Planet of the Apes
Contents
- The film
- Costumes
- Relevance
- References
The film
Planet of the Apes is a classic science fiction movie based on the Pierre Boulle novel 'Le Planet des Singes' (The Monkey Planet) originally written in French and published in 1963. The 1968 film starred Charlton Heston as an astronaut stranded on what he believed was a distant planet, but which turns out to be something else as revealed in the classic and climactic final scene. The film spurned 4 sequels, 2 TV series, a 2001 remake, and a large cult following. It is also considered one of the first films to have wide ranging merchandise tie-ins.
Costumes
Morton Haack was nominated for a 1969 Academy Award (Oscar) for Best Costume Design (but lost to 'Romeo and Juliet') while the legendary make-up artist John Chambers received an honary Oscar for Oustanding Achievement in Make-up, long before that became a regular award category in 1981. The film still holds the world record for relative make-up budget having dedicated 17% (or over $1 million) of its roughly $6 million budget to make-up effects.
Relevance
The film's relevance to sasquatch lore has to do with the costumes. The original feature was shot from May-August 1967, ending just 2 months prior to the shooting of the Patterson-Gimlin film (PGF). It is also noteworthy that the Hollywood production was filmed mostly around Malibu, CA, just 600 miles from Bluff Creek, the PGF film site. But coincident timing aside, most of the bigfoot community and even most of the hollywood special effects and costume communities agree that the PGF figure bears little resemblance to the Planet of the Apes costumes. This is at least partly because the apes in the film wore clothes and were therefore incomplete compared to the Patterson figure. Many advocates even argue that the state-of-the-art costumes used for this relatively high budget film are not nearly as sophisticated as what would have had to be created if the PGF was in fact a hoax. Similar debates continue about the ape costumes in another contemporaneous film, 2001: A Space Odyssey.
More specifically, the film is linked to bigfoot and the PGF because John Landis apparently started a rumor that Chambers had created a costume for the film. Chambers, seeing this rumor as good for his business, only denied it in 1997, shortly before his death.
References
BigfootEnounters Chambers article A BigfootEnounters Chambers article B IMDB Planet of the Apes entry Wikepedia Planet of the Apes entry
