 Ilse,
She-Wolf of the S S. - easily one of the most repulsive films ever
made-offered plenty of challenge for Blasco, as he was called upon
to inflict torture scars, radiation-induced cancers, and maggot-ridden
infected wounds on Ilse's many victims
taped there. Pretty soon Blasco had quite
a bit of knowledge stored up from his own background and what he had
seen others doing, and he practiced a lot on his friends. The older Make-up artists befriended him and taught him many useful tricks, seeing
that he already knew what he was doing and where he was headed. Says
Blasco, “I wasn’t even old enough to get into the Make-up union. You had to be 21, and I was only 19.” Blasco decided to
try teaching his craft when he saw an ad in the paper for a Make-up school. “They only taught beauty Make-up ,” says Joe, “so
I got this idea that I would put together a course in film and TV Make-up , and try to sell them on it and get them to let me teach it.”
The idea paid off, and Blasco had his first crack at teaching Make-up and Make-up effects. Blasco saw this as an opportunity to learn for
himself, as well, by inviting leading film industry Make-up artists,
such as Ben Nye and George Bau, to give demonstrations and lectures
on their techniques. “I kept inviting Ben Nye over, and pretty
soon he invited me to his lab, and after that I began spending more
time in his lab than in my own; and without pay.” Blasco finally
decided to quit the Make-up school and go to work for Nye in his lab
(for a salary, this time), and learn everything Nye had to teach.
George Bau also taught Blasco what he knew. “It was like getting
the information right from the horse’s mouth,” laughs Blasco.
Through his friendships, Blasco established valuable contacts with
industry people, and began his career at CBS television doing Make-up on The Red Skelton Show and The Jim Nabors Show. “I got an offer
from NABET [the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians]
to go on the road with comedian John Byner’s traveling variety
show for two years. It paid $150 more per week than my job at CBS,
so I took it.” Blasco learned a tremendous amount while on the
road with the show. “Mostly how to improvise-which is extremely
important in this business-and speed.” When he returned from
doing Byner’s Make-ups, he started doing commercials with Alan
Waite Productions. “Frankenstein’s monsters and werewolves,
” says Blasco, are what he mainly did. It was during this time
that Blasco got work on his first big feature, |
Touch of Melissa
(later re-titled Touch of Satan). Says Blasco, “I did a ripped
up neck and the old age prosthetic Make-up -the old woman in the movie.”
Blasco also did a disintegration scene that, unfortunately, didn’t
make it into the picture. “I made seven skulls that were animated
so they could do dissolves-having one skull fade into another, so
it looked as if the mouth was moving. It was Raiders of the Lost Ark
12 years ahead of its time . . . But they were afraid they’d
lose their G rating if they left it in.” Blasco’s next picture
was 1972’s notorious Ilsa (She-wolf of the S.S.). Joe was responsible
for the design and application of some effective radiation burns and
skin cancer wounds on the faces and arms of some of the actors. He
used only the technique of “construction” - that is, he
used no prosthetic appliances; only cotton, collodion, liquid latex
rubber, and the coloring. Each Make-up was built up on the actor’s
face-the construction technique can save time when you can’t
spend the extra days it takes to go through the process of moldmaking
and sculpting in the lab. The picture also featured some convincing
gunshot wound Make-ups by Blasco. In 1973, Blasco designed and manufactured
the monster for Dario Productions’ Track of the Moon Beast, a
film that was also one of Rick Baker’s first jobs. “I had
had a serious accident,” explains Blasco. “I ripped out
my thumbnail with an electric sander, and I still hadn’t sculpted
the hands of the monster yet, so I called up John Chambers and told
him my problem and asked if he knew any good sculptors. He told me
that there was this new guy in town who was a pretty good sculptor,
and good at making molds too; so I gave him a call.” And the
rest, as they say, is history. During the time that Blasco was doing
Make-up effects for features, he was also working on and off at ABC
television, and running his own school for film and TV Make-up out
of his apartment (he had seen how successful his first teaching venture
had been, and decided to try again, this time for him self). His classes
were fairly small, but big enough to be crowded. Eleven people would
cram into his two bedroom studio apartment. One of his students, David
Dittmar, would later assist Blasco on his next feature, a film called
The Parasite Murders which was also shot in 1973. The Parasite Murders
was a Canadian film, director David Cronenberg’s first commercial
feature. The picture went through a few name changes before it was
finally released in the U.S. as They Came From Within. For the movie,
Blasco was called upon to create some appropriately disgusting Make-up
effects, one of which was an air-bladder effect; something that, up
to that time, had never been done. Blasco had to create the effect
of parasites moving around inside actor Alan Migicovsky. To do this,
he took a cast of the actor’s chest and stomach, and made from
it a thin rubber appliance. He then meticulously laid hair upon it
to match the pattern of Migicovsky’s own hair. The next step
was to tape the air-bladders (rubber condoms connected to plastic
tubing) to the actor, running the tubing down each leg of his pajamas
and out to hand pumps (not the high-tech compressed air pumps they
have now, but empty enema syringes and hair-tint squeeze bottles).
The appliance was tightly laced on over the bladders so that it conformed
with Migicovsky’s own musculature. When the air was pumped into
the condoms by the technicians (Blasco and Dittmar with their squeeze
bottles), they would expand perfectly, causing lumps to seemingly
crawl across the actor’s stomach-as if something were trying
to burrow out. About the time They Came From Within was released in
the U.S., Blasco’s school |
