You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Molenski. In the late 1920s, not long after Steamboat Willie came out, Walt Disney had a problem. He was inventing something brand new, and he wanted to keep pushing the art form further, but there weren't enough artists to hire with the skills that he needed.
So he realized that the best way to do that was to train them. And he went to all these different art schools in Los Angeles. And he's like, hey, I don't have any money, but this is what I need. This is what I'm hoping to do. And they all turned him away, except for Miss Chouinard. That is the writer and historian Mallory O'Meara. The Chouinard Art Institute eventually became CalArts, my alma mater. The school has been a pipeline to Disney and eventually Pixar for generations.
During the Great Depression, Disney literally drove in his Buick down the Chouinard Institute. He would bring the animators to those classes, and while they were in class, he would look at the other artists that were there. Mary Blair and Millicent Patrick were both graduates of Chouinard who worked for Disney. I don't know if they knew each other, but they were on a parallel track for years. They each stood out for their talent early on.
But they each decided to leave the studio in 1941. From there, their paths diverged wildly. Mary Blair returned to the studio. She not only thrived, but she changed how Walt Disney wanted his movies to look. Millicent Patrick became an actress. Then she moved to makeup and special effects. She was a key designer.
I'm the creature from the Black Lagoon. For Women's History Month, we're doing a two-part miniseries about Mary Blair and Millicent Patrick. You might not know their names, but you know their work. In many ways, the choices they made in their careers were defined by the times they lived in, but the issues they struggled with are timeless. Let's start with Millicent. From the outset, her childhood looked like a fairy tale.
Her father was the superintendent in charge of building Hearst Castle. This was the famous estate of William Randolph Hearst, the super wealthy and powerful media mogul. Millicent grew up on the grounds of the castle. in California. Because it was William Randolph Hearst, he entertained all kinds of celebrities and politicians. So there were all sorts of, you know, very famous people there all of the time.
But on top of all of that, it was a little bit isolated. It's, you know, it's several hours away from Los Angeles. So it's almost like being in this sort of little magical bubble away from the rest of the world. Yeah, and aren't there like zebras and stuff there, giraffes?
Yes, he did have a zoo there. The zebras actually do run wild now, which is very interesting. Sometimes you can see them if you drive by. She must have had fond memories of living there because when she grew up, she chose the name Millicent. Her first name was originally Mildred.
It was William Randolph Hearst's wife named Millicent and that really inspired her. And she just thought this woman was so was so noble and so elegant. And it really made an impact on her. And she decided to call herself Millicent. When she was a teenager, the family moved to Los Angeles. She got several scholarships to attend the Chouinard Art Institute, and that's where she was discovered by Disney.
Disney himself noticed early on that Millicent's particular art style was suited for animation. She was extremely, extremely good at conveying movement and expression, which is what all animation is. Women at Disney typically worked in the ink and paint department. That means when the predominantly male animators finished their work using pencil and paper, the women traced over the drawings with the ink onto transparent sheets of celluloid.
Then they would paint colors in the back of the cells. Ink and paint was thought of as sort of like a repetitive task. And anything that was like a repetitive task was thought of as... women's work they had to be very very precise these weren't even allowed to drink coffee they could only have tea because they could not have a certain amount of caffeine in their system so they wouldn't be shaky
Mindy Johnson teaches animation at CalArts, and she wrote a book about the unsung women who worked at Disney. She says the work that the women were given may have been technical, but it required a lot of talent. And there was room for innovation. There were articles showing up in the local... papers and women's magazines about the girls who work at disney and how glamorous it was and they always had a hard time finding trained qualified talented artists for inking and painting
And it was highly competitive, very, very tough. They'd train a dozen or more women and one or two would make the cut. She recommended that I watch a 1941 film called The Reluctant Dragon. It's a behind-the-scenes look at how Disney cartoons are made. And at one point, you can see Millicent Patrick in the background. The premise is that the actor Robert Benchley is getting a tour of the studio in Burbank. including the color department.
The film is produced by Disney, so it's softened and glamorized. But you can see the lab and it's really impressive. The women are wearing lab coats and sometimes gas masks. We see them measuring very colorful powders on scales. mixing chemicals in bubbling beakers and spinning paints on whirling machines. They weren't just mixing paint. I typically say this was not Betty Crocker's kitchen. This was Madame Curie's lab.
The Disney Paint Lab was the first and only one of its kind in the world, creating paints exclusively for cell-based animation. We're working with over 1,500 shades of custom-created color, created exclusively at Disney Studios. Sometimes, Disney had the women do the work of journeyman animators. drawing the in-between poses of the characters directly onto the cells. It was a cost-cutting measure, and their draftsmanship was more precise when it came to something like Bambi's legs.
In her research, Mindy even found a married couple at Disney where the wife was paid more than her husband. She says this was one of the many reasons why the animators at Disney went on strike in 1941. In many ways, there were a number of reasons behind the strike, but one of them was Walt had initiated this training program to get the women involved in animation. The male animators were a little...
tweaked about that, thinking, oh, you're going to train women to undercut our pay. And that's how Millicent Patrick got a big break at the studio. The first officially credited female animator at Disney. was a woman named Retta Scott. But Mindy says Millicent was the first unofficial female animator. While they're in production on Fantasia, Walt wants to push boundaries visually.
Many of the conceptual design artists are working with chalk pastels, which is a very kind of a volatile medium. Typically, if you've ever worked with them, it goes everywhere but where you want it sometimes. So how do we get that quality? Well, the women in Ink and Painted developed dry brush techniques to get sort of a textured feel on the cells, but that still wasn't quite, you couldn't cover an entire cell with that.
So the women developed a clear spray adhesive, which allowed Millicent to draw with chalk pastels that would stick to the cells and not smudge. The big sequence she worked on was the monster Chernobog from Night on Bald Mountain. Walt wants the creature Chernobog, creature of darkness. How do you defeat the creature of darkness? Through light. So how do we convey this in a visual context with light?
By the way, Mindy refers to Millicent as Mildred Rossi, since that was her name back then. When you watch that sequence, you will never see it again once we point this out. But each time the bell tolls and the light... is emanating. We think it's lighting, but it's not. It's the chalk pastel artistry of Mildred Rossi. You can see Chernabog recoil and cringe and kind of run fearfully.
turn away from that light. It's powerful. Even when you just isolate that segment and you now know what you're looking for, you will never see that sequence the same way again. It's incredible. And that's Mildred's work. But on a personal level, things weren't going as well. Again, Mallory O'Mara.
There was the animator strike at Disney, and a lot of people left after that. But she also had an extremely turbulent marriage at the time, and that was not going well. It was with another animator at Disney. Also, on top of all of that, she developed migraines, which she would have for the rest of her life. And staring literally at a box of light all day while doing very, very precise artwork was very, very difficult when she had migraines.
She decided that it was time to leave. But she didn't realize that her future would be filled with more monsters, literal and figurative monsters. Men value different things about their appearance. But if you're a guy who really cares about your hair and it's slowly going away, you might be feeling discouraged. When you look in the mirror, you might think of animated characters like Gru, Shrek, Elmer Fudd, or Homer Simpson. Hymns can be like your own ink and paint department.
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restrictions apply. See website for full details and important safety information. In the late 40s, Mildred Rossi changed her name to Millicent Patrick. She began working as an actress, getting minor roles in movies and early TV shows.
So while she was on set, if you've ever been on set, you know, there's a lot of downtime, especially for the actors. So while she was sitting around getting her makeup done, waiting for her scene, she would sketch portraits of her co-stars. Eventually somebody noticed and that man was. a man named Bud Westmore, who was the head of the makeup department at Universal Studios. Bud Westmore was a big deal. He was the son of the legendary makeup designer George Westmore.
And when George Westmore came to Hollywood, he was very great at makeup and he was also very great at hair. He was a very talented wig maker. And he started going to some of these studios and saying, hey, you know, I'm noticing that you're having your actors do your own makeup, but you're shooting.
similar scenes on different days, the makeup's going to be different from scene to scene, sometimes from shot to shot. And to keep that consistent, you should have one person in charge of the makeup. And he invented the idea of a makeup department. Wow, so Bud Westmore was practically like Hollywood makeup royalty as the son of the guy that invented the modern makeup department.
Yes, him and all of his brothers truly were the most famous family in makeup design in Hollywood. They had their own very, very popular salon called the House of Westmore. They truly were big players in the Hollywood. scene. She began by doing makeup for actors. Nothing fantastical, just regular makeup. Then she moved to creature design. She worked on a film called It Came From Outer Space.
I know that sounds like a lowbrow B-movie, but this was an important film for Universal. They used to be known for doing monster movies. They had drifted away from that legacy. Now they were coming back. This was going to be in 3D. And Ray Bradbury had written the treatment for the screenplay. She had never done any sort of monster creation. And again, Universal hadn't.
Hadn't done a monster movie for quite a long time and it was their first ever science fiction film. They had no idea what to do, how to design it, especially because Ray Bradbury did not give them anything particularly concrete to go on. Like the description literally has the word Nebula.
in it is if I can if I'm recalling correctly and they just decided to give it to this woman in the department who was incredible at designing makeups and she she did a bunch of different designs and the final version I mean if you watch the movie now it looks very cheesy and silly it looks like um it looks like food that's been left in a sandwich bag in the fridge for way too long but back then it was very terrifying it was it was so new it was so fresh audiences have never really
seen anything like that. And the American culture at the time, in horror in general, had moved from being afraid of ghosts and monsters to being afraid of nuclear war and space and aliens. So seeing all these brand new fears... personified. It was pretty intense, and it's a very important film. Then she got the opportunity to design The Gill Man, which is the name of the creature from the Black Lagoon.
Well, the makeup department was not supposed to be involved with the creature from the Black Lagoon at all. The really interesting thing about creature design is that it kind of falls in between the cracks because it's sort of a costume because it goes on the actor and it's more than makeup.
because it is a suit uh but it's also kind of a prop because it actually has to be fabricated it was confusing for universal at the time especially because creature from the black lagoon is the first universal monster that is a full body suit up until that point you know frankenstein dracula all of these things were
Even the mummy, you know, his body is mostly covered in just bandages. They had never had to fabricate an entire suit before. It was either just like head makeup and then hands or clothes. So they weren't quite sure what to do with it. And the first thing they did was send it to the props department, who created a very weird, very failed design that was like it looks like a frog head and a spandex body, like flappy, flippery feet. And it just it looked it didn't.
look scary it just looked kind of weird and sad they realized that they needed they needed something else they gave it they just they were like oh well let's give it to the makeup department and uh after her success on it came from outer space obvious choice was millicent and she did a bunch of research she went to the library and researched because the
In the film, Creature from the Black Lagoon is meant to come from the Devonian Age, which is a real age. So she researched Devonian Age fossils and fish and amphibians and got an idea of what the real creatures looked like at that time.
It was something that was very important to her to have an air of truth. And so she designed the creature. There was a couple different design elements that were changed around the head of the department at the time. As I said before, Bud Westmore, he wanted it to have a tail.
And she took that off because it looked really silly. There was a brief design where he had some sort of like head protrusion that looked like anglerfish. Yeah, it had like a, it looked kind of like an anglerfish and she took that off. And then it went to the rest of the fabrication department. Chris Mueller was the sculptor on that. Jack Kevin helped work on some of the tech stuff. And they made it into Creature from the Black Lagoon. So what is it that she is handing off?
to them drawings their drawings okay it's not like a maquette or something like that no she did she did not not do any sculpting it was all it was all drawings In 1954, when the movie came out, the studio sent Millicent on a publicity tour. I was surprised they singled her out because several people worked on that character. But Mallory says the studio knew.
It came from her brain. It was her design. And also there was a big interest because she was so beautiful and she was an actor and she was a model and she was very charming. And the dichotomy between this terrifying creature and this beautiful designer was very, it was a cat. for the publicity team. And they thought it would be really, really fun to do a, you know, a Beauty and the Beast tour for it. And what was the tour like for her?
Well, it changed quite significantly from what it was supposed to be to what it was because once Bud Westmore got wind of the type of tour that they wanted to do, he got very angry because back then, even though he had a whole team of people doing designs.
He got all the credit for it. You know, there was no IMDb. There was no Internet. And the credits back then were not as comprehensive as they are today. It was really just some a few cards at the beginning or end of a film. And it just said makeup by Bud Westmore, even though. had a massive team of people helping him and he did not work on these designs. In fact, as I said, the ideas that he did have were terrible and Millicent had to take them off.
He was very uncomfortable, very insecure at, for the first time in his career, somebody else getting to take Rightful credit for the work that they did that he had been taking credit for up until this point. And he got in a big fight with the publicity team at Universal and he pulled his weight because getting a Westmore and your makeup department was they were royalty. They were they were very.
influential they were very famous they were very well known in town they were very well connected he threw that weight around and got them to change the tour from the beauty and the beast and the beauty who created the beast to uh the beauty who lives with the beast so it was supposed to be a tour where Millicent got to talk about her work and her design and how she created it and then it became her just showcasing the design that
She had to say that somebody else did. And she did everything that was asked of her. They gave her a chaperone to make sure that she was telling her the lie that... that she was instructed to tell correctly. Even though the tour was very successful, she did an incredible job of promoting the movie. The movie was a huge success, but Westmore was not happy about it.
He would get a list of all of the magazines and newspapers and radio stations that she was going to interview, and he would call them up after she had been there and demand to know what she had said. Reporters and journalists figured out pretty quickly that...
Millicent had to have been involved in the design in some way. It was pretty hard to hide. I mean, she had this incredible background as an artist. They knew she worked at Universal as a designer. It wasn't hard to connect the dots. So people started referring to her.
her as the designer of the creature and it even though she she didn't say anything she followed her script she did not deviate not one single time during the entire tour did she take credit uh it made him angry so while she was out on tour he Wow. And was she able to work at all anywhere? She never worked as an artist professionally ever again.
I mean, the Westmoores had a very, very strong network. If you were out with the Westmoores, you were out with Hollywood. You know, there was a Westmoore brother heading the makeup department of almost every single major studio in Hollywood at the time. This was not out of character for Bud Westmore. He was notorious for treating artists terribly, or firing them if he thought they were upstaging him. But this hit Millicent particularly hard.
The time that it came, Millicent was 39 when all of this was happening. And as everyone knows, turning 40 is such a big... big deal as an as an actor so she knew that if she hadn't made it as an actor at that point she probably wasn't going to and i i think there there is an alternate universe where she
continued on and made more amazing designs and worked on incredible stuff and stayed in that makeup department until she retired. But because of one man's insecurity, she never got to do it again. They used some of her, the designs that she had already been. working on for the metaluna mutant in this island earth and the mole people but that was it she never got to actually actively work on a on a design for a film ever again
Millicent Patrick's personal life was also tumultuous. She has one of the spiciest Wikipedia entries that I've read. She had several marriages and affairs and affairs with married men And there were deadly consequences for some of the people caught in her love triangles. You can learn more about the tragic details in Mallory's book, The Lady from the Black Lagoon. She got this sort of reputation as sort of, it's like this black widow, you know, this evil woman. A femme fatale.
yeah that's a better term for it but it just wasn't her she really uh she had a lot of problems with her family she was estranged from her family she was her father was not a good guy uh and thought very badly of her and she uh she always wanted to to fall in love and to really be able to escape from all of that, and she did not pick them well. She is finally getting the respect she deserves, even if it's posthumous. Mallory has played a big part in spreading the word.
One of the most heartbreaking things is she never got to, I mean, now people know it was her, you know, it's her credit online on IMDb, but she never got to see any of that. She died in obscurity. She says it's easy to take for granted that the creature from the Black Lagoon is part of the Universal Monsters, which you can buy as mugs, bobbleheads, plushies, and action figures.
It's very interesting because Frankenstein, Dracula, Bride, all of those classic Universal monster movies, they have these deep, long... legacies and pedigrees they come from some of them come from books you know there's many many different versions of them and creature doesn't have any of that creature does not come from a book there is not like an early play or like or there's not like an early
silent version of Creature from the Black Lagoon. It's just that one. I mean, there were two other films that obviously used her design, but it's just Creature. And he came decades after these other movies, like 20 years later. But he became part of that monster group, just as important, just as iconic. And that's all because of Millicent. You can see her influence in The Shape of Water. The Oscar-winning film portrayed a fish man.
as a misunderstood romantic lead. The director, Guillermo del Toro, said in an interview that he was inspired by the creature from the Black Lagoon. He saw it when he was seven years old, and he said the Gill Man was, quote, The most beautiful design I'd ever seen. Steve Wang is a makeup and creature designer in Hollywood. I asked if he was also a lifelong fan of the Gill Man.
Are you kidding me? That's like my favorite monster of all time still. I just remember as a kid that it just blew me away. And I just, at that point, just fell in love with that thing. And that has always just influenced me in everything that I've done. One of the things that stands out to me about the Gill Man is that there's an aspect of vulnerability in his eyes.
Also, his skin is layered in overlapping tiles that flow down his body, but they're not uniform, they're jagged and scaly. They're also separated into several distinct waves, which give the actor flexibility to move. It's a very modern look, and I've seen it on contemporary costumes of monsters and even superheroes. I asked Steve to tell me from a design perspective what he likes about the character.
I think his face is actually very graceful. You know, the first impression you get looking at the creature is that he kind of looks like a combination of a frog and a fish. And a frog primarily because of the waddle on his neck, you know? But the thing that I really love about the creature is the flow lines. If you look at the brow and how graceful the brows go up into the back of the head and then his fins, his gills.
how they kind of all flare out in a very kind of nice rhythmic motion and all kind of like echo each other from layer to layer just the balance and the sharpness like the movement of the back of the head fin and everything So when did you find out about Millicent Patrick's contribution? I don't think I found out about her until I was a teenager. Because for the longest time, I always thought, oh, you know, it was Bud Westmore. He was the one that made the creature.
but then when i uh was about 18 i had met bob burns and bob burns is a very well-known film historian primarily you know within the genre because i had seen in this book called making a monster with uh sue roy and al taylor and there was a picture of a guy sculpting on the creature head but then you had bud westmore standing next to him with the tool as well and that photo always confused me i thought
huh two people sculpting on a head that's kind of weird you know and who's this guy well i found out that was actually chris miller jr So when I met Bob Burns, Bob just kind of told me the whole story. He just said, yeah, you know, there's a woman named Millicent Patrick, and she was the one that designed the creature, even though she was largely uncredited. Not a whole lot of people knew about that.
but according to bob i just asked bob point blank i said bob who designed the creature and bob said millicent patrick designed it and according to chris miller jr who was there chris miller also said that was millicent's creature So how could that design have gone wrong? Because now we know exactly what the creature looks like. What were some ways that they could have screwed it up? Well, if you look at some of the behind-the-scenes photos of the earlier incarnations of it...
That's how I could have gone wrong. In fact, there was a head that Bob Burns had shown me, which I subsequently saw in photos of an earlier creature head, and it was much more slender. The head was very kind of pointy. small and then the and the gills are really tiny on it it didn't look very alive it looks more like an incomplete sculpture or incomplete thought and so they had put that on which totally did not work and then at one point I believe they had
half the suit was made of spandex i think and that didn't look real and i think they knew that as well from way back had they not gone the extra mile and really kind of know what they were looking at i think this whole thing could have gone wrong because if you look at all the
The monsters that came out from the 50s, there were some pretty kind of awful ones. You know, like heads too big or they have big ping pong ball eyes or something that just didn't quite look real. I think that's what made the creature so ahead of its time. So yeah, speaking of being ahead of its time, where do you see the Gilman's influence in other creatures that came afterwards? Oh, I think it's like everywhere. First and foremost, I believe the whole notion of a monster suit.
that's done well, I think has really inspired a lot of people, including myself. You know, I've made so many types of monster suits over the years. It always comes back to the creature, like how just the creature came together. And you always want to create the sense of like textures and colors and form and flow and everything that makes it a very believable creature.
In 2004, Steve worked with Guillermo del Toro on a live-action movie of Hellboy. Steve got to design his own fishman costume for the character Abe Sapien, who comes from the Hellboy comics. Remind me why I keep doing this. Rotten eggs and the safety of mankind. Ah. Yeah, certainly it had a lot of influence. Abe was a completely different creature all in itself in the sense that...
It was much more human-like. The body and the shape was more human. But if you look at the gills and the flow of the lines and everything, it was all very heavily inspired by the creature. And that one I can say for sure because, you know, I built that thing. As I mentioned earlier, Millicent Patrick died in obscurity. But she wasn't destitute.
She lived a quiet and comfortable life in Los Angeles. She may not have gotten the recognition that she deserved in her lifetime, but her work has taken on a life of its own. She's no longer seen as the beauty who lived with the beast. She is remembered as an artist and a creator. In the next episode, we will rewind the clock to see what happened when Mary Blair took the opposite path.
Like Millicent, Mary left Disney in 1941, but she came back to the studio and had enormous success. But there were darker shades lurking beneath her iconic, colorful artwork. That's it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Mallory O'Mara, Mindy Johnson, and Steve Wang. In the show notes, I have links to Mallory's book, The Lady from the Black Lagoon, and Mindy's book, Ink and Paint.
the women of Walt Disney Animation. We have another podcast called Between Imaginary Worlds. It's a more casual chat show that is only available to listeners who pledge on Patreon. I recently talked with Sean C. Jackson, who designs maze books of Disney theme parks, Marvel, and Star Wars. He also created an unofficial fan fiction maze about what happens to the character of Rey.
after the sequel trilogy you know she's doing the whole jedi living by herself kind of thing studying the texts and just collecting droids like she does because she likes them so much and fixing them up and they sort of like maintain the environment
and start building the farm and the moisture vaporizers and eventually build a big castle around her and by then people know it's haunted they don't know who's in there and it's run by droids who trade with the town oh my god that's great that's that's my dream Between Imaginary Worlds comes included with the ad-free version of the show that you can get on Patreon. You can also buy an ad-free subscription on Apple Podcasts.
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