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In January 1987 Jeff Farley drove up to Valencia to interview with Kenny Myers for Return of the Living Dead Part II. Half the crew he had just befriended at Makeup Effects Labs was heading there and had told him to come get hired. Myers looked at his book and said no.
So Farley drove all the way back down to Van Nuys, found a payphone a few blocks from Lance Anderson’s shop, called and asked whether he could stop by with some new pages. Anderson went through the book, then told him this: if you don’t hear from me tonight, come in tomorrow at eight, and if I do call, come in the day after. “So I realized I’d just been hired,” Farley says, “and I didn’t even know what it was.” Anderson had said something about mummies.
It was The Serpent and the Rainbow.
The shop where he learned the trade
Anderson’s crew on that film was stacked. Farley rattles off David Anderson, Lenny McDonald, Jim McPherson, Jim Kagel on sculpture, with Matthew Mungle, Mike McCracken and Mark Garbarino cycling through at various points. He got thrown into everything, mostly molds with sculpting where he could get it. He also built a paw rigged like a long glove that ran up to the wearer’s shoulder, made for shots of it swiping at people, and then the action came out of the script. “They wrote it out of the script after it was made, so it got shipped to the Dominican Republic and never used.”
That job ran three months, overlapping with Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker, which at the time was a genuinely long stretch of stable work. He is direct about why he thinks he got kept on, and it is not talent. “I don’t know if I was really as proficient at that point, but I guess when I saw something, enthusiasm, the willingness to learn and try to improve, I guess that’s what really kind of cinched it for me.” Anderson put him on a one week probation. At the end of it Farley got called into the office and assumed he was done. Anderson had given him a raise.
He found out he was even in the finished film secondhand. Farley was back from three months in Italy shooting Arena when a friend told him he had spotted his name in the credits. Up to that point his only screen credit was Garbage Pail Kids, which came out on his birthday.
Everybody pulled their own weight
Ask what he actually likes doing and he gives the answer he swears everybody gives. Sculpting. It looks cooler and it is easier than making molds, running foam, casting pieces and doing the heavy lifting. What he valued about the shops he came up in, Anderson’s and later John Carl Buechler’s, was that nobody got to do only the part they liked. Stan Winston’s operation, he says, was one of the forerunners of departmentalization. These were not that.
“Everybody pulled their own weight at places like John’s, where you never knew what you were going to be thrown onto,” he says. So it paid to know how to run foam, how to make a mold and how to rig something if it came to that. It is the least glamorous line in the whole conversation and probably the most useful one. The generalist is the reason the day gets finished.
Springwood by way of Lake Arrowhead
Farley had been taking Buechler’s calls on and off since the tail end of the Empire Pictures days. He was up at Lake Arrowhead running To Die For II: Son of Darkness with his late friend Dirk von Besser when Buechler’s shop was already deep into pre-production on Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare. He went from one straight into the other.
His credit on the film is special makeup effects lab technician for Magical Media Industries, and the thing he built that he talks about first is the thing that is not in the movie. “I got to build a puppet head that never made the final cut of the film, but it was an interesting 3D gag with worms popping out of Freddy’s cheek, where he gets bashed with the pipe.” He waves it off almost immediately. The film doesn’t lose anything by it not being there, he says, and he was never really an animatronics guy anyway. What did make it: he went down to set for the gag where a kid falls onto invisible spikes, and out again with Chris Robbins for the sequence where Freddy takes off his own fingers and the green blood comes up, opposite Yaphet Kotto. He mentions Kotto twice. He never expected to work with him.
Mike Deak was on that crew, Robbins was running a lot of it for Buechler, and there were more people than Farley can reconstruct now. “We pumped out some pretty cool stuff.” He also volunteers what he missed. Buechler’s Friday the 13th came along while Farley was in Italy on Arena, and by his account that cost him a shot at helping design and sculpt the Jason mask. Landing on one of the big franchise monsters even once was, in his telling, a consolation he was glad to take.
Don’t touch me
I asked whether the set carried any weight of finality, whether people were treating this as the last Freddy movie. He did not bite. “I don’t know if anybody ever really felt that way, at least I didn’t feel that way when I was there.” Rachel Talalay was good. The producers did what they needed to do. Craft service was good. It was a cool set and in some ways an actively fun one.
The fun is where Robert Englund comes in, and not as a phenomenon. Farley describes him as genuinely down to earth in those moments, a man who keeps his guard up for appearances and drops it in a makeup chair. What Englund did not enjoy was being retouched. Chris Robbins wore the same t-shirt to set every single day and the whole crew had clocked it. Third act, boiler room, Robbins comes at Englund between takes with a brush and maybe some glue. “No, don’t touch me,” Englund said, and then, without pausing: “John, can you give him another T-shirt? Can you give him like a troll T-shirt or something like that?” Buechler had directed Troll five years earlier. The set came apart. Johnny Depp turned up at the makeup trailer around the same stretch and hung around a few minutes, which struck Farley as odd mostly because he was at work.
Whose makeup is that
The best story in the interview is about a name. The Freddy makeup in the boiler room sequences, Farley says, was sculpted by Chris Robbins at MMI. “That wasn’t David Miller’s makeup.” He does not know why new appliances had to be built, whether the reason was political or personal or something else, only that Robbins sculpted an entirely new set for that stretch of the film.
Then dailies. Bob Shaye leaned over to somebody and said, as Farley remembers it, “wow, David Miller’s makeup looks great during these scenes.” Somebody corrected him. That’s John Buechler’s makeup. Farley goes out of his way to say nothing against Miller, and he reads the exchange as a straight win, evidence New Line was paying attention and part of why he felt the shop had real support on that show. Which is true, and still worth sitting with. The best thing that happened to Buechler that week started with a studio head getting the name wrong. “Just an odd, odd place,” Farley says of the industry, where you are somebody’s friend one day and hearing nothing the next.
The Full Moon years
Two decades on he is doing Charles Band pictures for a fraction of what he quotes. He turned Evil Bong down flat, with expletives, and Band kept calling until he said yes. The bongs came out of his place, the eyes radio controlled, with a rheostat rig so somebody could dial a glow up inside the thing. The mold only happened because a chemical salesman named Mike called out of nowhere with five gallons of silicone about to go bad and asked if Farley wanted it. He asked for no credit at all and got an end crawl instead of a title card, then sat through the cast and crew screening and decided Band had actually pulled it off.
Evil Bong 2 paid less and produced the piece he is proudest of anywhere in the conversation, a weight gain prosthetic and suit for a character who balloons between films. “I’m really proud of that one, and that suit I built almost by myself in two days.” He took the weekend before shooting and bashed it out with Dirk and a costume builder named Robert Miller. Then Gingerdead Man 3, which was going to be shot in 3D right up until the first day of principal photography. Farley had built toward that: a mechanical head rigged to split open, a cleaver gag, blood coming straight at the lens. He had also started a large scale hand puppet of the character. “Once I got the molds made, they wouldn’t pay for the materials to actually finish it.” He remembers being offered two thousand dollars for the show and getting twenty five hundred. When Band came back for Evil Bong 3, he said no and meant it, and was glad it went to Tom Devlin.
That unfinished puppet survives as a photograph in a Full Moon book. Most of the rest survives worse. Farley lost a run of his photos in a storage unit years ago, and the ones that made it are boxed somewhere he cannot currently reach. Forty years of foam, molds, paws, bongs and one worm covered Freddy head, and the accessible archive is a single book photo. He offered to dig up ten pictures anyway.
