The title character in Peter Benchley’s “Creature” leaves a haunting impression as it flashes across the screen. It resembles a shark, but it moves like a man. The eyes harbor an intelligence unexpected in the amphibious. It looks like nothing we have ever seen before: an unlikely hybrid of man and shark united in a genetic threat of considerable size.
The creature from the deep invites one of Hollywood’s most popular questions: “Is it real, or is it Winston?”
A four-time Oscar winner, Stan Winston is Hollywood’s reigning crown prince of character creation. Even before working on “Creature” (airing 9 p.m. Sunday and Monday on WLS-Ch.7), Winston and his carefully staffed studio boasted a formidable portfolio of beasts that includes the 9,000-pound T-Rex in “Jurassic Park,” Horribilis Regina, Queen of the Aliens in “Aliens” and the red-eyed chrasome “endoskeletons” in “Terminator 2: Judgment Day.”
The artist calls them characters, and that’s how audiences see them: marvelous amalgams of fantasy and reality that combine the emotional, psychological and intellectual traits of human beings with imaginative bodies that are living works of art.
A painter and a sculptor, Winston left Virginia 28 years ago for Hollywood. He started out in makeup at Walt Disney as an apprentice to the fabled Robert Schiffer, head of the department then and today. Winston’s first television movie — the cult favorite “Gargoyles” — netted him an Emmy. A year later he won a second Emmy for aging actress Cicely Tyson to 110 years old in the 1974 film “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman.”
From that point on, Winston continually reinvented himself to match and advance his rapidly changing field. He moved on to makeup effects, producing characters with externally operated articulated faces. Later, he defined new horizons for animatronics and robotic design. In 1993, he immersed himself in the computer revolution by joining forces with director James Cameron, IBM and former Industrial Light & Magic executive Scott Ross to form Digital Domain, a state-of-the-art digital-effects company.
Benchley’s creature — drawn from his book “White Shark” — presented Winston, 53, with unique challenges. As the story unfolds, we discover this humanoid spells double trouble. Forged in a military experiment to merge human and shark qualities, this biological mistake survived for decades in a cage at the bottom of the sea. Now he’s free and headed for his home — a lush Caribbean island. Not a comforting prospect for actor Craig T. Nelson, who plays a scientist conducting experiments on the island.
For Winston, design posed the biggest hurdle.
“Figuring out the anatomy of this part-shark, part-human was a huge challenge,” he says. “What would that be? How would it act? You can’t just take a shark and put arms on him, and you can’t just take a man and put a shark head on him. What we didn’t want to do was Guppy Man or `Creature From the Black Lagoon.’ There’s always a fine line between awesome and silly, but the only way to do something never seen before is to take certain risks. So we pushed the design to the hilt, and that’s what makes him wonderful to watch, along with who he is internally, and how he works in the story.”
Land sharks, the “Saturday Night Live” gag, figured prominently in everyone’s worst nightmares. “I heard that throughout the whole process,” says Mark “Crash” McCreery, conceptual art director at Stan Winston Studios. The designer hopes what comes through is a combination of the fear factor (the shark) and the human DNA element — “How scary it is to have a shark that thinks and reasons. It’s not about smelling blood and going after it. It’s about premeditating.”
Winston emphasizes the creature’s complexity. “There exists in him a multitude of psyches and a great deal of confusion. And instincts — not the most pleasant kind. We all know a shark as a killing machine and probably the only animal on Earth that is more terrifying than a shark is a human being. So you’ve got two of the nastiest things going. It’s not someone you’d like to bring home for dinner.”
In his many discussions with Winston, author Benchley emphasized that this man-shark is a lone individual not of his own making. “If you go back to the seed of what he is,” says Benchley, “here’s a creature who has every reason in the world to feel betrayed. He didn’t ask to be made into this; it isn’t his fault. It’s a Frankenstein story. I wanted a critter that had to be gotten rid of, but something that is in no way evil incarnate. Because it is a biological mistake made by man, rather than anything created by the forces of darkness.
“To me, the genius that Stan brought to this is to actually give this critter a character of his own. It is a living thing that has its own contribution to make to the story.”
McCreery estimates that between 70 and 85 people participated in the end products: two versions of an 800-pound, 7 1/2-foot mass of trouble.
