Creature from the Black Lagoon
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:30:01
and Jack Kevan, who was
Bud Westmore's right-hand man -

:30:04
Bud Westmore's right- and left-hand man -
Jack Kevan did a little of everything.

:30:09
Kevan worked as Westmore's assistant
but he was a hell of a lot more.

:30:12
He was a real hands-on guy who did
most of whatever work had to be done.

:30:16
He was born in Pittsburgh,
attended UCLA,

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and he went to work
doing make-up at MGM in 1932.

:30:21
He made up the main characters in
The Wizard of Oz, then, in World War II,

:30:25
he made prosthetic appliances for
wounded men throughout the Pacific.

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After the war he got a job at Universal.
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He worked on A&C Meet Frankenstein,
It Came from Outer Space,

:30:34
Man of a Thousand Faces,
Tarantula, scores of movies.

:30:37
And in 1958 he and Creature's
dialogue director, Irvin Berwick,

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struck out on their own and made a horror
film, The Monster of Piedras Blancas,

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a thinly-disguised attempt to duplicate
Creature's success

:30:47
with a lookalike monster.
Jack Kevan told me

:30:50
"They were lucky to find Ricou Browning,
who could swim underwater

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and not be restricted by the
equipment he had to wear."

:30:57
"We took a full body cast of him. On top of
his figure we built the monster to fit him,

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mouldwise, in several pieces.
I can't tell you how many now,

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but I would guess between six and ten.
They were cast in foam rubber,

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which at the time was something new.
The costume fit him pretty skintight."

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It sure did. Ben Chapman, the 6'5" actor
who played the creature at Universal,

:31:15
describes the gill-man suit as fitting
as closely as an outer layer of skin.

:31:19
Luckily, neither Ricou
nor Ben was claustrophobic.

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Anybody who gets into a suit like that and
finds out they are is in a world of trouble.

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Once in that suit, your eyeballs and the
inside of your mouth was all that showed.

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Unfortunately nothing is left
of any of the gill-man costumes.

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They were made of foam rubber,
which doesn't last.

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Even the moulds for the suits
have been destroyed.

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Universal threw them away
years ago to make some room.

:31:45
I was always bothered by the fact
that they want us to believe

:31:48
the creature could crack the boom
just by his powerful swimming.

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The boat's not anchored - the creature
would just tow it around the lagoon.

:31:55
Frank Lovejoy was considered
for the starring role in Creature.

:31:58
Lovejoy was the hero of Warner Brothers'
House of Wax, a 3-D hit earlier that year,


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