Jim Henson with John Landis and Rick Baker on the set of The Muppet Movie
Rick Baker is a special effects artist, particularly known for prosthetic makeups, creature suits, and animatronics in horror, fantasy, and other genre films. Starting as an assistant to famed Hollywood makeup artist Dick Smith on The Exorcist, Baker went on to create and portray the title ape in the 1976 King Kong, contributed to the cantina denizens in Star Wars, and won the first Academy Award for Best Makeup, for An American Werewolf in London. He created or designed the various simians in Gorillas in the Mist and the 2001 Planet of the Apes, the title character in Harry and the Hendersons, the special prosthetic makeup for goon Lothar in The Rocketeer, the aliens (prosthetic and animatronic) in Men in Black and its first two sequels, and the title characters in How the Grinch Stole Christmas and The Wolfman.
While they never directly collaborated, their similar film work meant Baker occasionally crossed paths with Jim Henson (and later with the Creature Shop, with crew and performers migrating between the two shops). Indirectly, Fozzie Bear's ear mechanism on The Muppet Show influenced An American Werewolf in London (which includes a clip from the series shortly before Baker designed monsters enter in a dream sequence). Dick Smith's correspondence with Henson in 1985 reveals that "I told Rick Baker about the use of syringes as pistons to work Fozzy's (sic) ears. That led Rick to experiment with syringes. Some of the man-to-wolf puppets have employed them but, more important, they inspired a new effect concept."[1]
On April 06, 1983, French director Jean-Jacques Annaud approached Rick Baker to create artificial ursines for his film The Bear, to be interspersed with actual bears. At the time, Baker was shooting Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes, having created the primates, and declined the offer pleading exhaustion. Three years later, after completing his film In the Name of the Rose in the interim, Annaud chose Jim Henson and his animatronics unit to handle the bears, making arrangements with the London Creature Shop on December 7, 1986 and meeting Jim Henson himself on February 23, 1987.[2]
Baker and Henson's Creature Shop continued to influence each other in the 1990s. John Stephenson recalled that "Rick Baker had used pre-recorded lip-synch for the creatures in Gremlins II. I thought it was great and encouraged Dave to start working on a pre-recorded performance system of our own,"[3] which ended up being used in Babe.
Sources[]
- ↑ 7/17/1973 – ‘Meet Dick Smith – lunch with girls.’. Jim Henson's Red Book. July 17, 2012.
- ↑ Benabent-Loiseau, Josee. The Odyssey of The Bear: The Making of the Film by Jean-Jacques Annaud. Newmarket Press: 1988, pp. 29, 38, 63
- ↑ No Strings Attached. p. 110