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Dick Smith - The Godfather of make-up
[Wed 27/08/2008 06:28:56]
By Rodney Appleyard
He has worked with some of Hollywood's greatest ever actors, such as Dustin Hoffman, Marlon Brando, Robert DeNiro and Peter Sellers, and he kick-started the special make-up effects industry with his early artistic creations in the 1940s.
Everybody who has ever been involved in the world of special make-up effects has Dick Smith to thank for putting make-up on the map.
Smith is also renowned for using revolutionary make-up methods to age some of Hollywood’s finest actors. For instance, in 1969, he used overlapping foam latex appliances to transform 32-year old Dustin Hoffman into a 121-year old Indian man, when his contemporaries thought this idea was crazy. His technique eventually became the norm.
In 1972, he used old-age stipple and a hair dryer to age Marlon Brando in The Godfather and he shared an Academy Award with Paul LeBlanc in 1984 for aging F.Murray Abraham in Amadeus.
But unlike himself, he did not find many make-up artists willing to share their knowledge when he first started. He joined at the time when there were only four or five artists working in New York and they were very protective about their tricks. However, he became the first staff make-up artist to be hired at NBC television.
Smith recalls how difficult it was back then. “As a rule, people tended to be secretive. There was not at all that much make-up work in New York – and Hollywood might as well have been on another planet. They weren’t eager to share anything; and the union did its best to discourage whatever inclination there might have been.”
It did not take long for Smith to start turning heads though. He received an Emmy Award for his work on Hal Holbrook during the production of Mark Twain, Tonight on NBC in 1967, which Smith still remembers as one of the best experiences of his professional life.
But he did not originally intend to work in make-up, as he recalls. “I used to envy kids at school who could draw cartoons. I didn’t have the artistic talent for that, but I had very good structural visualisation, so I could see 3-D images in my head. I was also a very good mathematician.
"I ended up studying Calculus at Yale University, but we had a terrible teacher, an idiot, so I only just managed to pass the exams, which put me off maths for life and then I opted for dentistry instead. During these studies, I stumbled across a book about stage make-up, and I have not looked back since.”
At the time, he was inspired by the make-up used in The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Jekyll and Hyde, so he used this book to transform himself into a monster for the purpose of scaring his colleagues.
“Initially they shrieked and hollered, but they soon wanted me to scare everybody else too. So we all raced down the dormitory corridors together in search of other victims. After that, I tried different classical make-ups every week so that I could frighten more people.
"I lived in a college called Branford, and I eventually became known as The Branford Terror in the University press. They never revealed my name, so I felt more like the Scarlet Pimpernel!!!.”
This obsession continued until he was offered a job at NBC, where he taught himself groundbreaking techniques that are still respected today. But his first make-up job on a feature film brought him face to face with Cassius Clay, before he became world champion boxer Muhammed Ali.
“During one boxing ring scene in the 1962 movie Requiem for a Heavyweight, I was in charge of the make-up for Anthony Quinn and Cassius Clay. It was filmed in the middle of winter in New York, so one of my jobs was to make their faces look sweaty.
"Well, Cassius was a clown even back then, and he used to make me chase him around the ring, while he was weaving and ducking trying to avoid me spraying his face. I kept missing him.”
Then in 1969, Smith’s work on Little Big Man established him as a major force in the world of make-up. “In the original book, Dustin’s character is 110, but the director Arthur Penn just said out of the blue one day: ‘Lets make him 121 instead’. I worked six weeks on the old age make-up, using photographic references for every wrinkle.”
Smith remembers that this was the first time contact lenses had been used in make-up, and they were the hard type too, so every time Dustin blinked, they fell out. “In the end, Dustin wouldn’t dare blink. This was such as shame, because I had invented foam rubber eye lids that actually blinked, but we didn’t get to use them because the contact lenses weren’t soft enough.”
Despite this disappointment, the aging make-up work he used changed habits in the industry. He was now on a roll and continued his revolutionary work during the filming of The Godfather, released in 1972.
“I created the first ever bleeding special effects in this movie by creating bladders that were hidden under a foam latex forehead, with a squib that detonated the bladder, allowing blood to pour through a pre-arranged hole in the middle of the forehead.
"I applied this to Sterling Hayden, the police captain who was shot in the head during this movie. It involved running wires through his hair, which were covered by the forehead make-up. Electricity was sent through the wires to set off a tiny charge that ignited a small cap, which punctured the bladder, freeing the blood to trickle through the hole. This was the first time special make-up effects had ever been done.”
By the time he started work on The Exorcist in1973, when he enlisted 20-year old Rick Baker to help him build Linda Blair’s head, he was regarded as the leader in special make-up effects. Despite almost having a nervous breakdown during the making of this movie, Smith still fondly remembers William Friedkin as his favourite director.
“He was a perfectionist. When we did the exorcism scene, he had the temperature at 0 degrees so that the breath of the actors in the room would show. However, it was so cold, ice kept forming on the contacts lenses of Linda Blair whenever I tried to put them in for each shot.
"I thought I’d broken them. It was so cold that snow started forming in the studio at one stage. Billy and I had a massive falling out over the make-up on an actor, but as soon as I presented him with a doctor’s note stating that I was over-worked, he let me have one day off a week and we became extremely good friends.”
Smith is very grateful for many rewarding experiences in make-up, but he also has countless amusing stories of when events went wrong.
“I remember working on what was meant to be my last special make-up effects job on a movie, starring Dennis Quaid in Everybody’s All-American, back in 1988. He was such a pain in the backside. It was my job to fatten up his face, which is harder than doing old-age make-up. This involved pushing both cheeks up to the eyes and creating a double chin,” says Smith.
“Dennis used to arrive at my trailer, flop into my make-up chair, and fall asleep because he was so drunk from the night before. I would yell in his ear, but that wouldn’t wake him. This infuriated me because I couldn’t get the glue on right and the make-up started to buckle and fold.
"One day, he blamed his drunkenness on his girlfriend. I said: ‘F*** your girlfriend’. That was it; he was ready to fight me now. So we stepped outside of the trailer, and I wasn’t afraid. I wanted to fight him. In the end, he took pity on me, because he could see that I was a frail 61 year old man, compared to him being fit and in his 30s.”
These days, Smith spends most of his time advising special make-up effects students around the world via correspondence through his course: The Dick Smith Advanced Professional Make-Up Course. There are currently 26 people in Australia who have signed up to it and he is a great admirer of the talent in this part of the world. He is looking forward to sharing more of his wisdom in the future to help the next generation of make-up artists become even better than him.
The special effects make-up industry is thankful to Dick Smith for the following inventions:
- He pioneered the use of foam latex in television
- Developed make-up shades for the 1st colour TV programme
- Developed old age stipple recipes which are now industry standard
- Used alginates instead of moulage for life casts
- Developed syrup based bloods now industry standard
- Developed bullet hits on the skin (in The Godfather and Taxi Driver)
- Developed folding eyelids/sculptured baldcaps and pre-painting (in Little Big Man) an EPOXY surfaced plaster moulds
- Developed bladder effects and URETHANE (in Altered States and The Exorcist)
- Developed Tricloroethlane swell effects (in The Exorcist and Spasm)
- Pioneered Facial Cloning (in Amadeus. This was a forehead wax transfer)
- Developed PAX Paint (in Tootsie) and combined it with stubble (in The Hunger)
- Responsible for the resurgence of Gelatine as a prosthetic material (in Everbody’s All American). Some of Dick’s most significant make-ups:
- Requiem for a Heavyweight, 1962 – He used appliances on Anthony Quinn’s cheekbones, nose, eyelids, frontal bones and ears, plus a dental plumper.
- Little Big Man, 1969 – Landmark movie for Smith, where he invents overlapping appliances and blinking eyelids – now an industry standard.
- The Godfather, 1971 – Smith applied two layers of old-age stipple, some painted shadows and spots, hair grey and dark tooth enamel to Marlon Brando, plus a denture device called “a plumper” to pad out his jowls.
- The Exorcist, 1973 – This movie included the famous demonic make-up on Linda Blair, as well as an incredible old age make-up on Max von Sydow – where he coined the phrase “Make-up Effects” when he mingled make-up and special effects for the first time.
- Taxi Driver, 1975 – Smith did some amazing bloody make-up effects involving bullet hits in skin. He also created DeNiro’s crew cut and bald head. He used a plastic cap and invented a way of blowing on chopped-up hair to look shaven.
- Altered States, 1978-79 - This was a make-up landmark requiring full-body foam latex suits. Smith had to figure out how to make and inject gallons of foam in huge 3-piece moulds. Smith also invented the famous ‘Bladder’ effect for this movie.
- Amadeus, 1983 – F. Murray Abraham played Salieri, the composer and rival of Mozart. He tells the story of when he is old and Smith had to age Abraham to eighty-ish. He considers this to be the best job he’s ever done, and he won an Oscar for it too.
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