Rob Bottin

I always knew Rick Baker was involved with Star Wars but wasn't really aware that also Rob Bottin worked on the Cantina sequence in the film, or I might have just forgotten about it as it has been mentioned in some articles over the years. For those of you who don't know, he's actually the tallest player in the Cantina band, he was just a teenager when his buddy Rick Baker gave him his start on STAR WARS.

According to Jon Berg (from a Cinefantastique Volume 6 # 4 / Volume 7 # 1 interview):
 
"Someone who should be mentioned is Rob Bottin. He was Rick Baker's assistant and certainly contributed to the Cantina sequence. There was really a neat alien that Rick sculpted. It had a big exposed brain with a teriffic wise old man character on its face. Because of another commitment, Rick was not able to complete it, so Rob came in. Rick did half of it, then Rob did the other half and made a mold of it. In the picture it's in the background and a little out of focus."
 
In addition to Baker and Bottin, masks were sculpted by Doug Beswick, Laine Liska, Phil Tippett and Jon Berg.
 
Rick Baker was working on The Incredible Melting Man at the time, and worked mainly as a supervisor to the crew he put together. "Since we only had six weeks and a limited budget, we could not do anything outstanding or complicated. Old masks that had been sitting on my shelf for years were thrown in the day they were shot as filler for the background. Much to my dismay, they ended up, being very much in the foreground. One in particular was a crummy werewolf mask that i made as a mass-production item."
 
Baker also added a mechanism to the Stuart Freeborn created mask for Greedo. This mechanism allowed the mouth and ears to move.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCQEFoEyFRY

^ around 3:40, there's a funny anecdote from him working on Star Wars.

It seems Bottin retired from the business some years ago. His legendary work in John Carpenter's The Thing is IMO to this day still one of the most impressive achievments in the history of makeup and special effects, in this age of CGI I'll truly miss true artists like him.

msycamore said:

 His legendary work in John Carpenter's The Thing is IMO to this day still one of the most impressive achievments in the history of makeup and special effects, in this age of CGI I'll truly miss true artists like him.

 +1

he won an oscar for total recall right?  that was probably the last non-digital special effects oscar.

SilverWook said:

The line between makeup and SFX can be hazy sometimes.

Yeah, There was actually some controversy around this very thing back in the '80's where the make-up artists union, I think, sued Universal for the credit Bottin was given in The Thing, not sure what the work of his was credited as or if they had to change it on later videoreleases etc. but it was probably Special Make-up or something like that.

Now when I think about it, was there even a Oscar category for best make-up back then?

not to get off topic but whats the difference between winning an fx oscar and winning a special achievement oscar for fx?  I keep hearing that ESB won the latter

SilverWook said:

Rick Baker got screwed over for King Kong in the 70's, as Dino DeLaurentis somehow managed to make the academy believe Carlo Rambaldi's life sized animatronic Kong was used for most of the movie.

Weird, didn't know about that.

walking_carpet, don't worry about getting off topic, this thread is kinda off topic anyway. ;)

It was in fact only Brian Johnson, Richard Edlund, Dennis Muren and Bruce Nicholson who received the statuettes, so only the visual effects got awarded, not Stuart Freeborn or Frank Oz or anyone of the other people involved bringing Yoda to life. Had make-up effects had its own category that year, ESB would certainly have gotten the statuette.

Both works were equally amazing in their own category, but they could perhaps have given the visual effects an award like they did in '78, and an special achievement award for the special make-up effects, I have no idea, I don't know how these things worked back then, the decisions of the Academy doesn't make much sense some years.