"What happened to you?"
I got into the movie biz on this film, and I wasn't even trying. I was only trying to sue somebody. (The first and only time I've ever done it, but that's another story.)
Anyway, I had to have papers served on the guy, and I found out he was working in the creature shop of this new remake of The Blob. So I called up the Blob Shop, and asked for their address.
"Why?" I was asked.
Figuring "I'm planning to sue one of your employees" would be a bad answer, I improvised and said I wanted to send a resume. I was put on hold.
A moment later I was talking to Lyle Conway, the man in charge of the Blob FX. I recognized the name right away - Conway had worked for the Muppets, and was nominated for an Oscar for his work on Little Shop of Horrors. He was a hero of mine.
So I stuttered my way through my lie about sending a resume, and long
story short, I did send a resume and got a job at the Blob shop.
(Meanwhile, the guy I was suing quit working there just before I started
- I never saw him at all.) And that's how Dad got into the movie biz,
kids.
On
my first official day of work they were shooting the scene when the Blob
reaches out of a kitchen sink, grabs a guy's head, and pulls him down
the drain. I was told to go behind the set where a hole had been cut
through the wall. I jammed myself halfway through this hole and grabbed
one end of this slimy tentacle thing, the other end of which was glued
to a stuntman's face.
We did a couple of takes of the stuntman doing a high-dive into the kitchen sink. There was a prop guy with a cup of water under the sink with me - his job was to throw the water into the air to simulate the splash of the man going into the sink. Most of the time he threw the cup of water in my face instead.
So I'm laying under a sink in a puddle of water and sawdust, jiggling a slimy rubber thing and getting cups of water thrown in my face, and thinking about how all my years of puppetry training were really paying off, when I hear a female voice say -
"Awww, it's just a GUY!"
And I turn to see Candy Clark, an actress I recognized from American Graffiti and other films, looking down at me. Apparently she had expected to see some kind of fascinating mechanical device but to her disappointment it was just a damp sawdusty guy with slime on his hands.
Which turned out to be my life for the next three months. I eventually got promoted to Head Puppeteer and had an entire crew working for me, but I still got slimed every day.
The Blob was mostly made of Methacyl, a food thickener. Methacyl is slippery as hell - people were always falling down on the Blob set - and it dries into something resembling Elmer's glue. I used to stop at a local market after work to get a soda for the drive home, and every time I went in there I was covered in flaking layers of drying Blob that puckered my skin in strange ways.
After several months of this, the girl behind the counter couldn't take it any more. She finally blurted out -
"What happened to you?"
I told her I was in showbiz. Ah, the glitter, the glamour.
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