MAKEUP ARTIST ADMITS 'GRINCH' WAS A BIG COVERUP

By Ellen Futterman

From The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 11.17.2000

Rick Baker is a self-described makeup geek. He lives for latex. He likes wearing it on his face.

Maybe like is too strong a word. Before Baker puts anyone else through the arduous process of getting poured into pounds of rubber or slathered with face paint, he thinks it only fair that he tries it out first.

Baker is a makeup artist in the truest sense of the word artist. He has won five Academy Awards for his work in films such as Men in Black, The Nutty Professor and Ed Wood. His most recent project is designing the special effects makeup for Tim Burton's remake of Planet of the Apes, due out next year. The 1966 original is what inspired Baker to his profession.

Right now, he's discussing the special makeup for Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Universal Pictures' $120 million, live-action adaptation of the Seussian classic directed by Ron Howard. Baker and his company, Cinovation Studios, created 125 character makeups for the film. On any given day, Baker would oversee 60 makeup artists applying as many as 110 makeups, which included all sorts of rubber appliances that were glued to the face. To give you some idea of the numbers, about 8,000 facial appliances and 3,500 ears were used.

Among the more daunting of tasks: coming up with the right look for the title character. Baker looked to the original Seuss book for inspiration, but knew he could never duplicate the drawings on a human figure. Still, he had an idea.

"When Ron mentioned that the Grinch was going to be Jim Carrey, I almost immediately visualized what it ended up being," says Baker. "I was more concerned about what the Whos would look like because I hadn't a clue."

Working from a three-dimensional clay sculpture of the Grinch, Baker began casting rubber molds and testing the makeup on himself. When he finally modeled his creation for the filmmakers and studio execs, they began to worry that perhaps it was too much. Under all the rubber, would audiences be able to recognize that the Grinch, in fact, was Carrey?

"I look nothing like Jim and I kept explaining that it would look like him when he wore it," said the 49-year-old Baker, who wears his long silver hair in a pony tail. "To me, How The Grinch Stole Christmas needs to be about the Grinch. There needed to be a distinctive look. It can't just be Jim Carrey painted green. That would be a disappointment."

Carrey agreed with Baker, but the actor was concerned that such heavy makeup would restrict his facial movements. So while working on Man on The Moon and Me, Myself and Irene, before filming The Grinch even started, Carrey visited Baker's studio sporadically to play with the look. Baker thinned the rubber in some places to give it more elasticity and placed holes in strategic places so Carrey could breathe. "I thought that was kind of important," says Baker.

In the end the look of the Grinch didn't change much from what Baker had first envisioned. He also created the character's "hair" suit, which consists of individually dyed yak hairs hand sewn onto a lycra spandex suit. It took four months to make.

"There was no skin to be had," Carrey said. "Literally everything was covered. It was impossible to scratch your nose. It was literally a lesson in Zen."

Carrey is pretty frank -- and pretty funny -- about his discomfort with the suit and makeup. It didn't help that it took nearly four hours to apply and an hour to remove or that he had to wear it almost daily for five months. But the absolute worst, according to Carrey, were the oversized contact lens. "They really push you over the edge," he says.

"It was all just a challenge and at a certain point you get past that," he adds. "Hopefully, from what everyone is telling me is that even through the contacts you saw the Grinch's soul. That's what you're after, what you hope to project. If they say action and I'm still thinking about the suit then you're in trouble."

Baker doesn't blame Carrey for having a hard time with all of it. "Heck, I find it hard enough sitting on an airplane for four hours without some joker putting glue on my face and poking me," Baker says. But when Carrey first complained to Baker that he had no idea how hard it was, the makeup artist sat the actor down for a little chat.

"I said, more than anyone else on this planet I understand," Baker recalls. "I've worn worse things than this, Jim. I played King Kong in Dino De Laurentiis' King Kong and wore a suit made out of bear hide that weighed 50 pounds. I had cables coming out my back that were 40 feet long and weighed 100 pounds that I had to drag. And I didn't have a trailer and I made scale.

"I told him I knew he could do it, that it was going to be worth it. It's going to be so cool. After that talk he was much better about handling it."