The Guardian
"Menace the Baby!"
Sometimes you don't get the luxury of being part of the planning of an effect - you just show up the day of the shoot and hope everything works because if it doesn't, you're the one who looks bad.
And sometimes it all becomes kind of ridiculous and you commemorate the whole thing with a T-shirt. At least that's how it went on The Guardian.
The Guardian was directed by William Friedkin, who did The Exorcist and The French Connection and several other fine flicks. Guardian was about a haunted tree and an evil nanny who kidnaps babies. There were also some wolves running around which were the "guardians" of the baby-stealing nanny and the haunted tree. (Maybe you saw the film - if so, then you know as much as I do.)
Anyway, at one point the main character dreams a tree has exploded up through his living room floor, and at the base of this tree is the guy's newborn baby son, and hiding in the tree is a nasty wolf with bad plans for the baby. This is where I come in.
I'd already worked for Steve Johnson's XFX company on several other projects, and Steve asked me to come in to puppeteer the wolf he'd built for this scene. So with very little idea of what I was going to be doing, I showed up on the set one morning, had some coffee, and promptly descended into the special kind of hell only puppeteers can experience.
On
the living room set was a big fake hollow tree. The idea was that I and
the other puppeteers would hide behind the tree and operate this wolf
puppet through the hole in the base. The wolf puppet was actually half a
wolf, from the head down to where the hind legs would start. It was made
mostly of foam rubber and fiberglass and had a lot of mechanical gizmos
in its head to make the eyes blink and the jaws move and so on. I was
supposed to stick my arm all the way through the puppet and operate the
head and the jaws.
The
first thing I found out was that this was one heavy wolf puppet. The
next thing I discovered was that I wouldn't be able to watch what I was
doing directly, but had to look instead at a video monitor hidden behind
the tree with me. (If you've ever had to do this, one of the things
you'll notice is that it's very hard to judge distance and depth
correctly. Also, watching yourself on TV is the opposite of watching
yourself in a mirror - when you move left, your image moves right.)
Then they brought in our co-star - a ten-week-old baby. They put the baby at the base of the tree, and we started shooting. William Friedkin and Steve Johnson stood by the camera and called out directions ("Blink the eyes!" Turn the head to the side!") as the camera rolled.
So
- I'm holding several pounds of fiberglass and metal and teeth at arm's
length, trying to make it act wolflike toward an infant I can't see,
while watching myself on TV in reverse. Both Friedkin and Johnson are
yelling directions while the guy operating the front legs gives me
feedback about how close I am to squashing the infant. (The leg guy can
peek through the tree without being seen.) My arm starts to tremble from
the weight. My fingers go numb as the blood drains from my hand. I'm
starting to worry that I'm going to drop the whole rig on the infant -
and at that moment Steve Johnson says, helpfully, "Menace the baby!"
We'd
brought the XFX camcorder to record the experience and if you study the
tape you'll see the wolf give a noticeable shudder when those words are
heard. That's me laughing.
I guess it just struck me as a strange thing to say. Here's this naked infant, surrounded by strangers, with a snarling, drooling wolf hanging over it being held by a guy who's lost all the feeling in his fingers - how much more menaced can this particular baby get?
Long story short, we got the shot (which was promptly cut down to almost nothing in the final film). In the days that followed I decided "Menace the Baby!" was the single strangest piece of direction I'd ever received. So I had it immortalized in a T-shirt which I gave to Steve and all the other puppeteers. I had a few left over which I kept for myself - there's probably a 30% chance I'm wearing one right now. In that way, The Guardian will always be with me.
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A final note - the wolf puppet made another appearance in the film when Brad Hall gets his throat ripped out. It was going to be a bloody scene, so we couldn't rehearse it. I conferred with Brad before the take - we decided it would be better to go for broke in hopes of getting it in one take. So they rolled the cameras and I basically punched Brad Hall in the throat with a wolf puppet. Brad screamed, blood flew. Friedkin said "Beautiful! Print!". It may be my best work. |
Baby Menaces Wolf |
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the Baby" T-shirt?
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