The Making of the Jack Pierce Tribute

As a writer and producer of special Hollywood projects, I always wanted to do something that paid homage the classic monsters. But what to do? Film clips of the monsters were wrapped up tightly by their home studio, Universal, and the various estates, specifically those of Karloff, Lugosi, and Chaney, were also spoken for. However, in 1998, there had never been a fully-realized project about Jack Pierce.

To the rare uninitiated monster fan, Pierce was the makeup genius who started at Universal in the 1910s, doing everything from stunt work to assistant directing before becoming a full-time makeup artist in the 1920s. After successes such as "The Monkey Talks," Pierce became Universal's head of makeup in 1928. He scored a major success turning Conrad Veidt into "The Man Who Laughs" that year, but the 1930s would bring him into legendary status.

After working on "Dracula," in succession, Pierce created the title characters for "Frankenstein," "The Mummy," "The Werewolf of London," "The Bride of Frankenstein," "The Wolf Man," and "Phantom of the Opera," in addition to working on all of the sequels to those films through "House of Dracula" in 1945. The studio then dismissed him after giving them 30 years and never signing a contract.

To undertake a Pierce project that would properly reflect this great body of work, I chose to at first present most of these films onstage through a combination of partial set pieces and accurate character re-creations. To do so, much like the efforts in realizing my earlier tributes to "Planet of the Apes" and "The Wizard of Oz," I had to recruit the best possible people in Hollywood to work on the creative aspects of the show.