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The Character Shop

 

At Rick Lazzarini's Workshop, Creatures Take On a Life of Their Own

 

Rick, Theater Ghost, and Waldo (12 kb)
Rick Lazzarini, The Theater Ghost from Ghostbusters II and the Facial Waldo, a device used to control the ghost

In the forefront of a new generation of special makeup and creature effects designers, Rick Lazzarini of The Character Shop in Canoga Park, California finds himself in the position of competing with the men who helped him hone his craft. "It's a weird feeling," he admits. "I'm honored to be going after the same productions as my mentors, but it's kind of scary. My generation realizes the kind of dedication it takes to succeed in this business."

"My generation realizes the kind of dedication it takes to succeed in this business."
Rick Lazzarini, founder, The Character Shop

While the new kids on the block aim to bring "a fresh look, an enthusiasm" to the industry, Lazzarini and others like him are acutely aware that they're building on a foundation that goes back to silent screen great Lon Chaney. "We're still at the stage where we're willing to try new things, but we know if we fail we can always fall back on traditional ways of doing things," he notes.

Working out of The Character Shop's [6,000-square-foot] studio, Lazzarini creates wearable makeup effects - "everything from a fake nose and prosthetic makeup to an actual suit" - as well as mechanical creatures controlled by cable or radio. Projects are evenly split between commercials and feature films. "Each requires a different mindset and a different time frame," explains Lazzarini. "You need to make a quick impact with a commercial because of limited screen time, but you don't want to detract from the product you're selling. On the whole, commercials build on pleasant, wholesome, cheerful images.' Among Lazzarini's commercial creations are the dueling World War I flying aces in Duracell's long-running battery campaign. He has two more Duracell spots featuring boxers and racing taxi cabs waiting in the wings. How the characters in these spots are produced is something of a state secret; he'll only divulge that "they're puppets, and they're bigger than you'd think."

For a series of Bell Canada commercials Lazzarini outfitted actors playing office workers with animal heads possessing radio-controlled eyebrows and mouths. He also designed a beer-guzzling green alien for Heineken beer's Dutch television and European theater spots. For these. he also endowed an actor with a large. radio-controlled mechanical head.

Feature films give Lazzarini the opportunity to create "for the dark side." His work in Ghostbusters II contrasted the traditional - "a gory, severed latex head with blood and guts" - with the high-tech - a winged, six-eyed, four-armed ghost, brought to life by Lazzarini's latest puppeteering device, the Facial Waldo. By means of special sensors attached to a puppeteer's face, head and body, the Waldo allows up to 16 individual features in a creature's head and face to be remote-controlled by a single operator. "I originally developed the Waldo for a puppet character in a Kraft salad-dressing spot that never aired," says Lazzarini. "I don't know why somebody didn't do it before me. Why not have the controls analogous to what the creature does? Although nobody actually put together the different technologies in the right combinations before, the Waldo is made of stuff right off the shelf; it's not from Jupiter!"

"Sometimes we deliver a hunk of aluminum or foam latex and have to breathe life into it."
Rick Lazzarini

Lazzarini's Facial Waldo is currently being used at Hollywood's Rhythm & Hues as a real-time method of recording realistic expressions on a computer-generated character. "The operator wears a cap on his head and sensors glued on his face, so when he moves the computer generated character does the same," Lazzarini describes about the almost eerie machinations of his device "Rather than actuate a 3-D puppet, the Waldo tells the computer-generated character what to do."

The Character Shop's most unusual project to date was for Nightmare on Elm Street V: The Dream Child. Lazzarini was called upon to construct an unborn-child puppet in its mother's womb, while a prosthetic Freddy Krueger face looks through the womb wall trying to get at the child's soul. "I wore Freddy's face for that sequence. I frequently end up in makeup we've created," says Lazzarini, who considers himself a performer and an actor (he was seen as Pizza the Hut in Mel Brooks' Spaceballs). "Sometimes we deliver a hunk of aluminum or foam latex and have to breathe life into it, even if it's by remote control; sometimes we're inside the makeup or creature. Either way, it's giving a performance. Ultimately, it all must show on the creature's face."

Lazzarini has been combining prosthetics and acting since the age of six. "I was going to be Jesus in the school play, so I made some wounds with crayons on notebook binder paper and wanted to tape them to my hands and feet. But that was a little too realistic for my teachers. They made me wear socks," he recalls. Undaunted, the young Lazzarini immersed himself in Famous Monster magazines. He decided that creature making would be his life's work after seeing Planet of the Apes. "That movie got me started on this whole kick," he says. "The creatures weren't just trying to scare you, they were actually characters [you could relate to]."

Completely self-taught, Lazzarini recalls the perils of the trial-and-error system in his home workshop: "I was 12 and wanted to do a face cast of myself. I used dental stone instead of dental plaster and wound up with 10 pounds of this stuff hanging off my eyebrows and eyelashes. I had to use a hammer to smash it off." He never made that mistake again. Good thing, too, because he made the face cast of Michael Keaton used to create the caped crusader's cowl in Batman.

"We're bending in different directions to create characters we can believe in."
Rick Lazzarini

Lazzarini progressed rapidly as a practical effects wiz and makeup designer. While still a teenager, he made outrageous props for the Tubes rock band. Then, as a student at the Loyola Marymount University's Film School in Los Angeles, he began working for the makeup effects company responsible for creating such cult classics as Slumber Party Massacre. Upon graduation he took a job at a prop house, where he gained "knowledge of a vast range of resources and materials."

As a mechanical designer and coordinator, he then joined makeup designer Stan Winston in creating the nasty buggers featured in James Cameron's Aliens. "I designed some of the mechanics that went into the Queen Alien creature. It was 14-feet high and 20-feet long, and had to be sturdy enough to hold two people, who fit inside," Lazzarini explains. "We used hydraulics to turn her body and a rail system to shoot out her tongue."

Lazzarini's next job was as mechanical coordinator in the creature department at Boss Films, the company responsible for the effects in Die Hard and the original Ghostbusters. A stint as creative effects supervisor at Apogee Productions followed, and then a period of doing freelance work. He founded The Character Shop two years ago.

On any given project, The Character Shop's staff may be found engaged in makeup testing. body casting, sculpting and model making, mechanical and electrical work, woodwork, plastics work and vacuforming, conventional design and illustration, as well as computer previewing of how system mechanics will fit under a cosmetic skin. The pressure is always on, says Lazzarini, "to continually prove ourselves. Every time we work we want to go one better than the last time." It wasn't long ago, he adds, that clients were looking for effects for effects sake, but that seems to be on the decrease. "Now we're bending in different directions to create characters we can believe in," he emphasizes.

Still somewhat of a young Turk himself, Lazzarini can't help thinking about the next generation of creature creators. "The people I'm hiring will someday be competing with me, and they'll have my accomplishments to boost them up," he says. "The next generation can take for granted certain technical breakthroughs; they can pick up off the shelf what someone else racked his brain to develop. But at least it's comforting to think that if any of them are going to start their own business, they'll have to go through exactly what I did."

by Christine Bunish

 


Rick's note: This article was published prior to our new location and business name; it has been updated accordingly. It's extremely thorough; I had thought of putting a bio on this Web site, but this article covers it!
Article from Film and Video Magazine, December 1989.

Copyright Film and Video 1989.

Article reproduced for review purposes.
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