Ex Machina. I just saw that for the first time, maybe
six months ago. I was blown away with the creation that robot woman.
And that was a mixture of prosthetic makeup and her movements, her body and
CG to create all the insides and the see through parts. It was beautifully
created. And that was a mixture, a blending of the two, a
correct blending of the two, very effective, beautiful work. Did you work
on Generations? Is that right? I did? Yeah, Star Trek Generations
the film which combined the original and next generation casts. It's kind of a
polarizing film. What did you do for Generations? I began by doing klingon
makeups with Greg Nelson and a couple of other people. But I also did
some sculptures for the movie for Patrick Stewart and Brent Speiner. For Brent,
I had to do there's a scene where Jeordie he has to twist the top
of Data's head and lift it off, and I had to sculpt a complete
wrap around foe head piece for Brent. In fact, I remember working for
Michael westmore than I said, if you don't have any pictures, I need
to see Brent. So Brent actually sat in front of me while I sculpted
the details of the way his forehead wrinkles went and all that. And for
Patrick, they did some post production work and they'd finished shooting all his stuff
in Generations and he was off doing a play and his hair was a different
length, but he couldn't cut it. So Richard Snell, a makeup artist
who's passed away, he did a ball cap on Richard on Patrick, but
it was a scene over the shoulder, a Christmas shot over Patrick's shoulder where
he's got the bald head and the hair. But I needed to make a
neck to cover the bald cap join which is all funky and weird and wrinkly,
So I had to basically duplicate Patrick Stewart's neck and his shoulders up into
his forehead, So it's kind of a disguise, makeup camouflage thing. You
never know it's there. Oh, I got to go find one quick shot.
If you blink, you miss it. I got to go find that
somewhere, by the way, I feel. I just felt betrayed when they
left Kirk's corpse. First of all, he dies by falling down. That
bothered me, greatest captain in the history of starfleet. And then they just
leave him under a pile of rocks to get eaten by the foreign planet vultures
and then they fly away. I have issues, Mark, I feel grief
over the death of Kirk in that way. Just say it. You worked
on Voyager, is that right? Or DS nine, which I worked?
Actually, I was working at the same time on DS nine, Generations and
Voyager prep. Was kind of hopping back and forth on all three for a
while. You make in Ferengi and stuff, or what do you doing now?
I was doing a lot of sculpting guest stars in deep space sculpting for
Voyager, stepping in to do sculptures and applications on Generations, all within like
a month period, and then when Voyager started up in Earnest, Michael Wesmore
hired me as the last staffer on that. Do you feel like sci fi
horror? I don't know. Do make up people tend to fall into those
genres simply because they tend to be more makeup intensive or was that your passion?
But you're like, oh my god, I want to work horror,
sci fi or does a word like that. There's a hell of a lot
more makeup effects in sci fi and horror screenplays, obviously, So yeah,
you just if I look at my resume, you know there's a lot of
horror, there's some sci fi, maybe one or two fantasy. I'd rather
work on dramas actually, but they're not makeupffects intensive and heavy. I'm looking
here at a couple of other uncredited roles, David Cronenberg's Videodrome classic, the
Beast Master Classic, John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness Classic. Well, why uncredited?
I mean, did they just bring you in to solve a problem?
What happened? A lot of people get uncredited for you come in and do
work for a few weeks and you're not the main person, or in the
case of Forbidden World, the production manager was too cheap to give everybody credit,
which has always bothered me. I mean, it's not that expensive to
submit a name to be put in the credits. But sometimes you get lost,
and if you're there for a week and the rest of the crews on
the film for four months, you might not get on the list, or
they'll spill your name wrong. So hey, Mark, we give credit here.
You have full credit right here on this. No. I always give
credit too. It's a big thing of mind. People do the work,
they should get credited. In fact, on Deep Star six, I had
twenty four people working with me, and I submitted all their names. At
the end of the production, I said, here's the list, here's who
did what. The line producer just arbitrarily picked ten of the twenty four and
gave them I mean, I had specific people on specific jobs, painter,
mechanical, animatronics, and this idiot, whoever did it, I forget who
it was, just arbitrarily picked less than half those names and put them down
as creature guy, creature guy, creature guy, creature guy. Come on,
people busted their asses for five months on that and you can't even give
him credit. You know, fuck people like that. Mark, you are
a library of stories, anecdotes, information, just good stuff. I would
love that. I wish we were just you know, having coffee. We'd
just probably keep going here. But thanks, thanks for squeezing me in.
Do you know your life? Your schedule? For talking about so much of
your work? I had all these other things we could have. We could
have talked about the X files, we could have talked about you, but
I think I probably better call it otherwise. We'll be here until tomorrow for
those who want to know more. How do people find you and your work?
Yeah, I'm an Instagram and Twitter. I use a special secret code
which is my real name, and like most people, yeah, I'm on
Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, which I don't do much social media less and
less these days. Is there a place where people can see kind of a
portfolio or is the best thing just to google your name? Mark? Showst
YouTube thing and it's got my real let me. I'm not even sure what
the name of it is. I don't just shoot it to me and I'll
put it in the description box. Okay, I'll need to derail yourself now,
but yeah, send it to me and we'll send that link to everybody.
I'll if you have IMDb pro I think it links to my real I'm
not I don't do too much self promotion and all that. And now your
works terrific man. You are a almost half century veteran of the business,
and you've got so much good stuff out there. And for those who are
fans of these genres like I am, it's just an honor to be able
to hang out and talk. So I'll put those links in the description box,
and all good stuff and all safety and all my best for twenty twenty
four and let's chat again someday. All right, thank you, sir.
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