The Incredible Melting Man
Exhibitor’s Teaser
Courtesy of It Came From Hollywood is this advance sales kicker for Rick Baker’s work in The Incredible Melting Man. With apparent influence from The Quatermass Xperiment, 1955, The Incredible Melting Man did well at the box office but was panned by critics. Rick Baker, the special makeup effects wizard whose creations appear in many notable horror and sci fi movies (Men in Black, Star Wars, It’s Alive, An American Werewolf in London, etc.), had designed the melting effect to be gradual, with four distinct phases of makeup.
It wasn’t until Baker was well into his work for The Incredible Melting Man that he heard from the Star Wars accountant who informed Baker that they wanted him to make the aliens for the cantina sequence. Baker explained that he was now totally involved in The Incredible Melting Man, but they persisted in their desire for Baker’s talent and asked if he couldn’t work something out. Baker would assemble and set up a crew to do the work with Baker supervising. The team Baker formed consisted of Doug Beswick, Jon Berg, Laine Liska, Rob Bottim [sic], and Phil Tippett, nearly all of whom are stop-motion animators…
…Baker’s work on The Incredible Melting Man consisted of four major latex full-head masks. Each one was altered slightly so that there were perhaps ten different versions of the makeup (Making a Monster, Al Taylor and Sue Roy, 1980, Crown Publishers).
From Paul: “This sumptuous heavy card stock teaser was sent out to exhibitors in the Summer of 1977 in advance of the picture’s Christmas release. I acquired this rare little gem in the Summer of 1985, and the story of how I knabbed it is worth sharing here.
During my youth as a wayward teen, smoking cigarettes and combing my hair to look cool, I used to do other “cool” stuff like rummage through garbage dumpsters behind local movie theaters. The Marquette Theater, one of three local neighborhood theaters in the Marquette Park area on the South Side of Chicago, had closed the year before. During the Summer of 1985, a crew cleaned the place out. Dumping boxes of god knows what into several dumpsters behind the theater. There were boxes of paperwork (which I should have also grabbed) and many other pressbooks and advertising material (which I also should have grabbed but didn’t), but within this pile of “garbage” was this little gem. It caught my eye above everything else because it was something I had never seen before. The cover was beaten to all hell, but the rest looked as mint as it does in these scans. I’ve held onto this since then because the excitement of finding it in a dumpster behind a defunct movie theater was one of the highlights of my life as a collector. Since discovering it in 1985, I’ve never run across another.
The Marquette Theater, to my knowledge based on research, never booked Melting Man. Star Wars played The Marquette for what seemed like forever, so I suppose the management wasn’t keen on kicking the golden goose to the curb to let an astronaut melt on the big screen. This item remains one of my most prized additions to my collection, mostly because it has a story attached to it, and pulling this nugget out to do a fresh, high-quality scan brought back all those memories of being a teen who loved movie marketing and memorabilia but rarely had the bread to buy anything.
