Catacombs Reference LibraryThis man's work is a blast
Catacombs Reference LibraryBy Holly Hill
Gannett Westchester Newspapers, TV/Radio Week. March 6, 1977 Page 3 and 4
Brian Johnson began his career by accidentally blowing out all the windows in a laboratory. Today, he deliberately blows up people, buildings, space ships and even whole planets as the special effects designer and director for television's science fiction series, Space 1999, seen Saturdays at 7 p.m. on Channel 11.
Some magicians wear top hat and tails, but magic-maker Johnson sports a colourful shirt and slacks and a thatch of brown hair almost reaching to his dark blue eyes as he relaxes in a Manhattan hotel suite and tries, like an earnest magician, not to give away the secrets of his trade.
"If you spend hours and hours thinking about a specific effect and it involves a lot of mental anguish, it's madness to give the solution away," Johnson explains. "You can build a body of knowledge by watching and analyzing pictures. You can figure out by watching Space 1999, for instance, that when the space crafts are moving, it is really the camera that is moving, while the crafts are stationary. Otherwise, we'd have to suspend the space crafts on wires and shoot them from angles which would hide the wires. You get a much smoother effect by moving the camera.
"Explosions in space," Johnson discloses, warming to his subject, "are created by pointing the camera straight up in the air and blacking out the studio ceiling. The explosion radiates out in all directions instead of going up and falling, and gives a much more spectacular effect."
Although he's now special effects director for the most expensive television series ever mounted, Johnson started out testing stresses on concrete blocks at The Cement and Concrete Research Association. "I thought I might be interested in doing research into structures like bridges, but I soon found out that the job was very boring. I started experimenting on my own mixture of concrete, and when I tested a block of it on the machine it shattered and broke the laboratory windows. So I got a job sweeping floors in a film studio," Johnson recalls with a grin, "and worked my way up to camera assistant and then to special effects."
Johnson's first special effects were gigantic spiders for a monster film. "We used real spiders on a miniature set, photographed by a closeup lens," he relates. "They looked gigantic, and that started me thinking about special effects."
After a two-year hitch in the R.A.F., Johnson worked as a special effects man in a British studio which specialized in horror movies. He learned a great deal, but it was not an auspicious period in his career. "When you're working on a film called Taste The Blood of Dracula and the' producer tells you he can't afford two suits of clothing for the actors, so could you please make blood that's edible and stain-free, what do you do?" he asked with a chuckle.
A lot of chuckling apparently goes on when special effects crews are at work. There are legions of film industry stories on us," Johnson admits, confessing that he once directed a torrential studio rainstorm toward a hapless assistant director. On another film, Johnson wired the chair of an electrician who kept falling asleep on the job and woke him up with a soft charge of gunpowder. "He never fell asleep again on the set," John son reports.
My crew on Space: 1999 are always pulling ones on me. They are without a doubt the most evil crew I've ever had in my whole life," he says with obvious relish. "They got hold of me one day and tied me up on a chain hoist with my feet off the ground. But the worst was when I got into my brand new British sports car, started off, and didn't move. The crew had jacked it up an inch off the ground. Oh, they've done some terrible things to me.
"This season, with the arrival of Catherine Schell as an alien who can transform herself into almost anything, we've had a new set of problems. She's always turning into gorillas or ants or tigers or lizards. God! For me it's a case of 'How do you make a lizard walk towards the camera and, on the beam of a green light, roll over and play dead?"'
Johnson has created special effects for almost every type of film, but still yearns to design "a really big spectacular World War movie with aircraft, ships, and all that sort of thing. I'd love to do a Tora, Tora, Tora, and most of all I'd like to produce and direct my own films one day. There is precedent for special effects men moving into directing and producing. I think the job is the best training in the business."
Holly Hill is a freelance writer and contributor to this magazine.
If earthlings were invaded by aliens from outer space who looked like actress Catherine Schell, they would probably break out the welcome signs. With blue eyes and red-gold hair, Miss Schell, who plays an alien resident on Space: 1999, looks like a fashion model.
Hungarian by birth, American by citizenship, British by marriage, and international by career, Catherine seems to have led as many lives as Maya, the character she portrays on the science fiction series, seen Saturdays at 7 p.m. on Channel 11. Maya possesses the power of molecular transformation, an unlimited ability to transform herself into objects, creatures, and other life forms. Presto, and Maya becomes a lioness, a panther, a dove, a dolphin, different human beings, and even fantastic apparitions and horrible monsters.
Making quick changes has been a feature of Catherine's personal life. The daughter of Baron and Baroness Schell von Bauschlott, she fled her native Hungary with her parents and two brothers during the Communist take-over there. Settling in the United States, she spent many of her school years in Washington and Staten Island, completing her education at the American school in Munich when the family moved back to Europe.
"I really wanted to be a teacher, not an actress," Catherine recalls. "I wanted to come back to the U.S. and go to a university, but my father said that he was putting two boys through school and couldn't afford to send me, too. I felt very cheated, as if I were being told that I didn't need an education because I was a woman, so I said that I was going to become an actress. I thought my parents would be horrified, but they were very nice and sent me to acting school in Munich."
From acting school Catherine progressed to roles on the German stage, and in both German and American films. On location for a film in Amsterdam, she met and married British actor William Marlowe. The two have since separated.
Catherine came to international attention last year with her performance in The Return of The Pink Panther, the highest grossing comedy in film history. Breaking into giggles whenever she played a scene with Peter Sellers, she managed to break up audiences too, and when the creators of Space: 1999 wanted a character who would bring more glamour and humor to Moon base Alpha, Catherine seemed an ideal choice.
Holly Hill