As a writer and producer of microbudget films, I always wanted to do something that paid homage to the classic monsters. But what to do and how to do it? Film clips of the monsters were wrapped up tightly by their home studio, Universal, and the various estates, specifically those of Karloff, Lugosi, and Chaney, were also spoken for. However, to date, there had never been a fully-realized project about Jack Pierce.
To the rare uninitiated monster fan, Pierce was the makeup genius who started at Universal in the 1910s, doing everything from stunt work to assistant directing before becoming a full-time makeup artist in the 1920s. After successes such as The Monkey Talks, Pierce became Universal’s head of makeup in 1928. He scored a major success turning Conrad Veidt into The Man Who Laughs that year, but the 1930s would bring him into legendary status.
After working on Dracula, in succession, Pierce created the title characters for Frankenstein, The Mummy, The Werewolf of London, The Bride of Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, and Phantom of the Opera, in addition to working on all of the sequels to those films through House of Dracula in 1945. The studio then dismissed him after he’d given them 30 years and never signed a contract.
To undertake a Pierce project that would properly reflect this great body of work, I chose to pay tribute to most of these films through an indie film which shot the action in a live setting all in one day through a combination of partial set pieces and accurate character re-creations. Even though this would take place on stage, because it was designed to be a film, I demanded of my team true film quality makeups and costumes. To do so, much like the efforts in realizing my earlier film tributes to Planet of the Apes and The Wizard of Oz, I had to recruit the best possible people in Hollywood to work on the creative aspects of the show. But I had no money whatever – how would I get these people to join the project?
In this case, my first collaborators, and among the very few original participants to make it all the way through production, were makeup supervisor Robert Burman and his wife, costume designer Jennifer McManus. They saw the project as an opportunity to delve into an atypical but fulfilling project. We would pay for basic costume materials, but would get as many donations as possible for makeup materials and in all cases, have the labor donated in the name of one Jack P. Pierce who influenced an entire industry. “What I was glad about for this project was the ability to make classic historical characters and really do them right,” said Burman. “It was really fun to be able to update everything so that it was today’s standards with yesterday’s style.”
