Name: Film s/fx Expert Tom Savini Collection on Letterman, 1984-87
Uploaded: 2019-08-28T13:48:42.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Film s/fx Expert Tom Savini Collection on Letterman, 1984-87' from Don Giller on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-08-28. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Film s/fx Expert Tom Savini Collection on Letterman, 1984-87' from Don Giller on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-08-28. Transcript available.

Film s/fx Expert Tom Savini Collection on Letterman, 1984-87

We have a great show tonight.
We have comedian Emo Phillips, Cheryl Teagues, and my first guest,
who I will introduce in just a moment, Mr. Tom Savini,
who has written a wonderfully entertaining book, Bizarro,
showing all of his great inventions and techniques and stuff
for making peculiar monsters and stuff like that.
And, of course, you know Mr. Paul Schaefer.
Did I introduce you yet, Paul?
Oh, we're all friends now.
Thank you so much.
How are you, David?
May I say something about you?
And I really mean this.
I believe this in my heart.
You are a national treasure, I've got to say.
You really are.
You should be preserved.
You know, a woman in the audience before the show brought up an interesting
point.
A couple of weeks ago on The Tonight Show, Joan Collins was whining about us.
Is that right, ma'am?
Yep.
Yep.
And she said she'd never do this show, didn't she?
Yeah.
And now, I've forgotten.
Do we want her on or don't we want her on?
We don't want her on.
All right.
I guess we never want to see her.
No, we don't want her on.
But you know it must be killing her.
She's dying to do this show because, of course,
it's the only one in the world she has not been on.
She taught me something.
You know, you have to ask two questions these days in the 80s
before you get involved with any sort of woman or anything.
You learned this from Joan?
Yeah.
You know, do you have anything communicable?
And do you ever plan to write a book about your intimate exploits
with the men you've known?
You've got to ascertain those two things first.
All right.
All right.
We learned that from Joan.
So if she's not getting on here, we'll put somebody on the door.
She's not getting in, all right?
I did want to make one other announcement.
This weekend, I believe, Bill Wendell's summer announcer camp
opens up in the Catskills.
So if you have a youngster, what is it, 8 to 14, Bill?
Yeah, I think we're all signed up, Dave.
Oh, okay.
Well, congratulations and another successful summer up there.
They go up there and they learn, you know, station identification,
show intros, public service announcements.
It's a good, it's kind of a character-building thing, isn't it?
Take them up into the woods.
Bill, don't start with that.
My first guest tonight is an actor and a stuntman,
but is best known for the truly shocking and unbelievable effects
he has created as a makeup artist
in such films as Dawn of the Dead, Maniac, and Friday the 13th.
He is the author of this book right here, right here, right here.
This one is The Heat.
It's called Bizarro, and his work can also be seen
in the upcoming TV series Tales from the Dark Side
and the forthcoming film Day of the Dead.
Please welcome Tom Savini, ladies and gentlemen.
Before we take a look at this,
what you do is special effects, or it's makeup,
or it's a combination, or what is it?
Special makeup effects, it's called.
I see, and what does that, when we go to a film,
what of your work do we see?
Oh, well, anytime somebody's head is blown off
or a cutthroat or a little creature runs around.
That's me.
Now, having a head blown off, it comes under makeup?
Special makeup effects, sure.
Oh, okay, well, let's take a look at some of the stuff.
Okay, let's uncover this.
Okay, speaking of heads.
Oh, my goodness.
Can I take that?
Oh, my God.
Oh, jeez.
How'd you like to be at dinner
and have your dog bring this in sometime?
Well, uh...
That's where I got it.
I'll be darned.
Bob's been out in the woods again, and, well...
Nobody called the neighbors.
What?
Now, wait a minute, Tom.
What is...
Sheeminy, that's unfortunate.
What, uh...
Now, how would that...
How would that, uh...
In a movie, how would that look like it...
Oh, stop.
No, let's...
You made the whole thing?
Sure, yeah.
What's it made of?
It's made of foam rubber.
It's solid foam rubber with dental plates in there
and, uh...
Glass eyes from an ocularist,
and it's got Rice Krispies in the neck here,
uh...
And they're painted with, uh...
Five-minute epoxy.
Gives them that shine.
See that shine there?
Now, that's interesting to me.
Why...
Why would you...
You think that the touch...
Oh, I know what this needs.
Some Rice Krispies here in the neck.
Sure.
A little texture,
a little different color from the Rice Krispies.
Actually, these are corn puffs.
I have Rice Krispies on something else behind me.
I thought those were corn puffs.
I said to myself,
Well, I don't want to embarrass Tom, but...
These are...
These are corn puffs.
Now, we have all sorts of household items you can use.
Now, in your business,
is it a lot of experimentation?
Are these old formulas or a combination of both?
It's mostly experimentation.
Just take a little Rice Krispies.
That looks good.
It stays, you know.
Yeah.
This is just unbelievable.
All right.
All right.
We'll put that there.
Okay.
Here's a rat.
Mm-hmm.
Okay.
You can hold on to that.
Now, this is from a film called
Maria's Lovers,
Nastassia Kinski,
John Savage.
Right?
Wow.
That's amazing.
This is for a nightmare scene
where John Savage is lying in bed.
He's having a nightmare.
This diseased rat comes in,
crawls on the bed,
and crawls into his mouth.
He bolts up in bed,
and we had this little mechanical rat.
He made the tail move with his tongue
with that little mechanism.
See?
I think we've all done math.
And then he would...
We would press this little button.
Now, can you actually put that
in your mouth and show us how it looks?
Oh, yeah.
Why not?
No.
Okay.
Oh!
Ooh!
Would you like to gargle?
Well, he went to the closed set
when we did it.
I don't know why.
That's unbelievable.
So this is obviously used for
still shots or not action shots.
Well, in case...
We had...
I think we were going to look for a scene
where he actually stepped on a rat,
and so I built this little dummy rat for him.
So you can flatten it?
Yeah.
All right.
Okay.
This is your non-skid rat, isn't it?
This is from Friday the 13th,
the final chapter.
We took a regular hacksaw
and put this huge, ominous blade in there
so that when his throat gets cut,
you see,
we would pump blood through here,
and the blood actually came out of the weapon.
Oh, my.
Oh, my.
Now, how was a scene like that shot?
You're obviously somewhere out of camera range.
Oh, sure.
I'm off camera.
This blade is brought around to the head like this.
The guy reacts.
You know, his head's pulled back.
We cut to something like blood dripping on the floor
or his feet kicking,
and then we go back to this,
and then all the blood comes out.
So you're operating...
You were actually on the set operating the pump.
Yeah, this is really simple.
For this, we just simply pump blood
when the move was right.
Now, what do you use for blood?
It's Dick Smith's formula.
Dick Smith is probably
the greatest makeup artist in the world.
You learned much of your stuff from him?
Well, he likes to share his secrets.
One of them is his blood formula,
and that's Cairo corn syrup,
red and yellow food coloring,
Photoflow, which is a wedding agent.
It makes the blood saturate clothing
instead of just rising above it,
and methylparaben,
which is a preservative
because the Cairo syrup is a food substance,
and it'll develop mold after a while.
And this looks very, very authentic.
It's the best.
It's the best blood formula it is.
Okay.
Well, we'll show you that recipe later
if we went too fast for you.
Okay.
This is also from Friday the 13th,
the final chapter.
This is the hand of Jason, the killer,
and there's a scene where he gets a machete
and he gets hit in the palm with a machete
and you see it splits right there.
Oh, God!
This is also...
Oh, my God!
Oh, stop it!
Just stop it!
Wait a minute!
Do that again.
Open that up.
Oh, my God.
That's just unbelievable.
Right.
So he gets it,
and it splits open like that,
and the fingers continue to move,
you know, when he looks at it.
You know, the amazing thing about this,
in the film, of course,
this is going to be unbelievably lifelike,
but even right here,
it's unbelievably lifelike.
Thank you.
Well, we're not squirting blood through,
but the same thing.
We just pump the blood through there
and it zooms out of the hand.
Oh, my God.
Now, this is really advanced stuff, isn't it?
Yeah, I would say so.
It's state-of-the-art stuff.
Now, when you see somebody's face swelling
or an artery bulging or something like that,
I'm talking about in movies now.
Sure.
Are those things done mechanically
or is that pneumatically?
Is that air pressure doing that?
It's air pressure, actually.
I see.
And there are bladders beneath a foam appliance
that goes over the bladder,
and the foam, of course,
stretches out like the, you know.
And you do that sort of work also?
Oh, yeah.
Sure.
Okay, we have many, many other delightful things
to show you from Mr. Savini's work.
We'll be right back after you take a look at this.
All right.
Okay, this is Nate's corpse.
This is from Creepshow.
And again, he's covered with Rice Krispies
mixed with latex.
It just makes great, muddy, kind of granular dirt.
Another ugly breakfast accident.
Okay, let's get that off.
All righty.
Okay.
This must be a great deal of fun to do this, isn't it?
Oh, yeah.
The outlet for practical jokes increases, I think,
when you do this for a living.
I like to scare kids in the neighborhood.
This is Fluffy.
Sure, Fluffy is also from Creepshow.
Fluffy was worn by an actor
who had special lenses in his eyes.
Fluffy, let's see, he, yeah, this operates his eyebrows.
Oh, my goodness.
See?
Just makes him snarl.
That's amazing.
That's really amazing.
Now, he gobbled up Adrian Barbeau in about three bites in Creepshow.
Now, most of what you do is actually made four actors, right,
to be worn, or do you build just special dummies
to take the place of actors?
Sometimes we have to build a dummy.
We're going to get to a thing later.
I'll show you Jason's death from Friday the 13th,
and to do that, we had to build a mechanical dummy
because what we did to him couldn't possibly be done
to, you know, a human actor.
This is the Fluffy puppet.
Oh, that's terrific.
Hi, Fluffy.
Oh, my God.
That's amazing.
Okay.
And this is Jason.
Okay.
Okay.
Oh, jeez.
Oh, no.
Oh, boy, oh, boy.
Let's get us another TV dinner, huh, Marv?
Oh, my God.
Oh, he's got kind of a nasty head wound up here.
Yeah, I'll show you what happens with that head wound.
He was hit with a machete, and his head kind of split.
Oh, my God.
Yeah.
Now, this is what I was talking about.
This would be great, you know, at a party,
just put dip in there.
Nice.
Woo-hoo.
Oh, my goodness.
This is a little something I brought you,
your own set of fangs.
Well, I have my own set, actually.
But I sat on them accidentally,
and they're a little warped.
Do you want to try them on?
Do you want to put these in?
These are at the bottom or upper?
Oh, this is the upper.
Upper, okay.
Yeah.
You haven't had these in your mouth, have you?
No, I haven't.
He did.
He did.
Yeah.
You can't really tell them from the ones I have.
Well, I did put the split in between the teeth.
Oh, I see.
There's the split in.
Oh, thanks.
Sorry.
By the way.
How did you get started in this?
You're also an actor.
Yeah.
But what was your first motivation to do this stuff?
I saw a movie when I was about 12 called Man of a Thousand Faces,
the story of Lon Chaney.
Lon Chaney Sr., silent screen actor, stuntman, and makeup artist.
And I wanted to do all those things.
And so far, I've been lucky enough to do that.
I have a son named Lon.
I named him after Lon Chaney.
So you do wonderful work.
Thank you very much.
It looks like a lot of fun.
Thank you very much for being here.
Tom Savini, ladies and gentlemen.
We'll be right back with Ashlyn Holman.
Thank you.
My first guest tonight was here once before
with some of the most awful-looking horror film special effects we've ever seen.
He is one of the most sought-after creators of such effects in the entire movie
industry.
His credits include Dawn of the Dead, Creepshow, The Burning,
and a whole slew of Friday the 13th movies.
Please say hello again to Mr. Tom Savini.
Tom, nice to see 