Word: rambaldi
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...American verismo," Bolcom says of View, using the Italian term for such popular slice-of-life operas as Puccini's La Boheme and Leoncavallo's Pagliacci. Sure enough, the tale of Eddie Carbone (baritone Kim Josephson), a middle-aged longshoreman who lusts after his young niece Catherine (soprano Juliana Rambaldi), has verismo stamped all over it, right down to the climactic knife fight. In this new version, adapted by Miller and co-librettist Arnold Weinstein, View has acquired a Greek chorus that comments on the unfolding disaster, though the overall effect remains faithful to the original play. Think of West...
Well, no. The gremlins really are an army of latex-skinned puppets devised by Special Effects Maven Chris Walas (Piranha, Raiders of the Lost Ark) and assembled for a bargain-basement $1.3 million. (By contrast, Carlo Rambaldi's E.T. creature alone cost $1.5 million.) The greenish-brown monsters, standing 23 in. tall with their 10-in. bat ears, were controlled by hands, cables, rods, radio signals and a simple but effective method that Walas describes as "throw-'em-across-the-room puppetry." The most complicated gremlin had 60 cables operated by a dozen technicians standing...
...appears on the screen is a highly evolved creature. One special-effects crew tried to make the spaceman and failed, spending a reported $700,000 in the process. Then Spielberg turned to Carlo Rambaldi, an Italian painter and sculptor. Rambaldi first came to the U.S. in 1975 as a consultant on King Kong, then in 1978 set up a small shop in Los Angeles. He explained the construction of E.T. to TIME'S Joseph Pilcher, beginning with sketches and a series of clay models for screen testing for Spielberg before building the creature. Finally, Rambaldi made an aluminum...
...Rambaldi's monsterpiece is about the height of a four-year-old child, with a large, lumpy, pulsating skull, a neck that extends or retracts according to mood, skin that is a very alien gray-green when E.T. is healthy, and long, marvelously graceful arms with four-digit hands. He is very strange and complex in his repertory of emotions, although he is allowed only a ten-word speaking vocabulary (his voice is that of an 82-year-old woman with some electronic distortion). He is onscreen most of the time, and he takes a firm, sure hold...
Once the drawings were approved, it took Rambaldi three months to build the alien that emerges from the mother ship to greet Truffaut. Spielberg and the crew nicknamed him Puck. The other aliens were propelled by simple machinery or by dwarfs, but Puck was animated in the same way that King Kong II was, through a combination of mechanical and hydraulic gadgets. There were even artificial tendons in his face, and by pushing levers 45 feet away, an operator could make Puck do everything but scratch his stomach and laugh like Santa Claus. "He doesn't have a wide...