Continued from the Part 2 article on Twilight Zone: The Movie which focused on Craig Reardon's work on the prologue and 'Nightmare at 20'000 Feet' segment.
The Twilight Zone movie's other effects-heavy segment was Joe Dante's retelling of the episode 'It's A Good Life', itself based on Jerome Bixby's short story. Joe Dante opted to update the premise for the 1980s, with Dante's love for cartoons shaping its story.
Realizing the special makeup effects of 'It's A Good Life' was Rob Bottin, who had previously worked with Dante on The Howling; one of Bottin's more simple taskes was the mouthless makeup appliance worn by Cherie Currie as one of Anthony's victims.
'Before Rob designed the creatures I ran Tex Avery’s cartoon The Cat Who Hated People for him, which has a lot of eyes popping and jaws dropping. So that was definitely an influence. Also, Rob has a fixation on the work of an artist for Kar Kulture buffs, Big Daddy Roth. Roth used to draw these bizarre characters with huge heads driving tiny cars, and during the mid-Sixties, they were everywhere. So, as a result of Rob’s cravings for these things, there’s a lot of Roth’s influence in the designs for our Twilight Zone creatures'.
The first of the living cartoons is a giant, fleshy rabbit that pops out of a hat. Bottin recalled about the inspiration; 'The rabbit coming out of the hat was my favorite. That was inspired by Rocky and Bullwinkle. Bullwinkle was always saying, ‘And now, I’ll pull a rabbit from this hat,’ and instead he’d pull out a lion or something — ‘Oops, wrong hat.’ So that’s where it came from. Nothing new in Hollywood. When we talked about the rabbit, Joe said he wanted something creepy — not disgusting like the stuff in The Thing, but not funny like a cartoon. The idea was to come up with a sinister, sneaky, evil-looking rabbit. I did three or four sketches, and finally came up with the one we used. Originally, I wanted to put hair on it — in patches, like some giant diseased rabbit — but time ran out.'
A collapsible rabbit puppet was made for the shot where bursts out of the hat. Bottin detailed the technique; 'I had this air cannon device that Doug Beswick built for me on The Howling. You put your compressed air into the cannon, which has a quick-release valve and solenoid to let the air out — and you can figure out that a certain amount of air will fill up a certain amount of space, so you can get a quick inflation without worrying about it popping.
As a test, we took our rabbit balloon and shoved it down inside this hat and pushed the button. The rabbit popped up, inflated perfectly, and then tipped over and fell down — which was discouraging because we were getting close to filming. I figured the balloon must be too heavy, so I had the guys pour up another one that was lighter, and then Dave Kelsey had the idea of using helium to keep it upright. So we filled the new rabbit with helium, and it worked. It stayed up and it floated and we put little weights on the arms to balance it out. It was great. So here we are with this giant rabbit floating in our doorway — like something from the Macy’s parade — and I decided we had to have a picture of it.
Dave said he’d hold it while I went to get my camera, but I told him it wasn’t necessary because the thing was just floating there — which was true. The trouble was, the little fishing weights that we used to stabilize it were fastened on with duct tape, which unfortunately didn’t stick very well to the rubber. I got back with my camera and the rabbit was gone. I started looking around, and then Dave Kelsey points up in the sky and there it was, drifting away over Van Nuys. Some kid probably has it in his room now. What made it especially bad was that we didn’t have time to make another one, so we had to use the original balloon with the cannon and a few wires on fishing poles to make everything stand up right. We also shot some smoke up through the hat when the rabbit came up. It wasn’t the greatest effect. In fact, it was pretty embarrassing — especially since I’d told Joe and everybody how great it was going to be. For a quick cut, though, it seemed to work okay.'
The rest of the rabbit's shots were achieved with an articulated puppet as Bottin explained; 'The hat was floating with suspension bars and cables and we had a spring steel rod going up through the rabbit. The rod was rather long, so we could stand below the camera and shake it to make everything vibrate. The arms were real rubbery, so they wobbled a lot. The head movements were controlled with cables and a couple of rods coming out the back and into the set. The jaw opened and closed, and it had a snarl mechanism around the lips which required about twenty cables to operate. I wanted to put a tongue on it that would come out and lick Kevin McCarthy’s face, but we didn’t have time. The ears were just marionetted from above. During one take, we had a wire break unexpectedly, and one of the ears flopped over. Joe thought it looked pretty good, so he cut it into the picture.'
'We did five creatures, all of which were supposed to be variations of the same character, but that didn’t really seem to come off as a concept. In real cartoons, the characters go through extreme changes. If they get hit on the toe with a hammer, their jaw drops open and their ears stand up like trumpets — they totally change shape, and then they return to their original form. So what I did was come up with one basic character, which had small ears and a big snozzle, and then just took it to its extremes. The problem was that we didn’t have enough time or money to do the in-betweens. If we’d been able to show them going from one form to the next, it would have been much more clear.
The first form of the cartoon gremlin, which spins out of the TV in a manner similar to the Tasmanian Devil out of Looney Tunes, was achieved as a fairly static puppet, though the 'whirlwind' effect was *not* added in post-production as Bottin detailed;'Everyone thinks it’s an optical but it wasn’t. I’d seen displays for Michelin tires where they have two tires fastened together at an angle — and when they’re rotated, it creates an interesting effect. I thought something like that would be perfect for us. The creature inside was basically a fiberglass dummy, with a few movable rubber parts so it could do things like hang its tongue out and wiggle its ears. Then we took some hula hoops, altered them to various sizes, and mounted them around the figure, with larger ones on the top and smaller ones at the bottom. Bob Worthington was in charge of that project. He did the head that comes off in The Thing — the part where it slides onto the floor and crawls away.'
The dummy was attached to a cart under the set, that had a slit cut through the floor to move the prop across the set; the hoops were coated in Scotchlite tape, and the sequence was photographed through a beam-spitter, with the yellow-light front-projected on the spinning hoops.Bottin stated; There was an electronic break that could stop the figure very quickly and it had a timer on it so we could tell exactly when it would be facing the camera. When Joe said, ‘Stop,’ Bob would punch the button, and it stopped perfectly every time. Then they’d pull a ring off and start it up again. The way the rings were mounted, they wobbled back and forth, which meant that we didn’t even have to go back and composite to get a double image.”
The effect was enhanced with special prop furniture, also made in Bottin's shop, that could be pulled apart to split as the spinning puppet passed through them. John Hora recalled about the shoot;“We shot that at about one frame per second. The figure took something like ten minutes to work its way across the floor and through the sofa, and lots of times it would only make it about two-thirds of the distance and then bind up. So we’d have to go back and start all over again. We ended up spending all of one day, just getting three takes on that thing.”
'...after the first one spins out and screeches to a halt (...) we went to the next one which puffs out its cheeks and blows a stream of CO2 across the room to get a cartoon whistle look. You could see the lips extend out about a foot, and we had bladders in the cheeks and ears that rotated. But it was a quick shot, and the way it was framed, you couldn’t really see that we also had it rigged so that when it was inhaling, the shoulders reared back and the chest expanded as it took a breath.'
'Next came the version we called Tex, because it looked the most like something Tex Avery would come up with. Archie Gillet engineered it. Unfortunately, you didn’t get to see much of that one either, but the legs spun around cartoon-style, shooting out smoke like tires burning rubber. The shoulders rotated, and its hands turned and stretched. The eyes extended out about five feet on springs, and smoke shot out of its nose and ears. The jaw hung open, scratching against the floor, and the tongue unrolled like a party favor. We had a lot of fun with that one.'
'Our final character was the most elaborate and expensive one of the bunch but it really didn’t work in the context of the film. The idea was to have it crouched on the ground like some great fleshy tarantula with a Jimmy Durante nose, bobbing and weaving and snarling about — kind of like the Tasmanian Devil when he stops whirling around and starts growling and making hideous faces. The thing was down on all fours, and had hand hands and feet hands. Those were done by having guys underneath the set with their hands stuck up through the floor into prosthetics that blended off into their arms.'
'There were also people underneath working all kinds of facial mechanisms, and other guys down there with cables moving the whole body around. When we set it up on the stane everybody was pretty excited about it. But when we saw it on film, it was just a little too weird. For one thing, it wasn’t smooth. We didn’t really have time to rehearse it and coordinate everybody’s action, and so it was just sort of randomly twitching. But the main thing, I think, is that it was just too bizarre. Somehow it started looking almost human — when it was supposed to be looking like a cartoon. Joe showed me a rough cut of the movie with that in it, but I had a feeling as we watched it that he’d end up cutting it out.'
Dante gave his reasons for removing the gremlin's final form; 'That last creature was really the scariest monster in the segment. But it also happened that it was the most impossible one to cut away to without getting the impression that it was something that had wandered in from another movie. I tried to work it in, but it just didn’t fit. We had to cut it.'
Bottin's own feelings on the segment were nonchalant; 'There was a lot of work on Twilight Zone but no great technical achievements. Most of the basic techniques we’d already developed, and we used pretty much the same process on all the characters. But I’m proud of what we did in the amount of time we had. In two-and-a-half months, we built five mechanical puppets, and did the rabbit out of the hat and the girl with no mouth. And it was fun. I’ll probably never get a chance to do that sort of thing again.'
Sources:
- Cinefex #14 'Shadows and Substance' by Don Shay and Paul Sammon
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