Stan Winston was no longer just a makeup artist, he had become a leader of artists.
artists were no longer relegated to the ranks of faceless technicians in white lab coats. They were gaining recognition as artists, as personalities, and—as dad insisted people acknowledge—as the co- creators of the stars of the film. It wasn’t about “FX” anymore. It was about creating characters. And now the industry was finally getting it. But there was something much bigger going on with dad at the time, and it would set the stage for the iconic fantasy characters that would come to exemplify the work of Stan Winston Studio for the next thirty years. The transformation he was undergoing would quite literally lead to Terminators, Men, and Na’vi.
Predators, Aliens, Iron
In order to understand how he was changing in 1981, it’s important to understand where he’d come from. Stan Winston Studio was founded in 1972, nine years earlier, out of our tiny two-bedroom house in Encino, CA. It wasn’t a “Studio” at all.
It was an ambitious twenty-six
year-old makeup artist doing everything himself on his kitchen table. I’d come home from pre-school to find dad doing very, very strange things in our little homestead. While other dads were at the office, my dad was at home transforming himself into vampires, werewolves, and apemen. The “studio” quickly outgrew our
kitchen table and, in 1973, we moved to a bigger house that had a little room off the garage. Dad turned it into a makeup lab and the new Stan Winston Studio was born. Sure, he had more space, and he would occasionally
hire a teenager
from the neighborhood to come help him with creating heavier molds, but that was it. Stan Winston Studio was still a one- man band. Finally, at the end of the decade, dad’s dreams outgrew our garage, and he opened up what would become, overnight, the largest Creature FX shop in town—a place that had the square footage to finally live up to the name “Stan Winston Studio”. Here’s the crazy thing. Dad didn’t have the work to warrant opening such a
large facility. He wasn’t expanding out of necessity, he was expanding out of desire. It was still basically just him under that roof. At the beginning, dad would even ask friends to come by and look busy so that when a producer would come to interview him for a job it would seem like Stan Winston Studio was a successful business. But dad was becoming fearless. His philosophy had crystallized: take the leap of faith and bite off more than you can chew. It will force you to push yourself and make great things happen. That’s exactly what he was doing thirty
years ago. He was biting off more than he could chew, and it was paying off: Because he had taken the risk and built a big shop, he could finally hire a team, and leading a team, he could push the boundaries of Creature FX further than they’d ever been pushed before. In 1981, on THE HAND, DEAD AND BURIED, and HEARTBEEPS,
Stan Winston was no longer just a makeup artist, he had become a leader of artists. While everyone else was still working out of their garages, Stan Winston was building a company. Stan Winston Studio was finally a real STUDIO. From that point on, he would always say
that Stan Winston Studio was not about one man, but about what was possible when a team of dedicated craftsmen came together to work toward a common goal. That ethos, born in 1981, is what made Stan Winston Studio the most legendary Creature FX shop in film history, and what continues to keep Stan’s team at Legacy Effects at the forefront of the industry. My dad knew it back in 1981. And it’s still true in 2011... If you want to make movie
magic, it’s all about the team.
FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND • SEP/OCT 2011 47
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