Does a hidden message pervade Story Musgrave?
2/25/2000
Flying Saucers over Hollywood! by filmmaker Paul Davids offers a rare glimpse into the great Hollywood UFO films.
Sunday night, February 20, in this new-millennium year of 2000, with a holiday to look forward to Monday morning, I headed down La Cienega to a happening nightclub known as THE GATE. The occasion? It was the cast and crew party for Universal's NUTTY PROFESSOR 2.
The Gate's wood paneling, Rembrandt paintings copied in oil by other artists, gaudy, gilded frames, and roaring fire in the fireplace was matched by the party's warm and friendly atmosphere. The club was packed with honchos, production personnel, and artists who worked on the movie, all boozing and schmoozing in celebration. The music was a little loud, and you had to get your face six inches away from the other guy's face to hear anything more than, "Hello, how.ya doin?".
First, I chatted with Michael Rosenberg, president of Imagine Entertainment, better known as Ron Howard's film production company, which just finished NUTTY PROFESSOR 2. Tall and distinguished, Rosenberg was also president of Imagine in the era when Howard directed APOLLO 13, and also during the days of the HBO NASA documentary series FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON.
APOLLO 13 is a grab-bag of secrets for AlienZoo fans to unravel. My own exposure to those mysteries and controversies goes back to the year APOLLO 13 was nominated for Academy Award as Best Picture, and I attended the pre-Academy Award party at Spago. That movie's party took place a few years ago, when Spago was still located on Sunset Strip, up on a hill. Back then I had learned that Howard was inducted as a top-level Freemason in order to receive inside information and full Establishment support for the making of APOLLO 13. According to NASA critic and face-on-Mars theorist Richard Hoagland, Howard was immediately elevated to 33rd degree Mason. It's not often that this happens to someone in a few days; Hoagland says Howard being given that honor was a bit like getting the blessing of the Pope in Catholicism. In contemplating the connection between astronaut ventures and the secret knowledge of the Freemasons, I am often reminded that Buzz Aldrin made a gift to the Freemasons of an American flag that had been taken to the Moon. Hoagland's theories show a link between NASA and Freemasons (of which most of America's founders were members), the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) in Pasadena, and space secrets regarding ET life that are not being shared with the public. Chew on that one!
That APOLLO 13 party was another time, another era, but highly relevant. With Aldrin, I had brought up the subject of UFOs and possible ancient alien structures on the Moon, which did not make him a happy camper. Publicly, Aldrin says UFOs are bunk. He gets riled up when he meets someone who takes the subject seriously, like me -- at least he did THAT night. He especially resented that people would think that astronaut heroes would go all the way to the Moon, come back alive, and then lie to us about what they did or didn't see or find.
Nevertheless, a number of friends have discussed what Aldrin has said to them PRIVATELY, and it just doesn't jive whatsoever with the public persona. One reputable TV producer who must remain nameless, tells me Aldrin told her he can't "talk" about the details of what he and other spacemen saw up there, because the roof would cave in on him. But apparently, privately, he has been known to hint strongly that "we're not alone" -- just as astronauts Edgar Mitchell and Gordon Cooper have stated publicly.
As for astronaut Story Musgrave, take a look at his superb, recent book of his paintings of astronauts visiting the lunar surface. A bit expensive, yes, but worth every dollar -- and you should be able to find it at all major bookstores. Even if you don't buy it, thumb through it and observe the following: In one painting, he shows an astronaut hitting a golf ball on the Moon (a real incident). It's painted in the most unusual way, from a very strange angle. The golf ball is VERY large in the picture, having been hit by the club and swooping high above the lunar surface . but the golf ball is painted in such a way that it looks PRECISELY like a honey-combed DOME directly over a crater. Hoagland has called that a hidden message -- not just a mere accident of artistic composition. In Hoagland's excellent two-pack videotape set, THE MOON/MARS CONNECTION, he makes the case that there are ancient artifacts on the Moon, including the ruins of large structures. (You can keep up with Hoagland's research at www.enterprisemission.com.)
The several days I spent a few years ago with Hoagland at NASA Goddard and the National Space Science Data Center helped convince me that, in spite of all the public denials by NASA and lunar astronauts (including Edgar Mitchell, who also denies this one), there is striking photographic evidence to be found and debated that lends support to Hoagland's research results, that our Moon was once an alien base -- and might still be!
I didn't have a chance to get into any of these issues with Rosenberg, whose Imagine Entertainment brought us close-up stories of astronaut dramas and traumas, in a form and format accepted by the Establishment. To have begun asking deep questions, I would have driven myself hoarse over the sound of the music, and he probably would have thought I was from Neptune. And after all, he was there for the celebration of the completion of NUTTY 2, not to discuss the ultimate answers to man.s cosmic place in the scheme of life in the universe.
So I kept wandering. In a quieter section of the club, I came across art designer, Bill Elliot, who has now done production design for four Eddie Murphy Pictures. I asked him if he's ever done production design for a picture with a space theme. He launched into a description of all the pre-production work he completed on a picture called GUAM GOES TO THE MOON, which has not yet been made.
Elliot tells me the inside line on GUAM GOES TO THE MOON is that a rich businessman in Guam wants to get information about what's on the Moon, free from NASA censorship. (You see by now that lack of trust for what NASA and what its representatives tell us is getting to be an accepted Hollywood theme.) In the story Elliot told me, the businessman gathers a group of failed astronauts, and Guam builds its own Moon rocket, to proceed with its own Moon mission. No word yet about whether or when it may go into production -- or what the nation of Guam finds when it gets to the Moon. Secrets are part of the game in Hollywood, too, just like they apparently are at NASA.
My schmoozing with Elliot was cut short when I spotted Rick Baker in the crowd. I absolutely HAD to talk to him. I went over to press the flesh, as we say. For those who know him by his work and not by his name, Rick is the primary primordial ape man of Hollywood. Back in the 1970s, when producer Dino de Laurentiis flopped at building a realistic gigantic King Kong for his KING KONG remake, he needed to solve his Kong problem in a hurry. Rick was the solution. He designed the Kong ape costume and wore it in the film, mixing his own human movements in acting the role of the giant ape with "audio-animatronic" ape features.
For those of you new to the world of special effects, audio-animatronic means that hydraulic controls are used to manipulate some of the body attributes of a movie prop -- a prop that's supposed to represent an organic creature. That may mean that the roll of the eyes, the lift of the eyebrows, or the flex of the lips as the mouth opens are all controlled by what are essentially hydraulic levers. Rick went on to be the apeman -- the man inside the ape costume -- in virtually every ape film Hollywood has made in recent decades. That includes GREYSTOKE, the ultimate live-action Tarzan movie, and the recent MIGHTY JOE YOUNG with Bill Paxton. Of course, Rick and his incredible special effects team designed and built all of those apes.
AlienZoo fans will probably most appreciate Rick for his magnificent work in two of the science-fiction space classics that have forever molded our view of the film alien. That would include the 1997 film, MEN IN BLACK, and the famous cantina scene in the original 1977 STAR WARS.
For MEN IN BLACK, Baker and his team designed the aliens, including the little alien that existed inside the "human" head of one of the characters. When you watch MEN IN BLACK again, compare that little-guy alien with the living alien we made for our Kyle MacLachlan / Martin Sheen film, ROSWELL. It's the same! Well, chalk one up in for my film having been an inspiration to Rick. But chalk one up to Rick for having trained, tutored and taught the special effects master who built our Roswell alien -- Steve Johnson of XFX, Inc., in Burbank. Johnson started in the business with Rick as his mentor.
Of all of Rick's achievements, however, AlienZoo fans will probably most appreciate his "zoo" of creatures in the cantina in the first STAR WARS movie. Rick spoke to me at the party about how he had built all those critters. Wasn't the cantina in that film the first and ultimate AlienZoo in Hollywood cinema? It is certainly the best remembered.
At the club, Rick and I discovered that we have much in common in our background. As young men, we both grew up with FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND, or FM, magazine. That magazine was the brainchild of Hollywood science-fiction prop collector and inventor of the term "sci-fi" -- Forrest J Ackerman. Rick and I both read every issue as kids, and we both entered FAMOUS MONSTERS movie contests as children. In my case, I made an 8mm film based on an imaginative short script "Forry" Ackerman wrote, titled SIEGFRIED SAVES METROPOLIS. Forry and one of the other judges, Don Glut (who years later was to write the novelization of George Lucas's .THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK.) selected my film for honorable mention. Photos from that youthful film effort of mine showed up in FAMOUS MONSTERS (FM) #35, with Dracula on the cover. This was after Forry had featured my 8mm silent films in another article about amateur monster movies in FM #27 (with the cyclops from Ray Harryhausen's 7TH VOYAGE OF SINBAD on the cover.) Rick remembered that contest well.
Rick, as a child, entered the FAMOUS MONSTERS MOVIE MAKEUP CONTEST. He spent all of his allowance for many weeks to create his contest entry. But according to his best recollection, the magazine dropped the ball and somehow never got around to announcing winners. No matter, it didn't hamper Rick in his career. He went on to become one of the greatest and most inventive special-effects and makeup artists Hollywood has ever seen, with a specialization in "organic" or living creatures, as opposed to high-tech effects. He was even honored a few years ago with the special GEORGE PAL AWARD, in which clips from his films were shown at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and he gave a lecture and then answered questions. I recall I was there that night, but didn't get a chance to speak with him personally at that time.
The highlight of this exciting evening at The Gate, however, during the NUTTY 2 party, was when I turned the conversation with Rick to the topic of UFOs. That's when we discovered something else in common. I had a daylight disc sighting on Feb. 25, 1987. That's when the subject of flying saucers was transformed, for me, from science-fiction to science-fact. It turns out that Rick also had an unforgettable UFO sighting of his own. It happened a number of years ago, when he was in Venezuela. It was a night-time sighting, but very vivid -- a strange and large ball of light that navigated in a very strange way through the sky. It made a profound and lasting impression on him. So let's now add Rick Baker to the list of Hollywood celebrities who have seen and therefore believes.
Well, that's it for this week, AlienZoo fans! Be sure to log on again next Friday for more FLYING SAUCERS OVER HOLLYWOOD!