Fashion naked show

What's the definition of a dream assignment for Rick Baker, the five-time Oscar-winning makeup artist who is possibly the closest thing to a below-the-line celebrity Hollywood can offer? The answer to that is simple--it's his latest project, Tim Burton's new version of Planet of the Apes. "At the time Tim called me, I was actually planning on taking a year off," says Baker, who won his most recent Academy Award in March for Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas. "I had just finished Grinch and Nutty Professor 2, I was burned out, and I thought, I'm going to close up shop and take a year to kick back. But I just couldn't turn this down." It's easy to see why. Baker, a self-dubbed "ape-crazy guy," has contributed to most of the simian-themed films of the past 25 years, including King Kong, Greystoke, Gorillas in the Mist, and Mighty Joe Young. For him to be given a shot at reimagining the advanced, articulate chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans that populated the 1968 movie of Pierre Boulle's novel--well, the much-needed breather from work would just have to be postponed.

Baker, of course, was intimately acquainted with John Chambers' Oscar-winning work on the original film. "I was 18 when I saw it," he says. "I was already a makeup geek and an ape geek at the time, and had made a number of ape things on my own. I was blown away when I saw the film--especially the first time you see the gorillas on horseback. But even at the time, even though I thought the makeups were great, I saw some things I would do differently. So I finally got a chance to put my money where my mouth is."

Also where the apes' mouths are--one area Baker felt could use some improvement. It may be recalled that Planet of the Apes wasn't the only movie in 1968 with complex ape makeup: the other was 2001: A Space Odyssey, during the opening "Dawn of Man" sequence. "That was done a whole different way," says the makeup artist. "What I liked about Stuart Freeborn's work in 2001 was that the apes could show their teeth. The apes in Planet of the Apes had little rubber teeth glued into their appliances, but they couldn't move their lips over their teeth. They always moved together. I thought, that's a shame, because apes are very expressive with their mouths, they bare their teeth and do many things."

Baker also hoped to diversify the various makeup designs more than Chambers had, even on the background apes. "Apes are as individual as you or I," he says. "In the original film, they came up with a design for a gorilla, a chimp, and an orangutan, and basically applied that to everyone's face. The only difference was, if somebody had a more oval face or a more square face, it made the head shape slightly different. I like making characters--I wanted to play up the differences."

Costume designer Colleen Atwood, whose job was almost as crucial in turning such human actors as Helena Bonham Carter, Tim Roth, and Michael Clarke Duncan into other species of primate, says, "You look at the old movie to see what works and what doesn't work, so you learn from it all. I had to consider movement in a huge way, because there is much more acknowledgement of ape movement in the costumes. It was like doing dance costumes." A character like Roth's General Thade, for example, runs, jumps, and springs in an agile, decidedly chimp-like fashion. But as Baker points out, he and the rest of the Burton Planet of the Apes creators had the advantage of hindsight. "I had 30 years since looking at the first films"--not only Franklin J. Schaffner's 1968 film, but the four sequels that followed in quick succession--"to mull it over."

This is not the makeup designer's first go-round with Apes. Plans for a remake have been afoot for years, with various directors and/or stars attached. "I was originally approached about eight years before Tim approached me, when Oliver Stone had the project," says Baker. "That's when I started thinking about what to do. For a brief moment, I considered doing animatronic heads, like I did in Gorillas in the Mist and Mighty Joe Young. I knew that we could make absolutely real-looking gorillas that were very animated. But I felt that it wasn't Planet of the Apes. I mean, so much of the charm of the first movie was that they were actor-driven performances. It would also be a logistical nightmare to coordinate what an actor's doing with what a puppeteer's doing, when you have 500 apes on camera and 1,500 puppeteers behind camera. So I almost immediately ruled that out."

The Stone version was put on the shelf, but Baker retained some of what he had conceived while briefly working on it. "We used basically the same materials in our film that they did back in 68; what we did in our film could have been done then. We used foam rubber, as they had. But to create the ape-like muzzle on the first film they had a great big chunk of foam on the person's face, and though the actors could open and close their mouths and wiggle them around a little bit, they really couldn't articulate the lips very much. So I thought, I'll make a set of dentures to push the actor's face out into a muzzle-like look to begin with, and then sculpt a very thin muzzle, relying on the dentures to create a lot of that mass."

It was an idea that translated into practice beautifully. But Baker had a lot of other conceptual work to do, and not a lot of time to do it. "When Tim first talked to me, I think it was about six months away from filming. All of the sudden, the movie was on the fast track. If they had asked me how much time it was going to take, I would probably have said a year. From day one I said, you're six months behind." There was no real script yet--"Tim said it needed work, and he didn't want to show it to me at that point. He just said, it's a bunch of apes, and it's not on Earth like the first film. So I started coming up with concepts, and had two weeks to do a bunch of designs. It was a really fun period, but not much of it applied when we finally got our actors and a script. It's kind of hard to do designs when you don't have the actors, because so much is dependent on the structure of the person's face."

In fact, Baker attempted in vain to affect casting. The denture-and-thin-muzzle solution he had come up with worked particularly well on certain physiognomies. "When I tested it on myself eight years ago, I thought it looked good, but I have a fairly big nose and bridge. Apes are very flat across there. I've also got kind of a short upper lip; I thought, if we had somebody with a much flatter nose and a long upper lip, this makeup would look really cool." With that in mind, the designer experimented on life casts of actors who met the criteria. "I gave Tim the life casts, and said, this guy has a good face, so there's minimal thickness on here. This one doesn't look as good because the guy's got a big nose. He totally ignored it. When they said, `We're looking at Tim Roth to play Thade,' I was like, `What part of this big nose thing did you not understand?'" But Baker agreed that Roth was a good actor for the part of the movie's chief antagonist, and made it work. "I think he's one of my favorite makeups in the movie."

During the design process, the makeup artist also flirted with other ideas. "We went off on directions like, since it's not Earth, then we're not really bound by Earth apes, are we? We could maybe play with what an ape on another planet is like. I thought about putting in some other primates, like baboons. I also thought, these apes have a society, they build houses, they make clothes, they would probably have a fashion sense and maybe trim their hair. But then we finally got a script, and I said, we should forget about all this space ape stuff, and go back to chimps, gorillas, and orangutans. That's what the movie's about; that's what people expect. My experiment with playing with hairstyles was taking them away from being apelike."

Individualizing the apes only went so far, too. "I held back at some point, because chimps can be anywhere from fair-skinned to black, and they have all kinds of interesting mottling and markings. But I thought we should standardize things for clarity's sake--if you have a black chimp in a helmet, and a black gorillas next to him in a helmet, are you going to be able to tell the difference? So we kept the chimps in brown shades, the gorillas black, and the orangutans gray." Baker did vary mottling and wrinkles from ape to ape, and built in structural differences to the initial sculptures.

APE FASHIONS