Blood on his hands
Working as a makeup artist in Hollywood can be a pretty ugly business
ONE of the most iconic scenes in the boxing classic “Rocky” showed Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone) taking out his aggression on a side of beef, leaving him with blood-stained hands.
In this entertaining book about his life as a Hollywood makeup man, Michael Westmore explains how the blood was good ole movie magic, created on the sly.
The scene was filmed at a slaughterhouse at night, when the producers of the low-budget production knew USDA inspectors wouldn’t be on the job. But since “dressed, cleaned and processed hanging beef doesn’t have any visible blood,” Westmore needed to get inventive.
He shredded the sides of a plastic bag, placed fake blood in the bottom, and fixed it to the beef carcass with safety pins. WhenStallone hit the bottom of the bag, out of view of the camera, the blood flew through the holes in the bag, slathering Stallone’s hands.
When the scene was over, Westmore washed the fake blood off the carcass and returned it to its previous state — ready to be shipped off to an unidentified fast-food chain.
“Who knows,” Westmore writes. “Maybe you ate a tenderized Rocky burger from a famous movie bovine — somebody did!”
Given Westmore’s personal and family history, he has hundreds of similar stories in “Makeup Man,” his entertaining book about his time in the business and his family’s impact on the movies.
His grandfather, George Westmore, was an esteemed wig maker and barber in England who came to America in 1917 and founded “the first movie makeup department in cinema history.”
At a time when actors and actresses applied their own makeup, Westmore introduced the concept of film makeup artists when he dolled up actress Billie Burke. Soon, the practice became standard, and he helped early stars such as Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks establish signature looks.
Westmore had six sons, and each one wound up running a Hollywood studio makeup department.
Monte Westmore, the oldest of the six and the author’s father, helped create the images of two early Holly- wood sex symbols, Rudolph Valentino and Clara Bow, and invented the “flapper” look. He also concocted the telltale scar for actor Paul Muni in the 1932 film “Scarface.” Fifty years later, his son would do the same for Al Pacino in the 1983 remake.
The author’s uncle Perc did makeup for Bette Davis, who insisted on being naked throughout the application process. Uncle Wally Westmore applied Audrey Hepburn’s eyelashes in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” and Uncle Bud put the Westmore stamp on the Barbie doll in 1957, after the toy’s creators hired him as a cosmetic consultant.
Michael Westmore himself has won an Oscar and nine Emmys for makeup, handling everything from the “Rocky” and “Rambo” films to creating the Sleestaks in “Land of the Lost,” and many of the alien looks for the various “Star Trek” series that followed the original.
Today, Westmore, 78, serves as an on-camera mentor for the Syfy channel makeup reality show, “Face Off,” which is hosted by his actress daughter, McKenzie (who, at age 3, played Robert De Niro’s daughter in “Raging Bull”). His other two children also continue the Westmore legacy in Hollywood: son Michael is a film editor who also works in movie makeup, and daughter Michele is a talent manager.
When Westmore won his Oscar — in 1985, shared with Zoltan Elek, for “Mask” — he accepted it not just for himself, but for the generations of his family who’d impacted Hollywood.
“In my heart, I felt I had accepted the Oscar on behalf of all the Westmores whose talents had graced the silver screen for so many decades,” he writes.