I only got to meet Stan Winston once, but it remains one of the highlights of my so-called Hollywood career. I went to his studio to pitch a take I had on a script. I was put in a conference room to wait, and I was surrounded by werewolves, Terminators, a velociraptor, and Tom Cruise. All life-size models of the things Winston had created for all the movies I’ve loved.
I pitched my take to Winston’s chief exec, a great guy named Brian Gilbert. He listened politely as I went through the mind-numbingly faithful video-game adaptation I proposed. But mainly, I just enjoyed the scenery. Winston walked through the meeting smiling, happy — you’d never have known he was sick — followed by his two dogs. He introduced himself, even though he probably had a lot better things to do than meet a schmuck writer.
Little kindnesses like that mean a lot, especially in this industry. But even if I’d only been in the room with his creations, I’d still feel pretty lucky. He never looked down on the things he made — you could see it in the care and effort he took to make it look real. He elevated a lot of movies from the “man-in-suit” disease that afflicted too many genre pictures. The fact that Iron Man did $100 million its opening weekend should tell you how much he changed the status quo: by making them more real, he helped move sci-fi and horror out of the ghetto where Hollywood had put them.
I hope he gets enough credit for that.
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June 18, 2008 at 11:06 am
[...] Sadie The Wonder Dog Stan Winston, RIP [...]