Stan Winston: 1946-2008

Sad news today in the world of movie fx. He did everything from The Thing, Aliens, Terminator 2 +3, Batman Returns.... he even worked on The Hand.

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Make-up and effects pioneer is dead at age 62.
by Alex Vo | June 16, 2008

Special effects and make-up maestro Stan Winston has died at the age of 62. He was surrounded by family at home when he succumbed to multiple myeloma, a condition he lived with for seven years, on Sunday.

No self-accredited cineaste can get far without knowing Winston's work by heart. Casual filmgoers need only to glance at his filmography to understand his impact on the movies. The Terminator series. Edward Scissorhands. Batman Returns. A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. The Jurassic Parks. The Predators. The Thing. Aliens. His creations made lasting impressions when we were young, and today his works stand out even more for their realism in a business currently awash in computer generated theatrics.

But arguably, Winston did his best work working alongside CG. He won an Oscar for Jurassic Park, which had the colossal tyrannosaurus strutting alongside galloping gallimimus, and another for Teminator 2, pitting the squishy T-1000 against Arnold Schwarzenegger, peeling flesh and exposed exoskeleton and all. And as recently as Iron Man, which was supervised by his effects studio, he demonstrated he know how to get prosthetics and computer artwork (the frenemies of modern cinema) to co-exist.

Let me mention I think of The Thing with particular fondness. Needless to say, it's a movie of monumental stature and hype. I admit I first saw it late in the game: a few years back, in a seedy hotel while covering E3. The scuttling alien, the pissed-off canines, and especially the surprise chest-caving scene -- to my absolute joy, The Thing looked and felt like something that just came out in multiplexes last week. Part of it was the gripping story. Part of it was John Carpenter's innate sense on how to pace an action movie. The rest is all about artists like Winston, the people who can figure out how to inject personalities to robots and a touch of humanity to their monsters -- all the more to terrify and inspire.