Invaders was my first big break in the movie Biz. I had worked for some smaller FX shops around town and went out every day with my portfolio making the rounds of every FX shop, production facility, and movie studio I could get into. One day I got a call from someone at a production office that they wanted to "take a meeting with me." I don't even know where they got my name. I met with Les Dilley, the production designer, who was well-known as an art director for movies like Alien and Star Wars. At that time found out the movie was Invaders from Mars, my favorite movie when I was a child. We got along very well and he like my portfolio, so invited me to lunch the next day in Hollywood. I couldn't believe it, a real hollywood lunch meeting.
When I arrived, it wasn't just me and him, but the whole production crew including Toby Hooper, the director, the producers, and two of the best FX people in the business, John Dykstra and Stan Winston. They had, at that point, decided on everything except for three props. Toby drew a peanut shape on a napkin and asked me if I could turn that shape into a spaceship. As it happened, I had about a three inch ball fo clay in my pocket, so while everyone went on with their meeting, I used some silverware and sculpted an organic spaceship with bones and tendons and meteor crators and window and other nifty stuff. They passed it around, then told me to report the next day to Apogee FX, John Dykstra's company, the second most famoud FX shop in the world, nest to the newly-formed ILM. I was now given free reign to sculpt the model spaceship anyway I wanted.
When I showed up at work, everyone was very nice to me and accepted me as one of their own. Later that day, someone from the studio came in and gave me the alien raygun to sculpt, as well. Since I came from a fine arts background, I was winging it making alien bits and pieces of things, but it was a lot of fun being allowed to be totally creative. No sooner had I finished sculpting those items, when I was told to report to location in an aircraft hanger on San Pedro Island in Long Beach. They had built the entire interior of the alien spaceship inside this hanger, along with a couple hundred feet of underground tunnels and caves. My job was to design and build the major prop for the movie, the giant needle machine, which drills and implants a controling chip into the base of the skull of unlucky captives, which turned out to be pretty much the whole cast.
I got to hire only one helper, Larry Carr. He had been running his own moves way before me, including some the best selling slasher films of all time. He was invaluable. During the first day I had to come up with a design and start on it. I was plenty scared because I had never made anything this big before.
We had to build scaffolding and use ten foot ladders to work thirty feet in the air. Our sculpted shapes were bolted and glued to giant aluminium tubes about six feet in diameter. They had to contract within each other, then slide out again, so all the added parts could only be six inches thick. There was never enough materials and every morning some other group had stolen our ladders, and we had to steal them back. For a few days, one of the set painters helped out, and for this, she was awarded my lead sculptor credit. I think it took a couple of months to finish the needle machine.
The day after it was finished, I came back to set to puppeteer the working of the ray guns. This went along fairly smoothly until we set up a shoot and all the actors and all the aliens are standing there and I've wired the ray guns so I can mechanically open them on cue and ramp up the highbeam lights that were installed, when Toby throws a fit because the ray guns don't work like real ray guns, what with the wires and cables coming out of it. He had approved everything weeks before. He shut down the set and went back to his trailer to rewrite the scene. I tried to rewire everything to make it less obvious that we didn't actually have alien technoloy, but he decided to go another way.
Since this was the first major production and live set I had worked on, I had no idea what to expect. I had never seen so much animosity shown between fellow artists before, but at the same time, I met many exceptional people that remained my friends over the years.
