Rick Baker – Interview 
By Scott Essman

 In one memorable week in the spring of 1968, an aspiring 17-year-old makeup artist saw the films 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY and PLANET OF THE APES in a suburban California movie theater.  Who was to know that those screenings would change film history over 30 years later?  Of course, the boy was future six-time Academy Award-winning makeup legend Rick Baker, and the makeups he witnessed formed the foundation for the special makeup effects revolution of the 1980s and 1990s.  Throughout his entire career, from Schlock to Planet of the Apes, Rick Baker is known for his amazing gorilla creations.  In this rare interview, he reflects on three 1970s gorilla projects – the 1976 version of King Kong, the Dino suit for 1977’s Kentucky Fried Movie, and the suit he build in 1979 for The Incredible Shrinking Woman.

 SCOTT: In King Kong, you did a series of heads where, as far as I know, this is the first time where we actually saw an animal show emotion on the screen in quite that way.  You did five heads for various emotions.  Carlo Rambaldi did the mechanics, but you sculpted those heads.  Talk about how you developed that.

BAKER:    That was an interesting project.  It was very frustrating as well.  The whole Rambaldi situation… John Landis was the first one to tell me about it.  He goes, "You know what?  There's some idiot's gonna remake King Kong."  I said, "And they're probably gonna have some asshole in a gorilla suit."  He said, "Yeah, right."  And I ended up being that asshole.  When--all of a sudden my attitude changed when they called up somehow.  Some of them thought that I did gorilla stuff, and they were looking for somebody to do a suit.  I went up and talked to them and they had some gorilla head that I'd made for myself, and a little sculpture of a gorilla that I did out of Sculptee, and some arm extensions that John Berg made, as a matter of fact.  When we talked about doing this gorilla suit with these arm extensions, he made these prototype arms that were pretty cool.  And I said, "This is how you do it."  You know?  Wanted to do hand tight suit.  And I was just about to start Squirm.  I said, "You know, if you want me to do this, I could get out of this other movie.  But I need to know now."  And it's like, "Well, we don't know yet."  What they wanted--they didn't want a gorilla, they wanted a caveman.  And a bunch of sketch artists, really good sketch artists--this guy, Mitch Hubler's a really good artist--drawing this caveman, this like prehistoric man.  And I go, "This is Conan!  What's wrong with you?"  And the whole attitude was really--you know, it was during the time of disaster movies.  They hired John Guillerman because he'd directed Irwin Allen’s Towering Inferno.  And that was just some other disaster.  Kong was just a natural disaster.  But they thought he should be a man--more man-like for some reason.  I go, "It's synonymous with gorilla.  You can't do it."  And they didn't want my opinions.  And they never called me back right away, so I took Squirm.  As soon as I took Squirm, they called back.  And I said, "I can't.  I can't start."  And in the interim, they got Rambaldi, this Italian genius.  And I was impressed by his portfolio.  I thought he had some really cool stuff.  I think he's really talented as well.  And he definitely had more mechanical experience than I had.  And it was the same thing as like the Stan Winston deal: how do two people with completely different ideas on how things should be done work together?  And a lot of it was me just kind of being more passive about it and saying okay.

SCOTT: Is this when they wanted to build the 40-foot robotic Kong?

BAKER:  Yes, at the time I came along, they said Carlo had convinced them to make a giant robot.  And they said, "This guy's a genius!  He's gonna build a forty foot giant robot that's gonna do the whole movie.  And we can see he's a genius."  And he's a liar!  You can't do that.

SCOTT:    Forty feet.  Well, they built that thing.  And it was in the movie about 18 seconds.

BAKER:    18 frames.  Yeah, well, I kept--I didn't know who the hell Dino DeLaurentis was.  And I was still young and thought I knew everything.  And I go up his office and say, "You know what?  You're crazy!  You're spending all this money on this fuckin' thing you're never gonna use.  And you're gonna be using me in a gorilla suit.  Give me the money to build a decent suit."  I said, "You're putting the suit on the back burner, and you're...."  They weren't giving us the money it took to do it right.  And I wanted to do a hand-tied suit.  And Carlo was convinced---  And he said, "You know, we need to use the real animal's hair."  They went to Bischoff's Taxidermy, which is down the street here, and got a black figure, and brought it in and held it up in front of the camera and shook it, and went, "Look, eez-a beautiful."  And Dino thought so too.  And I said, "But it's got leather on the back of it.  It's gonna be hot as hell.  It doesn't move.  It's gonna weigh like a ton.  And the hair's gonna stick straight up when you bend it over these forms that it wasn't made for."  "No, no.  We'll use the bear hide."  It was real.  Well....   So we ended up making this bear hide suit that was impossible to move in.  And when I first put it over the muscle suit, which was a sculpture that I did, it stuck up like it was this big fuzz ball, so I ended up getting clippers and just clipped it all off down to the--it cut off all the nice looking, shiny guard hairs and just went down to this fuzzy, downy stuff underneath.  And then they had to spray streaks and tips in this brown hair spray all over the suit, because that stuff was all like--it was like light, tan color.  I mean it was ridiculous that way that suit was put together.  But in spite of that, I actually thought the mechanism was pretty cool that he did.  And what really surprised me was my mechanical knowledge at the time.  I mean what I made on my test suit was a self-contained mechanism, very similar to 2001 Apes.  I could control it all myself from inside the head.  But it was limited as to what it could do.  The idea of actually having a cable running down the suit and moving something--you could get a lot more--you could do more with it, and I thought that was pretty interesting.  And I also was amazed at how simple it was.  ?????? have to be a mechanical genius to do it.  So I could stick on a cable and glue a piece of rubber.  So I had learned something about mechanisms from Rambaldi.  He learned about foam rubber.  He didn't know what foam rubber was to begin with--latex foam.  And about proper mold making, and sculpturing and punching hair and all that kind of stuff.  But it was a disappointing experience.  I mean I really thought it was gonna be my only opportunity to build a realistic gorilla suit.

SCOTT:    Which turned out to be horribly wrong.  But, before you move on, the five heads that you did for the various emotions: talk about how you did those.  Did you sculpt five separate heads entirely?

BAKER:    I sculpted--originally it was also that whole thing about who's gonna sculpt Kong?  What's it gonna be?  So we did the same thing like Jane Pittman.  I sculpted some heads.  Carlo sculpted a head.  I sculpted about three.  Carlo sculpted one.  The funny thing was it was something else.  Again, I can't complain.  I learned from Stan and I learned from Carlo as well.  My heads, I sculpted them as if I was doing them for myself, which was without hair, so they could be molded.  If they picked my head, we'd just put a mold on it right away.  Carlo sculpted more of a design sculpture.  He sculpted hair on it.  He sculpted eyes on it.  I just had where they eyes were closed and had a taper off to the edge where I wanted it to be.  And when I saw Carlo's head, I actually thought, "That looks pretty neat.  That was really smart to sculpt hair on it.  It looks more like a gorilla with hair sculpted on it."  Mine was the gorilla minus the hair.  But to my surprise--'cause I said, "Oh, shit!  They're gonna take his head."  To my surprise, they picked mine.  They picked one of mine.  Which was a one-day sculpture.  Throw the clay on there, stamp texture on it, here it is.  So that's the head.  Fortunately we know who made 'em and who made a mold right away and had the--they made a master out of that.  Made a mold of--flexible mold, so we could do clay press outs.  So we did a clay press out, and then I re-sculpted the clay press out.  So I didn't have to try to match that same sculpture every time.  So from the clay press out, then we sculpted the one that we called the angry head, and opened the mouth up and did more of an angry thing.  I forget what the other heads were. 

SCOTT:    A surprised head?  When he was blowing air on Jessica Lange?

BAKER:    Oh, yeah.  Hmmm.

SCOTT:    The angry head's my favorite, though.  Because that really looks like a pissed off animal.  How did you get that?  How did you nail that look?

BAKER:    Well, I'm ashamed of those Kong sculptures, because they really were done....  Each one of them's like a debt.  Today a sculpt like that, today I sculpt angry, maybe they'll look like it.  I mean, like now we spend like a month on a sculpture.  It was a different time.  We tried to make it as good as we could in the time that we had.  It's real---that's pretty much formula angry stuff.  I mean, it's 45 degree angles up.  And you do things with the brows that go down like this, you know.  Like this kind of angle,  you know.  But angles ????  And it's looking in a mirror, make faces, you know, like "that's a good one."  You know.

The Kong suit--I mean, if you saw the Kong suit in person, you saw everything....  You see it on film as well, even though the DP--whose name escapes me now--Richard--Dick Klein--Dick Klein did an amazing job of shooting the thing and trying to make it look good.  'Cause it was a real piece of crap, that Kong suit.  Everywhere you looked there were seams and zippers and Velcro and stuff that....  But the Dino suit [from Kentucky Fried Movie] didn't have that problem.

SCOTT:    Dino's face, though.  It's very expressive.

BAKER:    Mmm.  It was a self-contained thing, just a....  It's a pretty crummy suit.

SCOTT:    You didn't like it that much.  Sidney [from Incredible Shrinking Woman] was a huge step up.

BAKER:    Yeah.  Because I had a budget.  I had a couple hundred thousand dollars to make that suit.

SCOTT:    Was that with Craig Reardon and Mike McCracken?

BAKER:    Mike McCracken sculpted hands.  Craig--Craig did a chest for me, but I ended up re-doing it.  I didn't think it was enough.  And Craig did a really great pair of feet for that.  Really nice detail work.

SCOTT:    And instead of five heads for Kong, now you had one head that could do all these expressions.

BAKER:    There was more than one head for Sidney.

SCOTT:    There was?

BAKER:    Yeah, there was--but there was a cable operated head, and a self-contained head, and then there was a stock head as well.  The self-contained head was one that didn't have to be tied down to things with, and a cable operator.  'Cause that's something we never had on Kong that I was really fighting for.  'Cause I was always dragging forty foot of cable around my feet everywhere.  But yeah, it was at least a suit that was....  I was pretty much left alone to build it the way I wanted to build it.  And it was my first hand-tied suit.  And it was the closest at the time to a suit that I was happy with.  One thing that I really would have liked Sidney to be, but I didn't think was appropriate for the movie was, I wanted to do a cool silverback.  You know, with a nice big crest and all that stuff.  But Sidney was supposed be young gorilla, so it was kind of meant to look young. But, yeah, I was pretty happy with Sidney at the time.

Scott Essman has written extensively as a freelancer for various magazines about makeup and visual effects.  He can be reached at scottessman@yahoo.com.