Naked Lunch (1991) - Part 2: Mugwumps

Continued from the Part 1 article which focused on the Bugwriters.

The most famous of Naked Lunch's creatures, the Mugwump, actually had basis in the original novel. Cronenberg said about its role in the text, 'Burroughs talks about the mugwump in the book as a demure beast. I think that it represents all of the seductive monsters we run into that have some kind of addictive element — whether it is money or power or sex or whatever.'

Cronenberg also laid out his ideas for the Mugwump's appearance, and how it would be physically realized. 'I thought his body should be like that of an old junkie — emaciated and with the ‘look of borrowed flesh’ that Burroughs describes in the book.

I also wanted the mugwump to be basically humanoid, but with characteristics that would emphasize its nonhumanness. (...) Any kind of suit would have been too bulky. And I’ve already done my ‘human in a suit’ movie — The Fly.'

Stephan Dupuis and Jon Berg designed the Mugwumps on paper first, and Chris Walas made a series of sculptures. Jim Isaac said, 'We pretty much nailed the mugwump from the beginning. David wanted something that was very powerful and had a strong presence on the screen — not a monster, but a person. He also wanted him to have William Burroughs qualities. So we got some old photos of Burroughs and played around with those and eventually we sculpted the jaw of the mugwump to look like Burroughs’ jaw.'

Earlier Mugwump maquette, heavily based on Burroughs' features.

Isaac elaborated, 'Aside from that, it had black lips and a black beak and a tongue that was round as opposed to flat — like a parrot’s tongue. Its body was very spindly, with long arms and long legs. We also gave it a lizardlike coloring with a lot of veining underneath and very pasty-looking skin — David likes that unhealthy look in his characters. We built a foot-tall maquette and showed that to him, and he said: "That’s it. That’s the mugwump."'

Full-body Mugwump maquette.

In early drafts of the script, the Mugwump's 'teat', out of which people would suck out an addictive fluid, was placed on its stomach. As Jim Isaac remembered, this resulted in a problem for filming, as the actors would be in a very awkward position.

'It was very sexual. There was no getting around it. We really tried to make the teats do what they had to do for the movie, but not so blatantly that David would be trapped by it. We shaped them as little like phalluses as possible — but it was tricky. David would come in to see our tests and say, ‘Oh, man, how am I going to get a rating on this movie?’ And we were saying, ‘Well, David, that was our question from day one.'

To avoid an 'X' rating, Cronenberg opted for the Mugwump's teat to be placed on its head. This proved to work in the script's favor, as Isaac remembered.

'The idea of the teat on the head made sense in terms of the story. The mugwump was supposed to be almost worshiped. With the teat on his head, he could bend down — like a king extending his ringed hand to be kissed — and as the characters sucked, it was as if they were worshiping this creature. We also realized that having just one teat on the head might look silly, so we came up with the idea of placing several sea-anemone-type organs in the crest and having this teat grow out from among them.'

The finalized Mugwump head maquette.

The Mugwumps were a heavy workload for CWI, who built at least fifty full-size Mugwump props, mostly for the the 'Mugwump dispensary' sequence. The detailed Mugwump sculpture proved to be a challenge for the molds, according to mold supervisor Wim Van Thillo.

'We were very careful with the first mold to get all the detail and the fit right. The master mold was made in about twenty-five separate pieces because the mugwump was such an odd shape. We injected silicone in a stone case for the master mold, then we took one good copy and made five additional two-piece fiberglass molds from it. After that, it was a simple matter of painting in latex and foaming them up, five at a time. It took only about ten or fifteen minutes for the foam to set up, so it was a quick approach.'

Out of the fifty 'dummy' Mugwumps, two mechanized Mugwumps were built, one of them being the fully mechanical 'hero' puppet. The hero Mugwump puppet had a fibreglass understructure supporting the foam latex skin, and was cable-controlled.

The cable-controlled mechanisms were for the hero Mugwump's facial expressions, as it had several lines of dialogue. Air bladders were fitted in the head and face to give more life to the prop, but it was the mouth movements that required the puppeteers' attention.

Kelly Lepkowski spoke about the hero puppet's facial movements. 'He had a great deal of dialogue which is very unusual for an effects creature. We had to concentrate on the lips and make sure that we had some really good lip movement, along with simple up-and-down jaw movement, to get something that would read as speech. The beak-shaped mouth allowed us to get a lot of variation in the lips just by putting two cables in the top lip and two in the bottom. Each one of those cables was on a separate lever and the two levers were joined together with a bar. By pulling that bar, we could make both sides of the lips move in the same way.'

Lepkowski also described how the movement of the tongue - an important part for a 'speaking' puppet - was achieved. 'We were asked to build a tongue that would be able to extend about seven inches out of his head and be totally movable. But for it to move out seven inches, there had to be seven inches of blank space behind it for it to go back into. We ended up putting the tongue on the end of a flex shaft — and that is what pushed it in and out of the mouth.'

The Mugwump hero puppet's lip movements, thanks to its many scenes of 'speaking', were also a major concern according to animatronics engineer Bryan Dewe. 'I spent about four weeks rehearsing the lip-syncing. I got a tape of someone reading the lines and I practiced and practiced with that. When I felt as if I was getting close, I videotaped it to see what was working and what was not. The ‘P’s and ‘B’s were the hardest sounds to make.'

Jim Isaac also remembered how the puppeteers practised 'rehearsing' the dialogue in order to lipsync with the Mugwump puppet, as well as how Cronenberg managed to help actor Peter Weller with his performance in the Mugwump scenes. 'We had to find a way to coordinate the lip syncing and the puppeteering and the performances once we got on the set. If we had just had our puppeteers read the lines, that could have been distracting to Peter Weller because our people are not actors and they would most likely not do justice to them.

So David auditioned actors and hired one to read all of our characters’ lines in the proper rhythm and cadence. Then we taped that and rehearsed our puppeteering with it. On the set, the actor was miked so that our puppeteers below could hear him — and Peter could hear him live. So Peter had a real voice to play off of while the puppet was mouthing the words'.

This technique worked a charm according to Isaac, 'It made him much more comfortable. Peter never had any problems acting with the puppets. He embraced them just like they were actors.'

As per the scenes of the puppet talking, it was needed to move its head to face the actors. Lepkowski spoke on how the head's movements were controlled by pulley and joint mechanisms located in the neck. 'The neck was very complex. It had five axes of movement on it. It turned back and forth at the base, with the head turning in sync with it; and the head also tilted, in addition to rotating. We used a ‘three-way’ for the neck — a universal joint pulled with three cables. The neck came out almost perpendicular to the body; so the head, instead of being on top of the body, stuck out like it was on a stalk. It was very difficult to get organic movement from something like that.'

Jim Isaac also talked about the neck mechanisms, and how taxing they were for the CWI crew. 'David really liked how that looked but from a mechanical standpoint, it was a nightmare. The head was a good two feet from the shoulders, so we had to use very long cables to operate it. The cables ran down through the body and then underneath the set. Generally, the longer the cable, the more difficult it is to operate the puppet — and we had cables that were up to fifteen feet long in some scenes. One person would operate the head turn — which was a compound move — and then another person would operate the head tilt.'

Another difficulty CWI faced were the crests on the Mugwump puppet's head, as Cronenberg wished for them to be moving on camera.

Lepkowski recalled, 'He wanted them to move in a fluid motion, very organically, all of them in a different sequence. It was difficult because they were on a head that was mechanized through this very thin neck. Obviously, we couldn’t have forty cables going through that small a space. So we put a miniature cam controller device inside the head to pull the independent cables. It was driven externally by a motor that was fitted in the mugwump’s body.

We couldn’t have a motor in the head because it was sitting on the end of this two-foot-long neck and every ounce of weight that we put on the end of that translated to ten pounds to the cable in the back that was trying to lift it. So we ran a flex shaft up there and built a really lightweight cam mechanism that drove all the organisms in the crest.'

One of the crests was a 'teat' out of which the Mugwump's addictive fluid poured out of. Lepkowski described how the teat, which was achieved making a balloon-like appendage fixed to the puppet's head and designed to be inflated on camera, was made.

'The growing teat had us guessing for quite a while because it didn’t have any seams, we couldn’t do the typical thing with a fold that it could grow out of. David wanted to see it blend very evenly into the top of the head and then grow to two or three times its length. It was asking a lot. (...) One of the problems we had in the early tests was that materials would balloon out rather than growing lengthwise.

I ended up using nylon that was like parachute material. It was very lightweight, finely woven cloth which was slick and moved easily against itself. I sewed that into the right shape and covered it with eighth-inch-thick foam latex. We built up a nipple on the end and then painted some veining on it. There were no molds, so each teat had to be built individually.'

Inside the teat was an eight-inch nylon tube, used to both hold the teat in place as it extended, as well as for an operator to pump the 'Mugwump juice' through. The Mugwump juice that the actors drank on camera was actually a mixture of milk, honey and egg white!

The Mugwump hero puppet's arms were controlled like a marionette, both suspended with monofilament and controlled off-camera by a puppeteer. The Mugwump's 'smoking arm', used to hold the cigarette, was actually not connected to the hero puppet, and instead was a separate, articulated prop that needed two puppeteers to operate.

Jim Isaac detailed how the Mugwump puppet 'smoking' was achieved. 'We had a small cable wire that went through the hand and all the way down to the middle of the arm and then out the end where the other cables were coming out. The glowing cigarette tip was the kind of light used on miniature trains. It was on a rheostat so we could make it brighter or dimmer.

The trick in the puppeteering was to get the timing right because we had the cheek bladders going and the cigarette had to come up to the mouth and the lips had to move a little bit to accept the cigarette. The cigarette didn’t actually go into the lips, but the hand covered the mouth to hide that. '

The hero Mugwump puppet's body movements were controlled by a pole inside the armature, that could be operated from below. Jim Isaac explained, 'There was a T-handle at the bottom — like a submarine periscope — and we could twist it so the puppet pivoted at the butt, or we could twist it so the shoulders would twist alone. One person would do those two moves to keep the puppet alive. The body was all jointed so that the legs could move even though the puppet couldn’t walk. To simulate breathing, a tube was connected to the chest which had big balloon bladders in it. Someone below would keep that going with a foot pump.'

Just like with the Bugwriters, production designer Carol Spier worked to accomodate CWI's needs with the Mugwump's puppeteering. Lepkowski said, 'We talked with (Spier) about designing a stool for (the Mugwump) to sit on that would not expose all of the cables and the center rod that supported his body. Also, there had to be a large enough hole to allow for the slight side-to-side motion of the mugwump as he sat on the stool.'

In another interview, Isaac spoke about Spier's contributions, 'For the bar scene we needed to have a four-foot square trap door underneath the Mugwump. which meant they had to build the set to our specifications. Everyone worked together to make sure things worked right.'

Lepkowski also described how Spier helped with the sequences of the Mugwump's second appearance, in Jim Lee's apartment. 'The mugwump was sitting on a chair behind a table. Obviously, if it had been a standard desk or table, we would have had a lot of limitations. But the art department worked with us and came up with a chest with a board on top of it for Lee’s table. Because it was solid, it allowed us to have operators underneath and cables coming out, without having to worry about hiding them. It wasn’t as complicated as the bar scene — the mugwump didn’t have to smoke or any of that stuff. So we were able to deal with it with puppeteers lying down on the floor or hunched behind the table.'

The aforementioned fifty or so 'Mugwump dispensary' props, were made in varying levels of quality. Jim Isaac explained how this determined how much screentime each prop would take. 'The best ones were placed nearest the camera and the less desirable ones were put in the back. Then, for closer shots, we had two mechanical mugwumps with teats that actually dripped. There were no facial movements or anything on those. We did armature a few of them — some with steel, some with wood — so that we could pose them. Since they were all harnessed, there was only limited movement we could get from them anyway.

We also used our bend-over mugwump for a shot in which one of the characters is sucking the teat and talking to Bill. Because it was a closeup and the mugwump was supposed to be alive, there was a fair amount of head movement. We didn’t have time to build a whole new puppet from scratch, so we just flipped our bend-over guy upside down and hung him on a special rig so we could put him in any stall we wanted.'

Keeping up the the theme of turning the mere act of writing into something grotesque (arguably a gag on how certain critics had viewed Burroughs' novel as having perverted literature itself), CWI had to create yet another monstrous typewriter; the 'Mugwriter'.

Jim Isaac explained the Mugwriter's design. 'We designed very strange looking heads with keyboards and rollers. Some were organic looking and some were more mechanical. One thing that David knew was that he wanted Lee’s hands to be able to fit inside the mouth as he typed — the rest was up to us. So we came up with some wild stuff. But the more we played with it, the sillier it started to look; and eventually we went back to the mugwump head. In the story, the Mugwriter is basically the mugwump, just appearing at a different level.'

The Mugwriter head being sculpted.

The Mugwriter also was written to have dialogue, which proved to be a headache for the CWI crew thanks to its comically large mouth. Jim Isaac recalled how he was able to convince Cronenberg to use a 'transitional' Mugwriter head with a smaller mouth.

'The wide mouth just looked too silly when it talked and we figured, since it was a hallucination anyway, that the Mugwriter could transform itself in the course of the scene. David and I brainstormed and came up with the idea of reducing the size of the mouth when it talked and then, ultimately, replacing it with a full mugwump in the scene. That way, we were able to have the mugwump, rather than the Mugwriter, deliver ninety percent of the lines.'

The transitional Mugwriter head.

The sculpture for the Mugwriter was used to create a light-up 'glowing' Mugwriter head for when it is taken out of the furnace. The main Mugwriter prop required six puppeteers to operate its movements. Unlike the Mugwump puppet, there was no motors used.

'We didn’t need motors because, since it was only a head as opposed to an entire body, we could easily bring cables out through the bottom and they would only have to be about four feet long. The Mugwriter had the same four-way eye movement as the mugwump. On the wide-mouthed version, the lips moved independently and the mouth opened and closed. For the talking scenes, we would just remove the wide mouth and replace it with the smaller mouth by cutting into the jaw area and then gluing the face back on like a prosthetic.'

Sources:

• Cinefex #49 'Borrowed Flesh' by Jody Duncan, 1992
• Cinefantastique Vol. 22 No.5 (April 1992)

Read more on the rest of Naked Lunch's special effects on the 'Part 3' article, covering the transformations of Cloquet and Fadela.