The Lady from the Black Lagoon Read online

  The Lady from the Black Lagoon uncovers the life and work of Milicent Patrick—one of Disney’s first female animators and the only woman in history to create one of Hollywood’s classic movie monsters

  As a teenager, Mallory O’Meara was thrilled to discover that one of her favorite movies, Creature from the Black Lagoon, featured a monster designed by a woman, Milicent Patrick. But for someone who should have been hailed as a pioneer in the genre, there was little information available. For, as O’Meara soon discovered, Patrick’s contribution had been claimed by a jealous male colleague, her career had been cut short and she soon after had disappeared from film history. No one even knew if she was still alive.

  As a young woman working in the horror film industry, O’Meara set out to right the wrong, and in the process discovered the full, fascinating story of an ambitious, artistic woman ahead of her time. Patrick’s contribution to special effects proved to be just the latest chapter in a remarkable, unconventional life, from her youth growing up in the shadow of Hearst Castle, to her career as one of Disney’s first female animators. And at last, O’Meara discovered what really had happened to Patrick after the Creature’s success, and where she went.

  A true-life detective story and a celebration of a forgotten feminist trailblazer, Mallory O’Meara’s The Lady from the Black Lagoon establishes Patrick in her rightful place in film history while calling out a Hollywood culture where little has changed since.

  Praise for The Lady from the Black Lagoon

  “O’Meara’s deep dive into this unfairly forgotten genius of character creation enriches Hollywood history and should inspire future lady monster-makers for years to come.”

  —Sam Maggs, author of Girl Squads and Wonder Women

  “The woman behind the classic monsters of our collective Hollywood fantasies finally comes to life within this compelling odyssey of betrayal, broken dreams and shining resilience. Spanning the worlds of film, animation, horror and glamour, Mallory O’Meara richly reweaves the splintered mystery of Milicent Patrick into a dead-on exposé of Hollywood then and now. Dive in!”

  —Mindy Johnson, author of Ink & Paint: The Women of Walt Disney’s Animation

  “The Lady from the Black Lagoon is a celebration of the life and shamefully overlooked work of Milicent Patrick. It’s also an unflinching, from-the-front-lines recounting of Hollywood’s toxic patriarchal culture, a history of all manner of monsters. You’ll be infuriated at the legacy of continuing injustice but inspired by the talent, will, and spirit of Milicent Patrick and Mallory O’Meara.”

  —Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts and The Cabin at the End of the World

  “The Lady from the Black Lagoon is not just a story that needed to be told, the exact right person told it. At some point, the book starts to resemble troika dolls: echoes of Milicent Patrick’s life can be heard in Mallory O’Meara’s life, and echoes of Mallory’s can be heard in ours, the readers. It’s then that you realize how profound this book really is.”

  —Josh Malerman, author of Bird Box

  “Like many women film pioneers, Milicent Patrick’s trailblazing creature design and special make-up effects work has largely gone unrecognized, overlooked or even attributed to men. The Lady from the Black Lagoon shines a vital light on one of the unsung women heroes of cinema.”

  —Jovanka Vuckovic, author of Zombies! An Illustrated History of the Undead

  MALLORY O’MEARA

  THE LADY

  FROM THE

  BLACK LAGOON

  HOLLYWOOD MONSTERS

  AND THE LOST LEGACY

  OF MILICENT PATRICK

  Mallory O’Meara is an author, screenwriter and film producer. Whether it’s for the screen or the page, she seeks creative projects filled with horror and monsters. Every week, Mallory cohosts the literary podcast Reading Glasses. She lives in Los Angeles with her partner and too many cats.

  Follow Mallory on Twitter and Instagram, @malloryomeara.

  www.MalloryOMeara.com

  To all the monster girls.

  Show them your teeth.

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  Introduction

  1 Establishing Shot

  2 Fade In

  3 Smash Cut

  4 Dissolve

  5 Wipe

  6 Jump Cut

  7 Monster Mash

  8 The Beauty and the Beast

  9 Montage

  10 Iris

  11 Cross-Cut

  12 Cutaway

  13 Fade Out

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  Sources

  Interviews

  Index

  Endnotes

  In a low-cut, tight-fitting black crepe dress, worn under a white lace coat, with flashing necklace, earrings and bracelets, Miss Patrick, who is of Italian German descent, looked a lot more like a fashion illustration herself than a creator of bizarre monsters. Unmarried, she admits to no current romance.

  “Why should I bother with the Hollywood wolves?” she murmured. “I’m happy with my monsters.”

  —Milicent Patrick in an interview with journalist Jane Corby for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Valentine’s Day, 1954

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  During the course of Milicent Patrick’s life, she went by many names. To keep things straight for me as a writer and you as a reader, I’m going to refer to her as Milicent throughout the book, even during the early days of her life, long before she decided to call herself Milicent Patrick. Milicent was the name that she chose for herself. It’s the name I’ll use to tell her story.

  INTRODUCTION

  In 1954, Milicent Patrick was an artist working for the world-renowned special effects shop at Universal Studios in California, the movie company famous for its monsters. Dracula, the Mummy, the Wolfman and Frankenstein’s monster all had leaped from the studio there onto the silver screen and eventually, into the pantheon of film legends. That year, Universal was gearing up to unleash their latest horror creation upon the world, Creature from the Black Lagoon, and Milicent Patrick had just made history by designing it. No woman had ever designed a monster for a major motion picture before.

  Universal sent Milicent on a press tour across the country to promote the film. During the months she was away, a storm of resentment and jealousy raged back at the studio. The head of the makeup shop, a man named Bud Westmore, wanted the recognition Milicent was getting. Even though he received sole on-screen credit for the Creature, he couldn’t stand seeing Milicent in the spotlight while he stayed behind at Universal. By the time she returned to Hollywood, she no longer had a job. He pulled her from the film projects she had already started working on and refused to hire her for future work.

  After that, Milicent never designed another monster. She never designed anything for film ever again. Her name faded into obscurity while the Creature went on to become one of the most iconic movie creations of all time.

  On-screen credits in the 1950s were not as comprehensive as they are today; her name does not appear anywhere in the film. Her contribution to cinematic history soon sank into a black lagoon of its own. The only people who remembered her were dedicated monster fans. Even they were in the dark as to where she went, what happened to her.

  That’s where I come in.

  Until I started writing this book, the previous few paragraphs were all I, or any of my horror film colleagues, knew about Milicent Patrick. She is, at the time that I write this in 2018, still the only woman to have designed an ico
nic movie monster. Her rise, fall and disappearance behind-the-scenes in Hollywood is the type of story films are made of, the type of story that needs to be told.

  This book started as a straightforward biography, the fascinating story of a fascinating person. But the more people I told about the project, the more I was asked why I was doing it. She was some woman who designed a monster for an old black-and-white movie. Why was that important?

  It was a good question to think about as I began to spend all my savings and all my spare time investigating what happened to this woman who I didn’t know and wasn’t related to. Why was I doing this? Why did it matter so much?

  When I first heard Milicent’s story, my heart lurched with a terribly familiar ache. Hearing about a career beset by sexism, I could easily put myself in her shoes. I have the same pair—every woman in film has them. They’re standard issue and they’re uncomfortable as hell. Almost every day of my life as a filmmaker, I face the same kind of infuriating, misogynistic bullshit that Milicent faced in 1954. I didn’t have to imagine what it felt like for her because I constantly feel it myself.

  So many women share this experience, women in every profession. We’re ignored, sexually harassed, talked down to, plagiarized and insulted in and out of the workplace. It’s worse if you’re a woman of color, a queer woman, a disabled woman, a transwoman and worse still if you’re a combination of any of these. I don’t know a single woman working in my field, or any creative field, or any field at all, who cannot relate to Milicent Patrick. It’s not just her story. It’s mine, too.

  This toxic environment made it difficult to uncover much of Milicent’s history. The sad truth is that many of the male collectors and historians I spoke to who had pictures or information about her were only interested because she was gorgeous, not because of her artistic talent. Some openly scoffed at the project and doubted her contribution to film history. But I never doubted Milicent. From the first time I saw a picture of her, I knew she was exceptional.

  I was seventeen years old when I found out about Milicent Patrick.

  I had just finished watching Creature from the Black Lagoon for the first time. Like millions of viewers before me, I was completely entranced. The film is a masterpiece. Over sixty years have passed since it was released and it’s still stunning. The story, about a group of archaeologists who travel to South America to investigate the mysterious fossil of a fish-man hybrid, is compelling. For an old monster movie, it holds up. The cast is a pleasure to watch, with lead Julie Adams lighting up the screen.

  As with all great monster movies though, the true star is the Creature himself. He is still one of the best designed and recognizable movie monsters in Hollywood history. The pairing of grace and primal power as he moves through the murky depths of the lagoon is astounding. You can’t tear your eyes away from the horror and beauty of his longing as he swims beneath the heroine. The Creature is absolute movie magic.

  Like all the best magic tricks, I needed to know how it was done.

  This is a normal thing for me. I see a great movie, look up everything about it online and learn about all the people and processes involved in creating it. That’s just what nerds do. But this time was different.

  All of the well-known special effects artists are men. The Wolfman, Frankenstein’s1 monster, Dracula, King Kong, Godzilla—the artists who created all of them were male. Even the most devoted monster geek—which, at seventeen, I already was—would have a hard time naming a woman in the field.

  This didn’t seem strange to me. It was status quo. All of my monster-making heroes—Rick Baker (American Werewolf in London), Tom Savini (Dawn of the Dead), Dick Smith (The Exorcist), Jack Pierce (The Wolfman, Frankenstein)—were guys. I had never seen myself reflected in the world of horror filmmaking. The possibility of it never crossed my mind.

  So, I sat at my computer and read about Creature from the Black Lagoon. I happily stuffed new movie facts into my brain. Directed by notable 1950s science fiction director Jack Arnold, shot in 3D, inspired by Beauty and the Beast; cool, cool, cool. I scrolled down and studied the black-and-white behind-the-scenes photos.

  Then, there she was.

  A beautiful, statuesque woman leaning over the Creature with a paint brush. Milicent Patrick, animator and creature designer, the photo caption said. She worked on the monster suit with an easy confidence and a broad smile. This woman would have turned heads in any room she walked in. But standing on a film set, working on amazing special effects, she was galvanizing to me.

  She clearly didn’t fetch coffee for anyone. She wasn’t someone’s assistant. She wasn’t being helplessly carried away in the arms of the monster. She was creating it. Looking at this picture was like being struck by lightning. It was the first time in my life I had ever seen a picture of a woman like that.

  Milicent was holding a door open for me that I never realized I had considered closed. Come on, she said. We belong here, too.

  I accepted her invitation. I make monster movies for a living. I produce them, I write them. Over the years, I searched for information, for anything that could tell me more about her. For all of my adult life and film career, Milicent Patrick has been a guiding light, a silent friend, a beacon reminding me that I belonged.

  But while Milicent opened the door to horror filmmaking for me, the door to her own story was closed. Information on her life was scarce and often contradictory. Some claimed that she didn’t design the Creature at all.

  As I worked my way into the business, I thought of all the girls in the world, girls who love monsters, girls who love film. These girls are sitting on the sidelines, not content to watch, but filled with a frustrated desire for momentum and creation. All these girls are potential artists, designers and filmmakers. It’s so difficult to be something if you cannot envision it. To see no way in, to see the world that you love populated exclusively with those who are not like you is devastating.

  I wanted to whisper in all those thousands and thousands of ears that yes, you belong. Yes, you can do it. Look, look at this woman, she did it, and she did it way back in the 1950s. Seeing Milicent Patrick work on the Creature blasted open my mind and I wanted to amplify that force, immortalize it. Because the hard truth is that yes, Milicent did it over sixty years ago, but not many women have done it since. As a woman currently working in the same field she did, I can see some improvements, but not many. Certainly not enough for how many decades have passed. Every female filmmaker I know has struggled and continues to struggle against the same hardships that Milicent faced. Looking at the statistics, it is easy to see why someone would be surprised to discover that a woman was involved in designing one of the most famous movie monsters of all time.

  In 1981, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences finally created an Oscar category for Best Makeup and Hairstyling. Rick Baker won the inaugural award for his legendary special effect creations in An American Werewolf in London. Since then, men have been given roughly twice as many Oscars as women have in that category, and have been nominated three times as often. This is actually a very impressive ratio, considering that in the category of Best Visual Effects (digital effects integrated with live action), women have been nominated only three times since 1939, and only won once (Sara Bennett for the film Ex-Machina). Those women are also, by and large, white. The two Special Achievement Awards in this category have both been given to men.

  I would cite sources for the stats here, but I could find none. I had to go through lists of all the nominees and winners of both categories, count them and do the math myself. These depressing statistics do not just affect women in the special effects world, either. Fortunately for my math skills, and the wallet of my local bartender, the miserable facts about women in other parts of the film industry are well documented, thanks to the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film.

  One hundred percent of the top American films of 1954, the year Cre
ature from the Black Lagoon was released, were directed by men. Ninety-six percent of the top American films for 2016, the year I started writing this book, were directed by men. In sixty-two years, we have improved gender equality in American film directing by four percent. At this rate, we’ll be colonizing Mars before we see an equal number of female directors.2 It’s terrible all the way down the line of the film crew, too. There has been only one female cinematographer even nominated for an Oscar. Eighty-one percent of films do not have female production designers. Ninety-nine percent of films do not have any female gaffers or key grips.3

  All of this...and women account for fifty-one percent of movie goers. We see more movies, but see less of ourselves reflected in those who make them. This is why Milicent was such a miracle to me.

  Women have always been the most important part of monster movies. As I walked home one night, I realized why. Making my way down dark city streets to my apartment in Brooklyn, I was alert and on edge. I was looking for suspicious figures, men that could be rapists, muggers or killers. I felt like Laurie Strode in Halloween.

  Horror is a pressure valve for society’s fears and worries: monsters seeking to control our bodies, villains trying to assail us in the darkness, disease and terror resulting from the consequences of active sexuality, death. These themes are the staple of horror films.

  There are people who witness these problems only in scary movies. But for much of the population, what is on the screen is merely an exaggerated version of their everyday lives. These are forces that women grapple with daily. Watching Nancy Thompson escape Freddy Krueger’s perverted attacks reminds me of how I daily fend off creeps asking me to smile for them on the subway. Women are the most important part of horror because, by and large, women are the ones the horror happens to. Women have to endure it, fight it, survive it—in the movies and in real life. They are at risk of attack from real-life monsters. In America, a woman is assaulted every nine seconds.