Guillermo del Toro

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“Here’s An Old, But Clean, Tongue From The Exorcist. Put Peanut Butter Inside It, To Stick It On.”

June 14, 2015 in Excerpts, Film | Permalink

In a Medium essay, J.J. Abrams recalls his early passion for film being encouraged via letter and in person by childhood idol, Dick Smith, a special make-up effects artist who brought his talents to The Exorcist, The Godfather, Scanners and more. Smith was similarly influential in the development of Guillermo del Toro. The opening:

As an aspiring and chubby student filmmaker in the ‘70s and early ‘80s, I was obsessed with movies, notably monster, science fiction and horror films.

I would spend my weekends making Super 8 movies using any technique I could to kill my friends and blow things up with sheer and utter realism.

But in that era, technique was hard to come by.

Before the Internet and DVD special features demystified pretty much everything about the process, movies were sort of like crop circles.

How the hell did they get there? How the hell did they do that?

Avenues to unlocking the secrets of filmmaking were few and far between.

It was in 1981 as a 9th grader and, how do I say this, an insanely rabid Dick Smith fan after admiring his work from The Exorcist to Scanners, The Godfather and Altered States, I wrote the man a fan letter — never expecting to hear back.

I came home from school one day and found a cardboard box addressed to me. The return address was Dick Smith, Larchmont, New York.

My heart pounded as I opened the box.

The enclosed note read, “Dear J.J., Here’s an old, but clean, tongue fromThe Exorcist. Put peanut butter inside it, to stick it on. Or moisten inside and put dental-plated adhesive powder inside it. Yours, Dick.”

My mother was very concerned.•

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“He Liked To Troll The City Sewers And Dissolve Slugs With Salt”

November 25, 2011 in Excerpts, Film, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

I originally read Daniel Zalewski’s excellent New Yorker profile of filmmaker Guillermo del Toro in the print version and never realized until now that it’s online for free. Even if you’re not a fan of Del Toro’s work, you’ll probably enjoy it since the article is pretty much perfect. The opening:

In 1926, Forrest Ackerman, a nine-year-old misfit in Los Angeles, visited a newsstand and bought a copy of Amazing Stories—a new magazine about aliens, monsters, and other oddities. By the time he reached the final page, he had become America’s first fanboy. He started a group called the Boys’ Scientifiction Club; in 1939, he wore an outer-space outfit to a convention for fantasy aficionados, establishing a costuming ritual still followed by the hordes at Comic-Con. Ackerman founded a cult magazine, Famous Monsters of Filmland, and, more lucratively, became an agent for horror and science-fiction writers. He crammed an eighteen-room house in Los Feliz with genre memorabilia, including a vampire cape worn by Bela Lugosi and a model of the pteranodon that tried to abscond with Fay Wray in King Kong. Ackerman eventually sold off his collection to pay medical bills, and in 2008 he died. He had no children.

But he had an heir. In 1971, Guillermo del Toro, the film director, was a seven-year-old misfit in Guadalajara, Mexico. He liked to troll the city sewers and dissolve slugs with salt. One day, in the magazine aisle of a supermarket, he came upon a copy of Famous Monsters of Filmland. He bought it, and was so determined to decode Ackerman’s pun-strewed prose—the letters section was called Fang Mail—that he quickly became bilingual.

Del Toro was a playfully morbid child. One of his first toys, which he still owns, was a plush werewolf that he sewed together with the help of a great-aunt. In a tape recording made when he was five, he can be heard requesting a Christmas present of a mandrake root, for the purpose of black magic. His mother, Guadalupe, an amateur poet who read tarot cards, was charmed; his father, Federico, a businessman whom del Toro describes, fondly, as “the most unimaginative person on earth,” was confounded. Confounding his father became a lifelong project.

Before del Toro started school, his father won the Mexican national lottery. Federico built a Chrysler-dealership empire with the money, and moved the family into a white modernist mansion. Little Guillermo haunted it. He raised a gothic menagerie: hundreds of snakes, a crow, and white rats that he sometimes snuggled with in bed.•

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