| [Interview with Tom McLaughlin, part I of II]
His book Silicone Arts is considered by many to be the bible for working with these materials. If you don't know Tom yourself, I can tell you that he is one of the nicest, most giving people that I have ever met. If you ever have the pleasure of speaking with him, you will leave the conversation not only wiser, but you will have gained a life long friend. This interview was conducted during a recent trip to LA at his home. aRvin:I
guess I’d like to start off talking about your recent projects. I
know You were in Tiajuana Tom: Oh,
that ate up every ounce of my strength, and time... yes I set up... It
had nothing to do with silicone. Except for some of our proofs, and masters.
But we ran a lot of foamed latex. Setting up a factory there that ordinarily
does slip cast work to do foam as well. The molds were very new to them
because they were used to a big hole on their molds to fill with latex...
these were closed. Two piece molds, and they had to learn how to duplicate
them, I think we peaked at three mold sets for each a day. A front and
a back for each. I think we could have pushed ourselves
to 5 or 6, but I didn’t have a whip <laughs> aRvin So
what was the project for? Tom: It
was for Rubies Costumes. They are the biggest maker of Halloween gear
in the world, and they are in the process of designing a range now for
2002 release, so I think things will be at the spring shows. aRvin: Oh
cool. Has there been anything else in the works recently for you? Tom: I’m
working on the new Silicone Arts book, and the film world has kinda dried
up. I don’t know what to think about that anymore. I’m putting
my feelers out and diversifying. I’m doing some work with some private
clients, which I’m having a great time with, I’m doing some
prototypes for people who invent things. Making things for them in rubber,
so they can go and drum some cash up to have it made as a commercial thing.
aRvin: Would
you like to talk a bit about the new edition of the book? Tom: I can
if you want. There’s going to be photographs... lots and lots of
photographs. And more information on how to use silicone as a casting
medium, as well as molds. I’m going to go into molds and see how
many different variations there are, because every shop makes their molds
in their own way... aRvin: When
can we look forward to the release of the book? Tom: Well,
we’re aiming for the spring of 2002, we hope, we hope we hope <smiles> aRvin: and
that's going to coincide with a large silicone extravaganza... Tom: We’re
going to do another silicone extravaganza, and see if we can top the last
ones that we gave... yeah. We’re going to do it on the east coast.
There are some people that live closer to the east coast that wouldn’t
come out to California for the things we had at UCLA. So that will be
fun. aRvin: So
taking a bit of a step back, what were some of the early influences that
got you into the industry Tom: Oh...the
Universal Monsters, of course. I found out at an early age through a book
or magazine (it might have been Look or Time Magazine) that they made
the monster’s faces out of rubber. Liquid latex. And that set me
going. I had to track this stuff down. But if I knew about silicone when
I was 9 years old I wouldn’t have gone near latex. aRvin: <laughs> Tom: I wouldn’t
have...my goodness I found out over the years that you can push the materials
with plasticizers and vary the rate of cure, and polymerization and make
rubber or plastic softer or harder then it was meant to be or provided
to you as. You can only push latex so far before it either cracks, or
falls to pieces on the firm end, or turns to gunky gluey glop at the soft
end. But with silicone you have so many more consistencies that you can
pull from the one polymer. Its like the difference between the range of
leathers. Soft medium and hard leathers, and then going up from variable
gels in silicone all the way up to hard soles of your shoe kind of rubber.
aRvin: What
were some of the earliest projects you worked on? Tom: lets
see.. I entered in this whole thing from a perspective as a puppet maker.
I was into makeup, but never considered it a profession that I wanted
to go after. I liked being involved in more of a production because a
puppet production is usually smaller then a full scale film. So you can
do a lot more. You can do lights, and sound as well as the make up and
stuff. I did props and stuff for films at the out set. There is this place
on the east coast..Robert Joyce. He’s out here now. Oh he made some
wonderful props for a pirate film that was being shot out in the Caribbean.
We used a lot of polyurethane's and stuff...Oh! At Robert’s ship
I helped to make a pair of K.I.S.S boots for their 76 tour. Out of polyurethane.
They kept falling apart, but that wasn’t my problem. I wasn’t
out on tour with them. But at this place we made all of the props for
the pirate film. Bones, and coins and... oh you name it! The works. All
period stuff. We finished the work, and we went our own ways. In a week
or two’s time we had a call back to see if we could make a whole
other set of props in less then a weeks time to send out on location.
It seems that the location folks were from New York and presumed that
the seasons of the year are the same al around the planet... and they
weren’t. It was monsoon season where they were shooting and the entire
set, and all of the props and everything they brought out there got washed
out to sea. So we got called in to make a whole other set of props in
a weeks time. <Both
Megan and I laugh quite a bit about this> aRvin: Wow.
That's a fun little production schedule you had there. Tom: Yes.
You have to plan a head and make a few phone calls. aRvin: after
your stint with Robert Joyce what did you do? Tom: Oh,
Lemme see. There is a story if you really want to hear it. I used to do
puppet shows myself and had a troupe of 7 or 8 of us, and over a 3 year
period we did close to 300 shows. We linked up with the county parks,
and did about 75 shows each summer in a little sweat box. It was a trailer
with a hole cut in the side. And boy did I lose weight then! And then
I worked with Bill Baird in Greenwich Village on Barrow Street. He had
a marionette theater in his basement, and storage room. It was 5 floors
high. He lived on the fourth floor, and the top floor was the work shop.
He was an eccentric. A lover of the filthy limerick. <Megan
and I chuckle again a bit> Tom: He
started out in vaudeville, went to live television. He invented the auto
prompt. He called it the scriptanola. It was a long roll of paper with
all the lines for the play rolling in front of your eyes. Hanging over
a bar doing a marionette with both hands, who’s going to hold your
script? <more
chuckling> aRvin: Yeah,
that’s true. Tom: Yeah,
he taught me all sorts of fun things. He was the first person to use latex
and latex foam for a puppet in films and TV. It was such a hush hush thing
at that time. He’d make molds and send the molds out to be filled
with foam latex, and he didn’t really have a look at how the process
went but he’d been doing lots of slip cast work before that. That’s
where I got a really good shot of trying some foam out. Then I moved on
to the Muppets! They were doing the muppet show and needed to duplicate
Miss Piggy because she was a star and they only lasted about a year before
they’re worn out. And they found that no matter how hard they tried
they couldn’t carve a piece of poly foam to look the same twice by
hand (which is how they had been making them until then). There’s
a lot of the characters that they had were fabricated from sheet foam
and patterned and glued and tucked and trimmed and they make a shape,
but Miss Piggy is a complex shape that was actually carved by hand out
of a piece of poly foam. aRvin: I
thought she was actually a sculpted... Tom: No,
the very first ones were carved by hand and then she became a minor icon
in her own right. She had to be a few places at the same time in New York
and London, being photographed for calendars in Paris so they had to have
a few of her that looked exactly the same so they started to mold and
cast them in foam and foam latex and that’s where I first worked
with Dick Smith. I’d been on the phone to Dick Smith prior to that,
and I think that’s the first time I actually met the man. He was
called in to help us to help us get off the ground with the foam. He taught
us all of the rules that were set up here out in California for running
prosthetic foam. And as soon as he was out the door we went and had to
break all the rules, because we weren’t making foam appliances, we
were doing pigs. I think the very first Miss Piggy foam cast was a solid
piece of foam latex because we didn’t make a core for it. Somebody
snipped the inside of it out over the course of a week to find out that
this wasn’t the way to go.
aRvin: wow
tom:<laughs>
No
one had done that before; we hadn’t a clue! aRvin: right.
So how much foam would that have taken? Tom: about
2 quarts, and it shrunk like hell. The thicker your piece of foam, the
more it’s going to shrink. If it’s an even thickness all the
way around it’ll shrink at an even rate. It’s the same thing
with dried prunes and pears and apples. aRvin: Back
then in your early days of foam, what kind of volumes were you getting
with that? Tom: We
were using the Schram stuff which is was what Charlie passed on before
he himself passed on. We couldn’t get more than a 5 volume rise,
I don’t think. Certainly no more than 6, but averaged a 4. Hadn’t
a clue we could push it to a 7,8,9, or 10 at that point, it would take
another few years of running foam to find those things out. Had some old
timers on the phone, though who wore fishing boots to work. aRvin: Fishing
boots. Tom: Fishing
boots! They were making foam latex filling up huge mattress sized molds.
If the stuff didn’t set up, they’d have to get in there and
scoop it all out and clean the mold out. It was more an art than a science.
They hadn’t a clue; if it would work one week, the following week
it wouldn’t. aRvin: so
how long did you end up working with the Hensons? Tom: On
and off I’ve been involved with them for 17 years. It was a good
long stretch at the start - it might’ve been 6 or 7 to 8 years and
the Dark Crystal itself involved me for a good 4 years with them. From
the concept and the early r and d all the way through to moving to England
to actually build the film. aRvin: Do
you have any particular fun stories from that period? Tom: Jim
was having some of his people go through the patent office and see what
had been done and patented before. He paid for some blue prints of some
pretty bizarre and strange and weird devices that people thought were
worth investing all this money into patenting it. One of them was no more
than a scheme where you tied a string around your neck and around each
arm and leg and dangled them from on high to move a puppet down below,
and that was patented. They took that person’s money! That’s
on file. I don’t know what the number is... <chuckling
from all> Tom: It
was bizarre stuff. There was a good ole team of 10 or 12 of us that started
out on the east coast with Brian Froud living there working with the core
team, the r and d team, and was very fond of going through the trash,
Brian was. Outside of seafood places, for all the seashells and bits and
pieces and crusty animal bones. He’d bring them back to the shop
and clean them with bleach and work them into his designs. We were looking
for a very organic look and feel. aRvin: After
the Dark Crystal, didn’t you do work on some of the Star Wars films? Tom: Yes,
right after the Dark Crystal, they overlapped at one point, it was just
a point where I had two or three films that were booked ahead of each
other, and I had to pull out of one and slide into the other. I did the
last two of the first three. [Star Wars films] Which were in the middle
of Star Wars, which still doesn’t make sense. And you were talking
to Steve [Prouty] before, about the Star Wars films..do you know how hard
it was not to tell anybody that Darth Vader was Luke Skywalker’s
father? I didn’t even tell my mother! <laughter
ensues> Tom: My
girlfriend didn’t even know! aRvin: Wait..he’s
his what??? Tom: <laughter>
Darth who? aRvin: So
what kinds of stuff did you do on those films? Tom: All
of the foam pieces made in the UK . there are some things like the pig
guards and admiral Akbar that were made in California, but the rest of
the stuff we did there. All the Jabba the hutt foam, bib fortuna, the
guy with the tentacles around the side of his neck. That was Mike Carter
I think it was. He was the guy who got eaten on the stairs, er the escalator
in American Werewolf in London. He did the sales pitch to the Star Wars
guys “Hey I have extensive experience with prosthetics.” Little
did he know that he was going to be made up from head to toe in foam.
The only thing you saw that was his was the tip of his nose and his lips.
Everything else was foam, and he was miserable. And contact lenses. aRvin: Were
you running all the foam on Empire Strikes Back? Tom: Yes!
I was kind of let down with what they’d done with the shop, what
they’d done with the Darth Vader reveal. He was a tired old man,
it was such a build up. The sheer villainy of the character you kind of
expected something with bugs and things crawling out and tentacles, but
it worked. From what I remember it was done very quick like it was an
afterthought because I don’t think Stuart Freeborn knew it was coming
till the very last minute. aRvin: I
can imagine the makeup being much more extensive. Tom: So
we had days to pull that together. So much foam and working so late...
TO BE CONTINUED! |
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