[Movie] Stan Winston: 1946 - 2008

Stan Winston, Oscar-Winning FX master, died last night after a long, private battle with cancer. Winston is best remembered for designing movie monsters like the title characters in Predator, The Terminator, The Abyss and The Thing.

Stan Winston: 1946 - 2008

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Oh, man. I didn't even know that he was ill!

What a loss--seeing his name on a movie poster always meant that, regardless of the quality of the film, the creature effects would be superlative.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

James Cameron on Stan Winston's legacy...

Quote:

Thanks for doing what you're doing. You're right, the mainstream media won't get it. They don't understand the important stuff. They're too busy chasing young idiot celebrities around the rehab circuit.

Stan was a great man. I'm proud to have been his friend, and his collaborator on what for both of us, was some of our best work. We met in pre-production on Terminator in 1983, and quickly sized each other up as the kind of crazy son of a bitch that you wanted for a friend. We've stayed friends for over a quarter of a century, and would have been for much longer if he had not been cut down.

We've lost a great artist, a man who made a contribution to the cinema of the fantastic that will resound for a long long time. I don't need to list the indelible characters he and his team of artists brought to the screen. Readers of your site know them.

We all know Stan's work, the genius of his designs. But not even the fans necessarily know how great he was as a man. I mean a real man --- a man who knows that even though your artistic passion can rule your life, you still make time for your family and your friends. He was a good father, and he raised two great kids. His wife of 37 years, Karen, was with him in the beginning, helping him make plaster molds in their garage for low budget gigs on TV movies, and she was with him at the end.

He was a man of incredible humor. When I think of him I see him smiling, usually a goofy grin as he twists his glasses askew on his nose doing a Jerry Lewis impression. Never afraid to play the clown, because he knew his colleagues respected him. He lived life full throttle, in work and play. Like me he loved fast cars, and whenever one of us would get a new toy, the other had to drive it (a practice which was strained for few years after I skidded his brand new Porsche turbo, just off the boat from Stuttgart, into his garage and stopped a half inch from the back wall). We even went to formula racing school together. For the last ten years or so we rode motorcycles on Sundays with Arnold Schwarzenegger and some other friends, not every week but as many Sundays as we could. There was a comradeship that comes from starting out together, and never betraying the respect and trust of that friendship over the years, but always being there for each other, that the three of us have shared.

Stan and I founded Digital Domain together, and our friendship was never strained by being business partners. He always demonstrated incredible wisdom in business, because he knew people, and especially creative people. He inspired artists to pull together and work as a team, which is like herding cats, but it was perhaps his greatest talent. To lead by inspiration. His own team at Stan Winston Studios is the most stable in the business. His core guys have been with him literally since Terminator, 25 years. That's because they respected him so much, and because he made the work fun, even though it was hard. They would stay up all night busting their ass for him. They knew they would always be doing something cutting edge and challenging, and that he respected them enough to let them run with it. Though he could draw and sculpt as well as any of them, he never let his own talent eclipse theirs, because he knew that team building was the most important aspect of leadership. And that's what allowed them to create success after success for over two decades, and win 4 Oscars, among over 30 awards. A walk through Stan's studio gallery is a trip through the last two decades of fantasy cinema. Predators, Terminators, raptors, T-rexes, Edward Scissorhands himself and a hundred more. It hits you how great an impact he's had.

I spoke with Stan by phone Saturday morning, and apparently it was one of the last conversations he had. Incredibly, in retrospect, he was full of life, you'd never have known he was at death's door. We talked for a long time about all the fun times, and all the dragons we'd slain together. He said that once you've shown something is possible, everybody can do it. What was important was being first. Breaking new ground.

Well that's just what he did his whole career, and today's creature and character effects business uses the techniques he developed every single day. He inspired a generation of fantasy effects geeks, and his legacy will be found in their dreams up on the screens of the future, not just in the films he worked on directly.

I'm going to miss him, like I'd miss a brother. It's hard, almost unfathomable, to talk about him in the past tense. He was just one of those larger than life people that was so alive that you can't imagine them gone. But he is gone. I ask the fans to remember not just the work but the man.

How ya doing, buddy?

This blows. Hard. I've always loved his creature designs. Predator being probably one of my favorites of his. The only thing worse is when Ray Harryhousen goes (if he hasn't already. Dude's older than dirt)

Damn.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

Wow, this sucks... I just re-watched Terminator 2 last night, and was thinking about how legendary the F/X were. RIP.

I was speaking idiomatically.

A damn shame, this guy made some of the most legendary creatures in movie history and most people just don't know who he is, but I do, and may his legacy live on in our minds forever.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

I think his best animatronic work was shown in The Ghost and The Darkness. CGI will probably never reproduce the kind of realism that his work provided in that film.

R.I.P. Stan

FELIPE NO