looking kind of Escher-esque set.” Quinlan shares the sentiment. “The set was very rich and had a lot of depth. It felt very cartoonish. The colors were louder, the furniture was wonky. It was all a bit weird.” Dante explains the concept. “The
set was built in force perspective, so when people came from the kitchen they had to duck under the door and they would get smaller as they came toward the camera. Because it was essentially a live action cartoon, we decided to go for extreme lighting and extreme colors and shooting at different frame rates. The upstairs set was in black and white. It was all our attempt to be weird.” Adding an element of the grotesque to the cartoonish environment was special make-up effects maestro Rob (THE THING) Bottin, whose crew went to creative lengths to bring all the horrifying creatures in Anthony’s imagination to life. Remembers Dante, “I went to Rob Bottin because he had done THE HOWLING for me and specialized in crazy stuff. You shoot out the actors and then go to a warehouse somewhere and stay there for a week shooting nothing but monster props and transformation stuff.” Working with creatures to be added in post-production was something new to veteran Quinlan. She relates, “Joe would sit there with a screen on a wire rod, and he would say, ‘Ok, now the monster goes over
house, and he pulls a rabbit out of a hat. I remember Joe saying, ‘Okay, he’s gonna pull this thing out and it’s about yay big,’ he’s sort of describing, ‘and everyone is scared to death except you. You think it’s the funniest thing you’ve ever seen.’” While the main family worked together as an ensemble, there was one member, revealed upstairs in a room by herself, that enjoys only brief screen time but is perhaps the most memorable for audiences. Surprisingly, the role of Sarah, the mouthless girl watching an endless loop of cartoons in the darkened room, was played by ex-Runaways singer Cherie Currie. “As a kid in the sixties we lived
for this stuff,” shares the singer of her love for TWILIGHT ZONE. Currie jumped at the chance to join the cast. “I guess Joe Dante liked my eyes and asked if I’d be interested in doing it. It was a no-brainer.” While most of Bottin’s
Joe Dante and Jeremy Licht
here, and now the monster goes up here…’ as I am acting, and I thought, ‘Really? That’s what I have to react to?’ You’re kind of acting in a vacuum, and that was my first time encountering that.” Licht recalls the process. “There’s a
part where my character forces uncle Walt to do a magic show to keep Helen in the
efforts were in creature and mechanical effects, it was Currie that got to experience working with the effects pioneer first-hand. “Rob did a
full-face mold and built it from there. I got to spend a day with him at his home studio, where he created all those monstrous works of art, and it was unbelievable.” While the final version of “It’s A Good
Life” in TWILIGHT ZONE: THE MOVIE seems to differ from the bleak conclusion
TWILIGHT ZONE RADIO by Justin Beahm I
was always envious of people like Orson Welles and John Houseman, who were around in the 30s and 40s and created these incredible radio shows,” shares Carl Amari, producer
of the TWILIGHT ZONE RADIO DRAMAS. “I always felt like I could do it. Maybe not as good as them, but I wanted to try.” Out of that admiration was born the most ambitious homage to Rod Serling’s iconic television series ever undertaken: adapting every episode of the original series to radio. But that wasn’t always Amari’s plan… Amari, who missed the early radio drama boom with his tardy 1963 birth, took his love for
audio theatrics to rare lengths in the late 70s with the creation of Radio Spirits--at that time, the world’s largest licenser of classic radio shows. By 1998, repackaging potential tapped, he decided to try his hand at creating his own program. The choice of subject matter was easy. “I always loved THE TWILIGHT ZONE and felt it would lend itself perfectly to radio,” he says. “It’s so imaginative and runs the gamut from
70 FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND • JAN/FEB 2012
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