Did the creator of Spock's ears also create Bigfoot?
Friday, June 4, 2010
John Chambers was a masterful special effects makeup artist, best known for creating the ears of Mr. Spock on the original Star Trek series and for his groundbreaking work on the Planet of the Apes movies. But Chambers found other, stranger uses for his unique talents, far from Hollywood...
Chambers is probably the only person to have won an Academy Award and commendation for his work with the CIA. For years he secretly worked for the US government, creating Mission Impossible-style makeup jobs to transform agents so they could venture into hostile territory undetected. (He played a crucial role in the CIA plan that managed to sneak six hostages out of Iran in 1979.) He also designed lifelike prosthetics for soldiers who had been disfigured in combat, an accomplishment he reportedly regarded as the proudest of his entire career.
But there is yet another twist to Chambers' story. For many years, there's been gossip around Hollywood that the "Bigfoot" seen in the infamous Patterson-Gimlin footage is actually the work of Chambers. Click to see it here:
In 2001, Chambers died at the Motion Picture and Television Fund retirement home in Woodland Hills. He went to his grave denying he'd made the Bigfoot seen in the film, although two of his friends and proteges - makeup wizard Rick Baker and director John Landis - have said that Chambers created the suit. Baker later recanted, saying he no longer believed the rumor was
true, but many other effects artists have gone on record saying they believe the suit was Chambers' work.
We don't know for sure that Chambers created Bigfoot. But we do know that Chambers had piles of monster suits in storage, and often quickly threw together furry monsters out of spare gorilla parts for TV shows like The Outer Limits and Lost in Space. He was also, by many accounts, quite a prankster.
And it's not like this would have been the first Bigfoot hoax he'd been a part of...
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Technocrati tags: [Bigfoot][John Chambers]
Chambers is probably the only person to have won an Academy Award and commendation for his work with the CIA. For years he secretly worked for the US government, creating Mission Impossible-style makeup jobs to transform agents so they could venture into hostile territory undetected. (He played a crucial role in the CIA plan that managed to sneak six hostages out of Iran in 1979.) He also designed lifelike prosthetics for soldiers who had been disfigured in combat, an accomplishment he reportedly regarded as the proudest of his entire career.
But there is yet another twist to Chambers' story. For many years, there's been gossip around Hollywood that the "Bigfoot" seen in the infamous Patterson-Gimlin footage is actually the work of Chambers. Click to see it here:
In 2001, Chambers died at the Motion Picture and Television Fund retirement home in Woodland Hills. He went to his grave denying he'd made the Bigfoot seen in the film, although two of his friends and proteges - makeup wizard Rick Baker and director John Landis - have said that Chambers created the suit. Baker later recanted, saying he no longer believed the rumor was
true, but many other effects artists have gone on record saying they believe the suit was Chambers' work.We don't know for sure that Chambers created Bigfoot. But we do know that Chambers had piles of monster suits in storage, and often quickly threw together furry monsters out of spare gorilla parts for TV shows like The Outer Limits and Lost in Space. He was also, by many accounts, quite a prankster.
And it's not like this would have been the first Bigfoot hoax he'd been a part of...
Got a tip for Monsters and Rockets? Want to contribute to the site? Send us an email.
Technocrati tags: [Bigfoot][John Chambers]
1 comments:
The problem with this theory, and the general notion that it was just a guy in an ape suit, is that people who have analyzed the film closely (the most recent case of this was on National Geographic Channel) have noted that there are certain aspects of the subject in the film that it would have been beyond the ability of special effects artists like Chambers to create. In particular, it's said that you can see muscles shifting under the subject's fur, and while it's possible to simulate that today, the stretchable fabrics that are used for such things didn't exist in the 1960's. The makeup done for Planet of the Apes was the most up to date, state of the art work, but the apes in those films aren't nearly as realistic as the Bigfoot in the Patterson film is.
Even more importantly, there are certain anatomical features in the subject that it would be hard to fake today and impossible to fake over 40 years ago. I wish I had recorded the show to consult, but as I recall, while some things, like the length of the arms can be faked, the placement of the knees and elbows relative to the hips and shoulders, respectively, have to conform to human norms if it's a person in a suit (the suit's joints have to flex where the person's joints are), and they don't in whatever it is in the film (there was also something about how the shape of the subject's head and its placement relative to its shoulders would make it incredibly difficult for it to be a person in a suit--you couldn't really jam a human head into the space available and even if you could they couldn't turn their head the way the head turns in the film).
They also determined that the height of the subject was probably about 7 to 8 foot tall, so while no one was willing to rule out the possibility of a hoax, it would have required the participation of a rather tall person of unusual proportions and people at the top of their game in several fields pushing the available technology beyond it's existing limits and at some considerable expense.
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