Sgt. Angle Reporting for Duty!

Tighten up your uniforms and strap into your Humvees, soldiers. We’re gonna get ourselves into the makeup chair today and have our faces remodeled while our minds are blown by the work of Special Makeup Effects mastermind Rick Baker.

You’ve seen him on the big screen before, much the same way you’ve seen John Williams or James Cameron. Rick Baker has given us creatures to be scared of, and faces to be scared for. From Men in Black to Harry and the Hendersons, from The Wolfman to An American Werewolf in London, Rick Baker has created the most memorable, realistic, and innovative cinematic sequences and looks of the last thirty years. He stands on the shoulders of Jack Pierce (The Wolfman, the original) and Dick Smith (The Godfather, The Exorcist) , and continues the tradition of great movie makeup.

In high school, Baker changed his life goal from wanting to be a doctor to wanting to do makeup for movies. His parents were luckily supportive, and Halloween became the “Rick Baker Holiday” in the neighborhood. But for Rick, Halloween lasted all year long. Naturally, any makeup guy is going to have a “blood and guts” period as a teenager, but this quickly came to an end for Baker when he painted his friend with third-degree burns, and the kid’s father became hysterical at the sight.

Later, Baker located Dick Smith in New York City. He wrote Smith a letter and included photos of his work. Smith took the young Baker under his wing, just as he was finishing up his latest picture, Little Big Man, with Dustin Hoffman. Throughout the 70s, Baker refined his craft on B-movies and even a couple of A-listers, including some uncredited work on The Exorcist, and second unit effects on Star Wars.

In 1981, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences finally decided to add a Best Makeup Award for the Oscars. The first winner in this category was Rick Baker, for his incredible human to wolf transition design in An American Werewolf in London — clearly the new bar set for human-creature effects work of the last thirty years in filmmaking.

Baker worked several times with Michael Jackson, most notably on the greatest music video of all time (sorry, Kanye), Thriller (also directed by American Werewolf’s Jon Landis). Later came Harry and the Hendersons, featuring a family friendly Ron Perlman Bigfoot design, and bringing Baker his second Oscar for Best Makeup.

With the 1990s came three more Oscars for Baker — for classic monster makeup and aging prosthetics to make Martin Landau the unforgettable Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood, for redefining a classic film, for redefining Eddie Murphy’s career in The Nutty Professor, and for alien-to-human transitions in Men in Black.

But along with these finer achievements came some minor work, yet no less considerable on any makeup artist’s resume: Gorillas in the Mist, The Rocketeer, Coming to America, Wolf, and even Batman Forever. He won his sixth and record-holding Makeup Effects Oscar for green-ifying Jim Carrey in How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and was able to bring the Oscars to a new low by getting nominated for his makeup work on Norbit. He visualized the imagination of Guillermo del Toro in Hellboy, scared countless Americans out of their chairs with The Ring and The Ring Two, and made Robert Downey, Jr. into a funny Eddie Murphy black man in Tropic Thunder.

Most recently, Rick Baker was able to pay homage and put his own stamp to the original makeup work of Jack Pierce’s classic design of The Wolfman. Luckily, Benicio del Toro is a very hairy man, which no doubt made Rick Baker’s job that much easier. Asked why he would revisit werewolves despite having jumpstarted the genre in American Werewolf in London, Baker said: “It’s The Wolfman. It’s one of the films that made me the strange man I am today. I could do nothing but horror movies and be happy. I hate what’s become of them, with all these slasher films, and any chance I can get to do an old-fashioned gothic horror movie, I’m going to take it.”

In the same interview, Baker says his favorite monster-movie as a kid was actually Frankenstein. Unversal execs take note, because you have your monster-makeup-man right here. Steal him away before he is obligated to take on Norbit II. Seriously. Even Benicio del Toro threatened him…

At ease.

Sgt. Angle