Stan Winston’s affects achievements are a fanboy’s dream.
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In Memoriam: Stan Winston

“The smoke is literally smoke from a cigarette. It was someone offstage [blowing it on camera]… and it’s in the film, and it works.”

That quote from the late Stan Winston refers to the big finale for his break-out work in The Terminator: the moment where Sarah Connor crushes her cyborg pursuer beneath a hydraulic press. It’s the emotional catharsis that two hours of harrowing sci-fi action was building towards—the exclamation point on the ride that Winston’s effects helped to create. And yet it was all just smoke and tinfoil. Chicken wire and string. Puppets and guys in rubber suits. In our brave new CGI world, it sounds unbelievably quaint, but in Winston’s hands, those formerly hokey conventions became works of art whose like may never appear again.

People close to Winston talked about his openness and the enthusiasm he brought to every project. That enthusiasm may help explain why he is so revered today. He came to Los Angeles hoping to be an actor, but soon turned to make-up with an apprenticeship at Walt Disney Studios. Early success came on 1970s television projects both memorable (sharing a pair of Emmys for Gargoyles and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman) and, um, not (the Wookies in The Star Wars Holiday Special). But it wasn’t until The Terminator that he really entered the stratosphere, going from a hard-working Hollywood joe to the first name on everyone’s go-to list. The litany of his subsequent projects reads like a fanboy Shangri-La: Aliens, Predator, the Jurassic Park films, Interview With the Vampire, Batman Returns, and both the suit from this summer’s Iron Man and the crystalline aliens from the latest Indiana Jones film. In the process, he earned four Oscars and a slew of nominations—and with projects of his still in the pipeline, he may add a few more before the final tally.

At its core, his work always showed a commitment to practical effects: something that could be shot more or less during production rather than inserted after the fact. Because of that, they carried a weight to them that computer imagery has matched only fitfully at best. We believe in them in part because we can sense their immediacy, facing down the actors and dripping with the kind of imagination that the movies were made for. And they often sprung from very simple techniques: the kind of stuff that Mystery Science Theater used to snicker about every week. The initial mock-up for the Alien Queen was done with foamcore and a couple of trash bags, and there is, in essence, nothing conceptually different between the alien from Predator and the one from Robot Monster.

What separated those effects from their B-movie predecessors (besides an admitted increase in budget) was Winston’s commitment to their sense of reality. He never treated the films he worked on as summer junk for bored teenagers: the audience had to fully accept his creations without a moment’s hesitation or else the movie wouldn’t work. He applied that ethos to effects both great and small. The dinosaurs in Jurassic Park had the same spark as the undead make-up in Interview With the Vampire, and both served to create characters instead of just spectacle. We remember them because they had so much personality: their faces always had a story to tell even if we never heard it. So much of who and what the Predator is can be seen in its appearance, while the Terminator’s chrome visage instantly conveys the vast unmanned Cyberdyne factories which the budget for the first film could never reveal. One of his few projects as a flat-out director—the cult classic Pumpkinhead—has endured largely because of the way he brought the title monster so thoroughly and completely to life.

Perhaps most importantly, Winston’s creations always had a bit of the man himself behind them: indefinable sometimes, but always there. You could nod knowingly when his name appeared on the credits, seeing the countless tiny touches that he and his team always brought to their work. And yet he was able to do that while marrying his imagination to that of the other creative minds around him. The Alien Queen, while uniquely his, still belonged to the same species conjured by H.R. Giger, while his make-up for Edward Scissorhands and the Penguin perfectly matched Tim Burton’s macabre whimsy. Winston understood that film was a collaborative process, and knew how to place the overall vision foremost without sacrificing an ounce of his own contributions.

We don’t see nearly enough of that anymore. The computer is king now and while some CGI effects live and breathe the way Winston’s did, the majority are colder, emptier and infinitely more soulless. There will always be room for practical effects, of course, but nothing quite like his. While the talented artists he fostered at his studio will continue to build upon his work, no one will be able to duplicate the legacy he left behind. We can see it every time we watch a movie that he worked on: the wonderful magic which makes us believe in things that couldn’t possibly exist. Stan Winston did it all with smoke and mirrors, with tinfoil and string, with foam rubber and a little paint. His creatures are so memorable not because of what they were made of, but because of the creative mind behind them… a mind whose passing will be deeply missed.