Sad month for Special Effects and Seven Special Words

I never knew this, but my very first introduction to Stan Winston was on the Star Wars holiday special. He created the Wookie costumes for the show. I was a Star Wars nut and to see Star Wars on TV was awesome! Better yet, to see Chewbacca and his family, Han Solo, R2D2, C3PO and Luke was more than enough to drive me bonkers. The show was horrendous, but it was Star Wars and to a six year old kid, it was the greatest TV ever. I read Stan's biography on Wikipedia to get an idea of how prolific he was. I had already become acquainted with Stan Winston from the great horror classic John Carpenters The Thing and fun 3D slasher flick Friday the 13th part 3. But it was the movies Terminator, Aliens, The Monster Squad, Predator, T2, and Jurassic Park that made me a HUGE fan. At one point in my early life, I wanted to become a special effects / makeup artist because of Stan Winston and another of my favorites Rick Baker.

I'm sure there are incidents in everyone's life that sort of define who you are as you grow up. Now I am not going to profess that Stan Winston was a direct influence on who I am today (there were many), but he did have a very early and profound impact on how I view movies and special effects. He actually made me fall in love with the technical aspects of movie magic- he made me ask the question "how did they do that?" and more importantly, he was the catalyst to find out how they did it. With movies like The Thing and a brooding hulk with a hockey mask- he steered me to the horror genre, with all the inventive ways in creating monsters and gore. I was fascinated with the idea of tapping into my creative side, which did directly impact my life.

So it is with a heavy heart, that I bid farewell to a man who created magic before our eyes and inspired me to watch movies from a slightly different perspective, but most importantly, showed my how to allow my imagination to run wild.

Stan Winston 1946 -2008

George Carlin was a funny man. He was also a deep thinker and a commenter of business, government, race, politics, and religion. The BIG world he called it. I just caught him on the Actors Studio being fawned over by James Lipton. Aside from the incessant gushing, I was treated to some insights on how George thought. He was an atheist and quite astonishingly an optimist. He was an optimist in an extreme way- he stated that he hoped the extra-terrestrials would interfere again and sort of reboot the human race so we could all get along. Call it a fantasy or sarcasm, but I got the impression that he was a believer in man, but that we were sinking into places that were not meant to come back from.

I guess the strongest thing you can say about George Carlin as a comedian was his biting commentary of man's hypocrisy. From the Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television, the difference between baseball and football, to how much a person is attached to their stuff- he was a genius at poking fun at our own idiosyncrasies and hang ups. He wasn't afraid of controversy and I think relished the thought of being the center of man's own self indulgence when pointed at and ridiculed for his foul language and harsh words- I could see Carlin's raised eyebrow to quiet the naysayers. Yes, it was language that George loved. He loved the combination of images that words could create like, "rough sex with a Norwegian sailor on a barcalounger."

I watched Carlin on many occasions and enjoyed watching him with my father. My dad, who has very strong opinions, would never agree to everything Carlin stated, but we both found the humor and the point in what he was saying and ultimately doing: trying to show what we, as a species, are really like; the good, the bad, and the ugly. For my dad, Carlin was a funny man with some misdirection. For me, he was one of the greatest stand up comedians that ever lived and one of our most vocal satirists in the new millennium.

From his cutting commentary on government and religion, his hilarious introspection of ill-fitted words (near-miss), to his views on our species- George Carlin will be missed for not only making us laugh, but by making us think as we do it.

George Carlin 1937-2008