The other main ghost to make an appearance during the montage is Slimer--the malodorous spirit that slimed Bill Murray in the hotel hallway in the first Ghostbusters outing. Dubbed 'Onionhead' on the original film, the creature got its new name as a regular on The Real Ghostbusters cartoon series. In the sequel, Louis Tully sees Slimer twice--first in the fire station and then later driving a bus. The idea of including the character in the second film was a matter of considerable debate. "Kids love Slimer," said Ramis. "In fact, kids love anything associated with slime. Whenever kids would visit the set, one of the first things they would ask was, 'Where's Slimer?' The second was 'Is there any slime around?' One kid said, "I want to come on a slime day.' I guess they love repulsive substances in general. The notion was so popular with children, in fact, that whenever one visited the set, Murray would declare: 'Uh oh, is that a kid I see? There's a kid of the set, guys. What do we do? Everyone would answer in unison, 'Slime 'em!'"
With Slimer's appeal apparently universal, the filmmakers ultimately decided to squeeze him into the second film. In the subplot written for him, Slimer would first be seen eating various types of food while Louis tried in vain to catch him. Then later, when Louis straps on a backpack and tries to help the Ghostbusters, he finds Slimer driving a bus. Louis hitches a ride on the bus and the two eventually become friends. During editing, Reitman would decide to limit Slimer's role, but all the scenes were scripted and completed.
To create the Slimer material, Tim Lawrence and the creature shop began with some new concept drawings by Thom Enriquez, who had developed the prototypical Onionhead character for the original film. "Unlike the character from the first film which was primarily a monster," Lawrence explained, "Michael wanted elements from the cartoon version incorporated as well, and to this end had had Thom do the new series of drawings--which were fabulous. Slimer was not in the first script that I saw, but once we knew that he was going to be in the show, I called in Bobby Porter to play the role. I had worked with Bobby before and liked his facility in suits as well as his easygoing personality.
A lot of technology that was to be applied to Slimer had been worked out earlier on Nunzio. Both had the divided head construction, pneumatic jaws, SNARK capability and a fat-suit base. "The character was going together quite quickly, but then we were notified that it had once again been removed from the show, and I asked them to wait--to be very sure that Slimer was in fact gone before letting the guy go upon which everything had been custom fit. But release him they did. Two weeks later, Slimer was not only back in, but he had a role of increased importance to the story. We contacted Bobby to check his availability and found that even though he had signed to another show for stunt work, it looked as though the two schedules would fit and allow him to still perform Slimer. As the time approached, however, weather changed his primary committment and we found ourselves two weeks from shooting without anyone to wear the suit. Our effects coordinator, Ned Gorman, recalled a person he had worked with on Willow named Robin Navlyt. I was convinced no one else would wear the suit, but I had her come in for a fitting and audition. Incredibly enough, she was exactly the same height as Bobby--four-foot-ten-inces--and she fit into both the body pod and the already molded and cast gloves very well. The same day, Chris Goehe and his mold shop crew did a full lifecast on her and Al Coulter jammed on getting the mechanics fit to the new skull cap. It was really close, but we made the first day of shooting."
"Technically," said Mark Siegel, who did sculpting on both the original Onionhead and the new Sliemr, "the character was created a lot differently on the sequel than he was on the first film. In the original, he was controlled by cables and handles and things, while on this one we had electronic servo motors in the head and the jaw was operated with pneumatics. On the first one, everything was hand puppeteered from below the costume. Also the first one had a tongue that operated like a hand puppet, but on the second one the technology had improved so much that Al Coulter could make it servo-controlled. We got some beautiful movements and we were able to do the eating scenes without having a puppeteer standing behind Slimer as we had on the first one Even though Slimer could be hooked into the SNARK control system for repeatability, it was decided he should be shot live since he was more of a character. During the takes there were about five of us running the joysticks and doing all the functions live so we could react more directly to the situations in the plates."
"We were able to do some really nice things with the face," Lawrence marveled, "mainly because Al and his crew gave us a wonderful mechanical head. It was more than just a monster face. We could do subtle stuff and it would read. When we were originally thinking of Slimer, we had thought of him as this wild, broad character. But Michael Gross has a very good eye for performance and also a very good eye for looking at something and knowing what's wrong--what's too complicated, what's too much, what should be cut back and made simple. He was always on the set and kept going for a more subtle approach--which surprised us at first. We thought Slimer's actions should be bigger. But we did a few things his way and realized it was cool. Michael wanted a loveable character--and for him, the lovability of Slimer would come from a subtle, inner humanness that you might not otherwise see because of the way he looks. Once we saw the subtlety of the expression that was possible, Slimer suddenly had an incredible life to him that I had never seen in such a character before. To see his face light up from very sad to very happy was a wonderful thing. The scene I was most happy with was one that they just threw at us. I wasn't sure we could even do it because it was one thirty-second shot without a cutaway. In it, Louis gets off the bus and heads off down the sidewalk. At this point, Slimer and he are on friendlier terms. Suddenly Slimer enters the frame, rushed intently up to Louis and pats him on the shoulder. From his motions, it is obvious that he wants to go with Louis really badly, but Louis tells him he can't and Slimer gives Louis a big wet kiss with his tongue coming out and licking him. Then he does a spin and flies off. Well, we did that all in one cut and it looked wonderful. I had never seen a rubber character do what Slimer had done. Michael just flipped--he thought the performance was excellent. But at the same time, he told us that they might not be able to use the shot--and ultimately it did not make it into the film."
"What we found during editing was that Slimer was not working very well," Gross explained. "Whenever he was in there, it seemed like he was really an intrusion. At first we thought the answer was to add more of him, so we had an ongoing confrontation between Louis and Slimer in which Louis was constantly trying to catch him. We thought it would be funny and at screenings we expected the audience to cheer and laugh when they saw him again. But nothing. No reaction. The audience was looking at it as a fresh movie. There were a lot of kids who loved to see him, so we knew we could not abandon him completely, but he never really worked with the audience the way we expected. Ultimately, we decided less was better, and in the final film we limited him to two very quick shots."
Besides Slimer and the ghost jogger, the Ghostbusters encounter one supernatural disturbance during the montage. Upon entering a china shop, they discover a collection of expensive crystal artifacts--angels, reindeer, dolphins and plates--floating several feet in the air. When the Ghostbusters try to neutralize this pyschic disturbance, the art pieces crash through a glass case and fall to the floor. "One reason we had the scene in the crystal shop," noted Ramis, "was that--with the exception of Slimer--we did not want to repeat any of the imagery in the first film. We wanted a scene with something other than an apparition or a materialized being of some kind. Another reason we did it was for the budget. Ivan said, 'Gee, can we come up with something that's mechanical and doesn't involve elaborate opticals?' So we thought, 'Yes, the Ghostbusters can encounter other things besides just spirits,' and we came up with just a straight polarity reversal."
To create the results of this psychokinetic energy storm, Chuck Gaspar glued pieces of piano wire to the backs of each crystal object. "Originally I wanted to drill a little hole through each piece and tie the wire through that, but we found that the crystal would immediately start to crck if we tried to drill through it. So we put the piano wire down through a little plastic disk and then formed that disk to each individual crystal piece and glued it to the back. That supported the weight. The piano wire ran up to a piece of monofilament which was attached to a cord that ran up a pulley overhead. Off-camera, Joe Day and other members of my crew pulled on the cords to make the crystal float in the air. We taped a bullet effect to the monofilament so that when it exploded, the monofilament would cut and drop the piano wire causing the crystal to fall to the floor. We had sixteen pieces floating in the scene and all of them were triggered together. When we were filming it, I kept my fingers crossed that one would not fall prematurely. In fact, we suspended the pieces a week prior to shooting and just left them hanging on the set to see if they would stay. We did not want the production crew to get ready to roll and then have the pieces fall through the glass cabinet before their cue." The biggest problem Gaspar had to contend with was that the overhead pulleys tended to squeak. To remedy this, he went up into the scaffolding above the set and sprayed the individual offenders with lubricant.
With their business going like gangbusters, Ray and Egon show Peter and Winston a discovery they have made about the slime sample Ray scooped out of the subterranean river. Curiously, the substance responds directly to both negative and positive emotions. If, for instance, they get angry and yell at the slime, it expands ominously as it did in the courtroom. But if they play easy listening pop songs--a particular favorite being 'Higher and Higher' by Jackie Wilson--the slime reacts positively. To demonstrate the positive attributes of the pyschoreactive 'mood slime,' they pour a bit of it into an ordinary household toaster. When they turn the music up, the toaster starts bouncing across a pool table. "The toaster gag was fun," Gaspar recalled. "We mounted tiny air cylinders inside the toaster at various spots and used the toaster's power cord as switches to fire off the cylinders and the little toaster went bouncing all over the table."
Trapped within his musty painting, the restless spirit of Vigo the Carpathian has little to offer in the way of positive psychoreactive influence. Dana and her baby--who have been drawn unwittingly into the tyrant's plans for rebirth--bear witness to this fact when simple bathwater becomes a lunging mountain of slime. "Many different ideas were discussed for the tub monster," Lawrence notes. "It went from being somewhere where the tub turns into a porcelain version of Audrey II from Little Shop of Horrors to the tub becoming the beginning of a long road that goes down forever. Perhaps the most cartoonish gag was one involving a bubble bath monster. In that incarnation, Dana put bubble bath into the tub and then turned away. While she has her back turned, the mountain of bubbles get impossibly high behind her and then--when it is up over her shoulder--a dark shape comes up inside it and these eyes open up. With all the bubbles, the lensing effect makes it look like there are hundreds of eyes around this dark shape. When Dana turns back around, the creature opens a big maw and scares her. She drops an electric hair dryer into the tub and there's a big electronic snap. All the bubbles go pop, and what's left is a tiny little creature with two great big eyes that crumbles into cinders and goes down the drain. Ultimately, Ivan decided that the slime itself should turn into a creature inside the tub."
Featured in the sequence was a silicone tub and slime creature that were filmed together against a bluescreen. "We made a tub out of white silicone which looked pretty much like real porcelain when it was all slimed up. It also bent well. Then we made the creature itself out of dielectric gel--a Dow Corning breast implant material. The gel is transparent and tends to be somewhat flimsy, so we reinforced it with china silk and spandex. Since this was designed to work as a hand puppet, Tom Floutz was able to put his arm up through the bottom of the tub from below and operate the creature. Then we dumped slime down over the puppet, and poor Tom had to stay down below the tub while all this gunk dripped down on him." To give the creature a mouth, a maw-shaped piece of fiberglass was placed inside the puppet and attached to a vacuum tube. At the right moment, the vacuum was triggered to suck the outer material down into the maw shape and thereby form the mouth..
"Initially," said Muren, "the scene called for the tub to fill with slime, the slime to come to life and lift up, and then Dana would run out of the room. But that was not enough of a payoff, because we had four or five shots in the sequence and the last one was not that much different than the previous ones. Ivan asked what we could do to make a creature come out of this slime. So we went back and had our slime creature come out again and had the tub move around some more, but that still was not quite enough. Then Ivan came up with an idea. 'Why not have it stick out its tongue on the last shot?' That was really what it needed. Each suceeding shot gave you more than the last, and the final one topped them all. Since we were really too busy to handle anything more at the time, John Van Vliet of Available Light did an animated tongue that comes out in the last shot for about twenty-five frames."
Believing that the river of slime holds the key to the escalation of paranormal happenings, Ray, Egon and Winston decide to return to the Van Horne station to investigave further. In the depths beneath the city, the three Ghostbusters follow an abandoned subway tunnel to get back to the river of slime. En route they encounter some supernatural scares--first from a number of severed heads that suddenly appear around them, and then moments later from a mysterious ghoust train. Both scenes were among several added to the film after principle photography had officially wrapped--a situation necessitating a return to New York for additional location shooting only three months before the film was set for realease. "We went back to shoot some scenes that we thought would help clarify story points or expand certain portions of the film," Gross explained. "More specifically, the ghost train was added because that portion of the film needed more tension, more humor and more effects. It needed to be goosed a bit. The ghost train helped heighten the jeopardy and get across the idea that an evil force was trying to keep the guys away. It also fostered the notion that all these ghostly forces were starting to build up--which, in turn, helped justify the ending more. We had the slime and Vigo and the ghosts that appear in New York, but we needed to tie them together better--at least that's what our early preview audience told us after our first cut. In fact, many people did not even understand the concept of good slime and bad slime originally, so we decided to reshoot part of that as well."
Adding scenes was not necessarily a simple solution. While the number of shots needed to complete the film was expanding, the time in which to accomplish them was diminishing. "At one point," Gross recalled, "we were going to try and come out July 4th weekend, but then Ivan decided June 23rd was the weekend that would really do it for us. It was going to be tough, but we said, 'Okay, let's go.' When we learned in the middle of production that Batman was also going to come out on the 23rd, Ivan said to the studio, 'It would make a huge difference if we could come out on the 16th, right?' And the studio said: 'We'd love you if you could come out on the 16th. Can you make it? 'Ivan said, 'Sure, we can make it.' Then he looked around the room, and [co-executive producer] Joe Medjuck and I were turning pale. Oour editor, Shelley Kahn, I think fainted. We just looked at each other and said, 'Yeah, well, if you say we'll be out on the 16th, we'll be out on the 16th.' But on paper it did not look possible. On paper, it could not happen. It was a really killer. It meant the editing schedule had to be pushed back--and they were already dying. But we had to do it."
At this point in the production, ILM was indeed dying; and when additional shots of a ghost train and other entities were put on the table, it was simply too much. "Originally," said Muren, "the film was going to come out at the beginning of July and it was going to entail one hundred and ten effects shots. Then it became a hundred and thirty shots and then it became a hundred and eighty. When the release date got moved up the the 16th, that was it. We peaked out at a hundred and eighty shots and we could not take any more without jeopardizing the whole film. Every time we would get involved in new shots, it would take my time away--others' time away--from following through on the shots that were already in progress. And the schedule was just so tight that we had to be on top of those shots all the time. The question we had to ask ourselves then was, 'Can we handle any extra shots and not have the quality suffer?' We already had nine units shooting every single day for three or four weeks just to get the original shots doen, and there was no way we could take on any more and not have the quality suffer. Fortunately, Michael understood this. He kept saying: ;You've got to tell us when you've reached your limit. We're going to have to keep giving you shots, and at some point you've got to say, 'That's it.' So we did."
"There had to be that trust between us," Gross asserted. "I told Dennis that I knew Ivan would keep pushing and that he had to tell me when it was too much and I could deal with that. We sent some work over to John Van Vliet of Available Light. We sent some work to Peter Kuran at VCE and we sent some to Apogee. Plus, at one point, ILM had a new printer that was damaged during shipment, so Pacific Title was brought in to help out on some of the optical compositing. This show really was all over town, but it had to be because it simply became too big too fast."
While Available Light and Visual Concept Engineering helped out with animation effects, Apogee was drafted to create the new sequences that had been added to the film after production had wrapped--including the ghost train encounter. For Apogee, this meant going to New York for ten days of plate photography and location work at the Tunnel--a nightclub that features several hundred feet of abandoned subway track.
The ghost train sequence begins with the Ghostbusters walking down the deserted subway tunnel in search of the Van Horne station. At first, all is quiet, but then they start hearing some ominous noises. Suddenly they find themselves standing in the midst of the severed heads--all shot 'live' on the set. In an instant, the heads disappear and the threesome are again alone in the abandoned tunnel. "We bought the heads all over town," said Gross. "We had put out a 'dead head' call and found them wherever we could. Pam Easley--our visual effects coordinator--was a zombie wrangler for that. Rick Lazzarini made a few. We found a few. A prop house in New York had a few. For the shot, we placed the better ones in the foreground and the less-detailed ones in the background."
Understandably shaken, the Ghostbusters decide to return to the Ectomobile for their proton packs. As they turn to walk back along the tracks, they hear the sounds of a locomotive and then a bright light appears in the distance. The three men freeze. The light comes closer and closer until it becomes obvious that it is on the front of a train. Ray and Egon manage to jump out of the way, but Winston is transfixed--and the ghost train passes right through him. To create the sequence, the actors first did the scene live on the tracks and then Apogee added the train optically. "To help sell the scene," said effects supervisor Sam Nicholson, "we used interactive lighting when we filmed the actors for the plate. We put a 10k light right up behind them and then we put three or four air cannons on the to make their hair blow. There was enough wind to blow Ernie's hat off. Then we blasted them with a bright live that was supposed to be coming from the train."
Originally, the train was going to be a modern-day subway; but there simply wasn't enough time to build a suitable model, so an existing antique train was chosen. "John Swallow--our production supervisor--tracked down the train," Nicholson recalled, "it was eighth-scale--about twenty-five feet long--and that made it nice for light because we did not have to get into fiber optic snakes or anything that small. We could use 10ks on it and hide the cables in the train. Since we did not have to sync the shot of the train to any specific mark--other than have it pass through Ernie on the plate--we did not need to film it motion control. The train was stationary, but it had steam and reactive lights that Grant McCune rigged up. We shot it on ouir effects stage against black--with a snorkel lens about an eight of an inch away in clearance all the way down the train. We put the camera on a dolly and had four guys just whip it down the track. Since in the scene the train lights had to intensify as the train approached the Ghostbusters, we rheostated the lights on the model so we could dial them up as the lights got closer."
Once the ghost train passed through Winston and disappears down the track, Ray finds a way into the Van Horne station and back to the river of slime. Winston takes out a retractable tape measure to determine the depth of the slime, but his tape gets caught up in the slime and he is suddenly pulled in and swept away. Eager to save their friend, Ray and Egon abandon all caution and jump in after him.
To create the illusion of the Ghostbusters plunging into an imaginary river of slime, Hudson was first filmed falling off the station platform on the partial Van Horne set. Then Aykroyd and Ramis followed suit. Out of view of the camera, the actors landed on slime-free airbags and remained perfectly dry. Later in optical they were combined with ILM's miniature slime river. "The scene where Winston was being carried off down the river of slime required some incredibly difficult roto work and alignment," Tom Bertin recalled. "It was hard to get all the pieces to jibe exactly and to make the motion convincing. With Winston, for instance, Pat Myers had to pinblock a bluescreen element of Ernie Hudson against the background and trace what would be his logical movement in terms of direction and distance. He also had to take into account subtle plays in the slime river in areas where it arched and fell away. It was quite a difficult order, but somehow he did it. He was able to work with every one of those bumps and surface undulations. He also created every bit of Winston's motions in the river--his head bobbing up and down and moving from side to side. Then Sean Turner had to animate a rippling edge around him. In the wrong hands, that could have been disastrous, but Sean did a great job--Winston fits right in there."
"The slime was supposed to look like living energy," added optical team member John Ellis. "It was not liquid so much as it was textured soup, so we did not have to create a splash when the guys fell in. Optically, it was a little tough getting them into the slime. We had to do some soft-edge work and a little exposure shifting so that they would look like they were being enveloped. We also had to shift the exposure of the characters slightly so that they would take on the character of the slime itself before they disappeared into it. In addition, we put smoke into the plate, some nice articulate work done by animation and some wonderful matte paintings of the archway."
The Ghostbusters finally escape from the river and emerge through a manhole right in front of the Manhattan Museum of Art. Covered from head to toe in negative slime, they are overpowered with feelings of anger towards each other. Fortunately, Egon realizes what is happening and orders his companions to remove their outer garments. "We shot that scene in New York out on the street at two in the morning," recalled Ernie Hudson. "I don't know how cold it was, but it couldn't have been more than ten degrees--and with the wind whipping around, we were all freezing. And we were drenched. They poured buckets and buckets of sticky, watery slime over us--over our heads, over everywhere because Ivan wanted it even in our eyes. He wanted us to look like we had been swimming in slime. Then we had to pull off our jumpsuits--which weren't really warm enough for a New York winter to begin with--and stand there in our underwear. I don't think I've ever been so cold in my life. We shot for hours and we couldn't go into the trailers because they were too far away. So we had to sit outside between takes without the luxury of heaters. Danny was there and Harold was there and they weren't complaining, so I figured I shouldn't either. But things did get a little nuts, and at one point I had to ask them: 'Wait a minute. You guys wrote this scene? What the hell were you doing? Didn't you think you were going to have to do this stuff?'"
"When we wrote the scene," Ramis recalled, "I thought they would find a manhole and then we would go down a ladder and come up. Well, in front of the customs house that doubled for our museum, there was only a closed box underground for a phone conduit, and it was filled with big phone connectors. We had to wedge ourselves in like contortionists. Before we got into the hole, the effects guys would cover us with slime. Then they would smoke up the hole and put the manhole cover on it. I kept saying it was as close to being trapped in a mine or cave-in or the American earthquake as you could imagine. It was pretty awful and it was just freezing. But that really was not the worst of it. We did eleven takes, and then the next morning Ivan came to us and said the camera motor had run off speed and we had to do the scene again. At first we thought he was kidding. I mean, doing it once was the worst experience of my life. We thought, 'Great joke.' Unfortunately, it was no joke and the next night we did the whole thing all over again."
When the Ghostbusters inform the mayor that the only way to avoid wholesale disaster is for him to go on television and tell everyone in New York to be nice to each other, the patent lunacy of such a suggestion gets them straitjacketed and thrown into a psychiatric hospital. Meanwhile, Vigo is preparing to make his move. It is New Year's Eve and the tyrant spirit needs to inhabit the body of an infant before midnight. Vigo sends Janosz to capture Oscar. Dana is in Peter's living room when she feels a strange breeze coming from the bedroom where her baby is sleeping. When she investigates, she discovers that the child is free-standing outside on the ledge. "The idea of having the baby out on the ledge was to offshoot of my having a baby walk like an adult," said Ramis. "At one point, we were really considering doing that--but it would have involved either a stop-motion puppet or an adult in a baby suit. Neither of those approaches would have worked without it being in really dim light. As soon as Ivan thought about making a baby walk, he was not thrilled. It just seemed like too much--it made the baby too important."
Even though Oscar no longer had to walk, he still had to appear standing on the ledge of the building some ten stories above a crowded New York street. To accomplish this feat, Bo Welch built Venkman's corner loft apartment complete with two exterior walls and a ledge that stood ten feet above the stage floor. Then Chuck Gaspar had the task of devising a foolproof rig so that Oscar--interchangeably played by William T. Deitshcendorf and Henry J. Deutschendorf II--could stand up. "We made a big leather diaper that was attached to a metal pole bolted down to the ledge. The diaper was hidden inside the baby's jumpsuit; and as long as his legs stayed in position, you could not see the pole because it went up the back of his leg and behind his back. For reverse angles, we simply placed it in front of the baby. There was no way the baby could get loose--he was locked in. Of course, down on the floor below we had large air bags for him to fall on, but there was really no way he could get free. Either one of the twins could have become angry or annoyed by the whole thing, but fortunately they both seemed quite content out on the ledge. Ivan got lucky when he chose those twins--they were great."
The twins were comfortable with the rig--and after some preliminary checking, so too was their father. "I had great confidence in the people involved with this particular project," said Ron Deutschendorf. "Everybody on the film was very considerate about the kids. When I got the script, I knew there were going to be special effects and we were going to have to do some tricks with the babies. The first day on the set, I got with Joel Kramer, the stunt coordinator, and Chuck Gaspar and we looked at the ledge and how high it was and discussed how they were going to harness the babies in. I also checked that the harness was safe befire I put my baby in it. I had confidence in Joel and Chuck, but I never strapped the babies in without double-checking to see if I could pull the harness of the ledge or if there was any chance of it coming off by itself." To help direct the children, Deutschendorf stood on a ladder off-camera and made noises to ry and make the performing infant appear to be looking off into the distance.
To complete Oscar's dramatic adventure, a plate of the ledge set was photographed and then later reduced and placed into a matte painting by Mark Sullivan featuring the rest of the building and the street below. In order to get the correct angle on the ledge, Mark Vargo and his plate crew had to position a camera some forty feet up in the air along one side of the large soundstage. To reach this location, they had to climb a simple wooden ladder and then walk along a very narrow catwalk to the desired position. The Vistavision camera had to be elevated on pulleys since it was too heavy to be carried up the ladder.
As the sequence continues, Dana crawls out onto the ledge and tries to reach Oscar. Much to her horror, a ghost nanny pushing a baby carriage appears in the sky above and in an instant swoops down and whisks the child away. Like many other sequences in the film, the ghost nanny encounter went through numerous changes--and at one point was to have involved a two-headed flying dragon. "The ghost nanny sequence is another prime example of how things evolvee and got better," Muren explained. "The way this process of change would usually happen was that Ivan would send us a script. Three days later we would fly down for a meeting. Maybe Harold and Danny would be there, and the producers would be there and Chuck Gaspar--and we would all sort of hear the script through Ivan for the first time. During one of these meetings, he got to the two-headed flying dragon and he asked, 'Is this any good?' I siad: 'I don't think so. We've seen it before and it doesn't really fit into this film. He said: 'Great, I agree. So come up with something else.' From there it was up to us to do just that."
"We did dozens of concept drawings," Harley Jessup recalled. "Working with key elements in the story--baby, ledge, New York, New Year's Eve--we presented a variety of solutions to the problem. It was really a chance to find something that would work ten stories up in Manhattan and to think of how it would get up there. Some of the ideas involved creatures from a hellish world, while others were more down-to-earth. We had a phantom taxicab that would fly up, transform and take the baby away. We had a giant pigeon and a face that would appear in the moon and a vapor that came up out of the street. Other concepts involved billboard figures and building gargoyles coming to life. We even thought of a horrible Santa Claus. In retrospect, some of the ideas seem a little screwy, but we were trying to be one of the scariest moments of the film."
"We also thought that maybe it could be something inside Peter's bedroom that would come to life," Muren added. "That notion eventually evolved into the tub creature and the idea of having the tub move around. We just went round and around. Then, somewhere along the line, we had one of our marathon meetings at ILM with about ten people trying to figure out how to get the baby off the ledge and taken away--which was all that had to happen--and it just hit me. 'How about a ghost nanny?' It didn't seem like it was necessarily the best idea, but it seemed like an idea that was more appropriate to the film than the dragon--and Ivan really went for it."
Besides being simpler conceptually, the ghost nanny also proved to be a relatively easy effect to achieve. For closeups, Peter MacNicol was dressed in drag and filmed in front of a bluescreen. For wider shots, a miniature rod puppet and buggy were similarly photographed. Both the closeup and wide nanny elements were then combined with background matte paintings of the skyline above New York. For a shot where the nanny's arm appears to stretch down and grab Oscar, a simple arm rig was built by the creature shop--a piece of tubing covered in costume fabric that could slide down a pole and appear to stretch. This was also filmed against bluescreen and then combined with the appropriate background plate and animation.
After the ghost nanny has flown off with Oscar, Dana rushes to the museum. While she is en route, a freak eclipse of the sun plunges the city into darkness and New York is once again besieged by an onslaught of ghostly manifestations. In one montage segment, a wealthy socialite suddenly finds her mink coat alive and covered with four very angry animals eager to bite her face off. The woman quickly flings her garment to the sidewalk and then watches in horror as it runs away. Filmed at night on a street location in Los Angeles, the illusion was accomplished using four different coats actuated variously by radio-controlled servos, hand puppeteering and cable-pull mechanisms. Tim Lawrence and his creature crew developed the specialty garments. "When this gag first surfaced, many concepts were discussed and drawn. Some included using live animals--but for obvious reasons, those were discarded early on. What was finally chosen was the approach seen in the film--with one exception. From the very beginning we conceived of the coat as being made from a nonspecific white fur. All of the prototyping and patterns had been generated with a white coat in mind and synthetic fur had been ordered in bulk. The heads and legs--which were sculpted and cast in foam latex--had been hand-laid in a white crepe fur and all that remained was to finish the mechanics, fit the actress with the support harness and complete the assembly. About ten days before we were due to shoot, we sent a film test down to Ivan showing how the coat might photograph in either daytime or nighttime lighting and a test of the 'runway' gag. He thought the look and the gag were fine--but he wanted to know why the coat was white. Michael was as surprised as we were. It had never occurred to us that it might be anything else. Fortunately, we were able to scramble around and redo the coat with darker fur in time for the shoot."