Interviews
HOH Exclusive Interview: Robert Kurtzman - Part One
By Caretaker
Mar 22, 2006, 23:59

A few months back Caretaker and I had the privilege of heading over to the offices of Precinct 13 Entertainment run by none other that Robert Kurtzman.  Bob has been a major player in the genre as an FX guy and director and is known world wide as the K in KNB FX.  We got the chance to sit down and have a lengthy chat with Bob the day we were there and he told us about his career from a young child watching horror flicks to his latest project, a little ditty called The Rage.  The interview is quite extensive so I will be posting it in segments over the next several days.  In this first part Bob talks about his early days working the shops and hooking up with Greg and Howard to form the powerhouse trio of KNB FX.  Here is the first part of the interview, it is only really a couple of questions but Bob’s answers are so complete that it is just a ton of information.  Check back over the next several nights for continuing installments of the interview.

HOH:  Where did your love for what you do come from? 

RK:  Well, I have had a love for this since I was a young kid.  I used to sit in front of the TV with my bowl of chips and my drawing pad and watch Super Host and late night horror hosts, Saturday horror hosts and I was just into it for a long time.  My mom was an artist and had me in art classes.  I took art classes in school and outside of school as well.  I thought I wanted to be a commercial artist at that point, go to art school but that wasn’t what wanted to do.  I was always drawing creatures and monsters and art school was drawing shading and projects and I knew that wasn’t for me.  So, I came home, worked the summer and then went to LA and went to Joe Blasco.

I grew up with the Hammer films and the 50’s films.  I wasn’t until I was in high school and seen things like The Thing and American Werewolf in London and I thought, man how do I get into this.  I knew Savini was in the area and I called him up and was like, do you have apprenticeships and he was like, NO.  So I was flipping through a copy of Fango and there was the ad for Blasco and it promised a lot of things and I was like, WOW, that is where I have to go.  But it turned out that they taught mostly beauty stuff and very little prosthetic stuff so it really wasn’t a very good experience for me.  But once I was out there I just started shopping around and eventually got a job with John Buechler.  A lot of us started there.  So, I started working there and Howard went off to do Day of the Dead and he told Buechler “hey I’m going to go do this film with Romero” and John said “OK but just don’t leave me in the lurch” and I was like calling all the time and Howard asked if I would like to come in and cover for him for a few months and that turned into a few years and I was working on everything that Charlie Band was working on.  We would do 6 movies a year with him and that was a great experience because I was able to learn by doing and making mistakes and they were so low budget that they appreciated everything you could do for them.  You were learning but you weren’t being chastised for walking onto set with some weird piece of rubber that you had pulled out of your ass...so... (laughs)

HOH:  So, after you get out to LA and started working, what was the next step?

RK:  I was working as a lab tech on The Color Purple, working with sculpting and baking appliances then I segued into Night of the Creeps and we all got to be in the movie because they needed zombies.  So, we did our own heads and make ups and got to be in the movie.  At that time I was also at Stan Winston’s and Night of the Creeps got postponed and we went over to Stan’s to work on a few things.  I think it was Aliens, Predator and Invaders from Mars all at the same time so I was over there dong lab stuff and sculpting crap but I went in and told Stan I am here until Dave Miller calls and I am committed to that project so I don’t know when but when that show goes, I am out of here and Stan was cool with that as long as you told him up front and didn’t leave him hanging.  So then I did Night of the Creeps and then I was at Shostroms for a long time after that working on From Beyond and Nightmare on Elm Street 3, Phantasm 2, Deepstar 6 and Evil Dead 2 and we did those all over at Mark’s and I was the key guy there for years and I liked hanging out there at Mark’s, a little shop in south Pasadena  and I enjoyed it because Mark gave me a lot of artistic freedom so I could design stuff so that is why I hung out there and I worked at Kevin Yeager’s as well on The Hidden and 976-EVIL, I did al the make up and appliances on that and then around that time, right after Evil Dead 2 that Greg, Howard and I started talking about opening out own shop because we were basically supervising a lot of these shows, a lot of the work we were dealing with, everything from scheduling and stuff and we were like, lets just start doing this for ourselves.

The first little shop that we got I took a loan out from a bank here in Ohio and it was like a garage, and industrial space like a bunch of garages all stuck together.  It was 1000 sq. feet and we just built shelves and put an oven in and starting doing hand me down shows from Stan and when Stan had some pick up work he would be like, I am already on another job, here call these guys so we did some stuff for Action Jackson and some stuff for  Monster Squad and then we started to pull in low budget stuff and Intruder was like our first company show, they paid us $5000 to do a bunch of stuff in it but it was kind of a catch 22 because you couldn’t key a show unless you had keyed a show  so it was like a vicious circle so we started doing shows for free so we could get credit for keying shows so we did Night Wish and Dr. Hackenstien and we became the gore guys and everybody was coming to us for every gory thing they wanted and we kind of had to break away form that and land a little more mainstream stuff and how we started doing that was we did a movie called Gross Anatomy, it was a drama and it had all of these medical cadavers that went through all these stages of being dissected and we got the gig because Debra Hill was one of the producers on it and once we had that it was like something more realistic, none monster related and we ended up taking that around and that is how we got Dances With Wolves.

Okay, enough for one night.  I have transcribed all I can…  Check back tomorrow evening, by then I will have typed out a bunch more.  To be continued…….