Visionary Cinema's Scott Essman has written, produced, and directed a sincere and unique tribute, a collection of material entitled Jack Pierce: The Man Behind the Monsters. The DVD includes a generous potpourri of extras, but the centerpiece is Essman's ambitious play, whose single performance was filmed at the Pasadena Convention Center in June 2000.

The play is mostly a one-man show in the style of Tru or Give 'Em Hell, Harry, with an elderly Pierce (Perry Shields) reflecting on his long career. Interspersed throughout are historical photographs, frame grabs and audio clips from classic Universal films. The real treat, however, is that the performance features 15 actors in elaborate recreations of Pierce's famous makeups.

The makeups are extremely elaborate and coordinating this aspect of the show must have been a logistical nightmare. Significantly, Essman and Makeup Supervisor Rob Burman strive to recreate the makeups exactly as they appeared on-camera in the 1930s and '40s, even taking into account the bone structure of the actors that had originated the roles. In other words, the show's Mummy and Frankenstein Monster reflect not so much the actors onstage, but rather are designed to appear as if Boris Karloff himself were playing the part, hidden under the mounds of putty, cotton and collodion.

This aspect of the show is, at times, uncanny, with Mathew Thompson's Frankenstein Monster especially successful in this regard. Though not as successful, Essman and Burman also daringly mold young, contemporary faces into good approximations of Basil Rathbone, Colin Clive, and Evelyn Ankers, among others, using moderate to heavy makeup. Few of the young actors get the voices right, but little details like Clive's upturned nose and Claude Rains's flat, wide features are valiantly attempted.

Unfortunately, while the play works okay as a historical overview, it fails utterly as anything like drama. Most of the time Pierce merely rattles off a list of achievements as if reading a resume: "First up was a big Technicolor remake of The Phantom of the Opera . . . " Perry Shields, under mounds of makeup himself, is convincing as an older Pierce, but can't overcome the weak dialogue, leaning heavily on odd quirks such as his tendency to punctuate sentences with exactly three "heh, heh, hehs," or to emphasize every few sentences: "The Wolfman was my favorite character since the Mummy, almost . . . TEN . . . YEARS . . . AGO."

Much of the play is more a history of Universal and its horror cycles than an intimate, personal autobiography, and Pierce's anecdotes, for the most part, are overly familiar to the very audience the play seems targeted. (Some of Pierce's stories are also apocryphal or factually dubious, such as the suggestion that Universal's eight Frankenstein films earned $90 million during their theatrical run.) There's no real insight on Pierce's craft or his reportedly stormy relationship with Universal's management. Pierce had a reputation as a cantankerous, bitter, and professionally self-destructive man, but Essman's Pierce is only wearily nostalgic.

According to Essman, Pierce had unrealistic aspirations as a leading man in silent films, though his tight features (smushed nose, tiny mouth) were far better suited to B-Western heavies of the sort played by Morris Ankrum or Alan Bridge. Later, when Pierce is fired by the new Universal regime in 1947-48, an apologetic studio executive absurdly suggests Pierce might have been kept on if only he had combined acting with makeup like Lon Chaney (!).

Unwisely, Pierce almost never interacts with the rest of the cast, which are instead shown recreating famous scenes from Frankenstein, The Mummy, etc. This may have worked live onstage, but is deadly here. While the makeups are mostly successful, the sets are cheap flats, and the staging is anything but cinematic. These recreations are shown in black and white, a gimmick that doesn't bring them any closer to resembling the films they emulate. At one point, for instance, an actor playing Dwight Frye's Fritz chases the Frankenstein Monster around the stage with a torch. Probably owing to fire codes, a big wad of cotton is used in place of real flames, creating the effect that the Monster is being tormented by a giant Q-Tip.

Video & Audio

Jack Pierce: The Man Behind the Monsters is presented in 4:3 standard format and looks good throughout. There are a few minor sound glitches inherent in the live performance, but these are minor. There are no subtitles.

Extras

The weaknesses of the play are generally compensated by the DVD's nice set of extras. An all-too-brief (five minutes) Making of Jack Pierce is narrated by Rob Burman and costumer Jennifer McManus, in which they discuss the challenges of recreating Pierce's makeup using modern makeup techniques. A promotional trailer is noteworthy in that it features makeup veterans Harry Thomas, Dick Smith, and Abe Haberman (along with collector Bob Burns) offering brief testimonials. One sorely wishes both of these segments had been greatly expanded. The Cast features before and after photos, with complete credits of the artists who worked on each makeup. A two-minute Slide Show regurgitates illustrative material seen in the play.

A section entitled Memorabilia is a mishmash of miscellaneous items. Best of these is a two-minute excerpt from the TV series This Is Your Life, which warmly reunites Pierce and Karloff 26 years after the production of Frankenstein. Pierce himself is interviewed in a 10-minute audio-only segment of a Los Angeles TV show, where he peculiarly refers to the Frankenstein Monster as "Monstrosus." Essman and hairstylist Lilley Dirigo (who worked alongside Pierce) are interviewed in a webcast of Stein Online. Tellingly, she refers to Pierce as a "feisty little rooster."

Parting Thoughts

With Universal Home Video planning to release more than a dozen of its classic monster movies in April, Jack Pierce: The Man Behind the Monsters is a good companion video. The play is weak but impressively ambitious, and the extras make this a fine tribute certain to appeal to horror movie fans and aspiring makeup artists alike.

Stuart Galbraith IV is a Los Angeles and Kyoto-based film historian whose work includes The Emperor and the Wolf -- The Lives and Films of Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune. He is presently writing a new book on Japanese cinema for Taschen.