Stan Winston and George Carlin

Stan Winston, special effects wizard, died last week at the age of 62.

All through junior high I grew up wanting to be Tom Savini or Rick Baker. I was way into movie FX, and those guys were like rock stars to me. By college I turned my ambitions elsewhere, but I never forgot the hard work done by the creative guys hunched under false floors working the pneumatic pumps. Their skills and vision determined whether an audience could suspend their disbelief for a few hours and buy into the movie's premise.

Stan Winston's genius helped many directors sell their stories. The effects he cooked up using latex, exploding blood-filled condoms, and plaster casts are forever burned into my imagination. To this day I can't look at an X-Acto knife without thinking of Schwarzenegger carving out his own eye. That was all Stan.

Winston's work was iconic. An entire generation of artists and model makers now casually swipe his badass T-Rex and raptor designs in Jurassic Park,* although he is rarely credited. He took H.R. Giger's original alien design and amped it up with his own take on the queen in Aliens, and that, too, has been copied by others. Just watch any movie made for the Sci Fi Channel.

In an age of relentless digital visual effects manufactured by faceless teams of bleary-eyed geeks hunched over keyboards, Winston was the last true FX rock star. Movies won't be the same without him.

As a teen I bought George Carlin albums without my parents' approval--which George would have approved of and, likely, counted on. His comedy taught me to think and question authority.

In recent years I stopped laughing at his bits and started nodding because he made sense. How do you not like a guy ranting about how yuppie baby boomers ruined everything? Unless you are a yuppie baby boomer...in which case, fuck you for your unnecessary, blaring car alarms; for ruining the great rock anthems of my childhood by using them to sell sports cars; and for drowning America in a torrent of PC euphemisms that stifle simple and direct expression.**

You might not believe Carlin's assertion that "the Earth has been around for billions of years and will be just fine no matter what we do to it" (paraphrasing here), but the man posed compelling arguments that could make the most hardcore environmentalist feel silly about their position.

He died yesterday at 71. And just like the baseball players he made fun of in one of his best bits, he's going home.

* Here's proof: picture a velociraptor in your mind. If you imagined a six-foot-tall walking nightmare with gnashing teeth, you bought into Winston's exaggerated vision: actual raptors were less than two feet tall. He sold you a deinonychus under a different name and you didn't realize it. You, too, have been influenced by the great Stan Winston.

** I'm paraphrasing Carlin here, and not very well. But seriously, boomers, George was right about your generation.
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