Before bringing to life The Terminator, The Predator, JURASSIC PARK’s ever-hungry T-Rex, and the gut-busting Xenomorph’s of ALIENS, Stan Winston was a lone man with a dream: To Build a Better Monster.
By Matt Winston
Winston Studio provided the Character FX for the films, THE HAND, DEAD AND BURIED, and the robot romantic comedy HEARTBEEPS. For his groundbreaking prosthetic and animatronic work on the latter, he became one of the first two nominees (alongside Rick Baker) for the newly created Academy Award for Best Makeup. To transform deranged comedian Andy Kaufman and Broadway star Bernadette Peters into lovestruck robots, he had pioneered a technique for creating a translucent, metallic skin on his actors by applying gelatin prosthetics that had been infused with metallic paints during the mixing process. The gelatin was a nightmare for he and his artists to maintain on set (it had a tendency to melt under the stage lights), but it
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981 was a watershed year for my father, Stan Winston. His recently-expanded Stan
looked great on film, and the Oscar nomination was a validation of his inventive approach to the art of character creation. Though he didn’t win the Academy Award that year, the recognition that came from being nominated served to cement my dad’s reputation in the industry as a top-notch FX artist—someone who was not only adept at prosthetic makeup, but who was also a pioneer who embraced technologies that allowed him to push character creation further than was possible with traditional methods alone. At the same time, he was beginning to take on what would become his future role as the industry’s most vocal advocate. He’d begun to compare the work of top Creature FX artists to the work of the Renaissance masters. In 1981, thanks in part to dad’s efforts, makeup
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FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND • SEP/OCT 2011
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