DICK SMITH

Makeup artist. Academy Award for Amadeus. Other credits include Midnight Cowboy, Little Big Man, The Godfather I/II, The Exorcist, The Sunshine Boys, The Sentinel, Altered States, Ghost Story, The Hunger, Starman and Dad.
One movie that made an enormous impression on me was John Carpenter’s The Thing. I thought Rob Bottin’s effects were sensational, inventive and startling. One absolutely terrifying scene, in particular, was the sequence where the station’s doctor is trying to revive one of the characters by doing CPR, and all of a sudden the guy’s chest opens up and it becomes a huge maw that literally chops off the doctor’s hands. That was a total shock. There was nothing to make you anticipate what was about to happen. Then there was the way the creature kept morphing into different, bizarre forms. The characters would track it in one form, then suddenly it would transform into something totally different-bizarre and wild and unlike anything I’d ever seen. And these were entirely mechanical effects, which meant they had a wonderful three-dimensional quality you don’t always get with computer gen
erated images.
As for a favorite that I personally worked on -if 1 have to limit myself to the past twenty years, I’d say it’s the arm of Bill Hurt that changed shape in Altered States. We used overlapping bladders to create a kind of rippling effect that went from one end of the forearm to the other – and I think the effect worked really well for the story.
If I could go beyond the twenty-year time frame, though, I’d go back to 1956 and my first special effects assignment It was for a commercial about a beauty product. What the client wanted was a sculpted face of a woman, cut across the forehead like a mask, mounted on a wall. The idea was that this face would have stylized wrinkles that would slowly vanish in front of your eyes. I made a hollow plaster mask, into which I carved V-shaped grooves around the eyes and mouth. At the bottom of each of these slots, I cut a tiny crack right through the mask. Then I made a matching latex skin that covered these grooves. The back of the mask was sealed shut and a pipe was inserted in it, connected to a desiccator to draw a vacuum so we could suck the thin latex skin into all these grooves – creating the look of wrinkles. Then all we had to do was slowly let the air back in and the latex would resume its original configuration-and the wrinkles’ would be gone. It was such a simple effect, but everyone was wowed by it because you couldn’t tell what was happening.