: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,
:30:18
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.
:30:28
After the war he got a job at Universal.
:30:30
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,
:30:41
struck out on their own and made a horror
film, The Monster of Piedras Blancas,
:30:44
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
:30:54
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,
:31:02
mouldwise, in several pieces.
I can't tell you how many now,
:31:04
but I would guess between six and ten.
They were cast in foam rubber,
:31:07
which at the time was something new.
The costume fit him pretty skintight."
:31:11
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.
:31:22
Anybody who gets into a suit like that and
finds out they are is in a world of trouble.
:31:26
Once in that suit, your eyeballs and the
inside of your mouth was all that showed.
:31:31
Unfortunately nothing is left
of any of the gill-man costumes.
:31:34
They were made of foam rubber,
which doesn't last.
:31:36
Even the moulds for the suits
have been destroyed.
:31:39
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.
:31:51
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,