Costume & wardrobe

David Kalat

It's a wonder he even made it that long. Playing Godzilla was no easy gig. At the end of each shoot, he would drain a cup's worth of his own sweat out of the costume. During the course of production, he lost 20 pounds. Both he and Tezuka suffered heat exhaustion, experienced blackouts, and that was on a good day.

57:43 · jump to transcript →

David Kalat

The costume was built by the Yogi brothers, who erected a frame of bamboo and wire mesh and then proceeded to layer latex rubber onto that frame until they built up the creature to match Taizu Toshimitsu's model. They called in Haruo Nakajima to do a fitting and a trial run. He came to the workshop and crawled into the costume through a slit along those famous dorsal plates. The instant he was inside, he started to stifle.

58:03 · jump to transcript →

David Kalat

He could barely move at all and began to panic involuntarily. He managed to take just a couple of steps before he fell over and had to be extracted from the costume by anxious special effects guys. That first suit was just impractical. It weighed over 220 pounds, for Christ's sakes. Not willing to throw it out, Tsuburaya had it sliced in half. Top half used for scenes in the bay as Godzilla swims around, and the bottom half was fitted to a pair of suspenders that Nakajima could wear like a pair of giant clown pants as he trampled the streets.

58:27 · jump to transcript →

Alan K. Rode

She then became a presence in Republic westerns like Hellfire, but as she told Eddie Muller, Republic mogul Herbert Yates was, quote, too busy chasing communists to promote his films, unquote. Marie played a lot of bad girls, but her turn as Sherry in The Killing was something special. She invited Kubrick and the cast over to her house for dinner and noted, as many people did, that Stanley's limited wardrobe was worn everywhere he went. Clothes and his own appearance didn't matter.

11:34 · jump to transcript →

Alan K. Rode

but wardrobe for his actors did.

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Alan K. Rode

And here we come to the abrupt end of a very bad marriage. And Marie looks stunning in that black negligee. She's just a delicious package of sociopathic desire. Her wardrobe makes me recall Eddie Muller's line about Marie's superstructure, quote, statuesque with a balcony that could support a double run of pinochle. Indeed. We had to be stupid.

1:16:09 · jump to transcript →

Isn't that unusual in a film to have an art director do the camera work? What did the union say about this? I wondered what the union would say when Lawton, we see in the outtakes, moves a little furniture around or the costume. That's true. Well, there's the shot. Those willows came, and that's an upside-down tree. That came from the ranch where they were shooting, and there's the wound, and there's the shot. Another one of the great moments. Yes. Yes.

43:32 · jump to transcript →