More elaborate means were used to produce two monsters--one observed coming out of a movie theater and a second terrorizing people in Washington Square. The first--photographed at Apogee--was created by Rick Lazzarini of The Creature Shop in Van Nuys. "The theater ghost was based on a drawing by Henry Mayo. It had six eyes, four arms, two wings and a forked tail. The head was nearly human-size and sculpted by John Blake, while the body was made by Dan Frye. I worked on the mechanics. Since the theater ghost was added late to the film, we had only three weeks to build and shoot the puppet." To puppeteer device he calls the 'Facial Waldo.' "The Facial Waldo is a cop and vest system worn by an external operator. Sensors are attached to the operator's face--on the brows, cheeks, lips and jaw--and these sensors link up to Ziff cards in the vest. Ziff cards were invented by Stuart Ziff to enable radio control-type servos to be operated by direct wire--thus eliminating a noisy radio link. In effect, they fool the serco into thinking it is getting a command from a radio receiver. On Ghostbusters II, the Ziff cards received information from the sensors on my face and head and then sent signals to servos inside the creature. When I moved my eyebrow or any part of my face, the theater ghost did the same thing; and if I moved my head left or right, the puppet did likewise. Since the theater ghost had six eyes, it therefore had six eyebrows so that when I moved my brow, all six moved on the creature. This kept my hands free to puppeteer the wings, and it also allows for a much more natural performance." Three additional puppeteers wore black beekeeper-style suits with black mesh face screens so they could see without being visible on film.
In a single shot, the creature flies out of the theater, leers at the fleeing crowd on the street and then rushes at the camera. Even with the Facial Waldo, puppeteering the creature was still very difficult because of the number of appendages involved and the short length of the shot. "The real difficulty came after we had rehearsed everything at half-speed to get the moves down and then realized that forty-eight frames per second was necessary to make the movements look smooth," recalled Sam Nicholson. "This meant that the puppeteers had to do the moves two or three times faster--and all within about two-and-a-half seconds. Also, to finish with the creature's mouth just about covering the camera, we had to shoot the whole thing in reverse. That put a real strain on both the camera crew and the puppeteers." To create a glowing effect, the creature's eyes were coated with front-projection material. "We put a ring light on the lens and then dialed up the intensity as we got closer to the creature so it would really look like he was coming at us. Having the eyes lit not only helped increase the illusion of depth, but it also made the creature seem more alive."
Like the theater ghost, the Washington Square monster was a late entry designed to add scale to the sequence. With virtually no time to spare, the production sought out master stop-motion animator Phil Tippett to create the creature. "The people at ILM were good friends with Phil," said Michael Gross, "and Pam Easley in our department knew him from The Golden Child. So all of us approached him and said, 'Phil, you've got to do this shot.' He agreed to do it, but only if we accepted certain limitations. Given the time factor, he said he could do it if the shot was only a hundred and sixty frames long and if he could build the creature based on an existing armature. Also, he would only be able to do one take--in camera--because there would be no time for an optical composite. Since it was a see-through ghost, we figured it would be okay--and that's literally what Phil did. He and his people built the creature, shot it and delivered it to us one day early. Right in the middle of all of this, Phil and his wife were in an automobile accident. Both are fine now, but his wife had to be hospitalized and he too was injured--but he kept working on our shot and he delivered. His name is not on the film because he did not want us to list him for just one shot--but all of us are very grateful to him."
Both the theater ghost and the Washington Square ghost featured background material shot by Apogee while they were in New York to film the ghost train plates. Like the ILM crew that had shot plates earlier in production, the Apogee team encountered the incredible street-level popularity of the Ghostbusters. "We shot late at night," said plate supervisor Peter Donen, "and while the call had gone our for about three hundred extras, somehow word got out that Ghostbusters was shooting and tow to three thousand people showed up. It was five in the morning in Washington Square and it was just pandemonium. The first take had about seven hundred and fifty people, the second had twelve hundred, and by the time we got to the third take there wer thousands! Our Vistavision camera was set up in the middle of the scene and we had people flooding in from three different streets and underneath the arch. On cue, they all started screaming. Some climbed over cabs and others ran through traffic--and all of them ran right at us! At one point we had to jump in front of the camera to block them. It was like a riot. It was exactly as if King Kong were running rampant through New York and thousands of people were fleeing in terror."
The most haunting image to appear during the montage--and one of the first shots completed for the film ILM--involved the arrival of the Titanic and her passengers and crew to New York Harbor. "The idea came up while we were thinking about what big manifestations could happen when all hell's reaking loose," Ramis notes. "The idea we were shooting for was that because of all this psychic activity beneath the city, all the dead were returning to New York. We considered several ideas. One had the Hindenberg arriving with flaming passengers getting off carrying luggage that was also on fire. Another featured a ghostly subway station with rotting commutors. That was the precursor to the ghost train that is now in the film. We also had a cemetery scene where the gravestones were taking off like rockets. Then the idea for the Titanic hit me one day and that seemed to offer the most powerful images."
To create the shot, modelmakers John Goodson and Jeff Olson constructed a Titanic out of plywood and urethane, and also constructed several model buildings for the background. "We tried to be as accurate as we could using books, magazine articles and videotape of the wreck," said Bill George, "but we still had to make changes in two areas. One had to do with the fact that the smokestacks were torn off when the ship went down--but the ship without the smokestacks is less recognizable. So we built the smokestacks, making them very skeletal to kind of split the difference. The second change was because the director wanted the hole in the bow to be much larger than it actually was, and he also wanted the name on the ship moved so you could read it." Despite these alterations, the model was essentially accurate--right down to its fractured hull. "Although it's very difficult to tell in the angle it was filmed at, our model was broken in half because the real ship split into two sections when it went down. Early on we were thinking that it would be great to have the bow section come up and then have the aft section follow. There were also thoughts of seeing the ship floating above the water or rising up out of the water. But the director wanted the audience to be able to see once shot and get the whole joke. He did not want a sequence or any lead-in shots."
Since the real Titanic had been at the bottom of the ocean for more than seventy years, the model had to be aged accordingly. Normally, such aging would be stimulated with applications of paint, but George decided to try something different. "We had reference photographs of this stuff that has been growing on the Titanic's hull for years. The real ship looks like it's dripping with moss, but the 'drips' are actually rust deposits. So rather than paint the model, we sprayed glue on the boat and sprinkled iron powder onto it. Then we sprayed the iron with an acid so it would oxidize. When it oxidized, it also kind of bonded together. As a result, we did not have to paint or mix colors--it just got genuinely rusty."
In addition to the Titanic herself, the scene also featured a parade of ghost passengers walking away from the docked vessel. To create these ghosts, extras dressed appropriately to the period were photographed against black and then added to the model ship footage in optical. "It would have been nice to cut in for a couple of shots of the people," Muren reflected, "because they were drippig with water and carrying seaweed-covered luggage. We had the details there, but in the long shot you cannot see them. We also thought about having a male ghost come up close to the camera and wonder where he is, while behind him you would see distorted people and two ghosts walking through each other. The shot is really a pretty minor one in the film, we did a lot of concept art on it and though of a lot of different details and ideas that we could add."
With the city plunged into darkness and chaos, Dana arrives at the Manhattan Museum of Art and rushes inside. The moment she enters the main lobby, the outer doors close behind her and slime begins to blanket the exterior of the building. For dramatic closeups, a full-scale replica of part of the museum was constructed inside a soundstage at the Burbank Studios. "Ivan wanted the slime to really ooze out of the mortar joints, from above the doors and all over the building exterior," Chuck Gaspar recalled. "So we cut slits in the walls over the doors and so on, and then attached hoses to the slits and controlled them with valves. The hoses were connected to eleven dump tanks that held a total of eight thousand gallons of slime. There were so many hoses that we needed forty people to operate them all. In front of the set we had another tank to catch the run-off, which later we pumped back out with a vacuum truck. All together, it took about a week-and-a-half to rig the set." The slime wall had to be filmed twice. The first time the slime was too thin and the set was not quite wide enough for the effect Reitman wanted. For the second take, the set was extended and Gaspar ordered a thicker mixture. The retake was much more successful, though some of the hoses squirted out so far that slime actually struck one of the five cameras recording the event.
Faced with the second supernatural crisis of his administration, the mayor of New York orders the Ghostbusters to be released from psychiatric confinement and urges them to save his imperiled city. Back in uniform and ready for action, the boys race to the museum to find it completely encased in a rigid shell of slime that appears to be alive from within. "To create the slime shell," George said, "we first did a sculpture out of clay, made a plaster mold and had it vacuformed in clear plastic. Then we put a piece of plexiglass on the back of the vacuform shape, which effectively made it a clear tank shaped like the slime shell. We mounted this in a large metal frame and placed tubes, injectors and bubble makers inside. Next, we filled the whole thing with water and injected diamond dust--a fine metal powder we first used on Innerspace. The slime shell was shot high-speed with bubbles going in it to create water currents. During each take, cameraman Marty Rosenberg would cue different people to inject different colors into the tank. We could do two complete takes before the colors mixed together so much that we had to drain the tank and refill it again. The tubes with different colored dyes in them were placed all over the inside, so we were able to inject colors selectively. The effect looked pretty neat, and it gave the slime shell the look of life and purpose that was needed."
Inside the museum, Dana finds Oscar on an altar before the sinister painting. She grabs her baby and tries to run away, but Vigo is too powerful. An invisible force rips Oscar from her hands--then floats him across the room to his former spot in front of the painting. "Floating that little baby was a bit hair-raising," Gaspar admitted. "I don't mind floating a grownup, because it they fall, at least they can protect themselves. But a baby doesn't know how to do that. The gag worried me, but we did it in such a way that the baby could possibly get out of the harness. The unit we made was a piece of sheet metal hidden inside his suit and suspended on four wire attached to an overhead rig. The metal pan was attached to the suit with velcro so there was no way the baby could move. It was so tight, in fact, that at one point the baby started fussing and we had to loosen the velcro a little bit. Even so, he could not roll off the pan because it was inside his suit. During the takes, we had everybody standing around watching pretty closely, and as soon as the baby traveled from point A to point B there were people right there to grab him. Once again, the baby was amazing. He never cried or did anything."
The master shot of the action required three moves--a pull-through where the baby floated in a straight line across the room toward the Vigo painting, a turn to line him up with the altar and then a set-down where the baby was lowered slowly onto its surface. "For the straight pull-through across the room, the rig was controlled by a rope that I pulled myself because I was kind of nervous. The turn was so delicate that to make it nice and smooth we did it with a radio-controlled servo. For that move, I once again brought in Jay Halsey. At the beginning of the shot, I just pulled the rope and walked the baby along the straight path. When we got to the point where he had to turn, Jay radio-controlled the move. Then we simply lowered the baby down onto the podium." For additional close-ups where the wires would have been visible, the metal pan was concealed under the baby's suit. Depending on the angle, the pole was either held by hand or placed on a cart underneath the camera.
Even with their proton guns, the Ghostbusters are unable to penetrate the slime shell surrounding the museum. Realizing that the accumulated negative energy has become too strong and that only an overwhelming mass of good vibes can stop Vigo and the river of slime from overrunning the city, the Ghostbusters try to think of something that might be used to rally good feelings among New Yorkers. Finally they latch onto an idea. Determined to try out their jumping toaster theory on a truly grand scale, the Ghostbusters proceed to Liberty Island where they spray the inside of the Statue of Liberty with positively charged ectoplasm. At the same time, they rig the structure with loudspeakers and begin playing Jackie Wilson's 'Higher and Higher.' Within minutes, Lady Liberty feels the positive beat and begins to move.
The notion of bringing the Statue of Liberty to life was one of the first developed by Aykroyd and Ramis, though at first it was to be used by Vigo as a force of evil. "This changed in part because it took us nowhere storywise and also because of a respect for Liberty herself," Aykroyd explained. "She had to be a positive influence. Really, we were just looking around for a way to get her off that pedestal and into Manhattan. We loved the idea of setting into motion a massive fixed image that you normally could never conceive of having motion. It's like seeing the Eiffel Tower skipping down the Seine or seeing Victoria Falls and suddenly reverse themselves. Making the Statue of Liberty move also offered a great opportunity for the ultimate special effect."
Bringing the towering landmark to life required a wide range of techniques, from miniatures to a costume worn by an actor to large full-scale pieces. The earliest shots completed involved a larger-than-full-scale replica of the crown constructed on stage at the Burbank Studios. "When you are up inside the real crown in New York," said Bo Welch, "it's shocking how small it is. If we had kept ours to the exact same scale, you would only be able to see a little of the guys' faces and they would not have had enough room to stand up and move around with their backpacks on. So we made ours a good thirty percent larger than the real one so that we could accomodate the four Ghostbusters and see their faces and shoulders through the windows. We also left the glass out of the windows. That was Ivan's choice simply because the glass got in his way. We altered the scale, but everything else is extremeley accurate--the colors, the finish, the hair and the underside of the structure. The other license we took was with the base of the statue. The stair that goes up to the head is really a double-helix--it goes up and right underneath it is the stair coming down. We just did a single spiral stair. Basically it's the impression that was important. It felt like the Statue of Liberty."
The interior of the statue base was built for scenes where Ray and Winston first spray positive slime to bring the statue to life. "The slimeblowers were three times as heavy and four times as bulky as the original packs," Aykroyd said. "I think it took three or four guys to get us into them every time. These slimeblowers are going to every mother's nightmare if they ever go to the toy market, believe me--they were built to spew slime all over the walls. They were fun, though--and a beautiful practical effect. The only thing that worked on ours were the guns. The tanks were empty. The gun was actually a practical device with a spinner in it that sent the slime out, and it was driven by a lot of compressed air. Off camera were the real tanks that fed our lines. These tanks were huge--four or five feet high--and contained slime and air. So every time we blew slime on screen, we actually attached to these huge external tanks."
The full-scale crown was built on top of a gimbal so that it could be rocked back and forth to simulate the movement of the statue walking. Unfortunately for production, the gimbal broke down during the first day of shooting on the head set. "In the past," Gaspar explained, "gimbals were used a lot in Hollywood. But there are not many left today, and the ones that still exist are old and have not been well maintained. The first one we used fo rthe statue's head was the Burbank Studios gimbal that was probably built around 1940. It has been sitting on the backlot for years. One of the movements that Ivan wanted was a realy heavy jolt when she looks down at the ground, and the rocking put too much of a load on the old casters. We tried to remedy the problem, but then something started to break in another section of the gimbal and I realized that we neede to get another one. I hated to do that because I knew how much it would cost us, but the old gimbal just was not safe. So we got another one from CBC and remounted the head on that. It too was old and some of the swivel joints had cracks in them, so we had new cylinders flown in overnight and repaired it. From then on, we had no problems--the gimbal was better than it had ever been."
Riding inside the crown proved to be a unique experience for the actors. "Actually, it was a little scary," said Murray. "The rig would do strange things and would pitch and turn in ways that even the effects guys did not expect. At one point, Ivan told them to tilt it down even further than usual because he wanted us to be really surprised. Well, that was real fear you see on the screen. It went down so far we thought it had broken again. It was quite a ride--nausea, sea legs, the whole thing."
Since the large-scale crown was use primarily for closeups of the statue moving along Fifth Avenue, it was generally filmed against two large photo transparencies of Manhattan taken from one hundred feet above street level. Each transparency--lit from behind--was approximately twenty feet high and forty feet across. Both nighttime views were suspended on winches so they could be moved up and down, and on overhead tracks so they could be slid backward or forward. This enabled them to track backwards behind the head, thereby creating the illusion that the statue was moving forward.
Long shots of Lady Liberty were produced using a meticulously crafted costume designed to fit Jim Fye in his third unidentifiable appearance in the film. "The statue was the hardest thing we had to create," Tim Lawrence recalled, "in part because it is such a familiar icon. There are not too many people who do not know what it looks like--from here to China. The other reason was because at the time the statue was built, it could only be viewed from the ground--so it was designed with a built-in forced perspective. For instance, it has a neck that is longer than a normal person's and a head that in proportion is slightly small. It also has a real beefy right arm. When you look at it from the ground it looks pretty natural, but today we were used to seeing it head-on from helicopter shots in movies where it looks different. So there were some subtle art direction choices that had to be made on the design so that our costume could fit on a person and still look like the Statue of Liberty. We cheated the head up on the real person's head, lowered the collarbone to suggest a longer neck and made the arm just a normal person's arm. Beyond that, the statue has a lot of linear folds on the toga that look natural on the statue, but had had to be adjusted slightly for movement. I eliminated some of the smaller ones and moved others so that when our statue moved, we would hopefully get the look of some sort of flowing metal and not just creases in foam."
The most difficult area to recreate was the face. Lady Liberty wears a stoic expression--one that had to be matched carefully. "While we were sculpting it," Lawrence continued, "we worked pretty closely with Harley Jessup. He made the tight calls on how the different features needed to be adjusted. Harley came up with a really good system for checking our design. We had our favorite photos of the statue that we used for reference and he would come in every day or two and take photos of the sculpture from the same angles. Then we would get one hour processing and see what changes had to be made. When it came time to make the face for the costume, it had been decided that the statue should be barely animated--with essentially no facial movement so she could keep her familiar stern-faced expression. We cast the face area out of a very thin urethane noncellular called RP 6405--made by Rand Plastics. It is a really high-impact plastic that holds its shape very well. I figured since we were not going to have to change the expression, I did not want to run the risk of gluing something onto Jim's face and having it go down in such a way that it altered the look of the statue. With the hard and fast erethane plastic, the integrity of Bartholdi's original design would be maintained."
To further insure the design, the face plate was not glued directly onto Fye's face. Instead, it was attached to a headpiece that included a wig and the crown. "The wig section was cast out of a dense synthetic foam. It had a certain amount of flex to it and it fit like a cap. The crown was cast out of the same material as the face, and Bill George outfitted it with an interior model piece complete with miniature Ghostbusters and some lights. Then we married that to the wig and attached our face plate to it to make what amounted to a helmet that Jim could wear. The only appliance that we wore was a piece for the extended neck." To complete the Lady Liberty ensemble, Fye wore a one-inch thick foam toga, foam arms and polyurethane flex-foam boots that were sculpted to look like feet in sandals. In addition, the model shop provided urethane castings of the took and book for Fye to carry. "To get Jim ready for a shot, Buzz Neidig first glued down the neck piece. Next we put Jim into his toga piece, then the feet and arms. The last thing that went on before the shot was the helmet. When we put that on him, we had to be very careful to run the wires out the back so the lights would light up."
For closeup shots of the lower portion of the statue, Lawrence created a more detailed subsections of the costume. "I had a closeup skirt with finer detail. Also for the closeups, I created some thin vacuform plastic plates that we could attach to the closeup sandal so that when it moved, these individual plates would move. Thus, instead of seeing a curve of foam, the plates created straight lines to help suggest that the sandal was made out of individual copper plates. This was important for the shot were her foot is first seen stepping down onto a New York City street. We also used it for the shot where she first pulls her foot away from the pedestal on Liberty Island. When we did that shot, we put miniature debris underneath so that when the foot pulled away there would be concrete and wires hanging from its underside."
Besides the costume, the creature shop also constructed a bust of the statue from the collarbone on up that was twice human-size scale. "The bust was originally made just for the first pullback shot of the Ghostbusters in the crown. The guys were shot bluescreen with a move on them. Then we shot the model with a matched move. These were married with to background plate. It was then decided that the head would also be good for the front shot of the statue walking through the water on her way from Liberty Island to Manhattan. The first shot of her moving from the back was the costume shot against bluescreen and inserted into a background plate. But the front view of her moving through the water used the double-sized head." To accomplish the scene, the head was filmed at night in a makeshift pool constructed between two buildings at ILM. The head was placed inside the tank on a simple cradle-like apparatus attached to two poles that went to opposite sides of the tank. Standing outside the tank, two crew members held the poles. As they took synchronized steps, their movements transferred directly to the statue head so that it appeared as though the statue were walking along the riverbed.
Most of the time, the costume and double-sized head were filmed against a bluescreen--a factor that brought into question the matter of color. The real statue appears to be different colors depending on the time of day. Somehow the costume and bust had to likewise suggest this apparent anomaly. Optical supervisor Tom Rosseter--who would have to produce the final composites--became directly involved in helping to determine the paint scheme and lighting. "I started on the sequence fairly early. I met with Harley Jessup, and together we discussed what color her clothing should be--specifically how much blue there should be in it. We spent time going over color patches and then photographing them on stage and doing tests to see what worked and what did not. Once we had picked out the color we all thought was best, we found we also had to make adjustments in how we lit and shot it. Dennis, cameraman Terry Chostner and I worked together o this. They would adjust the way they thought they might light on the stage, and I would make some adjustments on my intermediate film elements. It took a lot of testing before we found the right balance. Every morning I would look at what they had shot the day before and make suggestions for the scenes they were going to shoot that day. Or they would offer to adjust something for me so their elements would fit better into the background plate. Another question we had to address was how much should the natural lighting affect the color. If you look at her at night when the lights from Liberty Island are on her, she looks very blue. Walking through New York City, she would have completely different lighting on her feet at street level than she would on her crown. So we had to work on this problem a lot--the interaction of light with the actual color of the statue. We might take a little bit of extra neutral density and run it across her feet when she walked through one kind of light, and then do some more when she walked in and out of a shadow. In the end, we did all kinds of subtle things to make the shots work."
In most instances, Rosseter had to combine the statue with background plates filmed in New York. Often these plates featured unruly crowds that looked great on screen, but caused headaches for the animation department. "Anything that involved the Statue of Liberty with a crowd meant very difficult rotoscope work," Tom Bertino noted. "I remember when the plate crew came back from New York. One by one as they met me in the hall, the first thing they would say to me was: 'Hi, Tom. Just remember it wasn't my fault.' I didn't quite know what they meant by that until I saw the dailies in the screening room, and I thought 'Oh, my God!' There were scenes where the statue had to be put behind a crowd and there were all these little waving hands--and everybody was dressed for winter so they had tassles and scarfs and little mittens hanging off their hands. Since this was set to occur on New Year's Eve, there were also balloons and flying confetti. One guy was even waving a crutch in the air. They were all so small in the frame that it looked like the ultimate rotoscope nightmare. But some of our star people just did an incredible job. Barbara Brennan did the first scene where the statue is seen walking in Manhattan--where her foot comes out from behind a building. The foot had to be places behind a small crowd that was in the foreground, and the rotoscoping on that was as close to seamless as anything I've ever seen. There were nearly two hundred frames that had to be rotoscoped just in that one shot, and everything had to match from frame to frame."
Several shots did not involve background plates. For one closeup of the statue turning the corner of Fifth Avenue, Jim Fye was filmed in costume walking among model buildings. Other views of Fifth Avenue required the broader perspective that only a matte painting could provide. "The main reason Fifth Avenue was done as a painting," Mark Sullivan explained, "was because it is virtually impossible to shoot in New York at night and get a good exposure above street level. There is just no way to light up all the buildings. Caroleen Green did all the matte painting, and she not only had to work with the buildings that were there in reality, but she also had to rework the left side to open up the view. Ivan did not want the city to appear claustrophobic. He wanted to see it go for miles so the shot would have an openness and grandeur about it."
Closeup shots of Lady Liberty required some unique solutions. The view of the torch exploding to life--and then subsequent where it is seen burning--involved shooting pyrotechnic elements on a separate stage and then matting those into either shots of a double-sized torch or shots with Fye in his costume. A scene where the statue accidently steps on a police car requied yet another solution. "We wanted to build a big foot and a big car," Bill George recalled, "thinking, of course, that the larger the scale the more successful the crush would be. But Dennis was concerned about a big foot looking mechanical, so he wanted us to use a real-sized foot and build the car to match the scale. We figured out what scale would be, and it turned out to be the size of a standard eight-inch long model car. We located a car kit that matched reference photos we had of the real police car in the plate. Then we made a mold of it and cast a bunch of them out of wax that were hollow inside and without windows. Charlie Bailey--who built the cars--put a small tube inside each one and filled it with margarita salt. Then , when the foot came down and crushed the car, he blew through the tube and margarita salt would shoot out the window areas and simulate broken glass."
The key to the shot was the manner in which the wax car was inserting into the plate. In New York, the crews shot a plate of the real police car on the street. Then they shot the exact same setup without the police car, but with people standing behind where the car had been. At ILM, the real car was rotoscoped out of its plate and inserting into the other so that it looked as though it was now in front of people. The next step was to film the Statue of Liberty sandal against bluescreen as it stepped down and crushed the wax model . Next the foot was matted into the plate. As the foot came down, the real car fell under its shadow. At that instant, the wax car was slowly dissolved in over the real car so that by the time the foot made contact, it appeared to be crushing the real car though it was actually the wax one. Then the foot lifted back up and continued on its way, leaving the crushed wax car in the plate with people reacting behind it. To help add to the realism of the shot, the wax model was built with a light bar on top and an additional flashing element was laid over the completed scene.
"The whole effect was life sleight of hand," Michael Gross observed. "The foot did not step on the real car, but it looks like that to your eye in the final shot. Originally they had people running across the front of the scene to help hide the switch of the cars, but Ivan said, 'I can't have guys running in front of it.' We laughed about it. It was like they were trying to pull a magician's trick--a little misdirection to conceal the switch. But if we had shot a real car being crushed, we would never have had people walking in front of the action, so Ivan said the people had to go. Of course, the ILM guys changed it and it worked wonderfully. It was really just one example of the entire Liberty sequence. We never had any doubts that ILM's statue would look like the real thing and be perfect. And in the end, our confidence was justified. The Statue of Liberty sequence is the one I am most proud of. One shot that I doubt anyone will know is an effects shot is the one where they guys are first seen inside the statue. You see them inside and then the camera pulls away until you see the whole head and shoulders. It looks so real you would think it was a helicopter shot pulling away from the real statue, but it was a bluescreen shot of the boys and the model--an amazing composite."
As the Ghostbusters take Lady Liberty on a stroll through Manhattan, they blast 'Higher and Higher' over loudspeakers and encourage thousands of people to sing along and be happy. By the time they reach the museum, they have amassed a giant crowd and a potent source of good will. The Ghostbusters use Liberty's torch to break through the skylight and together they slide down ropes into the building to do battle with Vigo. The torch was the double-size one filmed against black, but for the shot where the Ghostbusters had to slide down to face Vigo, the actors themselves rose to the occasion. "The nice thing about Ghostbusters," said Ernie Hudson, "was that nobody held back, no matter what they were asked to do. Everybody was committed , having fun and giving one hundred percent.. When we did the scene where we slide down the rope and landed in the restoration room, we had to go pretty high up in the rafters to slide down the rope. But Bill was there, Danny was there and so was Harold. That made it pretty hard not to committ. We were up there with our backpacks on, and I was thinking, 'Gee I don't know about this.' But Danny was all excited about it and Harold loved it so much that he went up and down five times. In fact, I think the next day he went back up to the top and slid down the rope again. You figure if the stars are up there, how can you not do it?"
"I had a great time," Ramis confirmed. "I kept sliding down from the top of the stage--about seventy feet. Of course, they had us on safety rigs. We were not using rappelling rigs. They were the kind that rescue teams use to lower injured people from high places or to lower nonprofessionals off ski lifts or high mountain ridges. So it was foolproff--there was no way we could get hurt. We could be unconscious and be lowered down one of those rigs. So I got a lot of confidence and I went back to do it over several times. Whenever I went up to the top of the stage, a stuntman went with me to make sure I was hooking the harness securely." To help create the illusion that the Ghostbusters were crashing through the skylight, Chuck Gaspar and his crew threw debris, breakaway glass and foam beams down from the top of the set as the actors slid down their ropes and landed firmly on the floor.
Once the Ghostbusters arrive, they blast Janosz with positive slime and then zap the painting. At first this seems to do the trick, but then suddenly Vigo appears among them and spits out a fireball that knocks the Ghostbusters to the floor and restrains them in a strange field of light. The energy bolt and field of light were both concepts added late to the picture when ILM was too overloaded to take on any more assignments. As a result, the scenes were turned over to Apogee. The bolt of light was a slitscan effect that employed a xenon light source rear-projected, while the energy field was a moving laser beam pattern combined with articulate holdout mattes to impart a Kirlian-like glow around the actors.
Just as the Ghostbusters appear to be losing their battle, the clock strikes midnight and the tyrant finds he has passed the dawning of the new day and year. Though he struggles to remain in the world of the living, forces stronger than he draw him back into the painting where his features undergo a startling transformation. The change was accomplished primarily by makeup applications devised by the ILM creature shop. "It was not the first work we did on the Vigo character," noted Tim Lawrence. "Early during preproduction, we were given a variety of sketches by Thom Enriquez depicted a very overweight-looking character with a wild-eyed look and a facial structure such that it would have been impossible to find anyone who actually looked like that. So at the beginning, we were going to be designing a makeup that would be used on an actor throughout the film. Then when it came time for transformation at the end, Vigo was going to be something much more monstrous--some kind of a huge construction that we never quite worked out completely because the whole concept went off in a different direction once Wilhelm von Homburg was cast for the part. Wilhelm has a very distinctive "bad guy" face and Ivan decided to use it without a whole lot of alteration--but he did still want some appliance makeup. So we did lifecasts on Wilhelm and then Mike Smithson and I did a variety of alterations in clay--fairly subtle things like strengthening his jaw line, staightening out his nose, giving him a more sinister brow, elongating his earlobes and sharpening his cheeks. We did ten or eleven versions of the makeup in clay and then photographed them in black-and-white and made up a little book that we sent down so that Ivan and the producers could see the various directions it could go in. They picked one that they liked and we made a set of appliances for this guy. The problem ws that they wanted this very elaborate makeup to be used for the whole film and I had asked for three weeks to do it. They said they could only give us two weeks and then wound up giving us one; but they said, 'Don't worry about it, because it's just going to be used for a photo shoot as a guide for the artist who is doing the painting, but that when he comes to life he should look more realistic and less stylized. So we did the makeup very quickly for the photo shoot and then Wilhelm was used without makeup for the film itself."
The final transformation was likewise toned down. "We did a lot of drawings for the Vigo monster--some of them pretty horrendous--and we had other things going on as well. At one point the slime was oging to bring to life things from some of the other paintings--so we had little Hieronymous Bosch characters running around and a spirally kind of Escher character. Over time, however, all that got more and more watered down to the point where instead of making a Vigo monster we were asked to come up with a makeup that simply represented Vigo's inner evil essence. We sent about fifty concepts down to Michael Gross--some of which were altered photographs. Early in the show there had been some mylar tests done on Ned Gorman--our effects coordinator--to show how the Scoleri brothers could be distorted and stretched. Some of those bizarre photos were blown up and artwork was done on them--and it was one of those that was selected. The difficulty for us when it came time to do the makeup was that the basic understructure was not a human head. Obviously the makeup had to be something that could be added to a real person--we could not stretch a person's head to do it--so we had to start by roughing in a scupture and getting a lot of people's interpretations as to what the stretch marks and bizarre washes of color on the photograph actually meant in three-dimensional terms. When we got as close as we could to the accepted design, we molded and cast the makeup in about seven pieces." Howie Weed--one of the creature shop crew members--wore the makeup for scenes of Vigo transformed within the painting and for a subsequent scene when Ray becomes entranced by Vigo and momentarily turns into a demon before his friends restore him with a blast of positive slime.
As the clock chimes out the last stroke of midnight, the image of Vigo and his slime corridor explodes and disappears. Simultaneously, the slime shell that has been covering the museum shatters and flies up into the heavens. "To create the destruction of the slime shell at the end," said Bill George, "we first did a sculpture of the full slime shell and then made a black urethane casting. Over this black slime shell we painted on a brittle polymer that was pinkish in color. Once that was done, we hung the shell upside-down in front of a black backdrop. The black shell casting effectively served as a support plug inside the brittle polymer. The plug was flexible, but the polymer was not. So when it was time for the slime to break away, we hit the inside of the plug and simultaneously inflated an innertube with air to make the plug expand. This caused the brittle polymer to shatter and fall away. When the polymer shattered, the black plug underneath blended in with the black background and was therefore invisible to the camera. The shattered shell was added over a model we built of the museum and both were later combined with a matte painting of the surrounding area."
"Ulitmately, a movie like Ghostbusters II is not about effects," Muren observed, "it's about making people laugh. Working in an improvisational environment, you have to be ready for anything and be prepared to take advantage of new ideas as they come along. To do that, you cannot give up. I believe the slogan, 'It isn't over 'til it's over.' Of course, you can decide when something is over. You can get tired and say, 'Well, I'm done with it.' Or you can say: 'Wait a minute. We still have time. Let's keep making these shots better. Let's not give up thinking about them. Just because we haven't figured out something doesn't mean that with two more minutes of thought we're not going to come up with some great solution to our problem.' Basically I believe in working up until the last possible minute. Ivan seems to work on the same wavelength. He just worked and worked to make this film the best that he could within the time frame that he had to make it."
"When we made the first Ghostbusters," Michael Gross concluded, "I thought no schedule could be worse--but this one was. It was scary and exciting at the same time to see if it would really all come together. There was one poit during a meeting with Columbia where studio representatives were getting really nervous about delivery. They kept saying: 'The 16th is locked. We've booked theaters. Are we going to make this? Ivan said: 'I can deliver the picture. The only thing we have to worry about is whether the effects will be done in time.' At that point the whole room turned and looked at me. I said, 'I swear to you, they will be done on time.' Then when we left the room, I said to Ivan, 'I don't know how good they'll be, but they'll be in the picture.' But we never had to sacrifice quality. It was a great team effort by a lot of people--and everybody delivered."