The one emblematic movie monster of the 1950s emerged-in 3-D, no less -
from Universal Pictures, the studio which had already led the field for two decades.
Sci-fi expert Bill Warren calls it "one of the most famous monsters ever created".
Sci-fi authority Bob Burns says it's among the best monsters ever designed,
and despite its Johnny-come-lately status, it fits in with Frankenstein,
the wolf man, the mummy and all the rest of the great movie monsters of old.
The characters in the movie call him the gill-man.
The people who made the movie affectionately called him "the beastie".
We call him "the Creature from the Black Lagoon".
Out of the Devonian Period, when life crawled out of the sea, it came.
From fishlike thing to mammal, from mammal to a manlike horror of the sea.
With the heart of a human, filled with hate, and a manlike instinct to love.
My name is Tom Weaver. Together we'll go back to that black lagoon
and look behind the scenes at one of the best monster movies
from the second half of the 20th century.
In the beginning, there was William Alland.
Alland had the idea for Creature from the Black Lagoon and produced the picture.
Alland was born in Delmar, Delaware,
and he began his career as an actor with a Baltimore troupe.
He moved to New York City,
arriving there with a few belongings, $25, and the ambition to work on Broadway.
He took acting courses, and he acted at the Henry Street Settlement House,
which is where he met Orson Welles.
This was in the '30s. Welles was on the verge of forming
his famous Mercury Players acting company.
Alland worked with the Mercury Players on stage and on the radio.
He was in the cast of the notorious 1938 War of the Worlds CBS radio broadcast,
which was so realistic it caused a panic among listeners,
and Welles and Alland nearly went to jail. They continued to associate for years.
Alland acted in some of Welles' movies, including Citizen Kane.
Alland played the reporter who goes through the whole movie in shadow,
trying to find out what Charles Foster Kane's dying word, "Rosebud", meant.
I'll interrupt myself several times as I try to tell you about the genesis of this movie.
So much to say, and only 79 minutes to say it in.
We're looking at a shot of Will Rogers Beach in Santa Monica, west of Universal.
William Alland socialised with Welles, and at some point in the '40s,
perhaps while making Citizen Kane, he was invited for dinner at Welles' home.
It was a party, I guess, because Welles' girlfriend was there, Dolores del Rio,
and Alland, and a guy named Gabriel Figueroa
who was a Mexican cinematographer, eventually quite a famous one.
He photographed The Pearl, he shot a lot of Luis Buñuel's movies,
he shot John Ford's The Fugitive with Dolores del Rio,
and he got an Academy Award nomination for best cinematography
for The Night of the Iguana, 1964, for director John Huston.
Huston later gave Figueroa one of his last jobs, maybe the last job.
Figueroa photographed Huston's Under the Volcano in the 1980s,
when he, Figueroa, was almost 80.
On the right is Julio Lopez, who changed his name to Perry Lopez
and became a busy B-movie star and A-movie character actor.
He played Jack Nicholson's former partner Escobar the cop, in Chinatown.
So here they all are at this party at Orson Welles' home. Just four of them, I think.
And Figueroa somehow gets onto the subject of a real-life half-man half-fish
that lives in the Amazon river, near a village.
According to Figueroa, once a year it comes out of the river to claim a maiden,
and then it returns to the Amazon and the village is safe for another year.
Everybody stared at Figueroa, I guess. He knew they thought he was kidding.
He started gettin' worked up, insisting that it was true
and people who live on the Amazon talk about it all the time.
He said he'd once seen a photograph of the monster and he could get a print of it.
Notice the little rubber pinkie claw, instead of scratching the sand, just bends.
For about five minutes Figueroa talked about this half-man half-fish
that he said was not a myth, that actually existed.
I have no idea whether he was on the level or not, or if anybody believed him,
but I know that little anecdote got lodged in the back of William Alland's brain.
Ten years later, Alland landed a job as a movie producer at Universal-lnternational.
He made a lot of westerns early on, and a Tony Curtis Arabian Nights sort of thing
called The Prince Who Was a Thief. All moneymakers but not world-shaking.
Interrupting myself, here's an example of how movies go together like big jigsaws.
This is a shot of a speedboat crossing the waters of Portuguese Bend in California,
shot September 30, 1953.
Now we're on the process stage at Universal, a month later, October 29.
But the background image on the process screen
was shot at Portuguese Bend on October 5.
And now we're 2500 miles east,
beneath the surface of Wakulla Spring in Florida, on October 14.
So this little nothing scene was shot in three different places,
on four or more different days, two different directors,
and the three characters were played, or "represented", I should say,
by seven different people. It's amazing all the work that goes into making a movie.
Anyway, Alland's at Universal, making picture after picture,
and he starts having ideas for science-fiction movies.
He had the idea for It Came from Outer Space and asked Ray Bradbury to write it.
Right about that same time, maybe just a few weeks later,
he himself wrote up and submitted to the studio a story called The Sea Monster.
It was just a three-page thing where the first page told the story
of that real-life dinner conversation with Figueroa.
Then he pitched the idea that he should make a movie about that kind of monster.
He wanted it to start with a scene of a dinner conversation,
like the one they'd had with Figueroa,
then go on to show an expedition entering an unexplored region of the Amazon,
accompanied, of course, by a beautiful blonde.
The man-fish spots the blonde and gets a crush on her, and -
here's where Alland's imagination ran away with him -
there was a bad guy on the expedition who wants to catch the creature,
and he uses the girl as bait.
Alland's memo on The Sea Monster ended by suggesting one of two endings.
In one, the girl is abducted, her boyfriend rescues her and the monster gets killed.
In the other, the creature is captured and brought to civilisation,
but it escapes and starts terrorising a seaport on the South American coast.
Alland wrote "Needless to say, the monster's end is brought about
by his desire for the blonde-haired girl of the expedition."
Well, you know what that is. That's King Kong.
Alland took the man-fish idea from the conversation with Figueroa
and he got most of the rest of his original story idea from King Kong.
When they made Creature, they used the first ending where the creature is killed.
But a few months later Alland made a sequel, Revenge of the Creature,
with the second ending. The creature is brought to civilisation.
It escapes and abducts the girl it loves.
In Revenge of the Creature it's a different girl, a different actress.
In Creature the girl is Julie Adams but in Revenge it's Lori Nelson,
who, true to Alland's original story, was a blonde.
I interviewed Alland back around 1995, two years before he passed away.
At the time we talked I'd recently watched Creature and Revenge back-to-back
and realised for the first time that the story was King Kong set on the water.
I asked Alland if he got ideas from King Kong. He immediately started laughing.
He said he did, absolutely, that that was the whole idea, his idea,
to redo King Kong but with a water monster.
The first writer Alland assigned to the movie was Maurice Zimm,
who turned in a 59-page draft, titled Black Lagoon in early December, 1952.
It's sufficiently different from the movie to mention here.
In this draft, Dr Lyman Reed, an undersea explorer,
risks his life in various underwater adventures to raise money
to form an expedition and search the Amazon for the Pisces Man,
a man-fish that is reported to live there.
We're looking now, by the way, at footage shot at the Hermosa Beach Aquarium.
Julie Adams and a crew went there during preproduction.
Dr Reed's girlfriend, Kay, an heiress, puts up the money herself,
but insists on going along with the expedition.
Unbeknownst to Kay, her guardian hires an adventurer named Ted Clayton
to find a way to also join the expedition and secretly watch over her.
On the expedition up the Amazon are Dr Reed, Ted, Kay,
Kay's doting companion Winnie,
and an explorer named Carl Sloan, who's got "bad guy" written all over him.
The explorers set traps for the Pisces Man, but it avoids them and weeks go by.
Sloan finally gets fed up, chloroforms Kay and places her on a raft,
using her as bait for the Pisces Man. The Pisces Man appears.
It has a "huge, fascinating, unbelievable head,
with a throat sac like a frog's and scalloped gills
that, at a distance, resemble the bobbed hair of a knight of old".
The Pisces Man kills Sloan and gets away with Kay,
but Ted follows them to the monster's grotto and subdues the Pisces Man
by slapping a wrestling hold on it until it passes out.
Kay feels sorry for the Pisces Man, which is locked in a tank
and brought back to civilisation. The tank is taken off the boat and put on a plane.
Kay sneaks onto the plane and unlocks the tank so the Pisces Man can escape.
The Pisces Man "comes slowly toward her, looms over her,
and touches the whiteness of her throat, ever so gently."
"Then, with his eyes still on her, he leaves the plane."
The military throws out a dragnet, but the Pisces Man is able to elude the searchers.
It climbs through a window into a house to hide, sees a small child sleeping,
and adjusts the kid's blanket before it leaves.
But when the Pisces Man tries to get back in the water by crossing a beach,
Dr Reed shoots him over and over and over.
Reed yells "If I can't have him alive, I'll have him dead."
The Pisces Man crawls into the water, which instantly starts churning
because piranha are attacking it. Kay dumps Dr Reed and flies back with Ted.
The Zimm treatment is too much like King Kong, apart from all its other flaws.
But when it was discussed in a December 1952 memo,
the memo writer, who didn't sign a name, wrote that it could be developed into
"a very fine horror movie". The memo writer, whoever he was,
also mentions discussing the script with Alland, who said he'd change the ending
"to provide a means of possibly continuing this into sequels
by keeping the monster alive or leaving his fate in doubt at the end of the picture".
So as early as 1952, plans were being made to turn Black Lagoon into a series.
There were monster's-eye-view shots in It Came from Outer Space,
produced by Alland and directed by Jack Arnold several months earlier.
Alland and Arnold, again teamed on this picture,
used that gimmick here, and then again later, in Tarantula.
They also teased the audience by keeping the gill-man offscreen in its first scenes.
We don't really see the creature until a third of the way through.
For the roar of the gill-man, which you'll hear in a moment,
the Universal sound technicians experimented with a lot of strange noises,
from a foghorn blown underwater, to an opera recording played at low speed.
To be honest, I don't know what they did use for the roar,
but I do know that for the Steven Spielberg TV movie Duel,
a distorted gill-man roar is used as the sound of the truck crashing.
That's just great, that baseball-mitt-sized hand grabbing Rodd Redwing's head.
Everybody I know who saw this movie on its original run in 1954
tells me this was one of the scariest scenes in the movie.
Here's our first shot of the Rita. Most of the rest of the movie takes place on it.
Back to the script of Black Lagoon. Maurice Zimm handed in his draft,
then a writer named Leo Lieberman came in and worked for two months.
But the story still wasn't in very good shape. In fact, according to Arthur Ross,
the Universal front office turned it down and said they wouldn't do the picture.
That was the point at which Alland turned to Ross, a Chicago-born screenwriter,
who did a lot of work whipping the story into shape.
Ross looked at what had been written and quickly realised
"that it was an imitation of films made in the genre at Universal for 25 years".
"The only difference was it was an undersea creature
instead of a mummy or Frankenstein or Dracula."
Ross was at the time reading The Silent World by Jacques Cousteau,
and it gave him the idea that the scientist should be the hero, not the villain.
Remember, neither of the two scientists in Zimm's Black Lagoon was a hero.
One was a publicity-seeking nut, the other the villain, a real Snidely-Whiplash type.
Ross wanted to make the scientist
"a humanist who enquires of nature rather than dictating to it or exploiting it".
"He's the one who holds out for not harming the creature."
Alland understood right away what Ross was trying to do.
According to Ross, Alland knew the first approach had failed,
the old-fashioned script they were trying to work with. Ross told me
"Whether I'm writing something just to make a living
or something I really believe is important, I never write down to an audience."
"Audiences are not stupid. They may not be geniuses or specialists in fields,
but they are reasonably intelligent people, in the main, and for that reason
I felt I would present what I thought was not only a melodramatic device
but also a study of characters in conflict."
"The conflict in this case was these people versus the creature."
"The more they attack him, the more he attacks them."
"I wrote intelligent people doing intelligent things -
everyone except Richard Denning who wanted the creature dead and mounted,
considering that just as good as live and left alone."
"He was unintelligent and arrogant, and he caused the difficulties."
"Those difficulties finally had to be rectified in violence because by then
the creature was a violent and beset thing that had no choice but to fight them."
After Ross finished, one last writer, Harry Essex, was brought in. Earlier,
Essex had had the simple job of turning a 111-page Ray Bradbury treatment
into the screenplay of It Came from Outer Space, which he did,
and undeservedly got a solo screenplay credit for it.
In later years, Essex was happy to take all the credit for It Came from Outer Space,
and he liked to try to take all the credit for Black Lagoon, too.
Writers had worked on Black Lagoon for months, many drafts had been written,
and Arthur Ross had it all whipped into shape.
But to hear Essex tell it, when he was hired
all Universal gave him to work with was "a very, very poorly-written short story".
"Just the basic idea of a fish that had been discovered in the jungle."
"Universal bought the story for very little, and assigned me to it."
"I was angry. I didn't want to do anything called Creature from the Black Lagoon."
"It was an embarrassment to me."
I should add that the title was just Black Lagoon when Essex worked on it,
but I'm sure you're already taking all his comments with a grain of salt.
Essex went on to tell me "Universal pleaded with me to do the picture."
"And so I began to redevelop the whole damn thing."
"It's pretty much formula for the kind of horror stories we used to do then,
except in this case I added the Beauty and the Beast theme."
"The idea was to give the creature some humanity."
"He wants to love the girl, but everybody's chasing him."
"It's an old formula of mine that I've used with great success."
Harry, Harry, Harry...
Some interesting touches in scripts that never made it to the screen:
The first intent was to keep the gill-man off camera until the middle of the movie.
Universal spent so much money on the gill-man costume that, understandably,
they finally decided to show him early and often.
But all you see of him in the first halves of early scripts
are flash shots, you see him in silhouette, in shadow, et cetera.
There was an evocative scene, also not filmed, where the captain of the Rita
talks about the fable of a mermaid who lived in one of the Amazon's lagoons.
"A beautiful legend about this mermaid, she falled in love with a man on a ship."
"And nobody believes him. Then one day, when the time came for him to go away,
she follow him, far out into the Amazon,
only to lose her way and be devoured by the crocodiles."
"Who knows? - Maybe this mermaid was even the wife of this half-man half-fish."
That dialogue was meant to be heard as narration over water and jungle images.
It would have explained the gill-man's fascination with Julie Adams.
I'm trying to tell the story in chronological order,
but I wanna jump ahead and mention that according to Chris Mueller,
the sculptor who sculpted the head and hands of the gill-man,
when Universal was making the second Creature movie,
there was talk of having the gill-man and a female creature in the sequel.
There is no female creature in the sequel, Revenge of the Creature,
nor have I seen a draft of the Revenge of the Creature script that mentions one,
and I think I've seen all of them. I guess it was just an idea being kicked around.
I'll talk a little more about that later.
All the scenes in and around Dr Maia's camp -
the fossilised arm sticking out of the rock, the gill-man killing the natives in the tent,
and these digging scenes - were shot on the Universal back lot,
at a spot called Sierra Canyon. A few months earlier,
Jack Arnold shot another movie in Sierra Canyon: It Came from Outer Space.
Most desert exteriors for that film were shot on location in the Mohave Desert.
But when Richard Carlson goes into the crater and finds the spaceship,
those scenes were shot here in Sierra Canyon.
They avoided showing the water and trees, because in that movie
Carlson was supposedly in a crater in the middle of the Arizona desert.
Ernest Nims, the supervisor of the editorial department at Universal,
often made script suggestions. A recommendation he made for Creature
was for the early scene where the gill-man's arm reached out of the Amazon
for Julie Adams' ankle as she stood on the riverbank.
In a memo he asked "Is the creature that we see in the inland water
the same as the one in the Black Lagoon? This will be confusing to the audience."
"Why not show the creature following the boat up the river to the Black Lagoon?"
"This would not only give added suspense but would clarify the story."
That was a good suggestion.
The movie's famous now and we know there's only one gill-man,
but in 1954, when people were seeing it for the first time,
a gill-man in camp and another in the lagoon might have been misleading.
So, sure enough, somebody added a shot to the script.
As the Rita chugs toward the lagoon, there's a shot of the gill-man following.
It was a high shot from the boat deck, showing the gill-man below the surface.
"A long sharklike shadow, slithering through the water, follows the vessel."
"As he lifts one hand out of the water, we recognise it as the green taloned thing
we had seen poking out of the inland water at the geological camp."
OK, fine, so the shot's in the movie, but then watch this cut right here in a second.
That's where the shot was before somebody took it out.
You can hear the music abruptly jump ahead.
They must have taken it out, and didn't have time,
or maybe the inclination, to fix the music. They just let it skip very noticeably.
Who took the shot out, and why, I have no idea.
Universal briefly considered shooting Black Lagoon in Eastman Color.
Of all the Universal sci-fi movies of the '50s,
this is the one that really would have benefited from colour.
It would have been dynamite in colour. If the colourisation fad hadn't died out,
and if they'd got it right, I'd have had no objection to seeing Creature colourised.
When I told Alland Creature and Tarantula would have been great in colour,
he said the same thing, that he'd love to see Creature colourised,
that it'd look fabulous. But the expense of shooting in colour worried Universal.
In colour and 3-D, they projected that Creature would cost them $750,000.
So, pardon the pun, they scaled Creature down, made it in black-and-white 3-D,
which they figured would cost them $650,000.
This is embarrassing to the memory of Jack Arnold,
and I'm jumping ahead again, but I'll point it out anyway.
On the first day of shooting, Tuesday October 6, 1953,
the first shot was the upcoming shot of the Rita
squeezing its way through the opening leading to the Black Lagoon,
the paradise from which no man has ever returned.
So Jack Arnold lines up his first shot on the first day of the movie, and...
It's a blooper. What's that telephone pole doing on the left-hand side of the screen?
Much as I'd like to, there may not be time to talk about all of the actors in Creature.
I've got too much information here about the production.
But one I have to talk about is Julie Adams.
Other actresses made more sci-fi movies in the '50s -
Mara Corday, Beverly Garland, Faith Domergue, dozens of others.
Julie Adams just made the one. But by appearing with the creature,
the most recognisable of '50s movie monsters,
she jumped right to the front of the line. She was born Betty May Adams in lowa,
and she wanted to be an actress from the days of grade-school plays.
In California, to pursue her goal, she took speech lessons to lose her lowa accent
and played roles in cheap westerns for a little company called Lippert,
each of them made in less than a week. At that point she was using her real name,
but at Universal she became Julia Adams, and then Julie Adams,
and she co-starred in almost two dozen movies there in the '50s.
A famous sculptor said she possessed the most perfect legs in the world,
so Universal claimed they insured her legs for $500,000.
That's an old publicity trick that went back to the '40s -
Betty Grable's legs were insured for a million. It's used today -
just the other day, Jennifer Lopez insured her legs for 400 million.
Anyway, she had these great legs, never seen in the western movies she made.
Universal gave her the bathing-suit lead in Creature.
It instantly became her claim to fame, the movie she's now best remembered for,
which is a "distinction" that she takes with humour.
More humour at some times than others, perhaps, but she's always a good sport.
She worked a lot in TV, including The Jimmy Stewart Show, as Jimmy's wife,
Yancy Derringer, and a recurring part on Murder, She Wrote.
She's still in front of the cameras today,
most recently in the documentary about Creature which is at the end of this movie.
Adams made other sci-fi movies, like The Underwater City, with William Lundigan,
and Psychic Killer with Jim Hutton,
directed by her former husband, actor-director Ray Danton.
She was in one of Elvis Presley's movies, the haunted-house comedy Tickle Me.
If you get confused when Richard Carlson and Richard Denning go underwater,
and can't tell which is which, notice Carlson has two tanks on his back
and Denning just one. They did that on purpose so people could tell 'em apart.
All the underwater scenes were shot in Florida by a second unit
that was working at the same time Arnold was shooting at Universal.
No actors could be there - they were busy at Universal.
So any time the camera is underwater, those scenes were shot in Florida
and none of the people you see in those shots are the actual actors.
They hired two college students to double for Carlson and Denning:
A girl named Ginger Stanley doubled for Adams,
and Ricou Browning, who I'll talk about more later, played the gill-man.
Today it's easy to overlook what an accomplishment
Creature's underwater photography was in 1953.
Keep in mind that 3-D was a new process then with a lot of bugs to iron out,
and here's Universal trying to figure out a way to take a 3-D camera underwater.
I think that's impressive enough, but on top of that,
it had to be a portable motion-picture underwater camera,
which was practically unheard-of then.
This was 1953, when virtually every underwater scene in any movie to date
had been photographed by stationary cameras or through glass tanks.
Universal shot some test footage with this underwater camera
and showed it to Life magazine, who were very impressed.
Maybe it gave someone at Universal the idea
that a Life photographer, Peter Stackpole,
be asked to take a three-week leave of absence from work,
go to Florida, and photograph the underwater scenes for the movie.
Peter Stackpole was one of the four original photographers for Life
and one of their top photographers, taking lots of photos of film stars in Hollywood.
He was also enthusiastic about underwater photography,
he was an expert swimmer and he had cameras equipped for underwater filming.
Also in the back of Universal's mind was the fact that
his participation would practically ensure a layout on the movie in Life,
and Universal would get lots of stills of the underwater sequences for their use.
I don't know if Stackpole turned them down,
but the guy Universal hired to direct the underwater shots was James C Havens,
and that's a funny story that I'll save for later.
The underwater scenes of Creature were shot at Wakulla Spring, Florida.
Movies had been shot there in the past,
Tarzan pictures, like Tarzan's Secret Treasure from the old Weissmuller days.
The place was managed by a fella named Newton Perry.
Our first look at Ricou Browning as the creature.
Newton Perry was also involved with Florida water shows and things like that.
He was known in Hollywood,
because when Universal decided to shoot there, he was the man they called.
They asked Perry if he knew of any swimmers,
and also if he knew any locations where they might find something
that looked like the Black Lagoon. Perry said he'd show 'em around.
But when the time came, he was in Miami, and all of a sudden he wasn't available.
Perry called his friend, Ricou Browning,
to ask him to pick the Universal people up at the airport and show them the spring.
Ricou was 23 years old at the time, and attending Florida State.
He'd worked for Perry before, producing water shows at Weeki Wachee Springs.
Ricou went to the airport to pick up Jack Arnold and Scotty Welbourne,
who was going to be photographing the underwater scenes.
They all went out to the spring, and Arnold and Welbourne liked it.
Wakulla Spring is in the middle of nowhere.
In 1953, and even right now, if you go there,
it would be like going to Florida with Ponce de Leon when he landed.
It's been that well protected. The bowl of the spring is about five acres.
It's the largest spring in Florida, and it has the largest water flow.
Ricou Browning was also a cave diver,
so he was hired at times to go down into underwater caves to map them out.
The bottom of Wakulla Spring slopes down inside a cave, and just keeps going.
Ricou doesn't know if anybody's gone the distance as to how far you could go.
The deepest that Ricou and the divers he worked with went with air hoses was,
he says, 100, at the most 110, 120 feet.
Of course, they didn't have the equipment or the helium mixes divers have now,
so naturally they couldn't go as deeply as divers today.
Much more recently, divers equipped with this new gear and the new mixed gases
have gone 200-300 feet down into Wakulla Spring.
But, as Ricou said, "They still may not have found the bottom."
Anyway, Scotty Welbourne had a movie camera with him, and he said to Ricou
"Would you swim in front of the camera so we can get some perspective
of the size of the logs or the fish or whatever with a human body?"
Ricou said "Sure", and he did swim for Welbourne.
Arnold and Welbourne liked the spring. Ricou took 'em to the airport and they left.
And a few weeks later, Ricou got a call from Jack Arnold, who said
"We saw the footage, we love the spring and we love the way you swim."
"I like your style. Would you be the Creature of the Black Lagoon?"
Ricou said "Fine. Let's have at it."
Arnold said they'd send tickets so he could come to Universal,
and they'd build an outfit for him to wear. And the rest, as they say, is history.
Come on, David. You can play house later.
The script has Denning be obnoxious in every scene,
so that we never forget that he's gonna be the heavy.
Browning went to Universal, where outfits for the gill-man were being devised.
I should mention that William Alland's concept of the gill-man
was more human than the gill-man in the movie.
Alland had a sculptor sculpt the head of a very sad, beautiful monster.
He told me "It wasn't a monster. It was far more attractive,
more romantic than the beast they ended up with."
"It had fish lips and gills and a vaguely fishlike face,
sort of an aquatic development of a man."
Alland told me "It would still frighten you,
but because of how human it was, not the other way around."
"And the studio said 'Get outta here, that's not scary enough."'
That's when the Universal make-up department took over.
Kay doesn't know about the creature, but she does know there are 9ft killer catfish.
You couldn't get me in that lagoon with dynamite.
Here comes the best, most famous scene in the movie, as Julie Adams takes a dip
and is ogled from below by yet another male admirer, the gill-man.
Julie Adams is doubled here by Ginger Stanley,
a "mermaid" swimmer at Weeki Wachee Spring.
When the camera is underwater, it's cinematographer Welbourne's camera,
and you see Ginger Stanley.
When the camera is above water, it's cinematographer William Snyder
photographing Julie Adams in Park Lake at Universal.
Browning's performance in this scene is the poetic/dramatic highlight of the movie.
The thing that makes the creature as image and myth
are the wonderful, dynamic, swimming- Ricou shots you're about to see.
There's no dialogue for a few minutes, so now is a good time
to talk about the music of Creature from the Black Lagoon.
Sci-fi movie music expert David Schecter, who releases classic sf film scores on CD
under the umbrella title Monstrous Movie Music, calls the Creature score
"one of the most varied and memorable in all of '50s sci-fi horrordom".
"Part of the experience of the film is the considerable musical accompaniment."
And he's right. A hefty 63 per cent of Creature has background music.
Of the 44 cues listed on Creature's cue sheets,
29 were composed specifically for the movie,
with the other 15 lifted from prior Universal pictures.
The 29 originals were, according to Schecter,
composed by Hans J Salter, twelve, Henry Mancini, ten,
and Herman Stein, seven. The music we're hearing now is by Herman Stein,
and the cue is called "Kay and the Monster".
"The older films that contributed music to Creature's score were from many genres"
writes Schecter. "Some, like Mr Peabody and the Mermaid, were water-themed,
which is why the music was considered for use in Creature,
and why it was so well-suited. Westerns also played a role in Creature's score,
as they did in other Universal sci-fi scores of the '50s."
"But what sets Creature's score apart from that of other Universal sci-fi films
is its reliance upon a single musical motif, Stein's three-note creature theme."
"In the film, practically every time you see the creature, his hands, his back, his feet,
or even his wet footprints, you hear his three-note theme,
often played on flutter-tongued trumpets."
Schecter calls the theme "a memorable musical signature", which it certainly is.
It's instantly recognisable, even when it crops up in non-Universal sci-fi movies,
like Women of the Prehistoric Planet and Dracula Versus Frankenstein,
that lifted music from Creature.
People often speculate that this scene was an inspiration to Steven Spielberg
when he shot some of the scenes of Jaws.
The plot of Creature is so indebted to King Kong, I think back to Kong.
This scene of a curious gill-man playfully poking and touching her legs
reminds me of the scene where King Kong takes Fay Wray up the mountain
and pokes her and tickles her.
I also wanna talk about the people who worked on the creature costume.
Prominent among them was a creative designer named Milicent Patrick.
Talk about Beauty and the Beast. She was born an Italian baroness,
she was a former Goldwyn Girl, a model, an interior decorator, an artist -
she was the first woman animator for Disney -
and she helped design the creature and did some painting on the costume.
Chris Mueller was a sculptor, Tom Case a painter on the various gill-man suits,
and Jack Kevan, who was Bud Westmore's right-hand man -
Bud Westmore's right- And left-hand man - Jack Kevan did a little of everything.
Kevan worked as Westmore's assistant but he was a hell of a lot more.
He was a real hands-on guy who did most of whatever work had to be done.
He was born in Pittsburgh, attended UCLA,
and he went to work doing make-up at MGM in 1932.
He made up the main characters in The Wizard of Oz, then, in World War II,
he made prosthetic appliances for wounded men throughout the Pacific.
After the war he got a job at Universal.
He worked on A&C Meet Frankenstein, It Came from Outer Space,
Man of a Thousand Faces, Tarantula, scores of movies.
And in 1958 he and Creature's dialogue director, Irvin Berwick,
struck out on their own and made a horror film, The Monster of Piedras Blancas,
a thinly-disguised attempt to duplicate Creature's success
with a lookalike monster. Jack Kevan told me
"They were lucky to find Ricou Browning, who could swim underwater
and not be restricted by the equipment he had to wear."
"We took a full body cast of him. On top of his figure we built the monster to fit him,
mouldwise, in several pieces. I can't tell you how many now,
but I would guess between six and ten. They were cast in foam rubber,
which at the time was something new. The costume fit him pretty skintight."
It sure did. Ben Chapman, the 6'5" actor who played the creature at Universal,
describes the gill-man suit as fitting as closely as an outer layer of skin.
Luckily, neither Ricou nor Ben was claustrophobic.
Anybody who gets into a suit like that and finds out they are is in a world of trouble.
Once in that suit, your eyeballs and the inside of your mouth was all that showed.
Unfortunately nothing is left of any of the gill-man costumes.
They were made of foam rubber, which doesn't last.
Even the moulds for the suits have been destroyed.
Universal threw them away years ago to make some room.
I was always bothered by the fact that they want us to believe
the creature could crack the boom just by his powerful swimming.
The boat's not anchored-the creature would just tow it around the lagoon.
Frank Lovejoy was considered for the starring role in Creature.
Lovejoy was the hero of Warner Brothers' House of Wax, a 3-D hit earlier that year,
and maybe that was why Universal thought of him for Creature.
But they decided to go with Richard Carlson.
For the part of Dr Maia, Universal first thought of Ramon Novarro.
Novarro was a Mexican-born leading man
who became a big, Rudolph-Valentino-like star in the silent era.
He had the title role in one of the greatest silent epics, MGM's Ben Hur.
But instead of Novarro, Universal went with Antonio Moreno,
who back in silent days was kinda like the poor man's Ramon Novarro.
Creature was one of Moreno's final screen roles. He died rich in 1967.
This was strange at a studio famous for its monsters,
but Universal tried to avoid an exploitative title on the movie.
They called it simply Black Lagoon for a long time,
but then they decided that wasn't going to cut it
and they sent out a memo requesting alternate titles.
The memo read "The request is for a title that may better suggest
the shock and mystery, and perhaps the prehistoric implications of the story."
"We have been asked to stay away from words like 'monster' or 'beast'
to avoid a title that might downgrade the picture."
Somebody suggested The Web and the Claw,
and Alland, who had a lot of success with It Came from Outer Space,
recommended It Came from Out of the Sea.
The other titles he suggested were The Demon of the Deep, The Sea Demon,
The River of Terror and It Walks the Sea.
When Alland heard in the 1980s that Universal wanted to remake Creature,
he felt that the studio should do another sequel instead of a remake.
Since the creature Alland had originally envisioned was so romantic,
he thought it should have a family - a mate and one or two little ones.
In Alland's story they were all removed from the lagoon and taken to a lake
on the estate of a very wealthy family in the US.
They communicate with the family and a relationship develops,
but unfortunately some heavies find out about them and capture the children,
and the mother and father go out after them.
Alland wrote it and tried to make himself send it to Universal
during all the many years that the studio talked about a new Creature movie,
but he never could bring himself to submit it. Alland passed away in 1997.
Director James C Havens was hired to direct the underwater stuff in Creature.
I'm sure Universal felt fortunate to have gotten him and had confidence in him.
He'd been in movies most of his life, and been around boats and water all his life.
I tried to track him down years ago and finally found his phone number,
but when I called, his wife told me he had died several years before.
But I had a nice conversation with her, because she had married him in 1924.
They were married 65½ years, so I figured she might know something about him.
She made him sound real interesting. He started as an art director at MGM in 1924,
the same year he got married, and gradually he got into marine directing,
which means he directed the seagoing scenes for movies:
Mutiny on the Bounty with Clark Gable,
Captains Courageous with Spencer Tracy, pictures like that.
And Havens always owned a boat. He had a sailboat first, with no engine,
then he and his wife had ketches and motorboats and all kinds of boats.
He was a captain in the marines during World War II, a demolition expert.
When John Ford made the movie Mogambo in East Africa,
Havens shot the animal scenes for Mogambo in Tanganyika.
He went around scouting locations in a Land Rover during the Mau Mau rebellion.
She made him sound like a real man's man, a guy who could handle anything,
which I'm sure he was.
So it was so funny, to me anyway, to hear what happened to him during Creature.
Havens goes to Florida for the underwater scenes and Welbourne's there to film 'em.
Days pass, and Alland gets a phone call from the Florida production manager,
who says "You'd better come here, all hell's breaking loose."
"Havens and Welbourne, they're not getting along."
Anyway, Alland hears that all hell is breaking loose, so he goes to Florida.
What's happening is Havens is afraid to go underwater.
Hang on a second. This is sort of an odd shot here, this blurry shot of the hand,
followed by the gill-man swimming away in another hard-to-see shot.
I think these shots should have preceded our first good look at the gill-man.
They'd have made great teaser shots.
I asked Mrs Havens if her husband liked to dive, and she said "No, no."
"He didn't like going under the water at all." So during the making of Creature,
the best Havens could do was float on the surface with a face mask and a snorkel,
and look down 50ft or 60ft or whatever, and try to figure out what was going on.
He sketched out the way he wanted each shot to be shot,
but Welbourne said he couldn't work that way.
Havens, floating on the surface, couldn't see what was at the bottom,
and sketched things that weren't even there,
and Welbourne said all he could do was take advantage of what was down there.
So Bill Alland's idea was, he'd put on scuba gear and he'd go down,
and maybe that would kind of shame Havens into doing it.
So Alland dove down 50 feet, where they had underwater light platforms
and all kinds of stuff set up, and watched Scotty Welbourne doing his thing.
Then Alland came up and told Havens "Either you go down there,
see what he's doing and work with him, or just get out of the way."
And Havens said OK, fine, he'd just get out of the way.
So, according to Alland, even though the credits say
"Underwater sequences directed by James C Havens",
Alland says "He didn't have a damn thing to do with what went on underwater."
"Scotty Welbourne directed the underwater stuff."
Ricou Browning also remembers the situation with Havens,
but doesn't tell the story the same way. He said it wasn't that Havens was afraid,
it's just that he wasn't capable - he wasn't trained to go underwater.
According to Ricou, "Havens got in an inner tube and put on a face mask
and watched, as much as he could, what was going on."
"He depended a great deal on Scotty, and Scotty was a sharp character."
"And Havens just kind of left it to him and us to do our thing."
"He would watch, and comment now and then."
I asked Ricou, I said "In a perfect world,
should the credits say 'Underwater scenes directed by James Havens'
or 'Underwater scenes directed by Scotty Welbourne'?"
And he answered "I would just say a combination of people."
"I would give Havens credit."
The guy who filmed the out-of-water scenes was no slouch -
a guy named William Snyder, who'd been around for years,
photographed a lot of pictures and had three Oscar nominations in the 1940s:
Aloma of the South Seas, The Loves of Carmen and Jolson Sings Again.
After Creature he worked a lot at Walt Disney Studios.
He also shot The Conqueror, the John Wayne Genghis Khan movie,
a movie that's notorious, A, for not being very good,
and B, for having been shot on location in Utah near an atomic test site.
A frighteningly high number of the cast and crew were later stricken by cancer.
Welbourne's no longer with us. Maybe that had something to do with it.
But he'd be over 100 years old today, and maybe that's something to do with it, too.
Carlson developing the photograph here makes me think of the Figueroa story,
Figueroa saying that he had once seen a photo of the real Amazon monster,
and that he could get a print of it if Orson Welles didn't believe him.
Ben Chapman will be appearing as the creature in a minute or so.
Ben Chapman is a Tahitian, born in Oakland, California,
while his parents were on a trip to the United States.
He was raised in Tahiti, relocated to the US in 1940,
and went to school in the Bay Area of San Francisco.
He was a Tahitian dancer in clubs before he landed his first movie job,
in an MGM musical with a Tahitian setting called Pagan Love Song.
He was a dancer in it, but he got along so well with the director
that he also got an additional little part as Rita Moreno's boyfriend.
He had other small parts before the Korean War sidetracked his career.
Upon his return from Korea, he was hired as a stock player at Universal.
Creature was his best movie role,
even if all you ever see is the inside of his mouth,
but he kept plugging away for years, acting on TV and Jungle Jim movies.
Eventually, he moved to Hawaii and got a job with a realty company,
but his business card had artwork of the creature on it.
Chapman plays the gill-man in the scenes shot at Universal.
He says Arnold insisted he walk like this.
The creature glides in water, so Arnold wanted him to glide on land, to shuffle.
In fact, they sometimes put lead, maybe as much as 10lb of it,
in his creature boots, a reminder not to lift his feet when he walked.
I had a strange talk with Henry Escalante, the actor who just got attacked.
I called him up, fishing, as it were, for more Creature stories,
and very, very casually, he told me that he played the creature.
He talked about how hot the suit was and how tough it was to breathe.
He told me he had a guy fanning him all the time.
He talked about how he sweated in the costume
and how the perspiration burned when it got into his eyes.
He talked about Jack Arnold. He could not have sounded more casual.
He sounded believable, but there wasn't one word of truth in anything he said.
It was the strangest conversation I ever had with anybody about a movie.
You'll notice these footprints don't match the way the creature walked.
He dragged his feet - he didn't take those kinds of steps.
Vision was a problem for both Ben Chapman and Ricou Browning.
For Chapman, they made different sets of eyes.
It all depended on how far away from the camera he was. For close-ups,
they gave him eyes that filled the whole eye socket, and he could hardly see.
Somebody would point a flashlight in the direction they wanted him to walk,
and Chapman, who could barely see the light, would head off that way.
For medium shots, the holes were bigger and he could see better,
and for long shots, he had eyes with good-size holes, and could see fine.
For Ricou Browning, working underwater, it was a lot harder.
At first, he tried to wear goggles under the creature mask,
but once water got in the goggles, you couldn't get it out.
They gave him a face mask,
but that made the gill-man face bulge out too far.
Finally, they just gave up, and he used his naked eyes.
That was tough, because the creature mask was bigger than his head,
and sometimes the eyeholes were a couple of inches from his real eyes.
Seeing out was like lookin' through a keyhole from a couple inches away.
He said his vision was often very blurred, and that a lot of it was kinda hit and miss.
The creature suit we see in the movie was not the first one
the make-up department came up with. The first one was very different
from the eventual design, and it was rejected pretty quickly.
Ricou Browning described it as more streamlined than the one we know.
According to Ricou "It had less scales, less fins,
and the head was more like you were wearing a tight stocking."
"A little bit more human in appearance."
That early rejected head was sculpted by Chris Mueller,
almost certainly from a design by Milicent Patrick.
And when Universal started thinking about making a second Creature movie,
there was talk of adding a Gill-Woman.
The rejected gill-man head, or something like it,
would have been used as the head of the female creature.
When the rejected head was made, it was supposed to be a gill-man,
but the eventual gill-man head used in the picture looked so ferocious
that this more human head looked almost feminine by comparison.
Q Magazine: "This horrendous pseudo-science-fiction melodrama
revolves, wildly, in three dimensions and with considerable excitement,
around a poor ancestral fish that never quite made the grade to man."
"However, it ain't funny, McGee. On the contrary, it's pretty scary."
"And Creature from the Black Lagoon is a first-rate thriller-chiller of its type."
But when the movie played on TV, the New York Times always called it
"about as charming as a dead cat".
There is such a thing as rotenone, they didn't make it up.
It's a crystalline substance used in insecticides.
Universal decided not to use real rotenone,
so they had to do some experimenting during preproduction,
combining pure cream with aluminum for shots of rotenone on the surface,
and they used pure cream alone for the underwater shots.
Here in one rowboat are the two leading sci-fi stars of the '50s.
Richard Carlson was in It Came from Outer Space,
The Magnetic Monster, The Maze and Riders to the Stars.
Denning was in Target Earth, Creature with the Atom Brain,
The Day the World Ended and Black Scorpion.
They were both in Black Lagoon, of course. So they're even, sci-fi-wise.
When I asked Denning about Carlson, he wasn't crazy about the guy.
Denning said Carlson could be uppity,
and that goes along with what other people have told me.
The one who said it best was Michael Fox, who worked with Carlson
in Magnetic Monster and Riders to the Stars, and half a dozen other movies.
He said Carlson envisioned himself an actor, writer, producer, director.
And Carlson was all those things at various times, by the way.
Fox said it was sad. Carlson was a good-looking guy, he was bright,
he was quite well read in many areas, but the moment Carlson thought
somebody else was in authority, he'd tell that person how to do his job.
According to Fox, "Carlson was used to being the intellectual limelight."
"He did not like to share it with someone who was, in his opinion,
lesser than he."
Incidentally, Richard Denning, who's out to bag the creature,
certainly did know his way around boats and nets and traps.
When Denning got back from serving in World War II,
he, like a lot of other young actors who'd had their careers interrupted,
had a hell of a hard time getting it started again.
He and his actress wife Evelyn Ankers had used all their savings,
so they moved into a house trailer at Paradise Cove,
and he set up 100 lobster traps. Denning had always loved the water
and boats, so I guess this was almost second nature to him.
He had a rowboat - he couldn't afford an outboard -
and he would row the traps out in the evenings and collect them at dawn.
The Dennings lived on lobster and sold lobster,
and years later, when he and Ankers looked back at that time,
they realised those were their happiest times.
Then Denning got work playing Lucille Ball's husband on the radio show
that was later changed for TV into I Love Lucy,
he started starring in B-movies again and he let the lobster business go.
He died in 1998, and Richard Carlson died in 1977.
The Rita was a real boat out on Park Lake on the Universal back lot,
but some scenes on the Rita were shot indoors on a duplicate Rita,
on Universal's process stage.
The scenes at the beginning, of Richard Denning firing the spear gun,
were shot indoors with the jungle projected on a screen behind them.
And this eerie nocturnal scene here was shot on the process stage, at about 9am.
The scenes in the creature's grotto were also shot on a set on the process stage.
Here's Ben Chapman, about to climb onto the boat.
Or, I should say, to try to climb onto the boat.
Once the suit got waterlogged it weighed a ton,
and even the young and strong Chapman couldn't climb a rope
with those slippery, wet gloves on and his suit weighing him down.
So what they did was get a big stepladder and put it in the water,
the top step just below the surface.
Chapman's walking up the ladder as he pretends to be climbing the rope.
But the mistake is, when he gets scared by the lantern
and lets go of the rope, you can tell that he's standing on something.
When Chapman let go, he should've dropped into the water like a rock,
but he stood on the surface for a split second and then fell off to the side.
Creature was Jack Arnold's fourth feature film and his third in 3-D.
He'd directed It Came from Outer Space
and murder drama The Glass Web with Edward G Robinson.
Jack Arnold was born on a kitchen table in Connecticut,
the son of young Russian immigrants.
He was raised in New York and began acting on Broadway in the 1930s.
In the war, he was a cameraman for documentary-maker Robert Flaherty.
After his discharge he made promotional films
with titles like Chicken of Tomorrow for the Agriculture Department,
while at the same time continuing to act on stage.
In 1950, he directed a public-relations film
for the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, With These Hands.
It starred Broadway actors Sam Levine, Arlene Francis and Joseph Wiseman.
With These Hands went into general release, became a critical success,
and received an Oscar nomination as best documentary feature.
Off of that project, he was discovered by Universal,
who placed him under contract in 1952.
As well as the movies he directed, he also produced and directed for TV,
including such series as It Takes a Thief and Gilligan's Island.
He was one of the first major sci-fi directors, and as a result,
his work was, in later years, honoured at film festivals,
in Mill Valley, California, France, Spain and Brazil.
In 1982, Creature from the Black Lagoon was to be remade
in colour and 3-D, a big budget, and with Jack Arnold at the helm.
John Landis brought the project to Arnold.
Landis was going to executive produce, Rick Baker was chosen
to furnish the creature, based on the classic design and make-up effects,
and Nigel Kneale wrote the screenplay, but this Creature was never made.
Universal decided to put their money behind Jaws 3-D instead.
Jack Arnold died in 1992.
I never understood how they could dive down, down, down to the creature's lair
and wind up in a cave that's at sea level, with a beach entrance.
You'd also think it would be as dark as the ace of spades in there.
This hand-on-the-shoulder gimmick is a cliché today,
but it still worked in 1954. It got a great reaction.
Ernest Nims remembered a scene in It Came from Outer Space
where Barbara Rush did the same thing to Carlson-came up and touched him.
It worked there, so Nims suggested they do it in Creature. Again it got a scream.
People who saw Creature at a preview mentioned it on their comment cards.
When something worked, Universal never let go.
They used it in Tarantula, with John Agar on the receiving end,
The Deadly Mantis with Craig Stevens, Cult of the Cobra with David Janssen,
Monster on the Campus with Joanna Moore,
right down the line for the rest of the decade.
One of the creature's habits was to pick guys up and throw them.
He did it to the college student in Revenge of the Creature,
and he did it to Jeff Morrow at the end of Creature Walks Among Us.
The plan here was for the creature to pick Zee up and throw him.
In the script, Zee would be thrown into the camera for the 3-D effect.
The actor, Bernie Gozier, was on a wire, and he would be pulled up into the air,
once Ben Chapman grabbed him and pretended to lift him.
They tried it, and twice the wire broke.
Finally, Jack Arnold decided to have the creature choke the guy instead.
But if you watch close enough, you can see in this shot coming up here
that the creature does reach down for the guy's leg.
They shot that before they found out the wire gag wasn't going to work.
Julie Adams says Creature was very pleasant and they all laughed a lot.
And she particularly liked this scene here.
"We were on the beach, doing the scene where the creature has killed a native."
"We were looking down at the body and we were all very still."
"Richard Carlson was in his trunks with his face mask on his forehead,
and in just the way people take off their hats for the dead,
he reached up and took off his face mask."
"He doffed it so seriously that we all started to laugh,
and it took a long time to come back together again. It was just too absurd."
"We had this wonderful guy who did the clapboard, an old vaudevillian."
"The day Whit Bissell's face was bloodied by the creature,
this fellow clapped the board, and said to Whit..." - Julie said this
out of the corner of her mouth - "'How are you fixed for blades?"'
Jack Arnold had the same attitude about the gill-man as Arthur Ross.
Arnold said that he set out to make it a very sympathetic character.
In one interview, Arnold said the creature was violent
"because he's provoked into it. Inherent in the character
is the statement that all of us have violence within,
and if provoked, are capable of any bizarre retaliation."
"If left alone and understood,
that's when we overcome the primeval urges that we are all cursed with."
"Man's inhumanity to man means not only inhumanity to his own kind,
but to anything else-especially something different from himself."
"You can trace the roots to primitive tribes, one against the other,
in cities, to this block against the next block, the Jew against the Arab,
the Protestant against the Catholic, black against white."
"We have not progressed to differentiate what is superficial and what is not."
"The sooner we learn the lesson, the better off we'll be."
"That's what I tried to say in my films, in a manner an audience would accept."
"I don't think they'd accept a polemic. They'd walk out on it,
or it'd be under investigation by the House Un-American Activities Committee."
"My objective was to entertain, but I also wanted to say something."
"If ten per cent of the audience grasped it, then I was very successful."
Whit Bissell, who's in several Jack Arnold movies, was a versatile character actor,
and an ideal choice for the part of the gentle Dr Thompson.
He was just as suited for his ruthless mad-scientist roles
in I Was a Teenage Werewolf and I Was a Teenage Frankenstein.
He was one of the most recognisable of 1950s supporting players.
He's also in sci-fi pictures like Lost Continent, Target Earth with Denning,
Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Arnold's Monster on the Campus,
The Time Machine, The Manchurian Candidate, Soylent Green,
and Psychic Killer with Julie Adams.
Bissell was from New York City. He worked on the stage from boyhood,
and appeared in Broadway plays before he went Hollywood in the mid-1940s.
He worked in movies at first under the name Whitner Bissell,
in pictures like Holy Matrimony, Destination Tokyo and Brute Force.
His busiest decade for film work was the '50s.
He made more than 50 movies in ten years -
a lot of small parts, but a few co-starring roles, too.
He was in lots of sci-fi TV series, and he was a regular on Land of the Giants.
Whit Bissell died in 1996.
It's hard to believe Bissell, or anybody, could fall asleep
guarding a seven-foot-tall killer from the dawn of time.
Maybe it's that soothing music, a Henry Mancini composition "Monster Caught".
It's funny to think of Henry Mancini writing music for monster movies,
and without credit at that, but this was years before Peter Gunn
and his several Academy Awards
for Breakfast At Tiffany's and "Moon River" and Days of Wine and Roses.
He also won over 20 Grammies. And in 1990, David Schecter tells me,
Mancini put out a CD called Mancini In Surround,
including music he wrote for Creature, an excellent piece "Monster Gets Mark".
You'll hear it during the scene where the creature kills Richard Denning.
Mancini reorchestrated and slightly recomposed the cues,
and he conducted them at a much more leisurely pace,
but it was still clearly Creature music.
Mancini also contributed to It Came from Outer Space
and Tarantula, and lots of other golden oldies.
Whit Bissell strikes the creature with a lantern, setting him afire.
They got a stunt man named Al Wyatt, Rock Hudson's stunt man,
and they put him in a fire suit and set him on fire.
They took that footage and superimposed it over this shot
of Ben Chapman, of the creature, waving his arms and pretending to be on fire.
Bob Burns tells me that in 3-D, the scene didn't work.
He says Wyatt must've been closer to the 3-D camera when he did his part
than Chapman was when he did his scene.
Burns says in 3-D, the creature and the fire seem to be different distances away.
Did you notice the way Antonio Moreno gave the impression
he was about to cover Whit Bissell, like he was dead,
and then he put the sheet down again?
I don't know if that was on purpose or not, but it was a great fake-out.
Tough as Browning and Chapman had it, the man who played the gill-man
in Revenge of the Creature probably had it even tougher.
The gill-man suits for Ricou and Ben were made in multiple pieces,
and had what are called flex gaps near the elbows, shoulders and knees,
which gave Ricou and Ben a little freedom and mobility when they moved.
But the suit worn by stunt man Tom Hennesy in Revenge of the Creature
was a moulded one-piece bodysuit,
which Bob Burns, who's had to wear suits like that in his time,
tells me are not made to flex, give you no freedom, and are very uncomfortable.
There were two sequels to Creature: Revenge of the Creature, in 1954,
and The Creature Walks Among Us, made in 1955.
Ricou Browning played the underwater gill-man in all three.
In Revenge, the land gill-man was played by Tom Hennesy,
and in Creature Walks, where the creature is seriously burned in a fire,
the smooth-skinned gill-man was played by actor Don Megowan.
The only name listed in the credits for make-up is Bud Westmore,
but he was just head of the make-up department. He did little of the work.
He liked to make out he did, he was a self-promoter and a publicity hound,
and for most every Universal monster movie there are a bunch of photos
of Westmore painstakingly working on the thing -
Westmore in his white shirt and tie and his sweater.
That was a tip-off-nobody who's really doing any work
in a make-up lab wears an outfit like that while he's working.
But that's how Westmore would show up when photos were going to be taken.
There's a story I shouldn't tell, but I will, about sculptor Chris Mueller,
the very talented guy who sculpted the gill-man's head and hands.
He started as an architectural sculptor, and his career went backaways.
He worked on the Sabu Thief of Bagdad, making the temple and the all-seeing god.
He sculpted animals for The Jungle Book, and for 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,
and also worked at Universal, doing architectural stuff first,
then gravitating to the make-up department.
He sculpted the hunchback and phantom for Man of a Thousand Faces,
the Hyde mask for A&C Meet Jekyll and Hyde,
the mummy for A&C Meet the Mummy, etc, etc.
So one day Mueller is at Universal, working on the gill-man head,
and somebody else tipped him off. The guy told Mueller
"If Bud Westmore tells you to take the rest of the day off, don't."
"That means that the press is coming in to take pictures,
and Westmore doesn't want you around."
Mueller goes back to work and sure enough, in comes Bud Westmore.
Westmore looks at the head Mueller's sculpting and says
"Oh, Chris, that's just great. Man, you're doin' a terrific job."
"Why don't you take the rest of the day off?"
And Mueller, still working, tells Westmore "No, I wanna finish."
Again Westmore says "Chris, you're doing great work, take it easy."
Mueller doesn't budge. "I don't wanna go. I'm almost finished."
"I'm so close to being finished. I can finish this today."
And what could Westmore say to that?
Out Westmore goes and then half an hour or an hour or whatever later,
sure enough, here comes Westmore back in, this time with the press corps.
Westmore in his sporty outfit, goes to where Mueller is working,
picks up one of Mueller's sculpting tools and holds it right to the head,
but he doesn't touch the head because he didn't know what he was doing.
Mueller's standing behind the head, still working,
and the photographer starts snapping away.
The pictures are published and the captions say
"Bud Westmore at work on his newest creation, the creature."
No mention of Mueller, but there he was in the pictures.
Because of where Mueller was, they couldn't crop him out.
Mueller got a kick outta that, and he used to enjoy telling that story.
The gill-man outfit was expensive, needless to say.
According to Universal's publicity, which probably inflated these figures,
it was valued at $18,000,
and was the product of eight-and-a-half months of experimentation.
"Fashioned of foam rubber, plastic,
hidden controls and specially-tailored fittings,
the costume forms the end result of 76 body sketches, 32 different head models,
and 176lb of foam rubber used during the experimental stages."
There were articles about the suit in magazines,
including non-movie magazines like Mechanix Illustrated.
There were also behind-the-scenes photos and an article in Skin Diver.
According to Skin Diver, the August 1954 issue,
Creature, which had only been out two months, had already grossed two million.
Hey, the cracked boom has mysteriously fixed itself.
I mentioned that the gill-man outfit had flex gaps
that gave the people inside a little freedom, but not a lot,
and it was a lot of trouble getting the actors in and out of the costume.
At lunchtime, Ben Chapman would take off the helmet, boots and gloves,
and they had for him a stand-up chair.
It looked like a chaise lounge, except that it stood straight up and had armrests.
He'd get into that, and there would be a high table for him to eat off of.
Ben Chapman also played the creature on TV in 1954.
He had a gag-cameo appearance in an episode of The Colgate Comedy Hour,
with Abbott and Costello, and, as the Frankenstein monster, Glenn Strange.
Universal considered TV a threat, the way most every other studio in Hollywood did,
but they used it to promote the movie anyway.
They let Chapman go on The Colgate Comedy Hour.
Julie Adams made some promotional appearances,
and they even had a trailer for the movie on TV, which caused a bit of a squawk.
A couple of TV stations refused to run it,
but one person at Universal took that as a compliment to the movie, and wrote
"I can't think of higher praise for what we have to sell on TV for Creature,
than to have a station refuse a spot because the material was too scary."
"We have had two such incidents locally, one with KTTV, a DuMont affiliate,
and KNBH, the NBC station. In both instances, it related primarily
to placement between programmes with juvenile followings."
"We finally won our point with KNBH, but it took considerable haranguing."
Creature had the same producer, director, and some writers,
as It Came from Outer Space, so it isn't surprising that a few echoes
from that plot should turn up. In It Came from Outer Space,
Carlson was an egghead and a peacenik who wants the xenomorphs left alone,
and he clashes with the hard-headed sheriff, culminating in a fistfight.
The relationship between Carlson and Denning in Creature
develops pretty much the same way, and they too come to blows,
at almost precisely the same spot in the picture.
The New York Times, in their review, complained
"It's an expedition that is necessary only if a viewer has lost all his comic books."
"The proceedings above and underwater were filmed in 3-D
to impart an illusion of depth when viewed through polarised glasses."
"This adventure has no depth."
Variety said "The below-water scraps between skin-divers and the thing
are thrilling and will pop goose pimples on the susceptible fan,
as will the close-up scenes of the scaly creature."
"Arnold's direction has done a first-rate job of developing chills and suspense."
The Hollywood Reporter: "Arnold's megging is briskly competent,
but too much time is wasted on underwater shots which are not novel
or dramatic enough to hold interest for the entire footage."
We're about to go underwater. This movie has 18 minutes of underwater footage.
Everybody working underwater had scuba gear,
but the way Ricou Browning worked underwater was,
he did what is called hose-breathing. He knew how to do that long before Creature.
Ricou says that his old boss, Newton Perry, the manager of Wakulla Spring,
was probably one of the first people to breathe from a hose underwater,
and he taught Ricou and other people how to do it.
You'd have an oxygen tank at the bottom, or, coming from the surface, an air hose.
Ricou could stick the air hose in his mouth and breathe,
like you would drink water from a hose in your back yard.
Ricou says they did hose-breathing in the shows at Weeki Wachee Springs.
That was how the mermaids breathed. Anyway, Ricou could do it very naturally.
He could insert the hose in the mouth of the creature,
then insert it a couple more inches to get it to his own mouth.
Ricou had several safety men with him at the bottom of Wakulla Spring,
guys he'd brought in himself. Some had worked with him in water shows,
others had done some cave-diving with him.
As he was getting ready to do a scene, Ricou would just be underwater,
ready to go, breathing from an air hose, with a safety man nearby.
When he was ready to do a scene, he'd give the cameraman a hand signal,
but he'd just stay in place, waiting for the cameraman to signal him
that the camera was rolling. Ricou'd hand the hose to his safety man,
swim into the scene and do what he had to do -
let's say it was a swim-through-so he'd swim right past the cameraman.
On the other side, there'd be another safety man with another air hose.
Between the fact he could hold his breath for a long time,
and all the air hoses and safety men down there,
he was able to stay underwater in the spring for long periods of time,
even though he was the only person down there with no scuba gear.
If he got in trouble, if he ran out of air with no one nearby,
what he'd do was just stop what he was doing and go limp.
That was his way of signalling his safety men to swim over and give him a hose.
Ricou tells a story about being out in the spring and needing to go to the bathroom.
Somebody offered to take him ashore in a boat, but he said he'd swim ashore.
He swam underwater,
because he said it was sometimes easier than swimming on the surface,
and he got to a ladder that was on the dock next to shore.
He climbs up the ladder, still dressed as the gill-man,
and all of a sudden, in front of him, was some lady and her little girl.
And the little girl started screaming. Rico said
"She screamed and ran. The mother went after her,
and I went after both of 'em, trying to say 'Hey, it's OK."'
"But me saying 'lt's OK' didn't do a thing. They took off and that's the last I saw. "
"But I never went out of my way to try and scare anybody."
"From then on, I made sure I kept the head off whenever I came ashore."
Ben Chapman, on the other hand, liked to occasionally scare people.
He says a lot of folks used to visit the sets and watch them shoot,
including guests of people who worked at Universal.
When he knew people were coming, he'd swim to the middle of Park Lake
and float there, with just the top of a helmet and the eyes showing.
He'd stay like that until he saw the people arrive,
and then he'd swim under the water and come bursting up like a porpoise,
and then go under again. He'd make it hard for them to really see him.
"Then I would swim in towards them with just the eyes showing."
"I'd swim in this way, getting as close to shore as I could."
"Of course, it's becoming shallower."
"I'd swim in to where it was a foot and a half deep, and then I'd stand up and..."
Ben let out a roar. Ben said some of the guests would just about wet their pants.
Audiences loved the underwater scenes. Bob Burns saw Creature when it was new,
and says that in the underwater scenes the water seemed to disappear,
and it looked like the gill-man was floating in midair in the theatre.
He said it was just amazing. There was a preview of Creature
at the United Artists' Theatre in Los Angeles on January 7, 1954,
and on the cards people were asked to fill out, one of the questions was
"Which scene did you like most?" The underwater scenes won hands down.
Funnily enough - talk about a sign of changing times -
in answer to the question "Which scenes, if any, did you dislike?"
More than one person complained about Kay's line
"David and I are together all the time anyway."
To them, that meant that they were living together, and they squawked about that.
One person said he disliked all of it, especially
"when Kay made like Esther Williams - not the time or place for it."
Some other comments: "Most exciting picture I have ever witnessed."
"Give us more pictures like this, only in colour."
"I'm a bundle of nerves. I'll never swim in a lagoon."
"The spookiest picture I have ever seen, and screamed throughout."
One person complained the plot was too much like The Thing, which is true,
but nobody mentioned King Kong, which was the inspiration.
As I said, watch Creature and Revenge back-to-back and you can't miss it.
In fact, one early script of Revenge of the Creature
ended with the gill-man being shot, not by the sheriff's posse,
but by a guy, or guys, shooting at him from a helicopter,
just like the biplane pilots who killed King Kong.
Speaking of the preview, or one of the previews,
Arthur Ross, who cowrote the picture, told me an interesting anecdote about it.
Ed Mull was the head of production at Universal, and according to Ross
"He sensed something in Creature that nobody else did
and they sort of laughed at him, but he said it was going to be a smash."
"For the preview of Creature, there were three buses of people."
"They took us to dinner and then downtown for the preview."
"Ed bade every executive, every contract producer,
every contract director come watch Creature, because, he said
'This will be the pattern and form and intent of our future films."'
"Harry Essex and I looked at each other and said 'He must be crazy!"'
Well, Ed Mull turned out not to be crazy. Creature cost Universal $463,700,
and by the end of 1954, it had already grossed three million.
Another negative review came from the Los Angeles Daily News.
"The action unreels as fast as an anchor being hoisted,
Miss Adams changes bathing suits several times,
walks woodenly and persistently into danger,
and screams so often and so loud that little babes in the audience grew pale."
Julie Adams, who shot this scene on her 27th birthday, has just screamed.
If I was Bissell, I'd be more worried about Carlson swinging that bat
than about the creature.
When Bissell's young daughters saw Creature in a theatre,
one of 'em stood up and screamed "It's going after Daddy!"
Milicent Patrick was one of the designers of the gill-man
and actually worked on the suit, and then, because she was a looker,
Universal sent her out on a tour to drum up interest in the movie.
Universal was going to promote her as "The beauty who created the beast",
but Bud Westmore, protecting his turf, took exception to that.
He claimed that the creation of the creature was completely his work.
Westmore, lying through his teeth,
said that many people had been involved in the original sketches,
but had all dropped out of the project when it became difficult.
As a result, he said, he spent four or five weeks himself
developing the model which was eventually used.
So, at a staff meeting, they decided to call Milicent Patrick
"The beauty who lives with the beasts". But even that didn't satisfy Westmore.
A couple days later, he barged into the office of an executive named Sam Israel
and said that he resented the whole project.
Sam Israel wrote in a memo "He is perturbed by Milicent being credited
for what he achieved in putting these monsters together,
and he would like us to ensure that, as far as possible,
the interviews stress the fact that he is the one who supervises
the entire creation of these creatures."
"Milicent's job, he says, is merely to put his ideas in the form of sketches."
"Frankly, I am fed up with these squawks from people who are paid to do a job."
"From what I hear, Milicent's contribution in this work is very important."
Milicent Patrick went on a whirlwind tour.
She did a jillion print interviews, and appeared on radio and TV.
She was on the Today Show and toured theatres that were showing Creature,
and Bud Westmore made it his business to get newspapers from cities she visited.
He discovered she was being credited as the designer of the creature,
and he made it known that he wouldn't use her as a sketch artist any more.
The suits at Universal tried to make Westmore see that she herself
did everything possible to credit him, and if there was any blame,
it was Universal's fault or the newspapers' fault.
One executive, who was exchanging memos with another executive, wrote
"It would be most unfair if Westmore discontinued
using the services of Patrick as a result of his pique."
"We haven't had a more cooperative person on tour than Miss Patrick."
"In every interview, she made it clear she worked for Bud Westmore."
"She plugged him as head of make-up, and followed the instructions we gave."
"Patrick conducted herself beyond any criticism from any point of view."
I've got a copy of Patrick's résumé, and unfortunately,
it doesn't look like she ever worked as a sketch artist at Universal again.
This is supposed to be dramatic. Julie Adams is so glad Richard Carlson is safe,
but it's so obvious she doesn't wanna get wet, I'm sure because the water was cold.
It was cold at night. Denning remembers shooting in the lake one October night.
They were out in the water and they were tired,
and a prop man brought them brandy to keep them from freezing to death.
"It worked great and we were going fine,
then we wrap it up and go to the dressing rooms."
"They're warm, and all of a sudden..." - Denning starts slurring his words -
"that brandy hit us like a sledgehammer."
"But out in the cold and the wet and wind, it didn't bother us at all."
Ricou Browning had the same thing happen.
Everybody was trying to be nice, kept bringing him brandy,
and pretty soon, they had a drunken creature.
So Ricou figured he'd better cut that out.
I think the idea of a drunken creature is kinda cute.
Julie Adams has a soft spot in her heart for the creature. She told me:
"The creature scared people, but there was a sweetness about it."
"In the real classics, there always is that compassion for the monster."
"I think maybe it touches something in ourselves, maybe the darker parts,
that long to be loved and think they really can't ever be loved."
"It strikes a chord. That's what Creature from the Black Lagoon did."
We're about to get a good look at the creature's gills pulsating.
Rubber tubes came into the back of Ben Chapman's helmet,
through the dorsal fin, and ran to the gills, where there were balloons or air pockets.
On the end of the hose, there was a guy off camera with a hand pump.
Chapman and this other fellow worked together to create the effect.
Chapman would open his mouth and gasp at the same time that the pump guy
pumped the gills. That way, it looked like the gasping made the gills flare out.
Julie Adams is replaced here by stuntwoman Polly Burson,
who got swept off the boat by Ben Chapman.
Now a scene shot in Florida,
Ricou Browning swimming underwater with Ginger Stanley in his arms.
That was our next-to-last shot at Ricou.
From now on, it'll be Ben Chapman up until the last shot of the movie.
Ricou was recently profiled in People magazine in connection with Creature.
But he's more proud of a lot of the other things he's done.
He writes, he's directed, he created the TV series Flipper,
he directed the underwater parts of Thunderball, and to him,
Creature was just another movie, just another job.
Ben Chapman, on the other hand, revels in having played the gill-man,
and he regularly appears at sci-fi cons and autograph shows.
He's also given a lot of thought to what made the gill-man so popular.
Here's some music from The Wolf Man as Carlson climbs out of the water.
Chapman says that if you look back at all the thrillers Universal made,
The Phantom, Hunchback, Frankenstein, Dracula, The Mummy and Creature:
"They were all very successful. And why?"
"If you'll think about it, they're all Beauty and the Beast."
"The phantom was in love with the girl, the hunchback loved Esmeralda,
the mummy had his princess. They would never hurt the girl,
only the people that got in their way. The gill-man was the same type of monster."
"After that, of course, movies changed, Universal changed,
stories changed, people's attitudes changed,
and now the studios are not making the quality thrillers they made before."
"Now it's all blood and gore. In the old days, these Universal pictures
were all well done, and the best of 'em were all Beauty and the Beast."
"My pride is that I was the original creature from the Black Lagoon."
These cave scenes were shot on the process stage at Universal.
The cave walls were made of plaster, but they were still hard as a rock.
When Chapman carried Adams there, he was wearing the medium-sized eyes,
and he couldn't see very well, and the cave was dark and narrow.
He banged her head against the rock wall. She let out a yelp, and she was hurt.
Not badly, but she had a cut or a bruise on her forehead,
so a nurse had to come and look at it.
There's a shot of Adams having a bandage put on her head by the nurse,
and around her are Jack Arnold, Richard Denning, Richard Carlson,
and, squatting down and looking very concerned, the creature.
I like this bit here of Carlson getting lifted in the air.
When the creature puts him down, notice the claw marks on Carlson.
He's got puncture wounds from the creature's thumbs on his sides,
and he's got gashes from the creature's other eight fingers
on the sides of his back.
In the Maurice Zimm treatment, Black Lagoon,
the gill-man is shot up and then devoured by piranha.
A later draft ended with Reed killing the gill-man on the boat deck with an axe:
"The axe protruding from the neck of the gill-man,
apparently embedded there, cutting the spinal cord."
"As the gill-man falls, the axe is pulled from Reed's grasp."
"Camera slowly pulls back to a full shot. No one moves or speaks."
A conclusive ending like that wouldn't do.
Jack Arnold told an interviewer that the gill-man wasn't destroyed because
"the studio wanted to keep him in there for a sequel, and I loved him."
"I called him 'the beastie', and I wanted to leave it a little open,
not show him destroyed. I thought he was very sympathetic,
due in no small way to the work of Ricou Browning."
Arnold was right about Ricou Browning, and about Universal thinking "sequel".
Even before Creature was released, the outline for Revenge was written.
The studio had no intention of letting what was
the best articulated full-body monster costume ever made
go to waste after just one movie.
Weeks after Creature went into release, an outline temporarily titled
Sequel to Creature from the Black Lagoon was on William Alland's desk,
dated February 26, 1954,
and opening with the lines
"The Rita chugs slowly up the Amazon."
"They are on their way to the Black Lagoon to see if the gill-man is still alive."
I'm Tom Weaver. Thank you for listening.