by Marc Shapiro

A script sits on a coffee table in the living room of Greg Can-'s North Hollywood home. Like most of the scripts that end up on the makeup man's doorstep these days, this one is a fantasy tale sorely in need of the makeup FX images that Cannom can supply. It is also a script, he says, that has a snowball's chance in hell of getting his help. "It is a real low-budget film," Cannom notes of the offending missive, "and right now I am kind of burnt out on low-budget films. It has gotten to the point where I can tell, instinctively, if a film falls within a certain budget range, that doing it would be letting myself in for a lot of aggravation, which I can do without at this point." Cannom is by no means irritated during this early morning conversation. In fact, considering that he has recently completed work on a trio of occasionally trouble-plagued assignments—Vamp, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors and The Lost Boys—Cannom appears downright mellow when describing the rigors of what many would consider a tough run. "I don't have tough runs," he responds. "All films, regardless of budget, have problems.

I could tell many horrendous stories about some big budget films I have worked on. It's a fact of life." Cannom became involved in the fact of life called Nightmare 3 following the completion of principal photography on Lost Boys and what he describes as the "big mess" of Vamp. "The trouble with Vamp was that nobody on the production had ever worked with make up effects before," opines Cannom, who provided the movie's vampire teeth, finger extensions and other FX. "Director Richard Wenk was fine to work with. I felt sorry for him because he was going through so much crap due to time and budget limitations. And for some reason, the lighting people insisted on using lots of red and green lights, which played havoc with the impact of the makeup." However, the problems on Vamp made Cannom reluctant to jump in-to the fire again on Nightmare 3, despite the fact that a number of hands (Kevin Yagher and Mark Shostrom among them) were dividing up the sequel's many FX. "But I knew the director, Chuck Russell, from his work on Back to School, and I felt the potential was there for a real special effects tour de force. I knew it would be a fun project. After taking a look at the effects budget, though, I also knew I would have to find cheaper ways of doing my stuff." One Cannom contribution to Nightmare 3's mayhem was a set of slimy, three-foot long phallic tongues, something that the makeup man proudly claims "really grossed out Chuck." He also created the "rubber tendons" for the scene in which puppeteer Freddy tortures Phillip (Bradley Gregg) by causing his arteries and veins to whip out of his body. "The tricky part of that effect was trying to find a glue that would hold the tendons down on the kid's wrists (and in the channels built into false arm makeup) and not pull off when tension was applied." Cannom feels that his biggest feat in Nightmare 3 was the scene in which Jennifer Rubin's heroin-inflicted body swells as her veins enlarge. "Initially, I was going to make a fake body, layer it with lots of bladders and have the whole thing go up Scanners-style," he recalls. "But, because of budget and time limitations, we were forced to come up with a new trick. "We took this special kind of concentrated rubber and layered it out," continues Cannom. "Then we put bladders underneath it to fit over the actress' upper body. It fit like a suit and swelled up real nice when the bladders moved." But while Cannom is happy with the result of this effect, he found its initial execution left something to be desired. "Two weeks before the effect was due to be filmed, I asked the producer, “Are you sure you are going to be shooting the scène from this angle?” He guaranteed it.

The morning of the shoot, I asked everybody on the set if they were still going to be shooting from that angle. They said yes. So I went in and did the makeup. It was a difficult job that took six hours. "Everything was ready. I got on the set, and Chuck Russell came up to me and said, 'No, that's the wrong angle. It has to be shot from the other side.' I told him what I had been told. Chuck decided to shoot the scene the next week. I said, “Fine, but it's going to cost you more money”. Another disappointing aspect of that effect was that the scene's original climax, with the hapless victim's head exploding, misfired and was subsequently dropped. "We had made this gelatin head and put explosive squibs in its eyes. Then we put the finished head in storage and it just sat there until the day the effect was shot. Unfortunately, the squibs had gotten wet, and so when they were exploded, only the eyes blew out," Cannom laments.

The bumpy ride of Nightmare 3, however, was nowhere near as crazed as Cannom's introduction to the vampire fantasy The Lost Boys. Director Joel Schumacher and producers Harvey Bernhard and Richard Donner called him in midway through the movie's shooting schedule to shore up an unsatisfactory makeup design. "My initial reaction was that Lost Boys was going to be a total disaster," Cannom reveals frankly, "I could not believe that anybody would get halfway through making a movie about vampires and not have any set make up design." Cannom did a test make up that resulted in something a bit too cartoon-like but less horror-oriented than what his predecessor on the project had created. The fussy FX master was not totally happy with his first attempt, but Schumacher loved it and hired him on the spot. "On Vamp, I did more horrific, monster-based makeups. For Lost Boys I wanted subtle, realistic makeups. Joel's favorite word was 'streamlined.' After the first test, I went back and did a very subtle makeup on Kiefer Sutherland, and after Joel's approval, made it more angular and evil looking. The other vampire makeups were downplayed to highlight their leader. I also made sure that the contact lenses stood out more than the facial makeup, so that their eyes hit you."

For Lost Boys' final vampire slaughter, Cannom and his crew dispatched the teen bloodsuckers in a blaze of gory. Brooke McCarter's holy water bath and Billy Wirth's arrow through the heart and electrocution emerged as highlights. "We did a cast of Brooke screaming and had a special huge aluminum mold made," details Cannom of the first choice disintegration. "I then got a hundred, cheap styrofoam heads prepared, that Ve Neill painted. We made a special skull out of an epoxy, so that the corrosive acetone in the bathtub wouldn't melt it away. In the shot, Brooke comes out of the water and goes down again, then it cuts. Next, our stiff styrofoam head appears and melts down to reveal our moving mechanical skull. Matt Sweeney handled the special effects. "Matt also rigged the explosives on the stunt guy who takes over when Billy Wirth dies. The shot switches to a mechanical body that my crew operated, moving the mouth and twisting the body. The arms explode off and explosives shoot off the back. It then cuts to a close-up of our stiff polyfoam body that Matt packed with explosives. It was a huge explosion." The extended death of the vampire's "father" never made it into The Lost Boys.

"After the vampire leader gets staked," Cannom reveals of what audiences missed, "a transformation begins. There were three makeups, and it progresses from his current age to 3OO years old. He falls back into the fireplace and smokes from internally, oozes blood and eventually goes up in flames. They cut it for time." Assisting Cannom with his Lost Boys duties were Earl Ellis, Larry Odien, John Vulich, Keith Edmier, Brent Baker, Everett Burrell, Chris Goehe and Bul Foertsch. As usual, all the FX work had to be completed in a hurry. "Obviously, there was no pre-production time," Cannom re-counts. "And on top of that, they decided to give me the entire package, which included most of the special effects. There was only a few weeks to pull the whole thing together. It was quite a scramble. "Things got so tight that I had to make a quick trip to England to piek up special contact lenses because there was no time to wait for them to come through the mail. But the worst part of it all was that there really wasn't time to finish things off or to refine or redo makeups. Joel agreed, with some slight exceptions, to just about all the initial makeup tests, so that's what we went with."

But Cannom remains largely happy with the results of this wind sprint. His vampire makeup, sleek and good-looking, scary rather than horrible, works in large part due to Lost Boys' director of photography, Michael Chapman, whom Cannom credits with a great lighting job. Plus, all his FX performed up to par. "I basically did an about-face on The Lost Boys by the time I was finished with it," concedes Cannom. "I'm now convinced that most of it looks pretty spectacular."

 

Back to homepage

Back to the Lost Boys page