It's been a while I know, but I did promise you guys I'd be back, and back I am! I've been touring Europe and Scandinavia with my family and enjoying all manner of cultures and landscapes, ranging from Venice to Lisbon and Tunisia to Copenhagen and Stockholm to Budapest, and then some. It's official.... Barcelona, Spain is THE most beautiful city in the world! You heard it here first... a wonderful place to visit.... and I've been around the globe a fair bit over the years. The only downside were the astonishingly fascist cops there who seemed to relish busting innocent street artists and performers everywhere we looked, as if the joint were still under General Franco's iron fist. Still, a great place, fantasticly insane Dali-esque architecture, super book stores for film and art, beautiful sights and nice people. If it weren't for the fact that it takes around 30 (yes, thirty) hours to get there from New Zealand, I'd go again next month. Living down here at the arse end of the globe can have it's advantages for sure, but travel ain't one of them!
I was recently invited to compile a list of the 10 best mattes of all time for the online magazine Shadowlocked. Well, 10 proved just a tad too lightweight for me so I upped the ante to 50, and that article may be found right here. I wanted to avoid the obvious, popular mattes where possible and have a wide range of genres and era's as an educator to the non matte savvy general reader to appreciate just how mattes can slip by totally unnoticed so often. The editor of Shadowlocked even agreed to install movie clips of several key matte shots as those special shots were difficult to appreciate as a mere static image. I expected all sorts of angry responses to my list (but only got one to my surprise). Regular readers of this blogsite will not be surprised at many of those finalists,with a great many vintage shots in there.
If any readers out there happen to have copies of old (and I mean OLD) American Cinematographer or British Kinematograph with articles on special effects, I would be your friend for life if any kindly souls would contact me in hopes of getting a scanned copy of particular articles. Am.Cine did alot of FX profiles in the 40's especially, with articles on Fulton, Sersen, Kellogg, Ries, Haskin, Dunn and Lerpae - all of whom are of great interest to your humble author. I thank those who have already sent me copies of fantastic articles such as the rare Whitlock article in Film Maker's Newletter among others. It's all very much appreciated and is so helpful for my research.
Anyway, the sad news of Matthew Yuricich's passing eventually caught up with me while between foreign locales so I counted my blessings as it were, that I'd had the unique opportunity to present a great many questions to Matt just a month or so before his death. What follows is a candid, often amusing and always revealing insight into the world of the matte painter as told in his own words. I hope you enjoy the journey.
________________________________________________________________________________
MATTHEW YURICICH:
IN
HIS OWN WORDS
A
few months ago I was contacted by Craig Barron, visual effects supervisor at
Matte World Digital and principal author of the indispensable tome The
Invisible Art – The Legends of Movie Matte Painting, whereby I was presented with the once in a lifetime opportunity to have a
candid Q &
A with legendary matte artist Matthew Yuricich. Naturally I leapt at the chance, though the
vast geographic distance between California and New Zealand proved to be a quandary as I’m not a telephone guy (I never use ‘em)
and Matt wasn’t an email guy. Just as
such a unique once in a lifetime opportunity started to look as though things
wouldn’t pan out, an extremely generous solution was quickly formulated by
Craig with Matt’s friend, visual effects cameraman Peter Anderson. I am most grateful to both gentlemen for
their solid support and really going ‘beyond the call of duty’ to facilitate
the ’on site’ interviews with Matt at his retirement home in Los Angeles. 
Since
this conversation took place in April of this year, Matthew sadly passed away
on 28th May 2012 at
the age of 89, so this document is more than likely his final interview, and I for one feel proud to have been invited to 'chew the fat' with Matt.
The
following article presents Matt’s recollections of his introduction to art and
then into the photographic effects world, told entirely in his own words. The
topics discussed with Matt were wide ranging, the many personalities colourful
– to say the least, the behind the scenes info revealing, and the chronicle of
one of Hollywood’s foremost matte painters - in all probability, the last of
the Golden Era studio matte practitioners, are priceless. It is my hope that this article will be
enjoyed by the many matte art enthusiasts out there – be they industry
professionals or armchair archivists. As
I’ve been told by numerous people who knew and worked with him, Matthew was
indeed ‘one of a kind’.
None of the following chronicle would have
been remotely possible, as outlined above, without the help of Craig and Peter,
to both of whom, I am deeply indebted. A
big thank you too to Michele Moen for kindly agreeing to write the foreword on
her memories of working for Matthew, and a thanks too to Richard Edlund, Virgil
Mirano, David Stipes and Gene Koziki for kindly supplying additional
photographs. Lastly, I’d like to acknowledge Robert Welch for allowing me to
use very rare material on Matt from the A.Arnold Gillespie collection.
______________________________________________________________________
MICHELE MOEN REFLECTS ON MATTHEW - MENTOR & FRIEND:
 |
| Matt's protoge and close friend Michele Moen at work on a matte at Boss Films. |
I began as an apprentice on Bladerunner and
the way Matt taught me was to have me sit on a stool behind him and just
watch. He’d come in to the studio really
early in the morning, sometimes at 4:30
or 5 a.m. and do the most important
sections of the painting before the rest of us came in. I’d be in before dailies at 9 a.m. and after dailies I’d watch Matt paint for 2 hours
or so and he’d explain process or point something out. He was a good teacher and patient and I am
lucky to have had that kind of training.
By 3 he’d show me an area on the painting that he wanted me to fill in
or continue painting on. He showed me
how to look at the film frame through the loop every few minutes while I was
applying a stroke to make sure the blend was successful. Look through the loop, look at the painting
over and over until I knew exactly what I was looking for. 
On Bladerunner, the matte paintings
were shot on a particular film stock so that to get a black color on film, the
paint had to be a muddy, murky grey-green but once a series of dabs of color
stroked on the side of the matte painting were filmed and we could see the
result, we knew what to mix to get that color.
It was all in relation to the film; the painting itself was not a pretty
picture to hang on the wall. Matt
painted with Winsor & Newton long-handled sable brushes and made short dabs
of color almost as an impressionistic style.
He said the film would bring it all together and it did. He smoked cigarettes then and would leave the
cigarette burning in his mouth until the ash fell onto the oil painting; that
was added “texture” which was O.K. Razor
blades scraping away the top wet layer of a lighter brown would become a dirt
road or a tree trunk; random texture that would photograph as realism. I would draft out in pencil the next painting
or project a film clip onto a board or glass and trace in pencil the details so
that Matt could come in the next morning and start a new painting. Also, I’d clean off his glass palette every
night and lay out fresh oil paint in the same order that he’d been working with
for years so that he could reach for a color without looking. At the end of the day, I’d wash often as many
as 50 brushes with an Ivory soap bar in warm water and then place them
carefully in a drying cabinet. If one of
the brushes was a little stiff and not washed properly, Matt would toss it back
into the turpentine-filled container to be washed again.
Other than visiting Matt and
talking to him on the phone, the last big, recent, fun outing together was when
I took my nephew and Matt took one of his grandsons to The Academy Awards in a
limousine. I think he took all his grand
kids and his kids one at a time to the Awards.
I wish he was still here; he had wanted to live to 100.
I really miss his stories; he
remembered everything about every movie he worked on.
Michele
Moen
July 20, 2012
__________________________________________________________________
MATTHEW YURICICH – IN HIS OWN WORDS
 |
| One of the many Oscar nominated mattes from THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD (1965) |
EARLY FORAYS INTO ART:
I was always interested in art. I can remember my father taking me to school back
in Ohio with 8x10” coloured
sheets of paper and pencils because I was drawing since I was at least 2 or 3
that I can remember. I couldn’t speak a
word of English then, that’s why he took me there, although I was born in this
country, and it just went on from there.
I’m very proud of the fact that the very first thing I did commercially
or professionally was a contest in the paper for, I think, Flash Gordon. It was a whole city and you had to paint it
and I won first prize. I was 12 years
old or something. In The Depression
years that was really something. |
| THE EGYPTIAN (1954) |
ARTISTIC TRAINING & UNCLE SAM:
I had no formal artist training. I was doing the stuff through high school and
I even got permission to take two years of art because you had to take one year
and a year of physics and chemistry and all that, but the art teacher thought
that I showed so much promise… then I went into military service and served in
the US Navy on the USS Nassau in the Pacific theatre of war.
 |
| Fred Sersen with his glass shot artists on the Fox lot. |
 |
| The grand CinemaScope costumer PRINCE VALIANT (1954) was one of many big Fox shows that Matt painted on. |
HOLLYWOOD BY DEFAULT:
 |
| Matt & Betty. A guy in uniform always gets lucky. |
 |
| Animated airplanes and tracer fire fx from Matt and Jim Fetherolf for DESTINATION GOBI (1953) |
One day 20th Century Fox
called me and they wanted to hire me for six weeks of frame by frame animation
(rotoscope) work. I didn’t know what the
hell that was…I’d never even heard of ‘24 frames a second’ and all that jazz, but
I quickly found out it was tracing and carefully inking figures, taking them
out of one scene and putting them in another (by hand drawn traveling mattes). This was about 1950 I think. I also was assigned to make the duping boards
(for duplicate matte compositing) at Fox.
 |
| The 20th Century Fox Special Photographic Effects department in 1953 under Ray Kellogg. |
We never did originals (original negative mattes) there in those days. We’d have a white board and black out an
area, then you’d have to trace out that area and reverse. It was very critical because that line has to
be perfectly matched. Everybody else had
lines that looked too heavy, and I could never understand that. I always tried to leave a little separation
so the stuff blends together in the shot.
That was one of the things I was doing there under Fred Sersen all the
time.  |
| One of Matt's earliest assignments as VFX roto/animator for DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL (1951) |
 |
| Jim Fetherolf |
 |
| NIAGARA (1953) which Matt assisted Emil Kosa on. |
We were working on a picture with Clifton Webb and John Payne – in the film they both died and were sent to heaven. We had to make rotoscope mattes for their ghosts walking through walls and that sort of thing, and I remember for some reason I had an affinity for this stuff. Both Jimmy and I did real fine, even though we had some problems with the frame by frame animation, we both traced accurately.
I did a lot of that rotoscope work back then that people will never know. I learned a lot of useful stuff right away at Fox.
 |
| TITANIC (1953) multi part split screen composite. |
 |
| One of Matthew's most iconic shots - LOGAN'S RUN (1976) |
TEAM PLAYER FOR A SUPERSTAR:
Around this time I wound up on Marilyn
Monroe’s softball team. We won the
championship. She was going out with Joe
DiMaggio at the time. That party up at
her house was something…she chased me all over the damn house. She liked men. I was rather a stick in the mud in those
days, and very naïve…I wouldn’t even dance with another woman because I
was married. I still wake up and have
nightmares of being so stupid. I may
have kept my integrity there, but I’d sure like to have lost my integrity with
Marilyn!
Marilyn had a bad reputation on the
set, but she was a really great gal as far as I was concerned, and to the guys
on her team. She really was alright… she
gave us a baseball autographed by the World Series champion, The New York
Yankees and Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe.
My wife threw it into the incinerator!!!
 |
| A wonderful, unused matte composite prepared for SOYLENT GREEN (1972) |
FRED SERSEN & RALPH HAMMERAS:
 |
| Ferdinand 'Fred' Sersen |
Sersen was good, and all the credit
to him. Ralph Hammeras was an old friend
and Ralph was the head of the matte department in the earlier days at Fox
before Sersen took over from him, and Ralph was just pushed aside, I don’t really
know why. Ralph had some very
interesting stories and he was almost killed in a bad automobile crash one time.
 |
| Ralph Hammeras (at right) |
He did miniatures as well as matte
painting. Ralph was a good artist. They got rid of Ralph because of some
personal stuff and Ralph then worked for Fred.
They brought Fred, and Fred brought Emil Kosa – both Czechoslovakians,
so I guess there was a little something there that I didn’t see. Fred was one of those guys like a real quiet
Santa Claus type, but really rough though.
The man will fool you completely.
He was a very tough guy and very knowledgeable.
 |
| Gary Cooper's GARDEN OF EVIL (1954) |
THE MATTE DEPARTMENT PECKING ORDER:
 |
| THE DESERT FOX (1951) on which Matt assisted. |
At both MGM and Fox there was no monkey
business. Fred would come over to us and
see what was going on, and he smoked his cigars, and the problem was that when
he told you or gave you orders, he was chomping on his cigar. You couldn’t tell what the hell he was saying
(laughs)… but when it was clear then you paid attention – I remember
that part very well.
I’d occasionally put my two cents in,
not knowing anything at all, but I’d never heard of a suggestion box, if they’d
had one at Fox. They sure never had one
over at MGM. He (Warren Newcombe) would
never go for that just because of principle because he was the ‘Lord and
Master’.
 |
| Fox FX cameramen with head Ray Kellogg 2nd from left. |
 |
| The not terribly entertaining DEMETRIUS AND THE GLADIATORS (1954) which recycled many mattes from THE ROBE |
EMIL KOSA, JR – ADVERSARY & ANTAGONIST:
His old man smuggled him out of Paris
to get in here. His father (Emil Kosa senior)
was also a matte artist, but his father was nothing like him, either as a
painter or as a person. He (Kosa snr) was
nicer, and although I met him I never worked with him. Kosa jnr was a friend of Ray Kellogg’s, who
became head of department, and Ray befriended him pretty well.
 |
| Emil Kosa, jnr |
 |
| Kosa in self portrait. |
Emil was an excellent portrait painter, a real traditional artist – but he was very bitter at that time because the abstract stuff that was popular was really hitting the traditional art world hard and I saw Emil try some of those things and I thought they were great. I told Emil that what he should do is to paint something different. Here I am, a little assistant telling him. He came upon his traditional ways when his father smuggled him out of Czechoslovakia in a potato sack...he started as the artists did for the last 400 or 500 years… they learned to grind their own paints and all that stuff in Europe. His father was a great artist too with a great traditional background. Emil’s ballet dancer paintings were just as good, if not better than Degas…and his portraits were just excellent. His matte shots were very good, though at times they’d be a little too tight. He was a prolific painter in mattes. He did most of the work and he was fast. Emil’s private life was kind of sad. He’d lost both his wife and his 11 year old daughter – both of them died. That daughter was his only child.
 |
| Matthew again assisted Kosa and Kellogg on KING OF THE KHYBER RIFLES (1953) with VFX animated dust storms. |
KOSA & YURICICH – AN UNEXPECTED APPRECIATION:
 |
| Emil Kosa jr plein air painting - late 1940's |
 |
| Kosa's gallery art which Matt admired. |
I was after him to take me painting
with him on locations to paint gallery stuff and he never would. Kosa must have thought I was capable because
he came to MGM one day years later and looked to see what I was doing there,
and I was doing Mutiny on the Bounty – squeezed (for CinemaScope) ships and all
that, and he was quite impressed. And
then I went to one of his art lectures on La Sienna
Avenue, and he’s painting a subject and describing
it and he spotted me and my brother in the audience and he stopped and he said “I’d like you to meet one of the finest
portrait painters” and “here is
Matthew Yuricich.” I had to stand up
and everybody clapped and all that.
Later when I got to talk to him I said “How can you say all that stuff…you never let me paint… you never let
me do anything… you don’t know what the hell I can do” Emil said, he saw my work at MGM on Bounty and
he remembered that portrait I did back at Fox. |
| Both Scope frames from THE ROBE (1954) |
TRANSITION INTO MATTE PAINTING:
 |
| Yuricich glass shot set up: UNDER THE RAINBOW (1983) |
 |
| CALL ME MADAM (1953) - Ralph Hammeras matte shot. |
 |
| Fox Artist Menrad von Muldorfer (left) |
 |
| The very dull bio-pic DESIREE (1954) with a miscast Marlon Brando as Napoleon. |
THY MATTE PAINTER SHALL PAINT, AND ONLY PAINT:
 |
| Lee LeBlanc at Fox |
 |
| Intended matte shot final design for BEN HUR (1959) |
 |
| POLTERGEIST II - THE OTHER SIDE (1986) |
 |
| Dazzling, flickering neons from LOVE ME OR LEAVE ME (1955). My own personal favourite matte genre...sublime! |
DAZZLING NEONS & SPECTACULAR SHOWCASES:
Those big theatre marquees….I did a lot
of them. I tell you, I must have worked
on 50 theatre fronts and animated the lights.
I was drilling out the holes for the bulbs and backlighting them. We did all that stuff for movie marquees and
we did an awful lot of that as double exposure and we used to use the punched
holes. Mark Davis was doing most of this
sort of work at MGM, he really liked that stuff.  |
| Reverse side showing drilled out 'bulbs' |
I’m trying to think of these other matte
artists. One of them had a bad back or
something and he was doing a lot of scenic work too. He designed and built a motorized chair on
rails so he could roll back and forth while painting matte shots and different
things. His name was Lazini or Muselini
or something like that. We did all the
marquees and signs, they were all painted, even those with 1000 bulbs glittering
underneath.
FIRST MATTE PAINTED SHOT:
 |
| Matt's first actual painted matte - from CALL ME MADAM |
If I was painting one of those big
ornate ceilings, if you painted as though you were doing the actual plastering
of all of those curly Q’s and fleur de
lis and all that stuff, and all very precise, it would look like a polished
piece of painting…that’s what it would be like.
Your eye might go to it. Well,
there were a lot of paintings where I had to do that though. I had to paint it so the painting looked like
a finished shot.
If you’ve got a good design, things
go and will fit. Some paintings fall
into place. If you’ve got a lot of
vegetation or foliage, that takes a lot of good expertise which Albert Whitlock
was good at and Mark Sullivan is fantastic at and as I say, he’s the best in
the business right now. They really had
a feeling for that stuff.
 |
| Matthew at MGM puts final touches on twin opening shot paintings for MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY (1962). Note the other finished painting for the sequence where Bounty sails on her voyage propped up behind Matt's leg. *Photo courtesy of Robert Welch from The A.Arnold Gillespie Archive |
WARREN NEWCOMBE – ECCENTRIC OVERLORD:
 |
| Warren Newcombe, circa 1930's |
Newcombe had a lot of power,
because when he got going, that was a mystery department at MGM. He just didn’t let anyone know just what he
was doing, so they figured out they’d just better not get him angry, because he
was weird (laughs)…to say the least!
You just couldn’t come on up there to see what we were doing for him (Newcombe). From his desk you could see through the door
and anybody who came upstairs he just wouldn’t let them come in. Even the windows were painted over in black.
Mark Davis became the cameraman for
Newcombe, but Newcombe treated him like something else – poorly in fact. He would take Mark out on location to shoot
the plates and he (Newcombe) would take his brushes and clean them on Mark’s
hair! Mark put up with a lot, though he
was a real clever guy and was able to figure out a lot of technical stuff. He used to tell me that his wife used to get
mad at him for letting Warren do
these things to him. Mark was very
creative and would take a lot of junk from surplus stores and he would create
things (effects gags) and they would work.
He was inventing stuff and he turned out to be a good cameraman but he still
got ‘beat up’ by Newcombe. I don’t think
Newcombe ever knew any of those technical things. Mark came in to MGM when Newcombe was
assistant boy there and he left the studio about ’56 or ‘57.
 |
| Newcombe fine art |
Did Newcombe make suggestions to us?…he
left the guys alone and every now and then he’d make suggestions, but we never
followed his instructions (laughs)… he was‘The Mad Hatter’, exactly that!
Newcombe did paint mattes
back at the beginning in the 20’s, but to me he couldn’t paint and wasn’t
really a top artist…his own paintings were all very stylized, but he was a
painter and would hold the brush like a hammer.
He did some lithographs and stuff.
In the old days the matte shots were done by his friend that he brought
with him from New York – he
was a real artist… he did all the work. They
had some 20 other guys there they hired during the war while the regular matte
artists had to go away, and their mattes were atrocious. There were a lot of artists in those days who
were matte artists only because they were the first ones to know about it.
I’d like to look into Newcombe’s
death and backtrack to see what happened.
He was murdered in Mexico…he’d warned me to stay away and that it was
all pretty dangerous and in his letter he tells me not to come down because
it’s very dangerous in Mexico…though I sure was curious.
 |
| Period costumer matte shot from THE KING'S THIEF (1955) |
HENRY HILLINCK – MENTOR & TEACHER:
Henry was a superb artist… he was
the head of the scenic department at RKO or somewhere… a very good craftsman…
he was the president of the union local. He could draw well. He was in the scenic department so he had
some background in it. A lot of the
scenic artists turned out to be good matte artists. Henry let me do a lot of stuff when I first
started there. He said “just keep painting”. I remember when I first painted and when I
was doing paintings for myself, but practicing matte shots while at MGM, and I
talked to him about it and I said, “What
do you think?” He said, “Put it away and look at it after you’ve
painted another 100 paintings and then you’ll see where it fits”. 
He taught me the razor blade technique for
texturing the painting…it was just beautiful.
I’d wanted to go into painting for galleries using that razor technique,
but it would have taken forever to do a painting that way, so I continued using
it just for matte shots as there were no other matte artists using it. I picked up a lot from Henry Hillinck. The
razor blade is great for ground texture like in Forbidden Planet… it was great
because you had these phony looking mountains in it and you have your grain on
the masonite.. you just put paint on it and just scrape it to create texture. You couldn’t use it at all times, just for
certain places. I painted some of the rocks and stuff… I was lucky there
because Henry would let me paint and it looked great to me then and I was
thrilled because I got to work on it, though when I look back it looks a little
stiff. Michelle (Moen) picked up the
razor blade technique too… she’s like a veteran with it.
Henry was more of a loose painter,
although he could sometimes be very tight in style. I remember when he used to fight Newcombe all
of the time on this ‘modern painting’ thing…abstracts were all garbage… anybody
could do it.
 |
| Henry Hillinick full painting from FORBIDDEN PLANET (1956) which Matt assisted with some of the rocks. |
I remember one of Henry’s mattes
that he was experimenting with painting impasto
– real thick. These hanging chandeliers, they had a half dome, and instead of
painting them in 3D, he actually put thick, sculpted paint to see if it was
any different than painting in the 2 Dimensional.
 |
| Close detail of Henry Hillinick's matte painting. |
 |
| Atmospheric closing shot from BEN HUR (1959). |
HOWARD FISHER – GENTLEMAN MATTE ARTIST:
Howard was a really nice guy… he
was an MGM matte artist and also one of the nicest guys you’d ever find – a
very nice gentleman. Howard must have
been around 65 back in 1955. They hired Howard away from some other
studio. There was a lot of jealousy in
those days.
 |
| Howard Fisher's iconic FORBIDDEN PLANET shot. |
Now Howard was more of a photo realist
in his painting, Henry had the feel and could paint it as though he were
standing 10 feet away. At MGM when I
first got there you were so close to the painting, you couldn’t get further
away. Each camera stand was enclosed and
the easel was just out about 5 feet. You
couldn’t paint that loose as you could from if it was 10 to 15 feet away. That’s what most artists can do. Warren
once said to me: “I want you to copy
Henry’s painting here…I want to see how good you do with a painting.”. He couldn’t tell them apart when I got
through.
When they ran matte shots in the
projection room at MGM, they didn’t loop it (spliced onto a continuous 35mm
loop). They cut the matte in with a production
shot before and a shot after and ran it that way. You’d be surprised how many times people
watching these said what are we supposed to be looking at? They didn’t know. But if you run the matte on a continuous loop
you’re going to see every disease that there is in there, and the painting at
it’s best is no way close to looking real. |
| DESTINATION GOBI (1953) |
 |
| THE MONSTER SQUAD matte shot for Boss Films. Michele Moen also painted on this picture. |
NEWCOMBE AND THE DUPY DUPLICATOR:
 |
| LOVE ME OR LEAVE ME |
 |
| The Dupy camera set up at MGM |
 |
| Mark Davis & Newcombe |
The camera moves were recorded on a wax disc by the sound department and they wanted control of it all, and that’s what really fouled up Newcombe… he didn’t like that, as it was a ‘matte shot’ and Newcombe wanted full control. Each department was a kingdom in it’s own, and the Dupy Unit was a separate unit (Olin Dupy was the MGM sound technician and inventor)… but at least they were trying something new. That was probably the earliest motion repeating system ever built.
 |
| THE EGYPTIAN (1954) |
ANAMORPHIC ANTICS WITH CINEMASCOPE & CAMERA 65:
The Robe was at Fox…I did a big
glass shot where the donkey is riding towards the city of Jerusalem. They had two big pieces of glass framed in
wood and we’re in the middle, we had a tree so it hid the frame. I had done
mattes before that but never a true ‘glass’ shot. I had never seen a glass shot until
then. We didn’t paint our mattes in the
studio on glass in those days – everything was done on masonite or over photo
enlargements but I did it plenty of times since then I tell you.
 |
| One of the magnificent mattes from KING OF KINGS (1961). Among the best mattes of the Biblical genre. |
It was very difficult to paint
squeezed, and to get your perspective correct and all of that. When I started on the first anamorphic
picture, The Robe, the scope lens was being used on the main production (**image
photographed in a vertically compressed format and later projected theatrically
through an anamorphic lens to horizontally uncompress the original image to
usually 2 ½ times the normal frame width) . They had colour problems with that process too. Everything was going red, I don’t know
why. That was another enigma with Emil
Kosa on The Robe… we had a big glass shot and Jim Fetherolf and Lee LeBlanc
started painting walls and rocks. I came
in with the second crew with Emil and he say’s “Wash it off!” I said, “What?” He said “Wash it off!” Jimmy was
what you’d call a photo realist and Emil was trying to get me to wash it off
because you’re never going to see it (so much detail). Emil had me mix some great colour and he
painted the whole thing. Emil’s
paintings were up and down in consistency and some on The Robe were so stiff –
the architecture was too rigid. |
| Both this and above matte are from BEN HUR (1959) |
The very first week I started at
MGM, Cinemascope had just come in and MGM still wasn’t sure about scope so all
of the matte shots were done two ways – in scope and regular – I got to paint the regular…while Henry and
Howard worked on the scope. I complained
that we didn’t have enough space. If you
paint full paintings for 65mm we needed about 20 feet just for the matte stand,
so everything had to be painted squeezed for Clarence’s photography. Later on Ben Hur we shot in MGM’s Camera 65
format. On the sides of the frame it had
a lot of squeeze, which flattened out toward the middle of the frame. The squeeze had something to do with quality,
but to me there would be more quality in a straight spherical lens than in that
widescreen process. |
| Matthew at work on his grandest painted matte - for BEN HUR. Mattes were split between Lee LeBlanc and Matt. |
The big matte shot in Ben Hur, we had
real troops for some of it – they marched up and turned right. So I took these real troops and reduced them,
and reduced them and then painted more, so there’s like 3 or 4 columns of the
same troops, repeated optically, and the rest were just painted people. On each side of the procession were real
soldiers. We had to make several tests
because we could see problems in the tests.
Lee insisted on painting the 3-point perspective stuff, with the columns
painted almost leaning over to accommodate that squeeze, and Clarence would scream
at him and say it doesn’t look right, and Lee would say “Well that’s the way you’re photographing it”. He said that it’s the goddamned lens, it
isn’t the human eye at fault. |
I remember in Ben Hur, Lee painted this
shot with these statues of horses rearing up on the right hand side. So I’m telling Lee, who’s my boss, “Lee, you’re too dark and those horses on
the side are going to have asses 3 feet wide in anamorphic.” He didn’t allow for the correct squeeze. So on the test, those horses butts were clear
across the room and blacker than a piece of coal. Of course it was a learning process too for
Lee. I don’t know why Lee didn’t know
because he had been painting mattes for years.
 |
| Barely detectable matted in city, lake and mountain range from THE DUCHESS AND THE DIRTWATER FOX (1976) |
UNIONS, POLITICS AND DEADLINES:
The Hollywood strike of 1957, Henry
said you’re in the union and you can’t paint and all that stuff, and I said “I’m not going to, but Henry, you told me
yourself in 1945 when the big strike was on, you got a building across the
street or somewhere, and you guys did the matte shots over there. What’s the difference?” Well, as it turned out Ray Clune, head of
productions who I knew from 20th Century Fox called up Lee LeBlanc…
things were slow, and he knew everybody, he said “You’ve got to lay Matt Yuricich off.” And I remember Lee, he said,“I
can’t do that. He’s doing a lot of work”. There was some kind of…. it wasn’t really a
strike, but there was a problem and I had to go. I went to Columbia
in 1957 and I worked with Larry Butler.
Because he wanted me back, Lee called, and I said “I’m not going back to that place.
I’m doing full matte work here as a first assistant. At Columbia, these people let me do it”. |
| ATLANTIS - THE LOST CONTINENT (1960) |
 |
| One of Matt's last trick shots, for UNDER SIEGE II (1995). The entire upper half of the frame is painted on glass. |
MEMORIES OF FELLOW MATTE ARTISTS:
 |
| Ray Kellogg |
Ray Kellogg… Ray Kellogg
started as a matte artist but he was really Sersen’s right hand man. He was a tough guy and a very strong,
aggressive individual. He did all of the
shooting on the sets of all of the shots for Fred and he eventually took over
the department. Ray would say things to
me like “How many push ups can you do?” and being young and not very tactful, I said “one more than you can do”. This is unheard of to talk like this to the
guy. He jumped down and did 25. I could never do more than 10 in my whole
life. My muscles just….. I did 26! When Fred retired they kept him on as a sort
of advisor because they weren’t sure Ray could handle the whole department.
 |
| Jim Fetherolf fine art |
Jim would go on to work later with Albert Whitlock over at Disney. Albert liked Jimmy too. Apparently they were very friendly.
Lee LeBlanc… I helped him at MGM and he was enough of a politician
to eventually make it to head of department.
I don’t know how he did that… he just felt that he was top artist, and
that wasn’t hard for him. I remember on
one black and white picture at Fox, Viva Zapata, Lee was having some problem,
he was painting this particular shot of a ceiling, and he was arguing with
somebody who said the ceiling isn’t quite right and you can’t see the design properly. Lee painted in two dogs screwing and things
like that up there. They photographed it
and it looked just like a beautiful, ornate ceiling.
Menrad von Muldorfer… Yes he was at Fox. His dad actually built the studio, so I guess
he got in through that end. Von
Muldorfer worked on all of those early big Fox films… The Rain’s Came and In
Old Chicago and later on Cleopatra and
others… they were all big shows.
Albert
Maxwell Simpson… In the old days, Al Simpson was another big matte painter.
He was one of the real old timers and he was used mainly to ‘work’ the matte
line. They had soft blends and he had
the patience to sit there and green by green touch up and eliminate that whole
matte line that was showing. That was
all pretty tricky work where he’d view the tests with the painting overlapping
the live action. There was always
something to it…he’d go in and it’s amazing just how well that worked. You’d get there with patience, and Simpson
was known for that, and that’s what they used him for – a sort of a ‘pinch
hitter’ for solving the blend…exactly that.
 |
| Cliff Silsby at Fox |
Max
de Vega… Another one of the real old timers. I knew him though there’s no real special
story. He gave me a lot of the
background on the previous Fox matte artists.
He helped me out a lot and taught me the tradition of the art. He gave me a lot of information about staying far away from Kosa, that’s for
sure (laughs). Fox had a big department
with a lot of resourses, and I utilized it and learned a lot of stuff.
Jack Shaw… Jack and I were
pretty good friends. He committed
suicide. Jack could not take the
constant direction from everybody, and Clarence Slifer told me that he did have
one failing thing that he’d just keep on painting – that they’d have to pull it
(the matte painting) away from him! I
saw him paint and what a good matte artist.
I wanted to find out more about the matte painting and stuff and Jack
was telling me it’s just too difficult when you have people that don’t know
anything about painting telling you how to paint. It bothered the hell out of him. He was a good man.
Lou
Litchtenfield… Lou had started with Paul Detlefsen and Mario Larrinaga at
Warner Brothers before the war…I knew Lou pretty well. I’ve seen a lot of his work and it was pretty
good. He went to Warners and set up an
optical department. Warner Bros had
quite a contingent of good matte artists, and Lou told me that when he was
working on The Fountainhead and there was a big, tall building that he’d
designed and all that, and he was going to paint it in oil and he used lacquer
thinner and the oil paint ‘ran’ by mistake.
Lou called Mario and he came in and they worked all night to repair that
matte painting. I can imagine the
problem.
George
Gibson (Scenic Artist)…George’s thing at MGM was head of Scenic Art, and it’s just unbelievable how good these guys were (scenic art department). You come up there to look at those backings and you can’t tell a thing. The brush strokes are 4 inches wide and you step back just like it was designed for…I mean it was just unbelievable how great the finished thing was. When you’re painting a thing like that, you are 2 or 3 feet away, you have to know what you’re doing even though it looks like you can’t tell what you’re seeing. That’s the same thing with matte shots. You’re painting for the camera and those who have the advantage of painting that same way and same distance for their whole career, they can do it standing backwards, and the same thing with painted backing. Henry Hillinck had that experience although his backings were nothing compared to George Gibson.
Irving
Block… I found paintings in storage from Julius Caesar that I tracked down
that Irving had done, maybe in 1950
or thereabouts…mainly painted over photo blow ups as I recall. He would always
be huddled over his painting whenever anyone came into the room. He’ll be
painting it like he’s hiding in a corner.
He’ll be turning with his back, so if you walked by you only saw his
back, but he was always doing something.
I later worked for Irving and his partner Jack Rabin on that race
picture, Death Race 2000.
Rocco Gioffre… I brought
Rocco out here from high school in my old hometown in Loraine,
Ohio for Close Encounters, and I got him
started. I didn’t know him back in Ohio. When later on I worked with Rocco, we did it all
on original negative, and we could make them match right there, and it kind of
took me back. I had kind of forgotten it
all. There’s nothing better than the
original negative… it’s like comparing night and day. You can take the same painting that doesn’t
look too good on a dupe, and it works fine as an original.
Jack
Cosgrove... Clarence Slifer would tell me about Jack Cosgrove, because he
worked for Jack for years and he said that he was the sloppiest painter. He’d drop his cigarette ashes and they would
be all in the painting, and there was dirt and everything in it, and he said “But boy, it sure looked good”. At Selznick when Clarence was there with
Cosgrove, they had terrific matte paintings.
Spencer
Bagtoutopolis… Spencer was an older man and, painting wise, he was the best
because he’d had 60 years experience of painting that way…there was no
impressionistic stuff to his work… everything was precise and done right and
with a feel, yet done fast…the guy was training all his life and he didn’t know
it. Living in a time where guys weren’t
photographing, he had to get these illustrations out real fast. There were assignments Spencer was painting
for the King and Queen! He was sent all over the world, especially India. He was
80 when he was working for Clarence. Spencer
and Clarence (Slifer) had some sort of big falling out though.
Peter Ellenshaw… Peter Ellenshaw was a master. My then wife and I were once driving by The
Laguna Beach Art Museum, and the road is quite a ways from the gallery windows
and entrance, and there are paintings there in the windows. I said “Stop
the car!” She says, “What’s the matter?” I said,
“There’s a matte shot artist that has some paintings in there!” She then says “Those are all seascapes”. I
said, “I don’t give a damn…I know a matte
shot technique when I see one”. It
was Peter Ellenshaw’s work. From 200
feet away I could tell there was a matte painting technique there. You look at Peter’s stuff that he did for
Spartacus and Quo Vadis… what beautiful shots
Peter used a lot of the old tricks on Darby O’Gill. He’s a guy that not only paints matte shots,
he supervised that whole thing and it was fantastic. I envy him having Percy Day show him how to
paint. Peter was able to learn the craft
and carry it on. Peter saved some of his
paintings, and I had one of them at MGM…it was on glass, already cracked, from
Quo Vadis.
Michele
Moen… I remember Michele was painting a city thing, and she wanted to do
the toughest shot. She was a very
aggressive gal, very ambitious and very talented. She said “There’s
something wrong with it.” I said to
her, “Step back here.” I could see the problem as I walked by and I
thought I’d let her sweat it out, as it’s the only way to learn. Well, a third of the painting or more, the
buildings looked like they were down into a 100 foot hole. It was a very simple thing and when I showed
her she corrected it because you tend to get so used to your painting while
you’re painting, and you look at it and it looks fine, and until you see it on
a screen, you then look at it and it ain’t fine. |
| EARTH II (1971) |
Jim got to know my work and I had seen his, and then what happened was
that we’d get lulls and there was nothing to do, and I’d go into the little
camera room, which was all glass and you could see in there, and Art
Cruickshank came up to me in the room and said “It would be smarter if you went somewhere where you can’t be seen when
you’re reading a book”. I said, “Art…I got nothing to do right now, if you
don’t need me let me know and I’ll leave…I’m not hiding for anybody. If I have work, I’ll do it…..if I don’t have
it I’m going to do……” And Jim just started clapping. He loved that. |
| The unfathomably bizarre Audrey Hepburn vehicle, GREEN MANSIONS (1959) |
THE LIFE AND DEATH OF VINTAGE MATTE ART:
I knew every painting that was left at
Fox. It broke my heart to burn most of
them up. Of course 9 out of 10 it didn’t
matter. There were some good ones. The only ones that were left were the ones
they happened to paint on glass or masonite or things like that, and they had
quite a few because this was from years of collecting.
When I went through these old pictures,
I mean the matte paintings in storage, there were close to 4000 – everything
was numbered – there were no titles on them.
It seemed like they neglected the matte shots and there were superb
paintings, and some of them that go way back.
They had a lot of cutouts and painted mountains and stuff like that,
pastels, and I used to take them home for my kids’ train set and put them all
around it. When I was working I knew the
shots by their numbers. I’m working on
1342 or 4031 and production number with it.
During one of the lay off periods, when things were very slow I set up a
system of filing these paintings because now we could save them. In storage, each one had a nice tissue paper
over the top and was protected and slotted and everything else. It’s all gone forever.
I remember when MGM opened up the
hotel in Las Vegas, they had a lot
of paintings and they had a sort of studio thing in there then.
 |
| Painted sky and island split screened with a gentle optical ocean roll comp for MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY (1962) |
MATTE SHOT PREPARATION:
At that time at MGM there was
Henry, Howard Fisher and Bill Meyer who was a draftsman that drew in the matte
shots when I first got there, and I thought Bill did a great job. So he would mostly draw architectural
stuff. He would draw the buildings and
everything…all he did was to draw these things in, and the lines were like an
indelible blue… they would bleed through.
Bill did nothing but draw this stuff and then you just filled in the
spaces. Then Bill was gone and I’m
trying to think of who else was there before… of course Lou Litchtenfield was
there for a while, but not very long. |
| THE WIND AND THE LION (1975) |
When I got to MGM the artists there
would make sure it would take at least three weeks to finish a matte. Some were intricate, but there were a lot of
shots that I, as an assistant, could bang out in three days – unless you ran
into problems. Sometimes you could do it
in one day and then do three weeks worth trying to fix the one thing that was
wrong We had this one at MGM with lights
drying it. I got to where I was using a
spray fixative. You had to be careful –
it’s like doing 10 coats instead of 2 – sometimes the heat would crinkle the
painted surface. It would start drying
and already start crinkling. That was a
matte artist’s dilemma when he just had to get things done. Nobody understood that it takes time to dry. None of our mattes were original
negative. All matte shots were done as
opticals.
 |
| The big STAR TREK-THE MOTION PICTURE (1979) money shot, which Doug Trumbull kept bugging Matthew to add more and more and more detail - most of which would be invisible to the viewer in the first place. |
CLASSIC ERA PASTEL MATTE ART AT MGM:
 |
| Incredibly fine detail achieved with sharp pastel pencil and crayon. |
 |
| MGM matte painter Rufus Harrington in 1939 working with pastels on a typical Newcombe shot. Note the pastels laid out to the right of this photograph. *Picture courtesy of Craig Barron |
 |
| ICE STATION ZEBRA (1968) |
TOO MUCH DETAIL AND NOT ENOUGH FEELING:
I’m trying to think of the movie…I
remember a movie we were on about Vikings (Prince Valiant) with a Viking ship
out at sea and we’d painted a whole fleet of these and every one of these the
sides were decorated with shields, and on the shields we painted tiny detail
that you could see with a magnifying glass.
Emil Kosa had us paint it over and completely start again.
 |
| PRINCE VALIANT |
 |
| UNDER THE RAINBOW |
 |
| Paris in THE 4 HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE (1961) |
I talked to the old time artists doing
everything very precise because, evidently, the clarity of the film and stuff
wasn’t as good then.
 |
| For the 1983 tv miniseries 'V' Matthew painted numerous shots. *Photos courtesy of David Stipes. |
SHAMELESS LOSS OF THE ARTFORM:
When Kerkorian finally closed down the
art department at MGM, all those paintings were taken by three guys, one guy
from MGM’s library and the other two were outsiders from a salvage company. These guys took them and they were trying to
sell them, they were going to build a museum for motion pictures. They took them… it irritated me. I wanted to get some of the others that I really
liked such as Mutiny on the Bounty. I’m
very sorry that I was so weak minded not thinking of these things and trying to
grab them. They wouldn’t let me take even
a brush out of that building! In the
meantime the salvage company came down and took down the whole place, and they
took those paintings and everything.
So much stuff was taken. 
Greg Jein got two of those miniature Russian
Mig jets from Ice Station Zebra, and he was telling me what those guys were
taking… all the old illustrations and sketches were stored in one of the old
stages upstairs. Well, some of these
people found stuff and were lifting it.
People who didn’t even work on the lot got away with them. That was tragic. The only ones they didn’t get are the ones
that I saved to help me with other paintings.
We had pastels from the old days, and there was about 3000 of them. They kept everything on file. When people wanted to know what I did, they’d
show the steps that were shot before the black matte on it, and then the whole
drawing, and the partial painting, and the completed painting. They had hundreds of those things around. I remember the ones that thrilled me to death
from those Tarzan pictures. |
| THE PRODIGAL (1955) |
 |
| ATLANTIS - THE LOST CONTINENT (1960) |
I saved some like the Las Vegas casino painted ceiling mattes for an Elvis Presley picture and a bunch of others. I even managed to grab one of Albert Whitlock’s paintings of the Gemini rocket on the launch pad and I saved that, maybe from Howard Anderson’s company. Linwood Dunn had a garage full of mattes at one time, including a bunch of Albert’s Star Trek paintings. I think all of those were sold.
 |
| A very rare DUEL IN THE SUN (1947) Cosgrove matte. |
 |
| PLEASE DON'T EAT THE DAISIES (1960) - tilt down matte shot. |
HANDLE WITH CARE – GLASS MATTE MISHAPS:
 |
| STRANGE BREW (1983) |
 |
| YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN (1974) |
Another thing I was doing for a
commercial… it was about the size of a table top – a square or rectangle. I got the thing done and I wanted to do a
little more on it, so I was going to carry it out in the sun and I picked up
the painting and it just fell into 1000 pieces!
You’ve got to use real good glass, and it can’t be aged!
There was another one… on one of
the Peter Sellers things, one of the Pink Panther series, they didn’t like the
matte shots done in England and I had to redo some, and it’s always when you
think you’re done, and I think the paint has something to do with it, just a
little tap, and you snap it!
 |
| KING OF KINGS (1961) |
THE YURICICH METHOD:
Let’s say there were some buildings
in the original dupe, and I start with one building and draw the line up, if I
wasn’t working on the enlargement already which had the building there. I’d work on that part, and I’d work another
part and it was the main structure of the shot, whereas if I were to do it now,
or in the last 25 years, I’d work on a building, but I’d paint that in real
quick, in paint – not draw it unless I had to be very precise. I’d go all the way across and that would give
me a feel when we shot a test as to where I was headed. If there was a sky, then I would make the
sky…I would get that in. That was my
‘key’ and I would paint some of the building and I would move over here so that
instead of working on one end and sweeping across, I would be jumping from one
to the other, and keeping everything in continuity so that one side wasn’t too
strong or a contrasty green and the other side a recurring red, or
whatever. You just keep doing it and it
keeps centering in, then you start picking from your tests the stuff that makes
it come alive. You’ve been doing it all
along, but now you’re gonna do the things that give it that sparkle and give it
the ‘life’.
 |
| All photos here from THE THORN BIRDS (1983) beautifully demonstrate Matt's invisible trick work to add a non existing beach house to a Greek Island. The close up detail nicely shows Matt's free and loose brush work, colour handling and most importantly, his sense of light - which can make or break a matte shot. * Original matte photos courtesy of David Stipes, who shot and composited these effects. |
Of course, everything is predicated on
what the dupe looks like. If it’s wrong,
I wipe it off and then do it again. I’ve
found that a lot of times I’m painting ‘mud’.
I have to paint and match to what I’m painting to. It’s the live action part. If it’s a dull colour, that’s what I paint
to. I had no problem with those
things. You had to have a feel for it
for that kind of work. I remember one
time, Henry got so carried away with a painting for Raintree
County that he fell in love with
the upper part of it. It actually looked
like two shots in one painting – one was set way forward and the other went way
back. |
| One of the less noticeable matte shots from GHOSTBUSTERS (1984) |
PHOTO ENLARGEMENT MATTE SHOTS:
 |
| THE WORLD, THE FLESH & THE DEVIL |
At the time (early 50’s) they often worked
on photographic enlargements and we’d paint directly onto that photo print to
make our matte shot . It could be a real
time saver. They would make an
enlargement of the scenes and they didn’t have to draw it out… I didn’t see why
anybody else didn’t do it. You didn’t
have to draw a damn thing… you just made a big black and white photo. The reason they kept me on was that when they
first started doing this, you had to glue photographic paper in a dark room
onto a large board and they would add Shellac.
You had to leave the Shellac exposed so that it would evaporate and then
you’d glue the photographic paper on and right next door is the darkroom where
the lab guys develop a print. This was
all on about a half inch thick plywood.
If the photo was too contrasty, when you painted on it, it would show
through… you had to get it just right.
That’s where I learned it…all that stuff in the paper comes right
through your paint. I don’t know how I
made tests with it.
 |
| LOGAN'S RUN (1976) |
In several pictures we did an awful lot
of it. The World, The Flesh and the Devil with the three people left on earth
and everything is abandoned, so New York City has no traffic, buses overturned
– we used all real photographic enlargements of the library and stuff and have
to paste them down using this technique, and then paint the stuff to tie it in.
 |
| WORLD, FLESH, DEVIL photo blow up matte technique. |
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| Another example of Matt's photo enlargement technique, this from DAMNATION ALLEY (1976). Upper photo shows Matt's original significantly reworked photo mural on board, and below the finished shot in the film. |
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| One of the many wonderful expansive painted mattes from THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD (1966) |
CLARENCE SLIFER – OPTICAL GENIUS:
 |
| Back row: Matt & Clarence |
When I started with Clarence, he
understood matte paintings and everything else.
When he developed his aerial image optical printer he had his machinist,
Oscar Jarosche, standing there, and as he thought of something that he wanted
built, he just told Oscar and he then built it for Clarence. I’m not that technically minded to follow the
physics of Clarence’s aerial image system… it’s a motion control sort of
thing.
When they were making this
printer, Clarence was there supervising and seeing that it was done, and they’d
have one of these electronics experts and Clarence could talk with any of them
and beyond! He knew not only machinery,
the camera, the electronics, the whole bit.
When we were doing animation, he
kicked the optical printer operators off.
I had to sit on the camera photographing these things…. it used to drive
me nuts…. I hate boring stuff. And near the end, if you goof up, you’ve got
to start all over again. That was in the
50’s.
Of course we always did moving
people gags. We had Clarence’s thing
with a screen and painted jagged coloured things and holes in the paintings,
and it would move in an oscillated form behind the hole wherever the people
that were painted were. This was a real
popular at MGM over the years.
 |
| An elaborate Clarence Slifer motion shot from BEN HUR, beginning as a brief dolly forward with Chuck Heston, followed by a tilt upward onto the matte painting. |
Lee LeBlanc and Clarence Slifer left
Fox and came to MGM on the promise that they were up to the latest technical
advances. The very first shot they were
going to do there was for The Brothers Karamozov. They wanted a 360 degree pan around shot with
a guy lighting a lamp, the camera is on him, and the horseman comes by and you
follow him all the way around the village until you come back to the lamp – a
full circle with mattes and live action combined. Lee went to the meeting and said “Oh yeah, we can do all this stuff”. He comes back and tells Clarence, and
Clarence says “it can’t be done”. Lee says we have to go out and try it because
this is what we sold to the director. So
we filmed this shot and we got that back and Clarence looked at it and said
it’s not going to work. Lee asked
why. He said we didn’t use a Nodal Point
camera! What did we know about
Nodal Head camera’s at that time? Well,
I painted, and I don’t know how we doctored the ‘slippage’ – or marry up
between the set and the painted elements.
I’ve forgotten the whole technical thing, but I know we matched the tree
trunks and pretty soon, the buildings too.
I tell you, that was the most successful shot… impossible to do, but we
pulled it off. I wish I still had the
paintings.
 |
| That very impressive Slifer-Yuricich aerial image 360 degree pan from THE BROTHER'S KARAMAZOV (1958). |
Clarence would tell me something and
then when it didn’t work out he’d say to me, “Well, I don’t know why you did it that way…” I said, “Clarence,
you told me to do it this way”. He’d
say, “No I didn’t!”, and I started to
write down what Clarence wanted, and he’d sign it and I’d keep it. It was the worst thing in the world to do,
but I was upset and tired of being blamed. So Lee LeBlanc said to me not to do that
anymore. He said “We know Clarence”.
Clarence was so innovative. Every shot for him was a new way to figure
out how to do it. You wouldn’t believe
the set ups we had at MGM…the printer way over there, running a wire this way
and all the rest of it….. and he really was a creative genius, really, but
Clarence needed the assurance that it was all going to work even from somebody
like me, and I didn’t know 1/100th of the technical end that he
did. Clarence was really ahead of his
time…I’ll tell you this, it wouldn’t take him any time at all and he’d know all
about today’s digital computers and he’d
make improvements. I tell you, right now
he’d be ecstatic…giggling like a baby.
The guy was something else. In
Ice Station Zebra they had these miniature Russian Mig’s flying, and you can
see all the cables. Clarence did
something where he optically shifted over just a little bit on the printer,
trying to get rid of them so that the sky would be doubled in to obscure those
cables, and it worked. I don’t know who
shot the miniatures, but they must have used 4 inch housers for God’s sake. |
| Another Slifer aerial image composite, from BILLY ROSE'S JUMBO (1962). The shot starts on Matthew's painted circus (with matted in people walking by) and pans across onto a live action train on the MGM lot and then tilts down and pushes in onto the principal characters. Slifer had this trick down pat, and would use variations of it over and over on films like THE UNSINKABLE MOLLY BROWN, MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY and THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD. |
On Forbidden Planet there was this
partially built set of the saucer with a considerable amount of painting done
on it.
So there was Arnold Gillespie,
head of special effects, who was going to do all this with process projection,
and he and Clarence were fighting all the time.
Gillespie was a sharp guy, but he was a politician – another guy that
got about four or five Oscars.
Clarence had his friend come in,
J.MacMillan Johnson, who was an art director and a good one, and a good
illustrator. They had worked together on
Gone With The Wind and he was doing sketch illustrations. Mac took over the MGM effects department.
 |
| Controversial matte shot from ICE STATION ZEBRA where the director insisted on having artificial snow blow through! |
I miss Clarence alright. As much as he drove me nuts, he was never
wrong and I just got tired of being the fall guy on all this stuff. Everybody knows Matt’s not going to tell
Clarence how to run that camera because they know I wouldn’t have the foggiest
idea. It seems that when you work with
geniuses, you’ve got to cater to their whims and stuff, and us mortals just get
to do our job, and that’s it.
 |
| NEVER SO FEW (1959) |
CINEMATOGRAPHER VS. MATTE ARTIST – DIFFERING VIEWPOINTS:
Almost all the artists that I
started with there (at Fox) were also cameramen because in the olden days they
had to do their own camera work. They’d
do the painting and then they’d photograph the painting. The unions would come on in, and they (the
matte staff) had to separate – are you going to be a matte artist or are you
going to be a cameraman? At that time,
the matte artists were the ‘top dog’ on the pole, and just what is there to
‘photograph a painting’, is the way they looked at it. |
| Before and after Yuricich matte shot for 'V' (1983). *Frames courtesy of David Stipes. |
 |
| Yuricich matte shot from THE LAST CHASE (1981) |
Jim Liles was at MGM in optical, and I had
some real trouble with him.
I knew more about shooting matte shots than he
did, and where you place your camera and all of that stuff. We had some shots in The China Syndrome – the
reactor shots - and the camera moved.
We’d have to make a soft matte line and split the painting in… the
camera wasn’t properly locked down, which was what I complained about at the
time. The director then insisted on
doing things my way.
 |
| THE CHINA SYNDROME (1979) |
I had several paintings to do – long shots of the reactor and all that stuff, and there’s no character, no shade – everything in the plate was ‘blah’. You’d think that the cameraman would know, and Jim Liles would fight me. His assistant could never believe that a matte artist could know anything about a camera, which is the most ridiculous thing.
 |
| Matthew's extensive opening matte from BILLY ROSE'S JUMBO (1962) |
A NEW BOSS AT METRO – J.MACMILLAN JOHNSON
On Billy Rose’s Jumbo the circus tents
are all painted, as well as some of the trees.
It was all like the English countryside it looked to me. The tent is halfway down before they raise it
up to the centre pole. I’d put the pole
in – it was just a slash with the brush and the pole was painted – and Mac,
this little short guy, was watching me and he went bonkers again, “You didn’t even try to draw it in or
anything!” I said “It doesn’t need it”. Again, he was not convinced until he saw it
on the screen. Now if I would have
painted a pole with the little knots in it and everything, and it was a foot’s
distance away, it would have looked like a steel beam out there.
Mutiny on the Bounty was where I
had to teach Mac Johnson about matte shots.
He was a good artist, but being a good artist has nothing to do with
being a good matte artist. I’m painting
these ships in the harbour and I’m painting The Bounty, and it’s got to have portholes. Now I’m putting the cannons in and I just
give the brush a little dark colour and I just slap them in. .On the painting I just went with the bold strokes and didn’t even bother to line them up.
Some were a little higher, some
were elevated, and Mac says “You can’t do
that?” I said “Why not?” He says that
there’s no holes in the ends of them. I
said “When you see it on the screen,
people will look there, and their mind will say those are cannons”. He just couldn’t believe it.
 |
| THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD - a beautifully atmospheric matte, and one the Matthew was proud of. |
The Greatest Story Ever Told had a lot
of photographic enlargement matte stuff.
Jan Domela came in and helped us out on some of the mattes on that
film. Mac Johnson loved colour, and he’s
say “Matt…with these canvas awnings in
this shot you’ve got to paint some in a little different colour.. that’s all
drab and blah”. I said “Mac, the whole shot is drab and blah! If I change the colours it’s going to jump
and hit you like a damn neon sign!”
So, I get pissed off. I painted
it bright yellow, bright orange and bright red and we see the test and look at
it, and it looked gaudy. Mac just turned
to me and said “I get your point”. So I went back and did it the way it should
be so everything has to fit.
 |
| MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY - setting sail for adventure. A seriously under rated epic. |
L.B ABBOTT – PHOTOGRAPHIC EFFECTS CINEMATOGRAPHER:
Bill was the First Cameraman
(Director of all Effects Photography) at Fox and later he became the Head of
Department after Ray Kellogg left and he did some really amazing stuff. He was
more than a cameraman… Bill Abbott was studying art and all of that stuff, and
I said “Bill, the books aren’t going to
do a damn thing for you. They’ll tell
you how to make a cube or the shadows from the light and stuff”. He wanted to know more about that end
of it because he knew the technical end of it backwards and forwards, but the artistic
side, he knew he was lacking in that. He
was such a nice man, I’ll tell you… the nicest guy I’ve ever worked with. He was a great guy to work for… he helped
everybody. Bill was responsible for me
getting an Academy Award, of course and for getting me a screen credit too. I should have been screen credited much
earlier with him and a couple of guys…Emil and another one who came from
Disney, Art Cruickshank. He put them up
(on screen credits) on the pictures where they did the most work. Art… he was a nice guy too, and he had a
chance to get an award too. |
| LOGAN'S RUN |
 |
| Lenwood Ballard (Bill) Abbott |
 |
| Before and after Yuricich matte shot from THE WORLD, THE FLESH AND THE DEVIL (1959) |
CREATIVE CONFUSION & THE WHIMS OF THE FILM MAKER:
For The Poseiden Adventure they had
this set, a little piece built. I
painted the whole ship upside down sticking up out of the water. The helicopter’s coming and they climb out of
the hatch. William Creber was art
director and a good friend, and Bill Abbott was on effects. One of them wanted barnacles and everything
on the ship’s brass propellers, and the other one wanted it shiny and clean
because it was a new boat! It was five
different times where one of them would come in and say “God damn it Matt, I told you this…” and I’d have to remove that
and every time I’d remove it, when you repaint it you’ve got to tie it into
your painting. Finally I said “You guys have to settle on one thing
because I’m screwing up the whole painting!” They didn’t want to talk to each other, but
they wanted me to do their bidding.
I remember the picture The Great
White Hope, I was going to have to paint the stands of Wrigley Field for the
boxing match and that stuff, and there was the director and producer and I just
casually said, “What point of view – am I
out in centre field looking toward home plate where there is like five
levels...or am I going to be on the home plate photographing out?” –
and each one took the opposite view.
They ended up fighting it out with each other right there. They never did the shot in the end.
 |
| Painted foreground and sky- ICE STATION ZEBRA |
 |
| STRANGE BREW (1983) |
On Ben Hur, they would not send
anybody from the matte department across to Rome. They were shooting off 50 or 60 foot
parallels or higher, and Eddie Carfagno told me to check all these shots. He said he couldn’t get them to tie down the
matte camera. Eddie knew all this stuff
and he was the art director but he had his own problems to watch over. He warned us… every shot jiggled! A big picture like that….. it cost them 1000
times more in the long run for us to take the jiggle out later! I had to plot the jiggles – vertical and
horizontal – on the matte stand, and I had to move it right down to the half
millimeter and so on. This was something
else. We’d photograph it, and I had to
move it frame by frame. Clarence
wouldn’t trust anybody else.
I remember on a big Lincoln TV series,
and at this time MGM had closed and I was working everywhere. This was with Howard Anderson’s company and
it’s just the White House with columns – muslin for the roof because I was
going to paint it in. What happens is
this carriage comes up and drives by, and gets in front of the steps and Lincoln
gets out. I said, “Howard, you can’t do it”. He say’s why not? I said “that
carriage is going to come out of one of those columns – it’s going to be
like one of these cartoons where the wolf disappears and sticks his head out
and this and that”. Howard says “what are you talking about?” I said,
“there is nothing to back up the carriage driving up. You’re only going to see it coming out of the
first column from the inside… it comes from nowhere!” I painted the White House on the right and on
the left, so where’s the carriage come from??
So I sent him back to the studio to get some big sheets of plywood, the
biggest they had, and paint some colour on and put it on the right hand side-
just blank and put some bushes so there’s stuff there. I had to put in some windows right there on
the spot so it would marry up with the matte.
 |
| Painted oil drilling platforms from THE LIFE AND TIMES OF JUDGE ROY BEAN (1972) |
Paul Newman’s western, The Life and
Times of Judge Roy Bean, I remember I painted the car and there is oil derricks
there and I have to paint in the background and this car – the old Model T –
and I’ve got to paint back there and everything and the production is blowing
smoke up there…it goes right through where the painting is going to be! I just can’t believe the problems these
people can create for you and you don’t do a good shot. |
| CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES (1972) |
 |
| KISMET (1955) |
These apes are walking around and I’m supposed to paint Century City back in the middle. J.Lee Thompson is the director, and in the shot there is a lot of activity. I’m just standing there. I’d come to do a matte shot but they’re handling it and I’m going to watch that nobody goes through the matte line. Thompson turns to me and says “Boy, that looked good…what did you think Matt?” I said “Everything looked fine. There was this dog that came wandering through, but I don’t think it bothered anybody.” He says “Oh shit! There’s no animals alive at this time in the story!” If I weren’t there, they would have printed that and they couldn’t have used the shot because their whole concept was that there were no domesticated animals left alive, which is why everybody had pet apes.
 |
| THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD |
TRICKS OF THE TRADE – MAKING THE SHOT WORK:
I got to where I was just using my
mirror all the time. I had a mirror
behind me when painting. Reverse image
is an old portrait painter’s trick going back to before Rembrandt. If you reverse the image, I remember somebody
showing me how each half of your ace is completely different. Now with the mirror, you get so immersed in
that, when you look in the mirror you find the eyes – one is an inch above the
other, one ear is lower, distortion becomes more apparent because you have a
different image now. Of course, the
mirror throws it back twice as far too, but it does give you a completely
different picture. |
| GREEN MANSIONS (1959) |
 |
| BATTLE FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES (1973) |
 |
| SILK STOCKINGS (1957) |
For that big interior shot in
Forbidden Planet, I did all the animation on that when they walk out from that
door into the matte painting, which was done by Howard Fisher. I told Newcombe that you’re never going to
see the actors there…I never know why people don’t know these things… including
Howard and Henry and everybody else. So
they shoot the shot from way up, and the actors come through the door…you can’t
see them…your eye is on all the other futuristic stuff everywhere and you don’t
even know the door has opened! I said, “Newc… you’ve got to have a light over the
door.” Then I changed it to go one
step further. I said, it’s still not
enough… we know what it is… we should have the light blinking on and off (to
catch the viewer’s attention) and that’s what they did, as an animation overlay.
 |
| Res Square in Moscow painted for the Arthur C.Clarke sequel to 2001, 2010 (1984) |
Almost every sky that I got to
paint, I learned from Emil by watching, and he’d have Jimmy and I…Jimmy was
shorter and I was taller, and we had to both work on stipples with a big
brush. We’re passing each other … I’m
over him, he’s under me. Most people who
saw my paintings insisted that I had airbrushed that sky, but no… no airbrushes. Clouds have always been hard to paint. Clouds are tricky. If you stopped in the middle of a cloud,
you’re going to get a cotton ball. I
would always lay them in coloured and use my big brush to move them around and
wait for those ‘accidents’ to happen, then I’d highlight it a little bit here
and work it. |
| HARLEY DAVIDSON AND THE MARLBORO MAN |
 |
| KING OF KINGS (1961) - a great shot despite the very noticeable cutting off of the Roman's spears as they all pass through the matte line at left - an almost identical screw up appears in BEN HUR near the start with much chopping off! |
MONUMENTAL MATTES FOR ALFRED HITCHCOCK:
 |
| Matt's establishing shot matte painting. |
 |
| Lee LeBlanc's painting for a closer shot of the house. |
They wouldn’t let us in there (the Mount
Rushmore National Park)
to film. For some of those monument
shots we took photographic enlargements and they would shoot a set piece, just
a little set piece, and we would matte that in and paint around it to ‘sew it
up’. I painted all of those heads for the drive
around bit. That was all my painting
because they would not allow…that’s twice now…Logan’s Run and North by
Northwest… they would not allow you to photograph a national monument.
 |
| Both Lee and Matt worked on this shot. |
 |
| Matt's vast interior painting of the UN. |
The first two shots of the house
are two different paintings. Lee painted
the closer one and I painted the long shot with the stone gates Cary Grant goes
through. On the close shot I said “Lee, this has too much orange in here”. Lee painted reflected light underneath the
windows. He was always very broad and
strong in that way. On another wide shot
both of us painted on it. Lee painted
the trees and rocks. The other shots,
like when Cary’s running away with the Mercedes and all that stuff, I had to
paint the Mercedes emblem and the hood and stuff…it was all painted. For
the United Nations scene Lee painted the outside down view and I painted the
inside lobby and high ceiling. I had a
problem there, and although it doesn’t look it, but the columns wouldn’t line
up. I don’t know if the plate was moving
or not?.
The art director would come
around…a very knowledgable guy…and he would relay requirements from the
director and we never got a complaint from Hitchcock. He liked it all. There were some shots that he didn’t even
know there was a painting on it.
Airplanes chasing Cary Grant down the road…I had to paint all this scenery
on the side with the fields and horizon.
“We never looked at our shots with
Hitchcock. They took them all across to Paramount
and he viewed them there where he had his office. He wasn’t on the MGM lot.
 |
| Lee LeBlanc painted this downview of the United Nations. |
 |
| The Oscar winning hit epic, DANCES WITH WOLVES (1990) |
 |
| STRANGE BREW |
SEAGULLS AND CONDORS:
I remember the work I did frame by
frame to add birds flying on Mutiny on the Bounty. We had seagulls and we were going to put
silhouettes because we weren’t going to make travelling mattes. We were drawing each frame. I remember when we started, I said “Lee, these birds are too big.” Here we go again I thought…I don’t know why
nobody else can see this. Lee’s been
doing matte work for 20 years more than I have, especially animation and stuff. He said “No,
no..we had to figure out the size and we’re doing the roto mattes on white
cardboard”. Well, we put that with
the silhouettes flying over and it looked like condors flying across…half the
size of these sailing ships. We had to
cut it down in size to make it work.
GEORGE PAL & EXECUTIVE INTERFERENCE:
 |
| DOC SAVAGE - THE MAN OF BRONZE (1975) |
Bill Abbott says “You’re crazy!” He said you’re lucky to get him. He’s talking about me!
Well, I went in for an interview and Ed was complaining about my shot of the landing of the lost world in Doc Savage and he said “Why didn’t you make a sketch or something first?” I said that I did, and that there were about 25 others. George didn’t follow them. Now I’m getting angry, which was not uncommon, and I said, “That’s it…I’m not working on another science fiction special effects picture, period, ever again!” Well, this one was set in the future with Yul Brynner, I had to paint an abandoned New York city. Anyway, Maury said, “No...wait a minute” He now reversed his position. “Don’t make up your mind like that…we need you.” All of a sudden they need me!
 |
| New York, year 2012...THE ULTIMATE WARRIOR (1975) |
Anyway, I wound up working with
Frank Van der Veer on it. Maury said we
were going to come up and have a meeting with the producer and director, which
we did. Ed said he’d be coming and
sitting in and listening. So, sure
enough, I made some sketches, and they’d okay’d them, and just before we were
going to start on the thing, one of the producers said “I don’t think you should do this…I think this should be whatever…” Ed Maury’s sitting there, and I turned to him
and said “You see…I think we’re lucky we
didn’t do the matte shot yet!”
Anyway, this producer or whatever he was gets madder than hell and says “I used to be an art director…an artist, and
all of that” And I said something
about “You must have been a shitty one!” Ed finally said to the guy – I forget his
name – he said “For Christ’s sake, SHUT
UP…you’ve okay’d these things before”. So
I do the matte shots, and if I must say so myself, they looked pretty
good. They’re running it in the
projection room at Warners – Ed was there but I wasn’t there - and this guy started
off again, and Charlie, the head man of all of Warner Brothers was
sitting there and he finally turned around and told this guy to shut up because
it looks damn good.
 |
| Matt's painted Battleship Row in Pearl Harbour for the excellent TORA, TORA, TORA (1970) |
A STINT ACROSS TOWN AT DISNEY:
After MGM, Clarence was retired and
then I freelanced. I worked
everywhere. I even did a little work
with Alan Maley at Disney on Island at the Top of the
World. Alan maybe wanted me there
because he had trouble with the union because they hired Peter to work and he’s
not in the union anymore and all that. For
the picture, there was a lot of ice and I was painting a matte of the whale’s
graveyard. I was a huge fan of Peter
Ellenshaw’s…I used to go to Peter’s shows and other stuff and the galleries and
I thought he was just fantastic. I asked Alan “Is Peter still around?” Alan went into a tirade…he said “I’m the head of department and Peter is
just an officer…he has nothing to do with this.
I run all this”. I said, “Okay, okay”. |
| Disney matte man Harrison Ellenshaw still clearly remembers Matt painting this shot of the Whale's Graveyard in a week. |
I ended up working when Peter was
there and Alan was there, and these English guys were funny. Very biting comments…they have this dry sense
of humour, and all of a sudden you realize that they are saying the funniest
things, but it’s all in a straight delivery.
They’re bantering back and forth constantly, and I’ll be damned, they
are the funniest people. You are so used
to this English stiff upper lip that you wouldn’t suspect. These guys have a sense of humour that’s out
of this world, and it was said in such a way that if you weren’t paying attention,
it would pass you by.
 |
| Painted ceiling and upper walls for THE UNSINKABLE MOLLY BROWN (1962) |
GETTING HIRED & THEN FIRED BY SPIELBERG:
My brother Dick is very
knowlegable and he can anticipate
problems, so he talked to Doug Trumbull one day and they hired me as an
insurance policy on Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind. I ended up doing matte shots all over the
place, with not one planned. As a matter
of fact Spielberg fired me once because I told him to stay out and stuff. I like to lay in the whole shot - it might
take me an hour, but when I see that lay in together on film I know where I’m
heading. So I was laying in a tree here
and the rocks scattered and coloured swatches of perspective, then I’d
photograph it, put it together and take a look at it and I would tell my
brother, Dick, I said, “Don’t let Doug
and Steven see this because they won’t understand no matter what you tell
them. I’ve been through this…when they
see something up on screen, to them they’re looking at the final thing in their
mind… they might say that the’re
not, but they are”.  |
| The matte that nobody notices, in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS (1978) |
Sure enough, one
of the first things I did was a tree and rocks and stuff, and Steven had some
comment about the tree is leaning too much and something else, and I blew my
stack! Here we go again and I didn’t
have the freedom! I understood his part
of it because he hadn’t worked with matte shots before and he was curious,
that’s why he’s a genius. When I got to
yelling and stuff like that, Spielberg told my brother that he wanted me out of
there and wanted me fired. My brother
talked him out of it and tried to explain what I’m trying to do in this
process, and from then on we were very close friends because he started to
understand.
In Close Encounters, I put everybody’s
name – my ex wife and my lawyers (laughs) – all around the rim of the mother ship
at the top. You wouldn’t really see it
because it looks like texture. Anyway, what’s happening is here’s this mother
ship with all these lights on, and nothing is being lit down below on the
ground. It was a faux paux in the planning stage – they had no time. My brother called me and said we’re going to
have to do big board animations here.
These are tremendous size boards – sixty of them – painting on each one
frame by frame? I said, I can do it for
you in one painting. He says, how? I said, “I
can do it”. I had never done this
before. I took the dupe of the set and
my matte painting – there was a matte painting with this shot – this ship has
to come down over both. So, as it’s
coming down, what I did was make a copy of my matte painting and original
together, and try to trace everything just exactly right. I painted it as though it were real ‘hot’ –
the light and stuff like that. It had to
match everything else that was there. I
said to my brother, now, as it comes down, you intensify that light on the
painting, so the light gets stronger as the ship gets lower, and I’ve painted
it so that it filters out to the trees all the way to the side. I did this shot in one day. 
I had to come up with an answer. The next day my brother came to me and said
they loved the shot…it looked terrific and all that. I said “Wait
a minute – how can you do this? I want
to see that. I didn’t think I’d get it
in one crack”. I think I was
entitled to see this thing in case I have to do some more painting”. My brother blows his top. He says come with me, and he goes to
Spielberg’s office and says “Matt’s
pissed off at all of you because he feels he should have been able to see the
damn shot.” Spielberg says, “Matt…it was great. It looked good”. I said, “I’m
not interested in quantity, I’m interested in quality, and I don’t like
anything that I’ve done to get out simply because they have to have it”. He says, “You
and Rocco go down to take a look at it”.
I was really mad and they all knew it, and everybody was stone
quiet. Rocco and I go look at it and I
said, “Geez, it does look good”. So we walked back and as I walk into this
room, everything is deathly quiet still, and I said, “The shot looked good – I don’t know what the hell all the fuss is
about”.
On Close Encounters the easels were
large – more than six feet across. Fox
had much the same size for CinemaScope…they were essentially miniature scenic
backings. I’d sure like to get a hold of
some of those.
 |
| CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND (1978) |
 |
| Spectacular night time cityscape full painting from BRIGADOON (1954) |
GHOSTBUSTERS – MATTHEW ON BOTH SIDES OF THE CAMERA:
On that big, wide shot looking down the
building, I said to Neil Krepela (matte cameraman), “Neil…those cars down there aren’t moving”. I’d painted the cars and everything else. I said “We’ve
got to get some animation in there”.
There is some movement in this blown out room with people walking up I
guess. Neil says “Why don’t we photograph somebody and put a balcony in there?” I painted a balcony and Michelle and I went
out and we would stand there waving things and Neil photographed us and matted
us into the painting… just a little movement out on that balcony.
Richard Edlund sold some paintings from
Ghostbusters. My brother and my son have
some too. Michelle called me to say
there’s a lot of them that were left from Ghostbusters and some other stuff
that I wouldn’t use to line my garage.
All the good ones were gone. Richard has some other stuff of mine that I didn’t
even know he had. Well, we used to have
them in the hallways at BOSS. I had
several from that stupid picture Masters of the Universe that actually weren’t
bad, considering the cruddy stuff. |
| THE MONSTER SQUAD (1987) |
 |
| New York of the future - SOYLENT GREEN (1972) |
HAPPY ACCIDENTS & SATISFYING OUTCOMES:
 |
| Irwin Allen's MAN FROM THE 25th CENTURY pilot. |
 |
| LOST HORIZON (1973) |
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| CANNERY ROW (1982) |
CREDIT WHERE CREDIT IS DUE:
 |
| LUCKY LADY (1975) - possibly one of Matt's films? |
 |
| YES GIORGIO (1982) |
I don’t think I ever got to paint
one matte shot at Boss Films that I had full control of… well maybe just a
couple of them.
 |
| LEGAL EAGLES (1986) |
MORE MARQUEES ON MY FAVOURITE YEAR:
 |
| MY FAVOURITE YEAR (1982) |
I remember in later years going to New
York on My Favourite Year with Peter O’Toole and
Richard Benjamin, who was the director.
They called it a ‘period’ film, which was like the late 40’s and 50’s
era. Some of the theatre marquees were
different and my job was to paint the new marquees, based on the designs of
what was there then, as well as New York
as it was in the background. I painted
the whole hotel front, and had to guess what was on the other side. I painted a kind of aged brick and they loved
it. Anyway, we’re shooting out from
under a marquee and I’m getting on with doing the lights and Richard Benjamin
says to me “Wait a minute. What are you going to do?...All those lights
are off over here…and what about that white truck over there?” I said “No
problem, we can matte right over the top…we can do it all as a matte shot” He then says “My God, we could have stayed back in LA and done it there!” I say, “Absolutely”. All I did back in my beginning days back at
Fox and MGM was paint theatre marquees and add lights. You couldn’t screw it up.
 |
| DEATH RACE 2000 (1975) |
MASTERING SOMEONE ELSE’S UNIVERSE:
On that Masters of the Universe there’s
one shot, and I said to the director, “Have
you ever directed before?” He says, “Hell
no!” These guys have all this
confidence, and I admire them. He want’s
to paint these bubbled buildings…. He’s talking it all up…there’s no sketch or
anything, and the more he talks the more I realize this wouldn’t even look good
as a miniature, and he wants light illuminating from the inside or something
like that, and I said it’s not going to work.
What you’re saying there, I think you should build a miniature. You can control different lighting and all
that stuff. He said “No…I’ve got the picture right here in my head.” I said to him, “You’re not going to get the picture that’s in your head…you’re
going to get the one that’s in my head, and I don’t know what the hell
you’re talking about!” I did
something different. That’s the thing…
when somebody’s got a visual thing in their own head, you’d have to do a
thousand illustrations before you got close to what’s in their
imagination. That’s hard work… but the
painting is easy. |
| MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE (1987) |
BLADERUNNER – RIDLEY’S AFTER DARK ALTERATIONS:
Ridley Scott was an artist, and so
was Tony – they were both artists …I love Ridley…I know he’s tough, but he was
funny. I would go home at 3 or 4.00 and
then they would bring in Rocco. Rocco
was at Dream Quest then, and when they couldn’t get me to do what they wanted,
they got Rocco to do it. They were
paying Rocco more money than I was getting.
I didn’t know that until I walked out on them. A couple of scenes of balconies, Ridley
wanted sharper edges, so he had Rocco paint and outline things, and I see this
shot the next day and it’s different and I’d scream “What happened here?” I
could tell right away they were making a mockery of a matte shot. Rocco had to paint wider and sharpen it for
them because that’s what they wanted.
All the paintings that I would have
liked to have kept from Bladerunner, all the stuff that were good paintings and
good matte shots…and the one matte that I wanted, I understand Alan Ladd jr
took it. He was the producer on it I
guess.
THOUGHTS ON THE DIGITAL MATTE REVOLUTION:
 |
| BILL & TED'S BOGUS JOURNEY (1991) |
 |
| SOLAR BABIES (1986) |
I remember I met several young digital
matte artists they called themselves, and they’d heard about me. If you’re grey haired and old they figure you
did alright. One guy was studying to be
a representational matte artist, and he was taking fine art lessons. I said, hey, that’s great , but I was
thinking to myself that it’s extremely difficult to go from the computer type
of thing and then become a traditional artist, unless you happen to be
artistically inclined to begin with.
You’re not going to get a Mark Sullivan or a Mike Pangrazio or any of
those guys that didn’t have that ability already.
 |
| An unfinished test and the final matte composite from the tv miniseries 'V' (1983) *Frames courtesy David Stipes |
 |
| BLADERUNNER (1982) |
REFLECTIONS ON PERSONAL PAINTING:
 |
| FIELD OF DREAMS (1989) |
My family still have some really
early stuff…old sketches I did of movie stars.
I always felt I had it in me to be a matte artist, I was destined to do
this stuff, though there were some artists I knew and worked with who didn’t
have it in them.
 |
| BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES (1970) |
 |
| Matthew working on a wonderful, though ultimately unused matte for STAR TREK (1979) |
MATT’S LAST WORD:
I could have told you some real
raunchy stuff you know! (much laughter)
 |
| BLADERUNNER (1982) |
MATTHEW
JOHN YURICICH
19th January 1923 - 28th May 2012
This is marvelous. More information like this needs to exist from the practitioners of this art form. We can learn so much from their expertise.
ReplyDeleteWelcome back with another excellent post ! Don't know if Matt worked on these but Left Hand of God and Stars and Stripes Forever has some nice matte work. Are there a lot of matte paintings in Call Me Madam ? What's coming up next on the blog ?
ReplyDeleteHi Steve
ReplyDeleteI've not heard of those two shows, but if you have the mattes I'd gladly receive same.
I've not seen Call Me Madam, but just have a few of the mattes from it. There were alot of other Yuricich shots I just couldn't squeeze in. It was cluttered enough as is. I think the Bounty set up was wonderful.
Coming up... well I have an extensive career Q&A with Harrison Ellenshaw where we will discuss everything from Pop Day, Peter, Disney, Star Wars and Dick Tracy.
I've also got a Rank-Pinewood biggie, and an ILM mammoth post as well as a few little profiles on things like Rains of Ranchipur and other oldies.
All the best
Peter
I realize,through this precious post,how much Matthew Yuricich was involved in so many iconographic shots of the Motion Pictures History.So interesting to hear about his thoughts and reflections on his art and career.Thank you Peter for this fascinating tribute to this Artist.
ReplyDeleteSince publishing this interview I have received fresh and very important historical information on various aspects of 'the old days of matte art', and I shall include this in my editorial on the next blog, as it's too dangerous to go back in here and fiddle with it.
ReplyDeletePeter
Hello Pete,
ReplyDeleteanother very special entry in your ongoing series of 'golden' matte art.
Side by side with Albert Whitlock and Peter Ellenshaw Matt Yuricich was one of the true old masters for me. I will always remember him as the one who painted the mattes for some of my favourite films: the Planet Of The Apes series, Logans Run, Ghostbusters and Blade Runner. I think he would very much enjoy this tribute.
Thanks my friend for your outstanding work.
Thomas
Blade runner is a timeless movie that never gets old. I love the sketches for the movie as well. Very futuristic for the times.
ReplyDeletehi
ReplyDeleteI just want to take this opportunity to thank you for generously documenting this fine art. I have enjoyed immensely reading it and i look forward to referring back again for updates.
I see that you have an ILM post soon, i will look forward to that
I have been working in the fx world for 18 years, i wanted so badly to be a matte artist, as i taught myself up to that point, doing matte shots on slides etc.. but i was discouraged somewhat by my early letters from VFX houses incl ILM, stating how much of a dying art it is, so as you can see from my site i got into prosthetic's industry,
I dont paint as much as i used to, but after reading this re ignited my passion for this art i had as a child, my parents still have no idea i painted matte shots on their new expensive patio doors!!
I now live in Wellington, just finished on the film with 3'7" people. (yes we are still not allowed to say we even worked on the film!! warner bros can be vicious!)
well done on the site.
maybe ill pick up a brush once im back in NZ.
thanks again.
simon rose
www.srosefx.wix.com/simonrosefx
Hi Simon
ReplyDeleteThank you so much for your kind remarks - it is appreciated. It's always gratifying to find like minded fans of the old hand made illusions.
As I write this, I've just learned of yet another specialist VFX house closing it's doors for good, Matte World Digital in San Francisco. Craig and the MWD boys produced so many wonderful matte and miniature trick shots over the past 20 years.
Peter
Peter,
ReplyDeleteI absolutely love this document. Is there a high rez version? The PDF I downloaded doesn't do justice to the amazing artistry.
I've always been a huge fan of these guys and to see their work and be able to study it would be terrific.
best,
Randal Kleiser - director
Hi Randal
DeleteThanks you so much for those kind words. It's good to get feedback from industry folk, especially in this 'desktop CG' era (yawn).
Sorry, but there's no way I know of to acquire these blog articles other than as you say, a PDF sort of saved document. I wish there were, as fear of some internet 'crash & burn' always frightens me.
All I can advise is to at least view this 'labour of love' on a decent sized screen, and not one of those dinky little 'toy' palm sized devices that, sadly, many only use.
Very sad incidentally that practically none of your pictures used 'matte artistry' (only one I know of was FLIGHT OF THE NAVIGATOR), though I may be proved wrong.
Regards
Peter
...Oh, yes, I recall WHITE FANG had one too - an invisible one that nobody ever noticed.
DeletePete