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(Jack Piccolo 1889–1968). Greek makeup artist.
Perhaps signalling the absence of romance in his soul which would both
distinguish and hinder his work for the Universal horror movies of the
1930s and 1940s, Pierce originally moved from Greece to America in order
to become a baseball star. Despite some talent for the challenging position
of shortstop, however, Pierce apparently never made it to the big leagues,
and in his twenties he drifted into the film business, acting and doing
miscellaneous work behind the camera. By the 1920s, he was a makeup artist,
although at the time the most imaginative work in the field came from
an actor, Lon CHANEY, who did his own makeup.
After Chaney's untimely death in 1930, offscreen specialists in horrific
makeup would become more significant.
Soon, Pierce was helping to define the look and style of the Universal
films that remain seminal influences to this day. His strength, I would
argue, was an inclination to take a methodical, logical, and scientific
approach to his work. Everyone has heard the story behind his makeup for
James WHALE's Frankenstein: assigned to the project, Pierce began
by ignoring the Golem-like approach to the monster's appearance employed
in an earlier, abortive effort to film the story with Bela LUGOSI
as the monster; instead, he researched the various ways to perform brain
surgery, reasoned that the inexperienced Frankenstein would employ the
simplest approach—slicing off the entire top of the skull—and designed
Boris KARLOFF's makeup accordingly. In its strategic
scars and bolts for the attachment of electrodes, Pierce managed to craft
both an horrific monster and the perfect image of the sort of jerry-built
human that an inspired nineteenth-century amateur might construct using
the science of his day. None of the innumerable subsequent efforts to
envision the Frankenstein monster have ever surpassed Pierce's brilliant
vision, which has permanently embedded itself in popular culture and served
to immortalize Mary Shelley's creation more than any other factor, even
Karloff's memorable performances. Other sorts of electrified creatures
also inspire Pierce, as shown by the wonderfully outré coiffure
of Elsa LANCHESTER's Bride of Frankenstein
and the pale, bug-eyed look that he developed for Lon CHANEY,
Jr.'s Man Made Monster, both intriguing images of what electrified
humans might actually look like.
Pierce's versions of a reanimated mummy—glimpsed briefly in
Karloff's The Mummy and at greater length in three lesser films with the
younger Chaney—also reflected a thoughtful, meticulous interest in the actual
ways that such preserved humans would decay after millennia of preservation.
But Pierce depended upon actors like Karloff and Chaney who would sit patiently
for hours while he carried out his work, and one suspects that the decidedly
inferior look Pierce provided for Tom Tyler in The Mummy's Hand was a
necessary concession to a aging western star unaccustomed to the rigors of
cinematic monsterdom.
Despite his triumphs, I would argue, Pierce lacked the broader
affinity for the magical and marvelous in all its myriad guises that
distinguishes later artists like Baker. There is nothing particularly memorable
about his numerous vampires, and despite various attempts with Henry Hull,
Chaney, and others, Pierce never managed to create a persuasive werewolf, his
imagination limited to pasting hair and funny noses on actors' faces. In
crafting these more florid, fantastic creations, Pierce was vastly outdone by
his successors. Other horror movies of the period, like The Old Dark House
and The Raven, simply required Pierce to make some actor look menacing
or ugly, which he generally accomplished only in routine fashion.
As a signal of its resolve to abandon the fading business of horror
movies, Universal fired Pierce in 1947, exiling him to work on westerns and
television programs precisely at the time—the early 1950s—when a new genre
of science fiction cinema was forged in a series of classic films he did not
contribute to. When he belatedly returned to his old stomping grounds later in
the decade, the only work available was in the inferior dreck that brought the
science fiction boom to an inglorious end, and Pierce's work descended to the
occasion. His renewed efforts to forge men turned into animals in Teenage
Monster and Beauty and the Beast lacked even the minimal competence
of the Chaney, Jr. Wolfman, and his dull, uninspired work on Creation of the
Humanoids commands attention only because of the name of the artist.
Fortunately for Jack Pierce, he had already earned immortality by creating
another, more memorable humanoid decades ago.
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