Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983) - Part 2: 'Nightmare at 20'000 Feet'

Continued from the Part 1 article on Twilight Zone: The Movie which focused on Craig Reardon's work on the prologue segment.

Reardon assumed his work for Twilight Zone was done, but then was asked to work on George Miller's segment, an update of Richard Matheson's 'Nightmare at 20'000 Feet'. Matheson had never been impressed with the television version of his gremlin, calling it a 'teddy bear' compared to the creature in his short story. Miller and Reardon opted to follow Matheson's description of the creature as Reardon recalled;

'I was in Nashville bashing up Richard Thomas’ face for a TV movie about Hank Williams Jr., when I had a call forwarded to me from Dennis Jones, the Twilight Zone production manager, saying he wanted me to come talk about the George Miller ‘Nightmare at 20,000 Feet’ episode. I couldn’t have been more delighted, because that was always one of my favorites from the original series, and I knew that this meant they wanted me to work on the gremlin'.

Michael Shawn McCracken sculpting the gremlin head. 

 

The gremlin suit underskull, with mechanisms visible. 

 

'I came back, and went in to meet George Miller and from the start, I loved the man; he was enthusiastic, friendly, full of ideas and yet open to all kinds of input. He had already developed a few firm notions of what a gremlin should look like, and had been in aided in this, to a very great extent, by Ed Verreaux, an artist who has done a great deal of storyboard work with Spielberg on Raiders of the Lost Ark, Poltergeist, and ET.'

'Ed is a very good artist, and a very fast one; I believe he worked with other directors on Twilight Zone but I believe that his input was the greatest on the Nightmare at 20'000 Feet episode. He and Jim Bissel, the art director for the episode, had all kinds of great ideas at our initial meeting with Miller. Off the cuff, I really couldn't think of any way to improve on their plans, so I found myself mostly sitting back and listening.'

'(Virreaux and Bissel) were thinking of a form-follows-function approach to the design of the creature, which led them to think in terms of a light-boned creature with different, more bird-like musculature. Ed came up with the idea of a quill structure at the top, that would erect into a wing-like shape, which turned out to be a technical nightmare when they decided that they wanted it, though I like the idea no less for that.'

'Ed also suggested suction cups on his feet and hands, to make the impossible idea of this thing clinging to the wing of an airliner in flight a shade more plausible. George was very enthusiastic about all of it, and he had brought in a book from David Attenborough's Life on Earth series that included a picture of a red-headed monkey that he'd fallen in love with. With a little revamping by Ed, a certain amount of the design was adapted from that source as well.

Reardon sculpted the suit with Michael McCracken (who Reardon had previously worked with on Poltergeist), with McCracken's son Michael Shawn McCracken also aiding in the sculpting process. Reardon's experience working under Dick Smith on Altered States proved valuable, but it was still not a smooth process. Reardon recalled;

Mike McCracken and I then set about sculpting the creature - which was entirely sculpted, and not built up, for delivery in three weeks. I did the hands and feet and the head; the head had a series of internal constructions that enabled the thing to roll its eyes and blink and smile and snarl. Mike McCracken did a beautiful job on the body, giving a very subtle, sort of lizard-pebble texture to the body. Largely as a result of the torture that the suit took from the wind and rain during filming, a good deal of what was put into the suit simply doesn't read.'

What I decided for the creature was to do an entire body suit, sculpted from head to foot — not something put together in pieces. That way, we could really control the look of the thing. I further decided to make the entire costume out of foam rubber. I had been involved with movies where that had been done — most notably Altered States, where Dick Smith was in charge — so I knew it was possible. There are pitfalls to foam rubber, however. For one thing, it shrinks. But there are disadvantages and advantages to every material. The good thing about sponge rubber is that it takes an excellent impression. It completely reproduces everything you put into your original sculptures, and it is also extremely flexible. Some of the plastic foams and other things that don’t shrink as much don’t have the advantage of being as flexible and able to move as sponge rubber. So, even with its inherent disadvantages, I decided to use it.”

'I ended up having to alter the original suction cup concept. When I first rendered typical suction cup shapes on the hands, the effect looked pretty corny — like something on a bathmat. So what I made instead were big fleshy-looking pads on the fingers and on the palm of the hand, similar to the foot of a crustacean. Everyone liked that approach. Unfortunately, there was never really an opportunity to see that in the finished film. Then we came to the creature’s tail which Mike McCracken sculpted and cast in foam rubber — a nice seven-foot-long tail with a spade-shaped flattened end on it. I think that was rationalized on the basis that it would be used something like a rudder for steering through the skies, and then as another suction device to anchor the creature to the wing upon alighting

What I knew had been done in the past — and, for example, what Dick Smith did on Altered States — would be to break the molds up into separate pieces for the torso, legs, arms and so forth. Then the pieces would be put together later into a single suit. What I tried to do, though, was keep everything but the hands, feet and tail in one piece — so we were dealing with an immense piece. These were then placed in a drying booth, at about two hundred degrees, to cure the foam latex — which is standard. Makeup artists use this approach all the time for noses and faces. We were just using it for a much larger project.

Larry Cedar, an actor and dancer, wore the suit during filming, and his lithe tall frame helped give the suit more of a presence. Rubber has a tendency to shrink, so instead of doing a lifecast of Cedar, the cast was done of a mannequin that was larger than Cedar in order to keep Cedar's silhouette. The suit had cable-controlled mechanisms inside the head allowing the gremlin's face to emote.

The sequence required heavy use of wind, rain and stuntwork, all of which took its toll on the makeup effects, as Reardon recounted; 'For all the exterior work on the prop wing, the very talented effects man Mike Wood was always there, providing the big lightning flashes, and oceans of water and wind. That was also almost my downfall, because the costume had been finished so quickly, and had to be brought onto the set so 'green' insofar as the paintjob and finish were concerned. '

'Originally the plan was to keep the costume away from the water; but it looks marvelous wet, and George realized that. So, it took a horrendous beating from the elements, particularly the water, and every evening I'd be taking something home that, if someone asked me. 'Did you do that.' I'd have said, 'Who? Me? Absolutely not! Poor Larry Cedar, meanwhile, was made miserable by the fact that the suit absorbed water - so he was wearing a cold, wet sponge all over his body! He proved to be a real trooper, and I don't think he would have been quite so patient if he hadn't realized himself what a good movie this was going to be.'

The suit had cable controlled mechanisms inside the head. Reardon himself activated the cable mechanisms with assistance from Bruce Kasson. However, the way the scenes were shot, with the darkness, rain and lightning flashes, meant this wasn't too visible in the film;

'George wanted very large eyes. In fact, he was always miming what he wanted to me, opening his eyes as wide as he could get them and saying, ‘This is what I want to see.’ George also wanted the gremlin to be able to pull its lips back from its teeth, so you could see quite a bit of gum-line. He made a big point about that. In addition, he wanted it to be able to grin quite broadly, as well as blink and roll its eyes. So I saw to it that our gremlin could do all that. Unfortunately, though, with fast cutting and all the atmosphere blowing by, you really don’t see much of the thing’s small repetoire of expressions. You do see a little bit of the smile blooming at the end, but the blinks and eye rolls are pretty much lost.'.

At first, Larry Cedar was able to see out of the mask through the creature’s transparent eyes — rather inadequately, I must admit — but as soon as he began to breathe, his breath would condense on the backs of the plastic eyeballs, and pretty soon he was blind. So for long shots, we installed a special pin that would allow the eye apparatus to lift right out of the mask. From a distance, it was impossible to tell that the eyes weren’t there, and Larry could then look out through the open holes. For closer shots, of course, the eyes were put back in.” As a final detail, Reardon installed tiny red grain-of-wheat bulbs into the inner temples of the creature’s head, near the occipital ridges. In the dark, they gave a slight glowing quality to the eyes. The subtle detail was obscured, however, in the maelstrom of storm effects employed during principal photography.'

The sequence, with its heavy use of wind and rain, took its toll on the suit, especially on its finer details such as the paintjob and quills. Reardon recalled;

'Ed Verreaux was the one who came up with the idea of quills coming up from the top of the creature’s head and falling all the way down its back like an Indian headdress. I’m not really sure what the rationale was, except that they seemed to be an interesting alternative to hair. It certainly looked marvelous when the wind started to blow; and from a practical point of view, they proved to be quite useful. For one thing, they helped us conceal the zipper down the back, which is the usual bane of any monster costume. Also, we were able to take our actuating cables out the back of the head and lead them down through the forest of quills, which was good camouflage. In terms of construction, though, the quills were really tough to figure out'.

'The idea was that they had to look like great sheaves of wheat blowing and rattling together like porcupine quills. I came up with a lot of possible solutions — including using shafts of feathers — before I finally hit upon the idea of using eighth-inch nylon airhose, which was available from a local supplier. I ordered rolls and rolls of that stuff, and cut it into three-foot lengths, which then had to be hung out in the heat booth to loosen up some of the tight curl acquired from being in a roll.

An amusing footnote to the whole quill business is that I actually drafted my mother in to apply them — a hard job, which she not only figured out how to do, but also arduously completed herself. She’d start by taking an ice pick and sticking it into the costume. Then she’d put a couple drops of cyano acrylate — otherwise known as Super Jet adhesive — on the end of one of the pieces of tubing. Then she’d jam it into the hole that the icepick had made, pull the pick out, and — presto — the quill would stay there. I’d had nightmares trying to figure out how to keep these things stuck to the costume, because the foam in some places was only a quarter-inch thick — but those quills held on famously. We only lost maybe a third of them through molting.'

'I managed to get the whole costume spray-painted just a day or so before it was needed on the set,” said Reardon, “which was unfortunate, because the kind of paint you use for foam rubber — which is basically just rubber cement with universal colorant — is much better and more durable if you give it time to mature and cure. But with only four-and-a-half weeks from start to finish, we didn’t have that luxury. I had to go virtually right to the set with the costume. Unfortunately, this basic problem was compounded by another. From our initial discussions, we had not figured on having a lot of direct water on the costume. Instead, the idea was to have the creature surrounded by an envelope of dry atmosphere, with the rain being blown to the camera side of him or beyond him.

But once George saw a test, and he saw the thing dripping wet, he said, ‘Well, we’ve got to do it.’ From that point on, it was firehoses and Ritter fans just soaking this suit every time you saw it. And, of course, the costume immediately took on water, just like a bath sponge. In fact, it was absolutely saturated with cold water the entire time Larry Cedar had to work in it. At any rate, the skin color originally had some rather beautiful undertones of blue and pink, and there was also some superficial detailing, including a network of little veins and things. But once the gremlin began taking a bath in that incessant rain, the paint began to go south on me. Certain colors began to leach through. Blues that had been used for some of the shadowing would suddenly come up through the paint film almost like dye.'

'It was awful — absolutely ghastly what was happening to that suit. But George kept his calm completely, and said not to be concerned about it. Fortunately, the scenes where the gremlin finally grapples with John were scheduled first, so the costume would look its best, and by the time the suit was starting to look really leprous, George had finished all but one of the closeups.” Even in its deteriorated state, the costume proved perfectly adequate for the remaining long shots.

The missing closeup, however, was a critical one — a jarring cut to the creature staring in through the window as Valentine draws back the shield. “That was supposed to be our very first shot,” said Reardon, “but I couldn’t get the suit ready in time. As it turned out, it became the last shot we did with the costume. I was very lucky that the gremlin was still in good enough shape to tolerate a closeup like that. Fortunately, George was a great K-Y lubricant fan, and he smeared great globby handfuls of it on the mask for any of the closeups — which relieved any minor chafing that may have been on the mask'.

Cedar in the suit was was suspended from an overhead wire rig. Jim Spencer gave the more practical and safety reasons; 'He was tethered because that wing moved rather violently, especially when he was on the engine pod throwing things in there with the explosions and whatnot. Even then, with all the water and oil, it was pretty slippery up there. So we had mattresses below, all covered in black, just in case he fell.'

Reardon's makeup duties for Miller's episode were still not over, as one shot would require actor John Lithgow's eyes to literally pop out of his skull, evoking a similar effect at the finale of Miller's earlier Mad Max. Reardon recalled how the effect was achieved;

'George uses things in an interesting, fragmented way, knowing that the human brain has the capacity to absorb things in a very short amount of time. When John Lithgow first sees the creature at the window, George wanted his eyes to bulge out of his head. And I said, ‘What exactly do you mean, George?’ He replied: ‘I want his eyes to pop right out of his head — I’ll only use about six frames of it. Can you do that for me?’ Apparently, he’d done something similar in Mad Max — for a shot of a guy who’s about to impact violently with a vehicle. So we tried it. There wasn’t time to do it properly using a false head, so instead I built an appliance that went over John’s eyes, with rubber eyelids and eyeballs, and false eyebrows. Actually, it was pretty unconvincing, if scrutinized, because it had to be made from his face to cover his face, unavoidably building it out so that it looked like he had Down’s Syndrome. But it was good enough for six frames'.

'Then we shot about fourteen different takes, pumping the eyes up like balloons, using tubes that ran back and over his ears and through his tousled hair to a couple of large enema syringes. It was hilarious, really. And George didn’t just want them to come out half an inch — they had to come out two and three inches! On several takes, the eyes got as big as baseballs! People were dying of laughter on the set, and pretty soon it was all John could do to keep a straight face as he was screaming in terror. But George’s intention was to just take a snippet of that, and cut it briefly in between the quick shots of the creature in the window, which is what he did — although when I first saw the film, even I couldn’t tell for sure.'

Reardon's time doing the 'Nightmare' segment was hectic, with him eventually handling everything himself thanks to McCracken bowing out; 'The entire film really was done at a white-hot clip and it came about that they needed various elements of the gremlin before they were ready. I had to put them off for as much as a week; at that point we went into overages which Mike McCracken felt would place too great a burden on me financially, because he was on my payroll; Warner Brothers had only had financial obligations to me. Though I felt, at the time, ready to pay any amount of money to keep Mike on, Mike wanted to spare me that, and left at that point, so that the last two-and-a-half weeks I tackled by myself, acually with my mom and dad pitching in a little bit'

Despite the hectic schedule, Reardon's recollections of Miller on the set were positive; ''When we were sculpting the creature, he came by one Saturday and sat with me for three or four hours, taking a great interest in what I was doing. He even, with a great show of consideration, asked whether I'd mind if he could pinch the clay a bit, and make a few changes. I didn't mind at all, and his changes were often quite helpful.'

'In the week before the gremlin 'came up to bat', when he was shooting all the interiors, he used to make the time to visit me at my shop each evening, around 9 or 10 at night, smoking his pipe with a friendly hello; once, when I was working with my folks, he brought a quart of ice cream. And no matter what the problems were, or how near the deadline might be, he never showed anything less than complete confidence in me. That kind of interest and concern is really very rare, and greatly appreciated.'

The gremlin's scenes end with it flying away into the clouds; this was achieved as a stopmotion animated sequence, with the miniature gremlin constructed and animated by David W. Allen and Dennis Gordon. Allen explained;

'The puppet was about six inches tall, constructed of the standard foam rubber material over an armature built for me back in the early 70s by Jon Berg. We worked from a number of photos of the full-size suit, with Dennis basically blocking the puppet in and I finishing it. Actually, it was a pretty good match. It even had about three hundred little silver-painted wires that Dennis pushed into it for quills, as well as small flying squirrel-type wings under each arm.'

David Allen's miniature gremlin 

 

Sources: 

• Fangoria #30 'Reardon at 20'000 Feet' by The Midnight Writer (October 1983)
• Cinefantastique Volume 14 No #1 (1983)
• Cinefex #14 'Shadows and Substance' by Don Shay and Paul Sammon

Read more on the rest of The Twilight Zone movie's special effects on the 'Part 3' article, covering Rob Bottin's work on Joe Dante's 'It's A Good Life' segment.