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 over two decades.
Science fiction expert Bill Warren calls it
"one of the most famous monsters ever created."
Another sci-fi authority, Bob Burns, says it's among the best monsters ever designed,
and that despite its Johnny-come-lately status,
it fits right 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 Be as tie.
We call him The Creature from the Black Lagoon.
Out of the Devonian Period, when life crawled out of the sea, it came.
From fish like thing to mammal, from mammal to a man-like horror of the sea
with the heart of a human, filled with hate, and a man-like instinct to love.
My name is Tom Weaver and together we'll go back to that black lagoon
and take a peek behind the scenes at one of the best and most famous
monster movies from the second-half of the 20th century.
In the beginning, there was William Al land.
Al land was the man who came up with the idea for Creature from the Black Lagoon
and who produced the picture.
Al land was born in Delmar, Delaware,
and he began his show business career as an actor with a Baltimore troupe.
A short time later, 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 did some
acting at the Henry Street Settlement House,
which is where he met Orson Welles.
This was in the '30s.
And Welles was then on the verge of forming his famous.
Mercury Players acting company.
Al land started working with the Mercury Players on stage and on the radio,
where he was part of the cast of the notorious Halloween, 1938,
War of the Worlds CBS radio broadcast,
which was so realistic it caused a panic among listeners,
and Welles and Al land were nearly thrown into jail.
Al land and Welles continued to associate for years.
Al land also acted in some of Welles' movies, including Citizen Kane.
Where Al land played the reporter whose face you never see,
the one who goes through the whole movie in shadow,
trying to find out what Charles Foster Kane's dying word, "Rosebud," meant.
I'm going to be interrupting myself several times in the next few minutes
while 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 here at a shot of Will Rogers Beach in Santa Monica,
a little west of Universal.
William Al land also socialized with Orson Welles,
and at some point in the '40s, perhaps during the making of Citizen Kane,
he was invited to have dinner at Welles' home.
It was a little bit of a party, I guess,
because Orson Welles' girlfriend was there, Dolores del Rio,
who was a Mexican actress, and Al land was there,
and a guy named Gabriel Figueroa,
who was a Mexican cinematographer, and 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 López, who later changed his name to Perry Lopez
and became a busy B-movie star and an A-movie character actor.
He played Jack Nicholson's former partner, Escobar the cop,
in Chinatown and The Two Jakes.
So here they all are at this dinner party at Orson Welles' home.
Just the four of them, I think.
And Gabriel 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 Amazon and claims a maiden,
and then it returns to the Amazon and the village is safe for another year.
Everybody just stared at Figueroa, I guess. He could tell they thought he was kidding.
And he started getting sort of worked up, and he insisted that it was absolutely true
and that the people who live on the Amazon talk about it all the time.
And he said he'd once seen a photograph of the monster
and that he could get a print of that photograph if they didn't believe him.
Notice the little rubber pinkie claw, instead of scratching the sand,
just bends out of shape.
For about five minutes Figueroa kept talking very earnestly 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,
and I don't know if anybody there ended up believing him,
but I do know that that little anecdote got
lodged in the back of William Alland's brain.
About 10 years later, Al land landed a job
as a movie producer at Universal International.
He made a lot of Westerns early on,
he made a Tony Curtis Arabian Nights sort of thing
called The Prince Who Was a Thief.
All moneymakers, I'm sure, but nothing world-shaking.
Interrupting myself again, here's a good example
of how movies go together like big jigsaw puzzles.
This is a shot of a speedboat racing across 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 image you see in the background on the process screen
was shot at Portuguese Bend on October 5.
And now we're 2,500 miles east,
beneath the surface of Wakulla Springs 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 in the scene were played,
or represented, I guess I should say,
by seven different people. It's amazing all the work that goes into making a movie.
Anyway, Alland's there at Universal, making picture after picture,
and then he starts coming up with ideas for science-fiction movies.
He dreamed up the idea for It Came from Outer Space
and assigned Ray Bradbury to write a treatment.
And right about that same time, maybe as little as just a few weeks later,
he himself wrote up and submitted to his studio bosses
a story idea called The Sea Monster.
It was just a little three-page thing, where
he spent the first page telling the story
of that real-life dinner conversation with Figueroa.
And then he pitched the idea that he should make a movie about that kind of monster.
He wanted the movie to start off with a scene of a dinner conversation,
just like the one they'd had in real life with Figueroa,
and then the movie would go on to show a small 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 started running away with him a little,
there was also supposed to be 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 with the suggestion
that they use one of two endings.
In one ending, the girl is abducted by the creature,
and her boyfriend has to rescue her and the monster gets killed.
And in the other ending, the creature is captured and brought back to civilization,
but it escapes and starts terrorizing a little seaport on the South American coast.
"Al land 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.
Al land took the idea of a man-fish from that conversation with Figueroa
and he got most of the rest of his original story idea from King Kong.
When they made Creature, they did go with the first ending, the simple ending
where the hero rescues the girl and the creature is killed.
But then a few months later, Al land produced a sequel, Revenge of the Creature,
which used the second ending. The creature is brought back to civilization,
and it escapes, and it abducts the girl it loves.
In Revenge of the Creature it's a different girl,
a different actress from the original Creature.
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 Al land back around 1995, two years before he passed away.
At the time when I talked to him,
I'd recently watched Creature and Revenge of the Creature back-to-back
and realized, for the first time, that the story was King Kong
set on the water instead of the land.
I asked Al land if he'd gotten his ideas from King Kong.
And 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 William Al land assigned to the movie was a fellow named Maurice Zimm,
who turned in a 59-page draft, titled Black Lagoon, in early December, 1952.
And it's sufficiently different from the movie to be worth mentioning here.
In this draft, Dr. Lyman Reed, an undersea explorer,
risks his life in various underwater adventures in order 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 on location
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 water-filled tank
and brought back to civilization. The tank is taken off the boat and put on a plane.
But Kay sneaks onto the plane when no one else is aboard,
and unlocks the tank so that 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.
At one point, 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
into the water by crossing a stretch of beach,
Dr. Reed shoots him over and over and over.
Reed yells out, "If I can't have him alive, then 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 home with Ted, instead.
The initial Zimm treatment is too much like King Kong, apart from all its other flaws.
But when this early draft was discussed in a December, 1952, memo,
the memo writer, who didn't sign his name,
wrote that he was sure it could be developed
into "a very fine horror movie."
The memo writer, whoever he was,
also mentions discussing the script with William Al land,
who said that he would change the ending
"to provide a means of possibly continuing this into sequels"
"by keeping the monster alive,"
"or at least leaving his fate in doubt at the end of the picture."
So as early as 1952, plans were already being tentatively made
to turn Black Lagoon into a series.
There were a lot of monster's-eye-view shots in It Came from Outer Space,
produced by William Al land and directed by Jack Arnold several months earlier.
So Al land 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 mostly off screen
in its first couple of scenes.
We don't get to really see the creature until a third of the way through the movie.
For the roar of The Gill Man, which you'll hear for the first time in a moment,
the Universal sound technicians reportedly 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 eventually 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 big baseball-mitt sized hand
reaching up and grabbing Rodd Red wing by the 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 the Rita.
Back to the script of Black Lagoon. Maurice Zimm handed in his draft,
and then a writer named Leo Lieberman came in and worked for about two months.
But the story still wasn't in very good shape. In fact, according to Arthur Ross,
the Universal front office had turned it down
and said they weren't going to do the picture.
That was the point at which Al land turned to Ross, a Chicago-born screenwriter,
who did a lot of work whipping the story into shape.
Ross took a look at what had been written and he quickly realized
"that it was an imitation of films that had been made in the genre"
"at Universal for 25 years."
"The only difference was that it was an undersea creature"
"instead of a mummy, or Frankenstein, or Dracula."
Ross was, at the time, reading the book The Silent World by Jacques Cousteau,
and reading that book gave him the idea
that the scientist in the movie should be the hero, not the villain.
Remember, neither of the two scientists in Maurice Zimm's Black Lagoon was a hero.
One was a publicity-seeking nut, and the other was the movie's villain,
a real Snidely Whiplash type.
What Ross wanted to do was 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."
Al land understood right away what Ross was trying to do.
According to Ross, Al land knew that the first approach had failed miserably,
the old-fashioned script that they were trying to work with.
Ross told me,
"No matter what I'm doing, whether I'm writing something just to make a living,"
"or something I really believe is important,"
I never write down to an audience.
"I don't believe in that. Audiences are not stupid.
"They may not be geniuses, they may not be specialists in fields,
"but they are reasonably intelligent people, in the main, and for that reason
"I always felt that 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, would be these people versus the creature.
"The more they attack him, the more he attacks them.
"I wrote intelligent people doing intelligent things.
"Everyone, that is, except for the aggressive person, Richard Denning,
"who wanted the creature dead and mounted,
"considering that just as good as live and left alone.
"He was unintelligent and he was arrogant, and he caused the difficulties."
"And those difficulties finally had to be rectified in violence,"
"because by that time, the creature was a violent and beset thing"
"that had no choice but to fight them."
After Ross finished up, one last writer, Harry Essex, was brought in.
A few months earlier, Essex had had the very 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 subsequent years, Essex was more than happy to try to take all the credit
for It Came from Outer Space,
and I'm afraid he liked to try to take all the credit for Black Lagoon, too.
Writers had been working on Black Lagoon for months,
many drafts of the screenplay had been written,
and Arthur Ross had gotten 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 had bought the story for very little money, and assigned me to it.
"And I was bitter and angry.
"I didn't want to do anything with a title like Creature from the Black Lagoon.
"It was an embarrassment to me."
I should add, at this point, that the title
was just Black Lagoon when Essex worked on it,
but I'm sure you're already taking all these comments of his 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 in those days.
"Except in this particular case, I added the Beauty and the Beast theme.
"The whole idea was to give the creature a kind of humanity."
"All he wants is 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 the various scripts that never made it to the screen.
For one thing, the original intent was to keep The Gill Man off camera
until at least the middle of the movie.
Universal ended up spending so much money on The Gill Man costume
that, I guess, understandably,
they finally decided they wanted to show him early and often.
But all you see of him in the first halves of the early scripts are flash shots,
you see him in silhouette, you see him in shadow, et cetera.
And there was an evocative scene, also not filmed,
where the captain of the Rita talks about the fable of a beautiful mermaid
who once lived in one of the Amazon's hidden lagoons.
"It was a very beautiful legend about how this mermaid,
"she falled in love with a man on a ship. And nobody will believe him.
"And then one day, when the time came for him to go away,"
"she followed him, far out into the Amazon, only to lose her way"
"and be devoured by the crocodiles."
"Who knows? Maybe this mermaid, she was even the wife of this half-man half-fish."
That dialogue was designed to be heard as narration
over a montage of water and jungle images.
And it would have explained The Gill Man's fascination with Julie Adams.
Now, I'm trying to tell the story behind Creature
in some sort of chronological order,
but here I wanna jump ahead and mention that according to Chris Mueller,
the makeup department sculptor who sculpted the head and hands of The Gill Man,
when Universal was getting ready to make the second Creature movie,
there was some talk of having The Gill Man and a female creature in the sequel.
Needless to say, 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 a female creature, and I think I've seen all of them.
So, I guess it was just an idea being kicked around.
I'll talk a little more about that later.
Eight days.
All we dig up are enough stones to pave a road.
All the scenes in and around Dr. Maia's camp,
the fossilized arm sticking out of the rock wall,
the scene of The Gill Man killing the natives in the tent,
and now these digging scenes, were all shot on the Universal back lot,
at a spot called Sierra Canyon.
A few months earlier, Jack Arnold was shooting another movie in Sierra Canyon,
It Came from Outer Space.
Most of the desert exteriors for It Came from Outer Space
were shot on location in the Mojave Desert.
But when Richard Carlson goes down into the meteor crater and finds the spaceship,
those scenes were shot right here in Sierra Canyon.
They avoided showing the water and all the trees, of course, because in that movie.
Carlson was supposedly in a crater in the middle of the Arizona desert.
Over hundreds of years, perhaps over thousands of years,
the current would break it up.
If there is a dead end...
Ernest Nims, who was the supervisor
of the editorial department at Universal,
often made script suggestions.
And one recommendation he made for Creature
was in connection with the early scene
where The Gill Man's arm reached up 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"
"when they take the trip up the river to the Black Lagoon?"
"This would not only give added suspense, but would clarify the story point."
And, you know, 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 Dr. Maia's camp and another in the Black Lagoon
might have been misleading.
So, sure enough, somebody added a shot to the script.
As the Rita chugs toward the Black Lagoon, there's a shot of The Gill Man following.
It was a high shot down from the deck of the boat,
showing The Gill Man just below the surface.
"A long, shark-like shadow, slithering through the water, follows the vessel."
"As he lifts one hand out of the water, we recognize it as the green, taloned thing"
"we had seen poking out of the inland water at the geological camp."
Okay, 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 even hear the music abruptly jump ahead.
They must have taken it out at the last minute, and they didn't have the time,
or maybe they just didn't have the inclination, to fix the music.
They just let it skip ahead very noticeably.
Who took the shot out, and why, I have no idea.
Universal briefly considered shooting Black Lagoon in Eastman color.
And of all the Universal sci-fi movies of the '50s,
this is the one that really would have benefited from color, I think.
Creature would have been dynamite in color.
In fact, if the colorization fad hadn't died out,
and if they finally could have gotten it right,
I would have had no objection, whatsoever, to seeing Creature colorized.
When I told Bill Al land that Creature and Tarantula and some of his other pictures
would have been great in color, he said exactly the same thing,
that he would love to see Creature colorized,
he said it would look fabulous in color.
But I guess the expense of shooting in color worried Universal.
In color and 3D, they projected that.
Creature would wind up costing them $750,000.
So, pardon the pun, they scaled Creature down,
made it in black-and-white 3D,
which they figured would cost them $650,000.
What are you going to shoot at?
Does it make any difference?
This is a little embarrassing, maybe,
to the memory of Jack Arnold,
and I'm jumping ahead of myself again, but I'll point it out anyway.
On the first day of shooting, Tuesday, October 6, 1953,
the very first shot was the upcoming shot of the Rita
squeezing its way through the narrow opening that leads into 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...
Why, it's a blooper.
What's that telephone pole doing on the left-hand side of the screen?
It's impossible.
Much as I'd like to, there may not be time to talk about all of the actors
in Creature from the Black Lagoon.
I've got too much information here about other aspects of 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.
And Julie Adams just made the one. But by appearing with the creature,
the most recognizable of '50s movie monsters,
Julie Adams instantly jumped right to the front of the line.
She was born Betty May Adams in Iowa,
and she knew she wanted to be an actress from the days of grade-school plays.
In California, to pursue her career goal, she
took speech lessons to lose her Iowa accent,
and played most of her early roles in cheap.
Westerns for a little company called Lippert,
each of them made in less than a week.
At that point, she was still using her real name, Betty Adams,
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 proclaimed that she
possessed the most perfect legs in the world,
so Universal claimed that they insured her legs for $500,000.
That's an old, old publicity trick that went back to the '40s.
Betty Grable's legs were insured for a million. And it's even used today.
Just the other day, Jennifer Lopez insured her legs for 400 million.
Anyway, she had these great legs that were never seen in any of the movies she made,
mostly Westerns and things like that,
so, Universal gave her the bathing-suit lead in Creature.
And that instantly became her claim to fame,
the movie she's now best remembered for,
which is a "distinction" that she takes with humor.
More humor sometimes than at other times, perhaps,
but she's always been a good sport about it.
She worked a lot in television, including The Jimmy Stewart Show,
as Jimmy's Stewart's wife, and Yancy Derringer,
and a recurring part on Murder, She Wrote,
and she's still working in front of the cameras today,
most recently in the documentary about Creature
which you'll find at the end of this movie.
Adams has also made a few other science fiction and horror movies,
including The Underwater City, with William Lundigan,
and Psychic Killer with Jim Hutton, which was directed by her former husband,
actor-director Ray Danton.
She was also in one of Elvis Presley's movies,
the haunted-house comedy Tickle Me.
In case you get confused in the scenes
where Richard Carlson and Richard Denning go underwater,
if you can't figure out which is which,
notice that Carlson has two tanks on his back, and Denning just one.
They did that on purpose so people could tell 'em apart underwater.
All the underwater scenes in Black Lagoon were shot in Florida by a second unit
that was working there at the same time that Jack Arnold was shooting at Universal.
Obviously, none of the actors could be there, they were busy at Universal.
So any time the camera is underwater, know that those scenes were shot in Florida
and that none of the people you're seeing in those shots are the actual actors.
They hired two college students to double for Richard Carlson and Richard Denning.
A girl named Ginger Stanley doubled for Julie Adams,
and Ricou Browning, who I'll talk about more later,
played The Gill Man.
Today it's easy to overlook what an amazing accomplishment.
Creature's underwater photography was in 1953.
You have to keep in mind that 3-D was a fairly new process then,
and there were still a lot of bugs to iron out,
and now here's Universal trying to figure out a way to take a 3-D camera underwater.
I think that's impressive enough, right there, but on top of that,
it had to be a portable motion-picture underwater camera,
which was practically unheard of at that time.
This was 1953, when virtually every other underwater scene in any movie to date
had been photographed by stationary cameras, or through glass tanks.
Universal shot some test footage with this portable underwater camera
and they showed it to people from Life magazine, who were very impressed.
And maybe that's what gave someone at Universal the idea
that a Life photographer named Peter Stackpole
be asked to take a three-week leave of absence from Life magazine,
and go to Florida, and photograph the underwater scenes for the movie itself.
Peter Stackpole was one of the four original photographers for Life magazine,
and he was one of their top photographers,
taking lots of photos of movie stars when he lived in Hollywood.
He was also very 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, of course, was the fact that his participation
would practically ensure a layout on the movie in Life magazine,
and Universal would also get lots of first-rate stills
of the underwater sequences for their own use.
I don't know if Stackpole turned them down, or what happened there,
but the guy Universal ended up hiring to direct the underwater sequences
was a guy named James C. Havens, and that's a funny story that I'll save for later.
The underwater scenes of Creature were shot at Wakulla Springs, Florida.
Movies had been shot underwater there in the past.
Some of the Tarzan pictures,
like Tarzan's Secret Treasure from the old Johnny Weissmuller days.
And the place was managed by a fellow named Newton Perry.
Our first look at Ricou Browning as the underwater creature.
Newton Perry was also involved with various Florida water shows and things like that,
and he was obviously known in Hollywood,
because when Universal decided to shoot part of Creature there,
he was the man they called.
They asked Perry if he knew of any swimmers that he could recommend,
and they also asked if he knew of any locations
where they might be able to find something that looked like the Black Lagoon.
Perry said sure, he'd show 'em around.
But when the time came, he was off in Miami doing something,
and all of a sudden he wasn't available.
So Perry called his friend, Ricou Browning, in Tallahassee,
and asked Ricou to pick the Universal people up at the airport
and take them down to the spring and show it to them.
Ricou was 23 years old at the time, and attending Florida State.
He'd worked for Newton Perry in the past,
producing water shows at Weeki Wachee Springs.
Ricou went to the airport and picked up Jack Arnold
and a man named Scotty Welbourne,
who was going to be photographing the underwater scenes in Creature.
Together, they went out to the spring, and Arnold and Welbourne liked it.
Wakulla Springs is in the middle of nowhere.
And in 1953, and even right now, if you go there,
it would be like going to Florida with Ponce de León when he landed.
It's been that well protected.
The bowl of the spring is about five-acres big.
It's the largest spring in the state of Florida, and it has the largest water flow.
By the way, Ricou Browning was also a cave diver,
which means that he was hired at times to go down into underwater caves
to map them out.
The bottom of Wakulla Springs slopes down inside a cave, and it just keeps going.
Ricou doesn't know if anybody's ever gone the distance
as to how far you could actually go.
The deepest that Ricou and the cave divers he used to work with
ever went with air hoses there was, he says, 100, at the most 110, 120 feet.
But, of course, they didn't have some of the equipment, or the helium mixes
that divers have nowadays,
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 Springs.
But, as Ricou said, "They still may not have found the bottom."
Anyway, Scotty Welbourne had a movie camera with him that day at Wakulla Springs,
and he said to Ricou, "Would you do me a favor?"
"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 were very happy with the spring.
And Ricou took 'em to the airport and they left.
And, two or three weeks later, Ricou got a call from Jack Arnold, who said,
"We looked at the footage, we love the spring, and we love the way you swim."
"I like your style. How would you like to be the Creature of the Black Lagoon?"
And Ricou said, "Fine. Let's have at it."
Arnold said they'd send him tickets so he could come out 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 Richard Denning say something obnoxious in every scene,
so that we never forget that he's gonna be the heavy.
Browning went out to California and reported to Universal,
where various outfits for The Gill Man were being devised.
I should interrupt myself here and mention
that William Alland's concept of The Gill Man
was much more human than The Gill Man we see in the movie.
Al land had a sculptor sculpt the head of a very sad, beautiful monster.
"In fact, he told me," It wasn't a monster. It was far more attractive,
"more romantic-looking than the beast they ended up with."
"It had fish lips and gills and a vaguely fish like face,"
"sort of an aquatic development of a man."
"Al land told me," It would still frighten you,
"but it would frighten you 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 makeup department took over.
Kay doesn't know there's a creature in the Amazon,
but she does know from Lucas that it's full of nine-foot killer catfish.
You couldn't get me in that lagoon with dynamite.
Here comes the best and the most famous scene in the movie,
as Julie Adams takes a dip in the lagoon
and is ogled from below by yet another male admirer,
The Gill Man.
Julie Adams is doubled in this scene by Ginger Stanley,
a "mermaid" swimmer at Weeki Wachee Spring.
When the camera is underwater, it's Florida cinematographer Scotty Welbourne's camera,
and you're looking at Ginger Stanley.
When the camera is above water, then it's cinematographer William Snyder
photographing Julie Adams in Park Lake at Universal.
Ricou Browning's swimming 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'll be no dialogue for the next few minutes, so now might be a good time
to talk a little 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 watching a creature film"
"is the considerable musical accompaniment."
And he's right. A hefty 63% 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, 12, Henry Mancini, 10,
and Herman Stein, seven. The music we're hearing right now is by Herman Stein,
and the cue is called Kay and the Monster.
"The older films that contributed library music to Creature's score
"were from many different genres,"
writes Schecter. "Some, like Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid",
"were water-themed pictures,
"which is why the music was considered for use in Creature from the Black Lagoon.
"And also 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 many other Universal sci-fi films
"is its reliance upon a single musical motif,".
"Herman Stein's memorable three-note creature theme."
"In the film, practically every time you see the creature,"
"or his hands, or his back, or his feet,"
"or even his wet footprints, you hear his three-note theme,"
"often played on flutter-tongued trumpets."
Schecter calls the three-note Creature theme, "a memorable musical signature,"
which it certainly is.
It's instantly recognizable, even when it crops up in non-Universal sci-fi movies,
like Women of the Prehistoric Planet and Dracula vs. Frankenstein
that lifted music from Creature.
People who write about this movie often speculate
that this scene here was an inspiration to Steven Spielberg
when he shot some of the scenes of Jaws.
Because 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
makes me think of the scene in Kong,
where King Kong takes Fay Wray up to the mountain top,
and pokes her and tickles her.
I also wanna talk briefly about some of 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 Walt Disney Studios,
and she helped design the creature and did some of the final painting on the costume.
Chris Mueller was one of the sculptors,
Tom Case was a painter on the various Gill Man suits,
and Jack Kevan, who was Bud Westmore's right-hand man...
He was 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 than that.
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 makeup at MGM in 1932.
He made up the main characters in The.
Wizard of Oz, and then, during World War II,
he made prosthetic appliances for badly wounded men throughout the Pacific.
After the war, he got a job at Universal,
where he worked on A and 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 low-budget horror film
called The Monster of Piedras Blancas,
a thinly-disguised attempt to duplicate the success of Creature
with a lookalike sea monster.
Jack Kevan told me,
"They were lucky in finding a person like Ricou Browning,
"a person who could swim underwater,"
"and not be restricted by all 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,
"mold wise, 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.
Because anybody who gets into a suit like that and finds out they are claustrophobic
is in a world of trouble.
Once you were in that suit,
your eyeballs and the inside of your mouth was all that was showing.
Unfortunately, nothing is left of any of The Gill Man costumes today.
They were made of foam rubber, and that stuff doesn't last.
Even the molds used to make the suits have been destroyed.
Universal threw them away years ago to make some room.
It's a small thing, but I was always bothered
by the fact that they want us to believe
the creature was able to crack the boom just by his powerful swimming.
For one thing, the boat's not even anchored,
the creature would just tow the boat around the lagoon.
Frank Love joy was originally considered for the starring role in Creature.
Love joy was the police lieutenant hero of Warner Bros.' House of Wax,
a huge 3D hit earlier that year,
and maybe that was part of the reason Universal thought of him for Creature.
But then they decided to go with Richard Carlson instead.
For the part of Dr. Maia, Universal first thought of Ramon Novarro.
Ramon 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 kind of 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 movie company famous for its monsters,
but Universal tried to avoid putting an exploitative title on the movie.
They called it, simply, Black Lagoon for a long stretch of time,
but then they decided that that just wasn't going to cut it
and they sent out a memo requesting submission of alternate titles.
"The memo read in part," The request is for a title that may better suggest
"the shock and mystery value, and perhaps the prehistoric implications of the story."
"However, 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 William Al land, who had a lot of success with It Came from Outer Space,
recommended It Came From Out of the Sea.
The other four titles he suggested were The Demon of the Deep, The Sea Demon,
The River of Terror, and It Walks the Sea.
Incidentally, when Al land heard in the 1980s
that Universal was thinking of remaking Creature,
he felt that the studio should do another sequel instead of a remake.
Since the creature that Al land 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 Black Lagoon and transported to a lake
on the estate of a very wealthy family in the US.
They can communicate with the family and a whole relationship develops,
but unfortunately some heavies find out about them
and capture one or both of the children,
and the mother and father have to go out after them.
Al land wrote it all up and tried to make himself send it in to Universal
during all the many years that the studio talked about doing a new Creature movie,
but he never could bring himself to submit it.
William Al land passed away in 1997.
A second unit director named James C. Havens
was hired to direct the underwater second unit stuff in Creature.
And I'm sure Universal felt very fortunate to have gotten him
and no doubt had a lot of confidence in him.
He'd been around the movie business most of his life,
and he'd been around boats and water practically all his life.
I tried to track him down several years ago and I finally found his phone number,
but when I called, his wife answered and told me he had died several years before.
But I had a nice conversation with her, because she had married him in 1924.
And they'd been married for 65-and-a-half years,
so I figured she might know a little something about him.
And she made him sound like a real interesting guy.
He started out as an art director at MGM around 1924,
the same year he got married, and gradually, he got into marine directing,
which means he directed the seagoing scenes for movies, big movies.
Like Mutiny on the Bounty with Clark Gable,
and Captains Courageous with Spencer Tracy, and pictures like that.
And Havens always owned a boat. He had a sailboat first, without any engine,
and then he and his wife had ketches and motorboats and all kinds of boats.
Then he was a captain in the Marines during World War II,
a demolition expert for the Marines.
And when John Ford made the movie Mogambo in East Africa,
Havens shot the animal scenes for Mogambo in Tanganyika.
And he went around scouting locations in a Land Rover
right during the big Mau Mau Rebellion.
She made him sound like a real man's man,
a guy who could handle anything that could possibly come up,
which I'm sure he was.
So it was so funny, to me anyway,
to hear what happened to him during Creature from the Black Lagoon.
Havens goes to Florida to direct the underwater scenes
and Scotty Welbourne is there to photograph 'em.
And a few days pass, and William Al land gets a phone call from Florida
from the production manager,
"who tells him," You'd better come down here, there's all hell breaking loose.
"Havens and Welbourne, they're not getting along."
Anyway, Al land hears that all hell is breaking loose, so he goes to Florida.
And what's happening is Havens is afraid to go underwater.
Hang on for a second.
This is sort of an odd shot here, this very blurry shot of a hand,
followed a few seconds later by a shot of The Gill Man
swimming away in another hard-to-see shot.
Seems to me like shots like these
should have preceded our first good look at The Gill Man.
They'd have made great teaser shots.
"Anyway, 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, in Florida, during the making of Creature,
the best Havens could do was float on the surface of the water
with a face mask and a snorkel,
and look down 50 feet or 60 feet or whatever,
and try to figure out what was going on.
He had sketched out the way he wanted each shot to be shot,
but Scotty Welbourne said he couldn't work that way.
Havens, floating on the surface of the water, couldn't see what was at the bottom,
and I guess he was sketching things that weren't even down there,
and Welbourne was saying that all he, Welbourne, could do
was take advantage of what was down there at the bottom.
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 Al land put on the equipment and he dove down 50 feet,
where they had underwater light platforms and all kinds of stuff set up,
and he watched Scotty Welbourne doing his thing down there.
Then Al land came back up and he told Havens,
"Look, either you go down there, and see what he's doing and work with him,"
"or you've just got to get out of the way."
And Havens said, "Okay, fine," he'd just get out of the way.
So, according to William Al land, even though in the opening credits, it says,
"Underwater sequences directed by James C. Havens,".
Al land says, "He did not have a damn thing to do"
"with any of the stuff that 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 Al land did.
Ricou said it wasn't that Havens was afraid to go underwater,
it's just that he wasn't capable,
in other words, he wasn't trained to go underwater.
"According to Ricou," Havens got in an inner tube and put on a face mask
"and he would watch, as much as he could, what was going on.
"He depended a great deal on Scotty Welbourne,"
"and Scotty was a pretty 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 of Creature 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."
And the guy who filmed the out-of-water scenes in Creature,
he was no slouch either. He was a guy named William Snyder,
who'd been around for years, and had photographed a lot of pictures
and had received 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 percentage of the cast and crew were later stricken by cancer.
Welbourne's no longer with us, and maybe that had something to do with it.
But he'd be 100-and-something years old today,
and maybe that had something to do with it, too.
It's the greatest find yet.
Nothing compares to it.
I've got the proof here in my lens.
Richard Carlson developing the photograph here
makes me think back to the Gabriel Figueroa story,
Figueroa saying that he had once seen a photo of the real-life Amazon monster,
and that he could get a print of that photograph
if Orson Welles and his friends didn't believe him.
Ben Chapman will be making another appearance
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 worked as a Tahitian dancer in nightclubs
before he landed his first movie job,
a bit 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 like that
before the Korean War sidetracked his movie career.
He served in Korea, and upon his return, he was hired as a stock player at Universal.
Creature was the best movie role he ever had,
even if all you ever see of him is the inside of his mouth,
but he kept plugging away for years,
acting on TV and Jungle Jim movies, and things like that.
Eventually, he moved to Hawaii and got a job with a realty company,
but his business card had artwork of the creature on it.
For a merman, he takes a fine picture.
This wasn't imagination, Doctor.
I'm sorry, David.
What proof do we have if we never find it again?
Chapman plays The Gill Man in the scenes shot at Universal.
And he says that Jack Arnold insisted he walk like this.
The creature glides in water,
so Arnold wanted him to glide on land, too, to shuffle like that.
In fact, they sometimes put some lead, maybe as much as 10 pounds of it,
in the bottoms of his creature boots,
a reminder for Chapman not to lift his feet when he walked.
I once had a very strange conversation with Henry Escalante,
the actor who just got attacked.
I located him and 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 sometimes.
He told me he had a guy with a fan fanning him all the time.
He talked about how much he sweated in the costume
and how much the perspiration burned when it got into his eyes.
He talked about how he got along with Jack Arnold.
He could not have sounded more casual.
He sounded absolutely believable,
except there wasn't one word of truth in anything he said.
It was probably the strangest conversation I ever had with anybody about a movie.
Quickly!
By the way, you'll notice that these footprints they're about to show
don't match the way the creature was walking.
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 for different situations.
It all depended on how far away from the camera he was.
For close-ups of the creature, they gave him eyes that were complete,
that filled up the whole eye socket, and he could hardly see through those.
Somebody would have to use a flashlight
and point it in the direction they wanted him to walk,
and Chapman, who could just barely see the light, would head off that way.
For medium shots, the holes in the eyes were a little bigger
and he could see a little better,
and for long shots, they just gave him eyes with good-size holes in them,
and he could see just fine.
For Ricou Browning, working underwater, it was a lot harder.
At first, he tried to wear little goggles under the creature mask,
but once water got in the goggles, you couldn't get it out.
They thought about giving 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.
But that was tough, because I guess
the creature mask was just a little bigger than his head,
and sometimes the eye holes were a couple of inches from his real eyes.
So seeing out the eye holes
was kind of like trying to look through a keyhole from a couple inches away.
He said his vision was often very blurred,
and that a lot of it was kind of hit and miss.
By the way, the creature suit we see in the movie
was not the first creature suit that the makeup department came up with.
The first one they devised was very different from the eventual design,
and it was rejected pretty quickly. Ricou Browning described it
as more streamlined than the creature suit we know today.
According to Ricou, "It had less scales, less fins,"
"and the head was more like you were wearing a tight stocking over your face."
"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 as I mentioned earlier,
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 very much like it,
would have been used as the head of the female creature.
When the rejected head was originally 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 ended up looked almost feminine by comparison.
Q Magazine: "This horrendous pseudo-science-fiction melodrama
"revolves, rather 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 sci-fi type."
But when the movie used to play on New York TV,
the New York Times always called it "about as charming as a dead cat."
Believe it or not, there is such a thing as rotenone,
they didn't make it up for this movie.
It's a crystalline substance used in insecticides.
Universal decided not to use real rotenone in these scenes,
so they had to do some experimenting during preproduction.
They combined pure cream with aluminum
for shots of rotenone on the surface of the water,
and they used pure cream alone for the underwater shots.
Here in one little 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.
And Richard Denning was in Target Earth, Creature with the Atom Brain,
The Day the World Ended, and Black Scorpion.
And they were both in Black Lagoon, of course.
So they're even-Steven, sci-fi-wise.
When I talked to Denning and asked about Carlson,
he wasn't crazy about the guy.
Denning said Carlson could be uppity,
and that goes right along with what some other people have told me, too.
The one who said it best was an actor named Michael Fox,
who worked with Carlson in Magnetic Monster
and Riders to the Stars, and probably 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
that somebody else was in authority, he would tell that person how to do his job.
"According to Fox," Carlson was used to being the intellectual limelight on a set.
"He did not like to share it with someone who was, in his opinion,"
"lesser than he."
And incidentally, Richard Denning, who's out to bag the creature in this movie,
certainly did know his way around boats and nets and traps.
When Denning got back from serving in the military during World War II,
he, like a lot of other young movie 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 up all their savings,
so what they did was move into a house trailer at Paradise Cove,
and he set up 100 lobster traps. Denning had always loved the water
and boats and everything, 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,
set them in the evenings, and then go out and collect them at daybreak.
The Dennings lived on lobster and sold lobster,
and years later, when he and Ankers looked back at that time,
they realized that those were their happiest times.
But then Denning started getting work again.
He played Lucille Ball's husband on the radio show
that was later changed for TV into I Love Lucy,
and 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, for example, of Richard Denning firing the spear gun,
those were shot indoors
with the jungle projected on a rear projection screen behind them.
And this eerie nocturnal scene here was shot on the process stage,
at about 9:00 in the morning.
The scenes in the creature's cavernous 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 Gill Man suit got waterlogged, it weighed a ton,
and even someone as young and strong as 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.
And Chapman's walking up the ladder as he pretends to be climbing the rope.
But the mistake they made was, when he gets scared by the lantern
and lets go of the rope, for a split second,
you can tell that he's standing on something in the water.
When Chapman let go of the rope,
he should've just dropped straight down into the water like a rock,
but instead, he stood on the surface of the water for a split second
and then fell off to the side.
Creature from the Black Lagoon was Jack Arnold's fourth feature film
and his third in 3-D.
He'd already directed It Came from Outer Space
and a murder drama called The Glass Web with Edward G. Robinson.
Jack Arnold was born on a kitchen table in New Haven, Connecticut,
the son of young Russian immigrants.
He was raised in New York and began acting on Broadway in the 1930s.
During the war, he worked as a cameraman
for documentary filmmaker Robert Flaherty's unit.
After his discharge, he made educational and 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.
The film starred Broadway actors.
Sam Levene, Arlene Francis and Joseph Wiseman.
With These Hands went into general theatrical
release, became a critical success,
and received an Academy Award nomination as best documentary feature.
Off of that project, he was discovered by Universal,
who placed him under contract in 1952.
In addition to 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, honored at film festivals,
in Mill Valley, California, France, Spain and Brazil.
In 1982, Creature from the Black Lagoon was going to be remade
in color and 3D, a big budget, and with Jack Arnold at the helm.
John Landis was the one who brought the project to Arnold.
Landis was going to executive produce,
Rick Baker was chosen to furnish the creature,
based on the same classic design and makeup effects,
and Nigel Kneale wrote the screenplay, but this new Creature was never made.
Universal decided to put their money behind Jaws 3-D instead.
Jack Arnold died in 1992.
I never quite understood how they managed to dive
down, 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 such 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 from behind and touched him.
It worked there, so Nims suggested they do it again in Creature.
And again it got a scream.
People who saw Creature at a preview
mentioned it on their preview comment cards.
Well, when something worked, Universal never let go.
They used it again 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 favorite habits
was to pick guys up over his head and throw them.
He did it to the college student on the beach in Revenge of the Creature,
and he did it to Jeff Morrow at the end of Creature Walks Among Us.
And the plan here was for the creature to pick Zee up and throw him.
According to the script, Zee was going to be
thrown into the camera for the 3-D effect.
The actor, Bernie Gozier, was on a wire,
and he was going to be pulled up into the air that way,
once Ben Chapman grabbed him and pretended to lift him.
Well, they tried it twice and twice the wire broke.
And finally, Jack Arnold decided to forget it,
have the creature just grab and 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 a very pleasant movie
and that they all laughed a lot.
And she particularly liked this scene here.
"We were down on the beach on the edge of the water one day
"doing the scene where the creature has killed one of the natives.
"We were looking down at the body
"and there was this moment where we were all very still.
"Richard Carlson was in his bathing trunks and he had his face mask on his forehead,
"and in just the way people take off their hats for the dead,
"he reached up and he 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.
"And then we had this wonderful guy who did the clapboard for the different shots,"
"an old vaudevillian."
"The day Whit Bissell's face was all bloodied up by the creature,"
"this fellow clapped the board, and then he 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
that screenwriter Arthur Ross did.
Arnold said in interviews 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 violence. 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 man's inhumanity to his own kind,
"but to anything else, especially something that's very different from himself.
"You can trace the roots down to primitive tribes, one against the other,
"in the cities, to this block against the next block, or the Jew against the Arab,
"the Protestant against the Catholic, the black against the white.
"We have not progressed as human beings
"to differentiate between what is superficial and what is not.
"Of course, the sooner we learn the lesson, the better off we'll be.
"And that's what I tried to point out in my science fiction films,
"in a manner in which an audience would accept it.
"I don't think they would accept a polemic. They'd walk out on it,
"or it'd be under investigation by the House Un-American Activities Committee,"
"or some such animal."
"My objective was primarily to entertain, but I also wanted to say something."
"If 10% of the audience grasped it, then I was very successful."
Whit Bissell, who's in a number of Jack Arnold movies,
was a versatile character actor,
and an ideal choice for the part of the gentle Dr. Thompson.
But he was just as ideally suited for his ruthless mad-scientist roles
in movies like I Was a Teenage Werewolf and I Was a Teenage Frankenstein.
He was one of the most recognizable of 1950s supporting players.
He's also in sci-fi pictures like Lost Continent,
Target Earth with Richard Denning,
Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Jack Arnold's Monster on the Campus,
The Time Machine, The Manchurian Candidate, Soylent Green,
and Psychic Killer with Julie Adams.
Bissell was a native of New York City. He worked on the stage from boyhood,
and appeared in a number of Broadway plays before he went Hollywood in the mid-1940s.
He worked in movies at first under the name Whitner Bissell,
and he was 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 10 years.
A lot of small parts, but a few co-starring roles, too.
He was also in lots of sci-fi TV series,
and he was a regular on Irwin Allen's Land of the Giants.
Whit Bissell died in 1996.
It's a little hard to believe that Bissell, or anybody else,
could fall asleep guarding a seven-foot-tall
killer from the dawn of time.
Maybe it's that soothing music,
a Henry Mancini composition called Monster Caught.
It's funny to think of Henry Mancini
writing music for these Universal monster movies,
and without credit at that, but this obviously 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 GRAMMYs. And in 1990, David Schecter tells me,
Mancini put out a CD called Mancini in Surround,
and on it, he included some music he wrote for Creature,
an excellent piece called Monster Gets Mark.
You'll hear it later during the scene where
the creature fights and kills Richard Denning.
Mancini re-orchestrated 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 the scores of It Came from Outer Space
and Tarantula, and lots of other golden oldies.
If it weren't for Mark Williams, I wouldn't have my work or even a job.
It's true, he helped you through your training and gave you a job.
But he needed you just as much as you needed him.
You're oversimplifying.
You've more than repaid him many times over.
Why, a good part of his present position at the institute
is due to your valuable research.
And another thing...
Whit Bissell is going to strike the creature
with a lantern in a minute, setting him afire.
How they did this was they got a stunt man named Al Wyatt, Rock Hudson's stunt man,
and they put him in a fire suit and they set him on fire.
Then they took that footage and they superimposed it over this shot here
of Ben Chapman, of the creature, waving his arms and pretending to be on fire.
But Bob Burns tells me that in 3D, the scene didn't work.
He says that Wyatt must've been closer to the 3D camera when he did his part
than Chapman was when Chapman did his scene.
Burns says that in 3-D, the creature and the fire
seem to be different distances away.
Did you see that? Did you notice the way.
Antonio Moreno gave the impression
he was about to cover Whit Bissell with a sheet, like Bissell was dead,
and then he put the sheet down again?
I don't know if they did that on purpose or
not, but either way, it was a great fake-out.
Tough as Ricou Browning and Ben Chapman had it,
the stunt man who played The Gill Man in the sequel,
Revenge of the Creature, probably had it even tougher.
The Gill Man suits for Ricou and Ben were originally made in multiple pieces,
and they had what are called flex gaps near the elbows, the shoulders and knees,
which gave Ricou and Ben a little bit of freedom and mobility whenever they moved.
But The Gill Man suit worn by stunt man Tom Hennesy in Revenge of the Creature
was a molded one-piece bodysuit,
which Bob Burns, who's had to wear suits like that in his time,
tells me are not made to flex,
they give the guy inside no freedom, and they're very uncomfortable.
There were two sequels to Creature from the Black Lagoon.
Revenge of the Creature, made in 1954, and The Creature Walks Among Us, made in 1955.
Ricou Browning played the underwater Gill Man in all three.
In Revenge, the above-water 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 you'll see listed in the credits for makeup is Bud Westmore,
but he was just the head of the makeup department.
He did very 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 international 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.
I mean, that was a tip-off right there. Nobody who's really doing any work
in a makeup 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 funny 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 out as an architectural sculptor, and his career went back aways.
He worked on Sabu, Thief of Bagdad,
sculpting the temple and the all-seeing god.
He sculpted animals for The Jungle Book,
and the giant squid for the Disney 20000 Leagues Under the Sea,
and he also worked at Universal, doing architectural stuff at first,
and then gravitating into the makeup department.
He sculpted the hunchback and the phantom for Man of a Thousand Faces,
the Hyde mask for A and C Meet Jekyll and Hyde,
the mummy for A and C Meet the Mummy, et cetera, et cetera.
Anyway, one day Mueller is there at Universal, working on The Gill Man head,
and somebody else there tipped him off.
The guy told Mueller, "Look, if Bud Westmore comes in here"
"and tells you to take the rest of the day off, don't do it."
"What that means is that the press is gonna be coming in to take pictures,"
"and Westmore doesn't want you around."
Well, Mueller goes back to work and some time goes by,
and sure enough, in comes Bud Westmore.
Westmore looks at the creature head Mueller's sculpting and he says,
"Oh, Chris, that's just great. Man, you're doin' a terrific job."
"Hey, look, why don't you take the rest of the day off?"
And Mueller, still working on the creature head, tells Westmore, "No, I wanna finish."
Again Westmore tells him, "Chris, look, you're doing great work,
"take some time off, take it easy."
"But Mueller doesn't budge." No, no, no. 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?
Well, out Westmore goes and then half an hour, or an hour, or whatever later,
sure enough, here comes Westmore back in again, this time with the press corps.
Westmore in his sporty little outfit, goes over to where Mueller is working,
and he picks up one of Mueller's sculpting tools
and he holds the thing right up to the creature head,
but he doesn't even touch the head with the tool
probably because he didn't know what the hell he was doing.
Mueller's standing behind the creature head, still working,
and the photographer starts snapping away.
Anyway, the pictures are published and the captions say,
"Bud Westmore at work on his newest creation, the creature."
No mention of Mueller, but sure enough, there he was in the pictures.
Because of where Mueller was standing, they couldn't crop him out.
Mueller got a kick out of that, and he used to enjoy telling that story.
- Lucas. Lucas, start your winch. - Eh?
The Gill Man outfit was very expensive, needless to say.
According to Universal's publicity department,
which probably inflated some of these figures,
it was valued at $18,000,
and was the product of eight-and-a-half months of research and experimentation.
"Fashioned of foam rubber, plastic,
"hidden controls and specially-tailored fittings,"
"the costume forms the end result of 76 different body sketches,"
"32 different head models,"
"and 176 pounds of foam rubber used during the experimental stages."
There were articles about The Gill Man suit in different magazines,
including non-movie magazines like Mechanix Illustrated.
There were also behind-the-scenes photos and an article in Skin Diver magazine.
According to Skin Diver, the August 1954 issue,
Creature, which had only been out a couple of months at that point,
had already grossed two million.
Take it away!
Take it up.
More, more.
Hey, the cracked boom has mysteriously fixed itself.
I mentioned earlier that The Gill Man outfit had flex gaps
that gave the people inside a little bit of freedom, but not a heck of a lot,
and obviously, it was a lot of time and trouble
getting the actors in and out of the costume.
When it was time for lunch,
Ben Chapman would take off the helmet, the boots and the 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 on it.
He'd get into that, and there would be a very 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, playing the Frankenstein monster, Glenn Strange.
Universal, no doubt, 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.
And Julie Adams made some promotional appearances,
and they even had a trailer for the movie running on TV,
which caused a little bit of a squawk.
A couple of TV stations refused to run it,
but at least one person at Universal took that as a compliment to the movie,
and he wrote in a memo,
"I can't think of higher praise for what we have to sell on TV
"for Creature from the Black Lagoon,
"than to have a station refuse a spot
"because it considered the material too scary.
"We have had two such incidents locally, one with KTTV, which is a DuMont affiliate,"
"and KNBH, the NBC station. In both instances, it related primarily"
"to placement between programs with large juvenile followings."
"We finally won our point with KNBH, but it took considerable haranguing."
Creature had the same producer, and director, and some of the same writers,
as It Came from Outer Space, so it isn't surprising that a few echoes
from that plot should turn up in this movie.
In It Came from Outer Space,
Richard Carlson was an egghead and a peacenik
who wants the Xenomorphs left alone,
and throughout the movie, he clashes with the hard-headed sheriff,
and it culminated in a fistfight.
The relationship between Carlson and Richard 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 original review of Creature, complained,
"It's a fishing expedition that is necessary
"only if a viewer has lost all of his comic books."
"The proceedings above and underwater were filmed in 3-D"
"to impart an illusion of depth when viewed through polarized glasses."
"This adventure has no depth."
Variety said, "The below-water scraps"
between skin-divers and the prehistoric thing
"are thrilling and will pop goose pimples on the susceptible fan,
"as will the close-up scenes of the scaly, gilled creature.
"Jack Arnold's direction has done a first-rate
job of developing chills and suspense."
The Hollywood Reporter: "Jack Arnold's megging is briskly competent,
"although too much time is wasted on underwater shots which are neither novel"
"or dramatic enough to hold interest for the entire footage."
We're about to go underwater again.
This movie has about 18 minutes of underwater footage.
Everybody working underwater had scuba gear,
but the way Ricou Browning worked underwater as The Gill Man was,
he did what is called "hose-breathing."
That's something he knew how to do long before Creature.
Ricou says that his old boss,
Newton Perry, the manager of Wakulla Springs,
was probably one of the first people to ever breathe from an air hose underwater,
and he taught Ricou and other people how to do it.
You'd have an oxygen tank at the bottom of the spring
or, coming from the surface, just an air hose.
Ricou could stick the air hose in his mouth and breathe from it,
like you would drink water from a hose in your back yard.
Ricou says they used to do hose-breathing
in the underwater shows at Weeki Wachee Springs.
That was how the mermaids in the show got their air.
Anyway, it was something Ricou could do very naturally.
He could just insert the hose in the mouth of the creature,
then insert it a couple more inches to get it to his own mouth, and then breathe.
Ricou had several helpers and safety men
working with him at the bottom of Wakulla Springs,
guys he'd brought in himself. Some of them 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 down there underwater,
ready to go, breathing from an air hose, with a safety man nearby.
When he was ready to go into a scene, he'd give the cameraman a hand signal,
but he would just stay in place, still breathing,
waiting for the cameraman to signal him that the camera was rolling.
Ricou would then hand the hose to his safety man,
swim into the scene and do what he had to do.
Let's say it was just a swim-through, so he'd swim right past the cameraman.
Then on the other side, there'd be another safety man with another air hose.
Between the fact that he could hold his breath for a long period of 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 whatever he was doing in the scene and go limp.
And that was his way of signaling his safety men
to swim over to him and give him an air hose.
Ricou tells a funny story about being out in the middle of the spring
and realizing he needed to go to the bathroom.
Somebody offered to take him ashore in a boat,
but Ricou said, "No, don't bother," he'd just swim ashore.
He swam underwater, because he said swimming underwater
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, needless to say,
and all of a sudden, right there in front of him,
was some lady and her little girl.
And the little girl started screaming.
Rico said, "She started screaming and running."
"And the mother went after her, and I went after both of them,"
"trying to say, 'Hey, hey, it's okay. It's okay.'"
But me saying 'it's okay' didn't do a thing.
"They took off and that's the last I saw of them."
"But I never went out of my way to try and scare anybody, no."
"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 that a lot of folks used to come and visit the sets and watch them shoot,
including guests of people who worked at Universal.
And what Ben would do when he knew people were coming was
he'd swim out to the middle of Park Lake
and just float there, with just the top of a helmet and the eyes showing.
He'd stay like that and watch until he saw the people arrive,
and then he'd swim under the water
and come bursting up through the water 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 and the top of the head showing.
"I'd swim in this way, getting as close to the shore as I could."
"Of course, it's becoming shallower and shallower."
"I'd swim in to where it was about a foot-and-a-half deep,"
"and then all of a sudden, I would stand right 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 in 3D when it was new,
and he says that in the underwater scenes, the water seemed to disappear,
and it looked like The Gill Man was just floating in midair
in front of the screen in the theater. 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 the people were asked to fill out, one of the questions was,
"Which scene did you like most?"
Well, the underwater scenes were the hands-down winner.
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 without being married,
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 of the other comments:
"Most exciting picture I have ever witnessed."
"Give us more pictures like this, only in color."
"I'm a bundle of nerves. I'll never go swimming in a lagoon."
"The spookiest picture I have ever seen, and screamed throughout."
One person complained the plot
was a little too much like The Thing,
and believe it or not, there is some truth in that.
But nobody mentioned King Kong, which was the inspiration.
As I mentioned before,
watch Creature and Revenge back-to-back next time, and you can't miss it.
As a matter of 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.
Maybe we won't have to fight him on his own terms after all.
Speaking of the preview, or one of the previews anyway,
Arthur Ross, who co-wrote the picture, told me an interesting anecdote about it.
A fellow named Ed Muhl 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 an absolute smash.
"For the preview of Creature, there were three buses filled with people.
"They took us to dinner at the Beachcomber, and then downtown for the preview.
"Ed made every executive, every contract producer,
"every contract director come watch Creature, because, he said,
"'This is going to be the pattern and form and intent of our future films.'"
"At that point, Harry Essex and I looked at each other and said, 'He must be crazy!'"
Well, Ed Muhl 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 of Creature came from the Los Angeles Daily News.
"As the action unreels with the speed of 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 again.
If I was with Bissell, I'd be more worried
about Richard Carlson swinging that bat around
than I'd be about the creature.
When Bissell's young daughters saw Creature in a theater,
this scene came on, and one of 'em stood up in the middle of the theater
and screamed, "It's going after Daddy!"
He'll be back.
I mentioned before that Milicent Patrick
was one of the designers of The Gill Man
and actually worked on the suit itself, 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 Patrick as "the beauty who created the beast,"
but Bud Westmore, protecting his turf, took exception to that.
Westmore claimed that the creation of the creature was completely his own work.
Westmore, lying through his teeth,
said that many people had been involved in the original sketches and thinking,
but had all dropped out of the project when it became difficult and complex.
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 talked about
this and they decided to call Milicent Patrick
"the beauty who lives with the beasts," instead.
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 the fact that Milicent
"will claim credit for what he has achieved in putting these monsters together,
"and he would like us to make sure that, as far as possible,
"the interviews stress the fact that he is the one who supervises
"the creation of these creatures from start to finish.
"Milicent's job, he says, is merely to put his ideas in the form of sketches.
"Frankly, I am getting a little fed up
"with these squawks from people who are paid to do a job.
"And from what I hear, Milicent's
contribution in this work is very important."
Well, Milicent Patrick went on a whirlwind tour.
She did a jillion print interviews, and she appeared on radio and TV.
She was on the Today Show with Dave Garroway
and she made personal appearances at theaters that were showing Creature,
and busybody Bud Westmore made it his business
to get hold of newspapers from a number of the cities she had visited.
He discovered that she was being credited as the designer of the creature,
and he made it known that he wasn't going to use her as a sketch artist anymore.
Some of the suits at Universal tried to make Westmore understand
that she herself did everything possible to credit him,
and if there was any blame in the matter,
it was Universal's fault or the newspapers' fault.
One of the executives, who was exchanging memos with another executive
about this situation, wrote,
"It would be most unfair if Westmore were to discontinue
"using the services of Patrick as a result of his pique.
"The facts are that we haven't had a more cooperative person on tour
"than Miss Patrick. And in every interview,
"she made it clear that she worked for Bud Westmore."
"And she plugged Westmore as head of makeup,"
"and followed the instructions that we gave to her."
"Patrick conducted herself beyond any criticism from any point of view."
I've got a copy of Millicent 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 a very dramatic moment.
Julie Adams is so glad Richard Carlson is safe,
but it's so obvious she doesn't wanna get wet,
I'm sure because that lake water was probably cold.
And it was definitely cold at night.
Richard Denning remembers shooting out in the lake one cold October night.
They were out in the water and they were tired, and it was late,
and a prop man kept bringing them brandy to keep them from freezing to death.
"It worked great, and we were going just fine,"
"and then we finally wrap it up and we go to the dressing rooms."
"They're nice and warm, and all of a sudden..."
And Denning starts slurring his words here.
"...that brandy just 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 thousands of miles away.
He says everybody was trying to be nice, and they kept bringing him brandy,
and pretty soon, they were working with a drunken creature.
So Ricou figured he'd better cut that out.
She's coming. Back.
I think the idea of a drunken creature is kind of cute.
Julie Adams has kind of a soft spot for the creature in her heart, I guess.
"She told me," The creature scared people, but there was also a sweetness about it.
"In the real classics,
"there always is that feeling of compassion for the monster.
"I think maybe it touches something in ourselves,
"maybe the darker parts of ourselves"
"that long to be loved and think they really can't ever be loved."
"It strikes a chord within us."
"That's what Creature from the Black Lagoon did."
Stand by to pull her up with the winch.
Pull her in.
That's it.
Whoa!
I'll go down and unfasten it.
Give me slack!
We're about to get a good look at
the creature's gills pulsating as he breathes.
How they did that was, rubber tubes came into the back of Ben Chapman's helmet,
through the dorsal fin, and ran into the gills,
where there were little balloons or air pockets.
On the other end of the hose,
there was a guy sitting off camera with a little hand pump.
Chapman and this other fellow coordinated and worked together to create the effect.
Chapman would open his mouth and gasp
at the same time that the hand-pump guy would pump the gills.
That way, it looked like the gasping was what made the gills flare out.
Julie Adams is replaced in this shot by stunt woman Polly Burson,
who got swept off the boat by Ben Chapman.
No, don't shoot, don't shoot! You might hit Kay.
And now we cut to 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 right up until the last shot of the movie.
Ricou Browning was recently profiled in People magazine
in connection with Creature.
But he says 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 a little bit of music from The Wolf Man
as Richard Carlson climbs out of the water.
Chapman says that if you look back at all the thrillers that Universal made,
The Phantom, The Hunchback, Frankenstein, Dracula, The Mummy, and Creature,
"they were all very successful. And why?
"If you'll think about it, they were all Beauty and the Beast.
"The phantom was in love with the girl, the hunchback loved his Esmeralda,
"the Mummy had his princess. They would never hurt the girl,
"only the people that got in their way.
"And The Gill Man was the same type of monster character.
"After that, of course, movies changed, Universal changed,"
"stories changed, people's attitudes changed,"
"and now the studios are not coming out"
with the quality thrillers they made before.
"Now it's all blood and gore. But in the old days, these Universal pictures
"were all well done, and the best of 'em were all Beauty and the Beast.
"And my pride is that I was the original creature from the Black Lagoon."
As I mentioned before, 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.
In the scene where Ben Chapman carried Julie Adams through there,
he was wearing the medium-sized eyes, and he couldn't see very well,
and the cave was dark and narrow to begin with.
Well, 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 in and look at it.
There's a classic shot of Adams
having a bandage put on her forehead by the nurse on the grotto set,
and gathered 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.
And another nice touch is that when the creature puts him down,
notice the claw marks on Carlson.
He's got puncture wounds from the creature's thumbs
on the sides of his stomach
and if you look closely,
he's got gashes from the creature's other eight fingers
on the sides of his back.
No, no more. Let him go.
In the Maurice Zimm treatment, Black Lagoon,
The Gill Man is shot up and then devoured by piranha.
A later draft of the script ended with Reed
killing The Gill Man on the deck of the boat
"with an ax," the ax protruding from the neck of The Gill Man,
"apparently embedded there, cutting the spinal cord."
"As The Gill Man falls, the ax is pulled from Reed's grasp."
"Camera slowly pulls back to a full shot. No one moves or speaks."
Well, a conclusive ending like that wouldn't do.
Jack Arnold told an interviewer that the reason.
The Gill Man wasn't destroyed more decisively was,
"The studio wanted to keep him in there for a sequel, and I also loved him."
"I used to call him The Be as tie 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."
Well, Arnold was right about Ricou Browning,
and he was right about Universal thinking, "Sequel."
Even before Creature was released,
the outline for Revenge of the Creature was written.
The studio had no intention of letting what was, at that time,
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 already on William Alland's desk,
dated February 26th, 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.