PLANET OF THE APES
Coming out the very same day as 2001 was a movie no less ambitious and even heavier on simians. Here’s how Planet Of The Apes beat the odds — and a hellish shoot — to re-define genre cinema
And this one featured monkeys doing so much more. “Bones?” they cried. “This is what we think of your bones!”
when
Roddy Mcdowall looked in the mirror, he didn’t recognise the face staring back at him. Heavy-browed, with a round wrinkled snout, it wasn’t even human. Mcdowall rose slowly from the barber’s chair in which he’d spent close to six hours having this new face applied, one May morning in 1967 at 20th Century Fox Studios. Then, seized by an odd compulsion, the London-born former child actor, star of How Green Is My Valley and Lassie
Come Home, started jumping up and down. He let his arms hang loose and scratched manically at his armpits. He stuck out his tongue and jabbered madly. For a full 15 minutes, as Mort Abrahams, associate producer of Planet
Of The Apes reported, “he went berserk.” The crew watched in stunned silence while Mcdowall leapt, shrieked, whooped and chittered until, exhausted, he finally slumped back down in his chair. “I was just flipping out,” he explained later. “It was the strangest experience I ever had.”
Mcdowall had been keen to take the role of chimpanzee archaeologist Cornelius in this strange and daring science-fiction adventure because, he said, “you don’t get asked to play a chimp too often.” But after that first make-up session he had serious second thoughts: “What can I do to get out of this movie?!” As visually remarkable and innovative as the prosthetics were, allowing Cornelius’ mouth movements to directly mimic those of Mcdowall’s, they made him claustrophobic.
But he resolved to deal with it and meet this “tremendous acting challenge”. His co-star, Kim Hunter, the Oscarwinning actor who played authoritydefying zoologist chimp Zira, found that popping a few Valium helped with the gruelling transformation process. For Mcdowall, the solution was to store up his frustration and then, the very
second each shooting day wrapped, cathartically rend that smothering simian visage from his own.
Planet Of The Apes was a tribulation for almost everyone involved. Including those responsible for turning Mcdowall, Hunter and more than 30 other actors into the eerily evolved chimps, gorillas and orangutans encountered by Charlton Heston’s beleaguered astronaut in the movie. Make-up artist Daniel C. Striepeke (pronounced ‘Stree-pack’) worked closely alongside John Chambers, the bluff prosthetics genius who went from engineering new limbs and facial features for US Army casualties, to creating Mr Spock’s ears for Star Trek, to taking on Apes and winning the second ever Oscar for make-up. Striepeke is now 87 years old, one of the few of the 1968 production’s crew members and cast who is still with us. When Empire calls him at his Californian home and asks if he wouldn’t mind sharing his memories of making the film, he is happy to oblige.
“Okay,” he says, straightaway. “I’ll start off with one word: hell.” t h at hell was sparked into life by Arthur P. Jacobs, a former Hollywood publicist with big ambitions and an inability to take no for an answer. Since forming his production company APJAC in 1962, Jacobs was desperate to mount something thrilling and fantastical. Something that would blow people away. Something like King
Kong. In 1963, he met with a literary agent he knew, Alain Bernheim, in Paris. “Speaking of King Kong,” said Bernheim, “I’ve got a thing here, but it’s so far out, I don’t think you can make it.” It was La Planète Des Singes (Monkey
Planet), by Bridge On The River Kwai author Pierre Boulle: a still-unpublished science-fiction satire about a Gulliver-ish traveller crash-landing on a distant planet named Soror, where apes are the dominant species — wearing clothes, driving cars — and humans are dumb brutes. Jacobs loved it. “I’ll buy it,” he announced. “I think you’re crazy,” said Bernheim, “but okay.”
Bernheim wasn’t alone. Over the next three years, Jacobs failed to win over any Hollywood studio with his vivid pitch for a space adventure about talking primates. Apart from the nuttiness of the concept, which brought to mind men-in-ape-costume cheapies like 1954’s laughable Gorilla At Large, science-fiction just wasn’t a lucrative genre. It was ridiculous, niche, unfashionable — like those old flyingsaucer B pictures of the previous decade. Undeterred, Jacobs hired Twilight
Zone creator Rod Serling to write the script. Self-plagiarising his show’s
I Shot An Arrow Into The Air episode, Serling savvily relocated Boulle’s story to a far-future, post-apocalyptic Earth — giving the movie its killer twist ending. Meanwhile, after trying for Paul Newman, Rock Hudson and even Jack Lemmon, Jacobs also secured a big-name star: Charlton Heston. The chiselled front-man of Biblical and historical epics met with him on 5 June 1965, and was impressed. “I usually play formidable authority figures,” he reflected at a press event for the film’s 30th anniversary. “But this was a part such as I’d never played.”
Heston lent Jacobs some valuable heft in his negotiations, as did the fact that he now had another big project (also about talking animals) in production at 20th Century Fox: the Rex Harrison musical Doctor Dolittle. Ensconced on the Fox lot, Jacobs and his right-hand man, Abrahams, focused their efforts on the studio’s boss, Richard D. Zanuck, hectoring him to the point where he told Abrahams, “If either of you ever mentions Planet Of the Apes to me again, that will be the end of our relationship.”
In the end, two things turned Zanuck around: firstly, a $7,000 make-up test, which starred Heston alongside 72-year-old veteran Edward G. Robinson, provisionally cast as human-hating ape leader Dr Zaius. The ape prosthetics, designed by Fox make-up head Ben Nye Sr, were rudimentary, but at least proved the characters could be taken seriously. (Though Robinson proclaimed he’d go crazy buried under them and promptly quit, with the role eventually taken by British stage-trained actor Maurice Evans.) Secondly, there was the surprise box-office success in August 1966 of Fox’s Fantastic Voyage, in which a submarine crew is shrunk to microscopic proportions and injected into a dying diplomat’s body. Perhaps, Zanuck realised, another out-there sci-fi adventure wasn’t so crazy. In October, he finally relented, and gave Jacobs the two words he’d been waiting years to hear: “Okay, go.”
not that it was so simple. The shoot was set to begin in mid-may 1967, giving Jacobs only seven months of prep on an extremely daunting project. “No movie had ever been made like this before,” says Striepeke. “This was totally new ground. It was absolutely revolutionary. And particularly at that scale, you know?”
Before anything else, Serling’s script needed a drastic rework. The hi-tech ape world it described, with monkey-bar crosswalks and ape-piloted helicopters, was financially impossible given Zanuck’s strict $5 million budget. Also, Jacobs insisted there be no chance any viewer would twig that Heston’s character, Taylor, was back on his home world before the climactic Statue Of Liberty reveal. “Arthur said, ‘I want it to look like nothing on Earth,’” recalls art director William J. Creber. So, inspired by the “primitive architecture” of some early African societies and the ‘troglodyte’ city of Cappadocia in Turkey, he designed an Ape City with a striking, alien, pre-industrial feel.
Screenwriter Michael Wilson was brought in to re-envision ape society along these less-modern lines. He also injected a coursing undercurrent of political commentary, emphasising class divisions between the three ape species and adding the trial scene (where Zira is attacked for her heretical assertion that Taylor is a “missing” link who proves apes are evolved from men), based in no small part on his own experience being blacklisted during the House Un-american Activities Committee’s witch-hunts.
The most important and daunting task, however, was to make the apes themselves believable; to develop the make-up in such a way that the actors beneath it could fully emote and enunciate. This required a specialist.
Jacobs’ first thought was British make-up expert Stuart Freeborn. He’d heard good things about the work Freeborn was doing for the Dawn Of Man sequence on Stanley Kubrick’s
2001: A Space Odyssey in England, and made an overture. But, perceiving a conflict of interest, Kubrick ordered Freeborn not to speak to anyone involved with Planet Of The Apes. He wouldn’t even throw Jacobs the bone of allowing Freeborn to consult with Chambers and Striepeke once he’d hired them.
Not that they felt they needed Freeborn’s advice. Where he had engineered mechanical armatures to enable Kubrick’s performers to control their ape facial movements with the poke of a tongue, Chambers pioneered a more direct, organic correlation between prosthetic and performer via foam-rubber appliances. “In 2001, they didn’t talk or show expression, except for grunts and roars,” he said in 1971. Besides, Chambers was affronted by the idea of asking for help. “I’m an Irishman and I said, ‘Any time any Englishman can teach me anything, it’s going to be a cold day,’” he told authors Joe Russo and Larry Landsman in their 2001 book Planet Of The Apes Revisited. “In fact, I taught what most of the English have learned.” Striepeke, meanwhile, remains bemused by the suggestion. Apart from anything else, he says, “there just wasn’t time. It was just head down, you-knowwhat up and go for it!”
Not only did Chambers develop new materials to make the ape make-up work — foam rubber that allowed the skin to breathe; paint and adhesive that didn’t clog the pores — he and Striepeke also had to pare down the application process to around three hours, apply it to multiple actors at a time, maintain it throughout 14-hour days, and manufacture fresh prosthetics all the way through the shoot.
“We had to keep our laboratory running 24 hours a day,” Striepeke says, “and we were only about a day-and-a-half ahead of production almost throughout the entire film. I had 47 make-up artists working some days. There was a lot of maintenance, too. I went onto Stage 21 one day after lunch and I saw this gorilla and his chin was hanging off. I looked into it, and the inside part of the chin was full of peas! So we sat him down and cleaned him up and glued him back together.”
No amount of care and attention could ease the ape actors’ extreme discomfort during the film’s first three weeks of shooting. Director Franklin J. Schaffner (hired with the approval of Heston, who’d starred in Schaffner’s 1965 Norman melodrama The War Lord) ordered them all to Page, Arizona, a searing desert terrain he chose for its hostile, desolate and alien quality. It was a place where the temperature could rise as high as 50 degrees Celsius. “It was
brutal,” said Mcdowall. “You simply couldn’t remember any lines.”
Once the production moved to the Fox Ranch in Malibu Creek State Park, where Creber’s Ape City had been constructed as an extensive, walk-through set, it was Heston’s turn to suffer. Dressed in little more than a ragged loincloth for most scenes, Taylor’s abuse at the hands (or rather stinking paws) of the apes made for a physically taxing experience, worsened by him coming down with the flu during the shoot. “There’s hardly been a scene in this bloody film in which I’ve not been dragged, choked, netted, chased, doused, whipped, poked, shot, gagged, stoned, leaped on, or generally mistreated,” Heston wrote in his journal on 19 July 1967.
The question remained, would it all be worth it? The one-time Ben-hur wasn’t honestly sure. “If the social comment comes off as well as the wild adventure,” he wrote on 10 August, the day the shoot wrapped, “we may get some attention.” But by the year’s end he still regarded Apes as “an unknown quantity”.
heston
need not have worried. Planet Of The Apes would become the actor’s biggest hit since 1961’s El Cid and 20th Century Fox’s most successful movie of 1968, grossing more than $32 million in the United States. Just as Jacobs hoped, it found a broad audience, some appreciating its humour (“human see, human do”) or feeling its political resonance, others simply thrilling to its high-adventure elements and sheer visual novelty — not forgetting, of course, the electrifying jolt of its big twist ending.
2001: A Space Odyssey — released the very same day in the States — would make $14 million more than Apes and is still regarded more reverently as the masterpiece that elevated science-fiction to art. But, as well as setting a new bar in make-up effects and world-building ambition, Planet Of The Apes also laid a new template for commercial genre cinema. It was the first science-fiction franchise in the modern, non-serial sense, spawning four sequels of varying quality between 1970 and 1973. Plus a spin-off TV show in 1974, a risible remake by Tim Burton and the recent reboot trilogy starring Andy Serkis. It was also a merchandising phenomenon, with Apes action figures, masks, comic-books, novels, lunch boxes and bedclothes selling out before George Lucas had even thought up Star Wars.
“In many ways,” reflects Striepeke, “it changed the face of cinema.” Rather like he changed the face of Roddy Mcdowall all those years ago.