OU MAY NOT KNOW STAN WINSTON BY NAME, BUT YOU UNDOUBTEDLY
KNOW HIS FAMOUS CREATIONS. Among them: the Terminator, Predator, Pumpkinhead, the dinosaurs
of Jurassic Park, the Universal-inspired ghouls of The Monster Squad and the Alien Queen. Needless to say, when the special effects legend passed away in June 2008 from a form of cancer called multiple myeloma, at the age of 62, cinema lost one of its most creative imaginations. This year marks the 40th anniversary of Stan Winston Studio – now entrusted
to four of Winston’s colleagues and rebranded Legacy Effects – while his family continues to honour his life and body of work with the recently founded Stan Win- ston School of Character Arts (RM#112), a subscription-based online educational program dedicated to teaching the hybrid of practical and digital effects techniques that Winston believed were quintessential to the evolu- tion of character creation in movies. To fully appreciate the extraordinary extent of Win-
ston’s influence on the film industry, however, one must flashback to when a young Stanley Winston – born April 7, 1946 – was growing up in Arlington, Virginia, com- pletely enamoured with the idea of becoming an actor. “Dad learned the skill of puppetry and performance
from being a class clown and a closet performer from a very young age,” reveals Winston’s son Matt, an actor
From Aliens To Apes: (inset) Stan Winston (left) tests monkey makeup on himself and son Matt, and (above) Winston and his team tinker with the Alien Queen.
best known for his roles on TV’s Six Feet Under and Star Trek: Enterprise. “He dreamed of being the next Lon Chaney. He was always doing puppet shows as a kid and filming Super 8 monster movies.” Following his dreams, Winston eventually enrolled at the University of Virginia
and joined its theatre troop before doing what many aspiring actors consider a rite of passage: he moved to Hollywood, in 1968. When his acting career failed to take off, however, he scored a three-year apprenticeship as a makeup artist at Walt Disney Studios, after which he and his wife, Karen, welcomed Matt into the world. Winston then founded Stan Winston Studio, in 1972. “My earliest memories were of joining him on set and seeing this magical world
where he would transform actors into creatures and characters,” Matt recalls, likening his dad to “Santa Claus mixed with Willy Wonka,” with some dinosaurs thrown in for good measure. “What made Dad successful was that he was the biggest fan boy in the world. We saw all the classic monster movies. I remember seeing the original Bela Lugosi Dracula, Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein, The Crea- ture from the Black Lagoon, The Invisible Man and everything else. Dad never sheltered me from horror movies; in fact, quite the opposite. I think his greatest pleasure in life was to terrify me and my sister. … He loved to take me to the shop and show me the latest decapitation he was working on. I never had an issue with horror because of that. It was just a part of growing up.” Beginning with the TV movie Gargoyles, Stan Winston
Studio quickly became known as the premiere practical effects house in the film industry. As Winston’s personal