Man, lately it’s really feeling like we’re at the end of an era, isn’t it? We’ve been losing so many of the men and women whose work meant so much to me in my formative years. The latest is the visual-effects genius Stan Winston, who died last night after a seven-year fight against multiple myeloma, an incurable cancer.
You know Winston’s work even if you’ve never heard his name. He specialized in what’re called “practical effects,” i.e., stuff that happens “live” on the set with the actors, notably effects that amount to very sophisticated puppets. The chromium robot skeleton that menaced Linda Hamilton in the Terminator movies, the full-size T. Rex in Jurassic Park, and the little sweetheart you see in the photo above — the queen of Ripley’s nightmares in Aliens — were all Winston’s creations, full-size physical objects that came to life through the magic of hydraulics, compressed air, motors, and remote controls. He won three Oscars for the examples I named, and was nominated for several more projects, including the extra-terrestrial big-game hunter in Predator and the vicious-looking prosthetics worn by the gentle-hearted Edward Scissorhands.
In recent years, the sort of work that Winston excelled at has often been replaced by computer-generated models — for instance, the skeletal Terminators in the latest offshoot of that franchise, the Sarah Connor Chronicles television series, are mostly CGI — and even Stan himself has branched into the digital effects field. But for my money, CG puppets still don’t have the physical presence, the mass, or the menace of the real thing. I can still vividly recall the first time I saw The Terminator as a teenage boy sitting on his best friend’s living-room floor, my armpits drenched in flop sweat and stomach clenched in dread as that damned thing just kept coming, even after being blown in two by a pipe bomb. (That living room, by the way, no longer exists; my friend’s house was demolished years ago. But I still remember which corner the TV was in… and in my memory, the image on the screen is of that shining, red-eyed, mechanical skull dragging its own severed torso after its prey, unyielding and unrelenting even after being dismembered…)
No less intense was the first time I saw Aliens a couple of years later: it only takes a little mental nudge and I’m on the edge of my seat in a grungy second-run house, nervously tapping my fingertips on the sticky armrests like a three-pack-a-day-er in the middle of a nicky fit from hell as Ripley, armored up in an her industrial exoskeleton, slugs it out with the monstrous Queen.
That these experiences were so visceral they still linger after 20-some years is in large part because of Stan Winston. He made the monsters real, real enough for our heroes to defeat. His death at the relatively young age of 62 — the same age as my father — is a tremendous loss to the movies. He still had a lot of creatures left in him, I think, and I’m sorry that we’ll never have the chance to see them…
