Transcripts For CSPAN3 Life Of Hollywood Artist Milicent Patrick 20240712

She most noticeably designed the creature from the black lagoon, the pantheon of monsters. It was the last one to be included. Everyone has their own pantheon. You can come fight me later. [laughter] in my opinion, creature was the last one. She was one of disneys first female animators, she was an actress, she was an illustrator. Everything about milicent patrick was larger than life. It has been the greatest honor of my life so far to tell her story. If you read the book, you know there are pictures in there because milicent lived a very visual, cinematic life. I have a treat for all of you. Ive got some photos that have never been seen before. I have hundreds of them i was not allowed by my publisher to put in because we could not fit 700 different photos in the book. So i would like to take you through while telling you about milicent and why she is a trailblazing artist and one of the most important women we have ever had in the Film Industry. I would like to take you through her life a little bit with some awesome photos. Lets see if i can remember how to do it. Here is my girl. Milicent patrick began life in a place called Hearst Castle. If cribs was a tv show back in the 1920s, Hearst Castle would have been on it. This is what it looks like. It was the summer home, just one of many, of a man named William Randolph hearst. He was americas first media mogul. Not only did he have an amazing home, but people like Charlie Chaplin and Winston Churchill used to go and hang out at the ranch, as they would say. This is where milicent patrick grew up because her father was a man named camille rossi. He was the superintendent of construction here for 10 years. That is where she started life. Everything in milicents life was bigger, more bombastic than anyone could dream. This is where she grew up. This is where she and her siblings hung out. They used to play here while her dad was getting into fights and trying to figure out how to make this thing. Milicent always was a great artist. To make a go of art. She decided to go apply for a scholarship to go to the chouniard institute. I have been told i am allowed to swear. I am making sure there are no children. She was a complete badass. Just a year after women were allowed to vote in this country, she opened an art school in Southern California that was about to change the face of art schools. She ran the school with an iron fist and an artistic flair. I want to share some unseen drawings of milicent. That is her modeling. The really cool thing about the chouniard institute is not just that it was created by nelbert, who was amazing, but the thing nelbert was really good at was working with students and teachers and lecturers, trying to get more cool people in for her school. One day, an artist came to her from an upandcoming movie studio and wanted to make animated films, and he really wanted to get his artist trained in a special way because he had a vision for how to change how animated films were made and how they looks. The man was called walt disney. You have probably heard of him. [laughter] this was the early days in the world of disney, and he did not have money to train all these animators, but he knew they had to be trained differently. You cannot take an animation course at school. You needed to train in a special way. So he went all these art schools across Southern California and he said, i cannot pay you, but i want to bring my students here, and they all said no. Except for our lady nelbert. A pipeline formed between the chouniard institute and disney. Disney would in his buick drive his students down and wait for them while they were in class. He would hang out around the school. That is how the pipeline got formed because he got to see the best talent at the chouniardhe n to two nard two chouniard. He got to see the best talent at the chouniard institute, and that included milicent patrick. So he started hiring animators and artists from chouniard. And was animators were hanging out and learning things there, sometimes as instructors would come up and help him work on his films, he met millicent. Millicentsne l art was special in the way she was able to convey a lot of movement in just a few lines. He hired her originally to work in a place called the ink and paint department. I suggest you buy a book by Mindy Johnson called inc. And paint. A lot of people do not realize that in the early days of disney, there are a lot of different steps to animation. You have a lot of things you have to do. A lot of the animators at that time were all men, but the people taking those animators drawings and inking them into these clear cells or 100 women. Buildinga massive staffed 100 by women. In fact, men were not allowed to go into the building for a multitude of reasons. Enter office dating was really discouraged at disney studios. Cent is where mili started. She started as a painter and then became an anchor and they notice her skill. She became one of the first animators at disney. Heres a drawing of somebody you might know. Pretty cool. Thesen see the style of from snow white. The first thing millicent worked on was an ambitious film disney wanted to do. By todays standards, if you wanted to pitch the film, some executive would say we are not going to do this. They want to do two short films that were sent classical pieces of music. These arewanted the early days of animation still. People still really did not understand it. He wanted to elevate the artform. That is how a movie called fantasia was born. Milicent was hired on to be in the special effects department because this was a totally different type of movie. They needed new ways of animating. What disney wanted was the look of pastel and a lot of these shots. How many people in this audience have seen fantasia . Lots of people. Amazing. Great film. He wanted the look of pastel, but you cannot animate with pastel because it is chunky and chalky. Terrible. He needed to figure out to paint in a way that looked like pastel. This was called the pastel effect. That is what milicent patrick did. If you look for this soft pastel effect, you can see it is used in fantasia a lot. She was hired to do that in the studio. There were a bunch of sequences they were working on. This is sort of a big reveal in the book, but i want to tell you. I watched a kid, lot of movies, read a lot of books, and a lot of people now i am a huge horror fan and have been for a long time. People always want to know, why are you into this weird stuff . Kid,l them, when i was a my grandfather showed me fantasia, and i loved it. It was a fun kids movie. Hippopotamuses and dancing brooms. Until it got to the mountain sequence. All of a sudden game changer. It was the first time art made me feel something that power fall powerful. Even though it was terror, it affected me. It was the first time art affected me in such a way that i thought about it afterwards. I have really bad anxiety. It was the first time i was afraid of something that was not real, which, if you have anxiety, you know what a vacation that is. I fell in love. When i found out that milicent also intimated my favorite animate monster, it blew my mind and made me feel like i was on the right path. Also, fun halloween october fact one of the models for that monster was none other than bella lugosi. You can totally see. As the monster is incredible. This is the first film milicent worked on as an animator. This is a picture of her at disney studios with a woman named loretta scott, the first credited female animator. As you will see in the book, or then in, credit back movies was difficult. In animated films, even more difficult, because there are hundreds of people working on the film at the same time. When you decide who the first female animator is you have to decide it, was that the first person to draw something animated . A film completed . It is such a great area. I never feel comfortable saying that milicent was the first female made her, but she definitely first female animator, but she was definitely one of the first. Until some secret behindthescenes footage comes out, that is where i will stand. Loretta was the first woman credited on screen as an animator for bambi. A lot of amazing female powerhouses back then in the disney world. Speaking of powerhouses, there was a lot of turmoil happening at disney. Milicent only worked there a couple years before a union strike and her own struggle with migraines caused her to quit disney and she never worked in animation again. What she did do is take advantage of her good looks and become a model. She was very good at it. She lived in los angeles at the time, which is a great place if you want to get into this industry. Pipelinesa lot of already in place. And she was very good at it. She has a look. She was a very gregarious person. She loved being in this world. That is sort of how she segued into modeling. The thing is, while she was modeling, she was still working on her art. She still loved being an artist. She was sketch all the time, do portraits for friends. And one day, while she was waiting after a trade she just model that modeled at, a hollywood producer came up to mean a lot of this stuff, did you make this up . No you cannot make this up. He asked her if she wanted to be in the pictures and she said yes. Universald on the columbia paramount backlog as a background actress. That is how she got back into the Film Industry. Even while she was doing this, she was still modeling, but she loved being in front of the camera. She got her first taste of this while she was still working at disney. How many of you have seen a film called the reluctant dragon . It is a big commercial for disney studios designed as a movie. A comedian at that time at disney the whole plot of the film is him trying to go to disney to pitch walt disney, which is a nightmare now. He would have to dig a hole underneath disney to get in. He is trying to find his knee, trying to pitch them his idea for a film, but as he goes through the studio, you see various clips of short films and him moving around on the studio lot. In the background and one of those scenes, there is a group of animators sketching an elephant, is milicent patrick. As she got back into acting, she loved the life of it. She was a big personality. While she was on set, if youre an actor you know this, there is a lot of downtime. The phrase hurry up and wait was probably invented on a film set. While she was doing that, she was doing a lot of sketching. She was still doing a lot of art. It was her biggest passion. One day, she was waiting in the makeup chair. One of her favorite things to do was sketch portraits of her costars. She absolutely loved doing it and she showed it was a Universal Studios film, and she had all these great sketches, and she showed them to the man who ran the Makeup Studio there, a man named bud westmore. If you know, you know. Have always been surprised there has never been a film about the westmore family. Makeup. Did anything you put on a face is makeup. He came from the westmore dynasty of makeup. Think the mob but with lipstick. This was a true dynasty. His father, george westmore, was literally the man who invented the idea of a makeup department. When george came to hollywood from the u. K. , they did not have that. Early black and white film that she came from a theater tradition they came from a theater tradition, so all the actors and actors is put on the makeup themselves. There was no quality control. He barged on the set and said, hey, what if i did this . It would look consistent from scene to scene. He said it, i will do it. He got hired and started the idea of a makeup department. He had a bunch of sons and all of them went into makeup and it became a dynasty. There is a certain point back in the 40s and 50s when there was a westmore brother heading up almost every single major studio makeup department. He did not want to piss off the westmores. Warner bros. , they all ring the Makeup Studios they all ran the Makeup Studios. Westmore really wanted to hire. The westmorest was that they were beauty people. They had their own book called the westmore book of beauty that was have you ever taken a quiz in a magazine that says, what eyebrows should you have for your face shape . They invented that stuff. Have you ever despaired because you have a round face and cannot have the eyebrows i want . Blame them. They had a massive salon on sunset boulevard called the house of westmore. Everyone rich and famous went there. They were not monster people. They were not horror people. They were not alien people. They were not creature people. But really needed somebody onset who could do characters. As the head of a big Makeup Studio, he was not doing a lot of the designing. He was doing a lot of the admin work. He needed someone who creative talents were different from his own. He found milicent milicent and was like, i am to hire you. I am going to hire you. The very first woman to do this. She was so good. She was the very first one. This is a very interesting time in hollywood, this is the mid50s. We went from being afraid of europe to being afraid of space. We were starting to be afraid of the russians, nuclear war, the sky, spaceships, aliens. All of a sudden, we have this new thing called Science Fiction. All of the classic monster were built as a backbone back in the 30s were dracula, wolfman, those kinds of horror. They had never done Science Fiction before. All of a sudden, the kids wanted scifi, so they had to figure how to make a scifi movie. All of a sudden, they had a new audience they never had to cater to before. A very terrifying, still terrifying, audience teenagers. They had this Massive Group of teenagers who had pocket money, who had time. This is when the suburbs were a thing. They wanted to get these kids out of the house. The parents wanted them out of the house. The best ways for them to be was the movies. They wanted to make scifi movies for kids to go see. So they started cooking something up. Milicent went from this in bp makeup went from designing beauty makeup to aliens. They took this beautiful woman and at this time she was still doing background work. She was still doing acting. She was transitioning to doing more and more work on the universal lot. It was more pay. I do not know if it was more fulfilling for her, but it was a lot less waiting around. So they came up with this idea for a movie they wanted to do called it came from outer space. The treatment for it was written by an author who i love very much named ray bradbury. Veileda very thinly antimccarthyism movie. Ray bradbury wrote a treatment for this. If you have ever read bradberry, he is very verbose you know and not always detailed. He gave milicent this block of text that even had the word nebulous in it and milicent had to design it. But she did. She designed the alien for it. The film was made. It did well for universal. It was universals first Science Fiction movie and it became a classic. It is still cheesy, as many 1950s scifi movies are. I would describe it as an eyeball left in a bag that has legs. Back in the 50s, that was really scary. It was really intense. A lot of people were frightened by it. Creativeent was very and innovative with her design. She had come up with all these different ways to figure it out. She came up with this massive page full of designs, which bud westmore used later. We will get to that later. He was like, this is great. I want you to keep doing this monster thing. We have a new movie that we want you to do and this one will be bigger and better and higher budget called you have to read the book but it is not called creature from the black lagoon. This monster that she designed was going to be completely different. Fromeason why the creature the black lagoon is still known and iconic now is he is the only universal classic monster that has never been remade, and you cannot count the shape of water because it is not from universal. He is the only monster that goes underwater. He is the only universal classic monster that was played by two different actors. He was the only one that was out in daylight. So milicent had to up her game. The monster had to be complete, detailed. There were a lot of technical elements. She fucking nailed it. It is still one of the most famous monsters today. Even people who have not seen the movie, they see a picture of creature and know that is the creature from the black lagoon. The reason why i think milicent s design has stood the test of time is because she had that disney training. Just a few lines, with just a few lines, she could convey a lot of movement, a lot of emotion. A lot of people nowadays are used to make up and cgi and see the film and they think, man, is that makeup, is that a mask . No, it is one piece of rubber. Because of the way milicent designed it, when the two actors wherein the suit moving the head, it looks like makeup. Besides that disney training was her incredible empathy. Milicent designed this monster wanting people to feel for him. So when you look at him, you are scared by him. There were a lot of kids who ran out of that theater, including alice cooper. But you want to understand him. He looks just humanlike enough. If you have ever watched a lot of cheesy scifi movies, you are aware. It is very difficult to make a monster like this that does not look silly. But no one was laughing at creature except for bud westmore. He did not like this design. He thought it would not hold up. He thought it was a ridiculous idea to put a monster like that out in daylight. He thought it was going to be a flop. They still went through with the movie. The producers loved it. Everybody else thought it would be great. Peoplem was shot and started taking notice. They started doing test screenings and they did not have to edit anything. People absolutely loved the film and they loved the creature. That was the big thing. They absolutely loved the creature. Here is bud westmore himself displaying milicents drawings. Those drawings, those original drawings of creature, are the creature from the black lagoon fans white whale. No one knows what happened to them. I am hoping there is a collector that has them and will fall into a volcano and they will be released into the world, but no one knows where these are. We do not know if they still exist. And give any to any i would give any amount of toes to see them. Peers but and milicent working in the monster shop here is bud and milicent working in the monster shop. Herwould march in with heels, pearls, and beautiful dresses, and she was totally cool with being the only woman there. She was unapologetically feminine, unapologetically herself. She loved the work. She loved working with this team. She loved designing. She even loved bud westmore. Apparently at the beginning, they got along very well. Here she is having some paint adding some paint to the suit when they had to tested underwater. This is from a shoot called the paint test the tank test. There were testing it in the water tank on the universal lot. This film, they started coming up with ideas to promote it just like today. Milkshakes at mcdonalds, ridiculous toys. No social media then. Universal studios and other big movie of studios try to come up with ways to sell their movies. Universal was like, how will we get people to see this movie . They came up with all these wacky ideas. One of the most wacky was somebody thought, hey, we had this beautiful woman, and she is very charming, very gracious, very well spoken. And she designed this. Why do not we send her out on tour . She is the perfect promotional platform. Everybody is like, this is fantastic. So the wheels started turning on this tour. This is when bud westmore comes in. Movie, the title cards you sought the beginning was all the credits. Now when you see a film, there is a 10 minute end crawl at the end of the movie. Every person who has ever even thought about that movie has been credited. To be fair, movies are hard to make and that is great, but that is not how things were then. Bud westmore, is the head of universal makeup, got sold credit for everything everybody in the department did on every film. There was no imdb, no twitter, nothing like that to check, so people were not even thinking about that. The public was not going, hey, the key grip on this was not given credit. People did not even know. Even though he was not doing the designing income of sculpting, the molding, he got credit for everything. That shoul suit him just fine. When he found out that they were going to take this woman and let everybody know that he did not know the design he did not do the design, he got really mad. Really, really mad. You are sitting there thinking, wow. This woman is amazing. She did all these cool things. Why doesnt she have a star on the hollywood walk of fame . This is why. Kicked up a huge fuss at universal and they said, we already have the plans in place. We will rebrand the tour. Instead of the beauty who created the beast, she will be the beauty who lives with the beast. We will pick her as someone who takes care of all the universal monsters. So she got to go from the creatures creator to the creatures roommate or babysitter, i guess. She got demoted into this motherly role. She designed him. I do not know whether or not she knew what the tour was supposed to be, but when they pitched that to her, she agreed. After years of trying to shun their monster movie background, they brought frankenstein, all those monsters out of the vault. They were like, we want to really show our monster movie pedigree here. Milicent got to go all over the country with all of these masks, some of which she did design. When she is wearing on her head is from abbott and castella meet dr. Jekyll and mr. Hyde. Display them to and be like, i am the beauty who takes care of them. I guess brushing out the wolfman and spritzing creature with missed. I do not know what she needs to there. She was going to go on this massive promotional tour across the country. The movie came out while this was happening. Before she left, she had a meeting with bud and the people at universal, and she had to swear, to promise, that she would lie to everybody and tell everyone she did not design this. She had a chaperone with her to make sure she stuck to the script. Every interview she did that said that bud westmore was the credit. She had some of the other names of the people who worked on it, but she was not allowed to take credit for her own work. She agreed because this was the 1950s. They were going to pay her very well. She did negotiate for a higher salary, but she had to live. She went off on tour. She did all kinds of radio interviews, magazines, newspapers, tv spots. I have never been able to find them. People were loving it. People already fell in love with the creature. She started getting fan mail because she was so friendly and smart and interesting and passionate in the way she talked about her work and the way she talked about creature. You could tell she loved him. Outle started to fil figure that it maybe wasnt bud westmore who designed this. Maybe this woman who worked as a designer was the designer. I do not know why bud thought he would be able to sweep this under the rug, but people started to figure it out. People started doing pieces not just about the movie, but about her. She was such an electric, interesting person. Back then, there was this dichotomy between this beautiful woman and this monster. People are fascinated by her. Were fascinated by her. She started to a clips some of the creature buzz to eclipse some of the creature buzz. Mad he would follow her progress across the country and figure out what magazines and radio stations she spoke to and demand to know what she said, what they were going to print. He was furious. This was all happening without her consent. She was still sticking to the script, still being chaperoned, but people were so interested in her and quickly figuring out that she designed this and printing stuff without per se. Not her fault. But in his mind, as soon as milicent got off on her own, she was taking all the credit, even though it was her credit to take. Of her the absolute peak career, bud westmore fired milicent patrick, and she never worked behind the scenes on a film ever again. She came back from her tour, back to los angeles, and the film she was working on, another classic scifi film called the silent earth, she was pulled from. And she never worked on a universal movie in that way ever again. That is why you do not know anything about milicent patrick. There was no internet, no imdb, and after all of this, bud westmore quickly realizing he had this opportunity to take credit for this monster, stepped creature, my best friend that i designed by myself. There was no way to check. Even though she still received fan mail for years because people remembered her and were excited by her and there were girls and women all over the country inspired by her, she disappeared. For six decades, nobody knew anything. They did not even know if she was still alive. And because of that, nobody could follow in her footsteps. That includes me. When i first saw milicent patrick when i was 17 years old, a really interesting thing happened in the 90s. Imdb started up, the internet started. All of these photos that had never been seen before and these cool facts no one had ever been able to share we had the internet. We could put them on message boards. Parkour film nerds started talking about these things hardcore film nerds started talking about these things and creature became a beloved film. All these pictures started to show up, and the picture i showed you with milicent painting the creature, not a publicity shot, just a picture onset working on her work, that started floating around. People knew her name but did not know anything more about her. I am sort of the black sheep of my family and not just because i am goff. I did not have any siblings who are into or. Into horror. When i was a teenager, i was like, great. I did all night research. I wanted to do research. I watched all of the universal classics. I started with the wolfman. I got to the creature, which is the last one. I fell in love with him, the same way a lot of people did. In love with that movie because i felt like creature. I felt like that walking through the halls. The way he swims underneath julie adams is the way i feel looking at hot people. I empathize with them so strongly. I wanted to know more about him. I went online and wanted to know who made him, who designed and o designed him. I was a scrolling through google image search and i found this photo of a Woman Working on the monster suit. Up until this point all my heroes had been men. All these masters of monster makeup. They are all dudes. That is fine. There were no women. I never thought i could be in that world. I loved the movies and read scary things but i never thought i could do that. I did not see the way. That entire world, all the directors i knew, it was all populated by people who did not look like me until i saw millicent. Here was that woman not getting coffee. She was just doing her job. Under the picture there was a caption that said Millicent Patrick, animator and designer. I looked about Wikipedia Page and there was nothing about her online. That was all it took. It was like someone had poked a hole in this wall and i could see through to the other side. She became a beacon for me and several years later, i became a horror filmmaker and she was my hero. She was the only role model i had and i clung to her even though i knew nothing about her. I am covered in tattoos as you might see and i decided to get a tattoo of Millicent Patrick to remind me every day that i belong in the horror Film Industry no matter how much i didnt feel like it, no matter how much people made me feel like i didnt. Because millicent did. A few weeks later i was at a party and a literary agent friend of mine asked me again quote who is this woman you have tattooed asked me again quote who is this woman asked me who is this woman you have tattooed on you . I told him it was Millicent Patrick. He said her story was a good idea for a book. I told him i was in a writer. I thought, why not . I wanted to know so badly about what happened to her. All the blogs written about her were written by men. No one knew anything. I just started and now if you are holding the book, if you have it in your hands, i ended up finding everything. I got most of the details of her life, her death, her career, her personal life and she remained my hero throughout all of it. Wondering, this is great, this wonderful woman plays to this trail. That was 60 years ago. Why does this matter . I had friends of mine who were not monster people while i was working on this pouring all of my savings and time into it asking me why are you doing this for this woman you are not related to . Why does it matter . it matters because what happened to Millicent Patrick still happens to women. It has happened to me. It has no happened to every woman i know in every single industry ever. No matter what you do, the system and the problems that caused Millicent Patrick to lose her career are in place right now 60 years later. It has been 60 years and we have not had another woman design another monster for a major motion picture. 60 years have gone by and we do not have a monster designed by a woman. We just had a lot of cool neyo monster movies come out. Cool new monster movies come out. Girls like me did not have a role model and we did not know we could do it too. We just went through another oscar season and they could not come up with a single woman to cough up for best director. She had all the advantages any white lady could have and she still got crushed. If you are sad for millicent, be sad for all those women out there who are lack, gay, disabled. Trans, this is why we need to tell these stories and show women that it is great we are era. G in this mee too meas writing this before the too era then me happened and my editor was like how fast can you write . Too happened. E me it has really changed the landscape. We are far away from where we need to be but the conversation is changing. What i want women and girls and everyone to know is right now we are pushing to have more female directors and painters and writers and any type of field you can imagine but what we really need to know is we have always been here. This is not a new thing for girls to be interested in comics, art, and film. We have always felt interested. We have may not have always felt safe enough to say we were interested, but we have always been here. Millicent patrick is living per proof of that. She shows we have a legacy here. Girls are the most important part of horror because horror happens to girls. In real life girls are the ones fighting horror so roles need to be the ones writing those films, directing those films, designing those monsters, writing these comic books. They are the ones who have to grapple with them every single day and if we dont let them make these movies, designed these monsters and be up on screen and behind the camera, we cannot show them how to win. That is why it Millicent Patrick is so important and it has been my honor to tell you all about her today. Now we will open it up for questions. [applause] oh, i can pick the questions. I was just wondering if you have heard anything from the west mars. The westmores. Funny story. While writing the book i tried very hard to get in touch with them. Ntil i finish the book i am bit huge cocktail nerd. I was going me and my exboyfriend were going to a los angeles liquor store chain. Checkoutng through the line to buy bourbon. I was wearing a creature pin. E guy checking me out says oh you like creature from the black lagoon . My boyfriend got excited because he thought someone was trying going to explain lack lagoon to me. Uncle designedmy to that monster. It was one of those freezeframe moments where i thought there are several ways i can respond to this but the book was not out yet. I still had the chance to put stuff in the book so i thought ok, sucked down the volcano of hatred, try to get information out of this guy. Really . Out oh what westmore . D bud he was like you really are a creature fan you know who by the westmore is. Westmore. W who bud is bookd him i am writing about the creature and i would love to get in touch with the westmores. I gave him my email. Must have looked me up they must have looked me up because they never emailed me. Heir of west bud westmore served me my bourbon. I still to this day have not heard from any of them. Screw them. Ishael westmore i have heard a very nice person. He still works in the field of makeup and is a fantastically talented person. But he has never tried to get in contact with me. Thought of shape of water as you were talking. The heir toke it is creature from the black lagoon. It is basically creature from the black lagoon fanfiction. Toro when toro watched black lagoon as a child he always wondered why the creature didnt end up with julie adams. I have a great quote from del how millicents design work affected him. What is your opinion of hereditary . Fantastic movie. Any other questions . Yes. The book dooint in you discuss conflict . Im so glad you are asking this question. Do you regret putting it in the book . I ended up not leaving anything out of this book. I was very protective of millicent when i started writing this book and i still am. She means a lot to me. When i started uncovering things about millicent that were not flattering and were not nice and made her look like a bad person, i really struggled with putting those in the book. I wanted to protect her. I was working so hard to have the world know about her and i wanted everyone to love her and accept her. I feel like the last three years of my life i have been carrying the banner of Millicent Patrick. There are still people who dont believe she designed the creature. I love talking to those people. I hope they fall down a manhole. People still ask me that at signings. No question there. I am a very protective of her. I didnt want people not to like her and i didnt want to give them any ammunition against her. Then i realized i was judging her just like i did not want her to be judged i other. Women are worth writing about even if they fuck up. None of those choices ever took away anything she did for the world of art and film. She is still worthy. She is still a human being. Myself me feel ok with and it made me stop judging her and myself. I realized if i got to put that stuff in there, maybe someone else would feel that way about herself or someone else she looked up to or looked down to. Ultimately i did not take anything out. Even everything in there, the bad parts of her life. Is this a question . I want to know what you think about artists being separated from their work. Thing s the other millicent is dead. Sorry, spoilers. There was a time when i was not sure if she was dead or not. Think millicent sheanything in her life never did anything bad in that way, but if she did we wed be having a different conversation havingow we would be a different conversation right now. We are living in this me too era. We do not have to give them money. Is a complicated and there lot of gray area, but ultimately no, we cannot separate the art from the artist. We cannot. If there is somebody you do not believe in, stop giving them money. If you find out that a comic book artist assaulted a woman, do not buy his comic books. You are not giving him any money and you are showing the publisher you should not hire people like that. I believe we cannot just be like theres nothing we can do. There is something all of us can do. You put money where you want things to happen. If there is a director working on set that you dont feel comfortable with, dont give them space on social media. Find out what movies are playing in your area that were directed by women and give those people money instead. Have so much power as consumers that people do not realize. We cannot live in this world where its like where its art. Oh its art reflects where you are at. How many women were not allowed to be artists because of men like what jan like woody allen . Thats my take. Subject, what is your favorite question. A harder there are two pantheons. I will mash them together for your benefit. If i had to pick five favorite movies, horror movies. The exorcist, the thing, american werewolf in london, and it is a tossup between the original wolfman and shining. This is a threepart question. Oh come on. There is only one. A horror movie that can scare me. What is your recommendation . A horror movie that can scare you . Thats impossible. Its like picking out your underpants for you. Someone can try but it is the most subjective thing we have. That is why it is the most important genre. Its funny it is looked down as a juvenile art form. Stephen king is the most popular author in this country and surprise he is a horror author. If you care about the values of an air out watch the horror films of that time. We can be very political and people will say oh, its just a horror movie. Im really afraid of skip snakes. For me the horror a horror movie is like the discovery channel. I can watch it some horror movies and im totally fine. It is a trick question and i am calling you out on it. I have no idea what time it is. Ok. My pinprick through the wall was mary shelley. Nice. What are your thoughts . Bratz dolls . Ke barbie is mixed with universal horror. The idea of combining those two things. Barbies are already like monsters. Why do we need to make them scarier . The you always seen that sculpture of what barbie would look like if she was human. Shes like seven foot tall. Doing need to make right now we are living in an embarrassment of riches for young girls for horror stuff. There are so many incredible middle grade novels, comics, movies. Monster hi i dont know. I will look them up later. Enduring e most thank you. When you met her family thank you for spoiling the entire book. Im just curious if you could feelst all about what it like to invest so much in a person you never met and then to meet the people who are her blood relatives. Are you married . Take what you felt when you met her family and amplify it by one million. That is what i felt. Not only was i trying to get them to like me so they would tell me about millicent looking at this strange lady that came into their home it was so much pressure. I was very nervous. I never even showed them the tattoo i have of her. I assume they must have seen it at some point. We are still in contact, but i have never talked to them about it just like i have never talked to my own family about it. I didnt want them to think i was weird or obsessive. There is still a lot of pressure. Even now i do have another unknown unsung woman that worked on a very, very, maybe bigger than creature monster movie and i am hesitant to do it because i am not ready to do another biography. When you do a project like this you are an external hard drive for another person. I am the world expert on Millicent Patrick right now and it was so much pressure to convince them of the sincerity of the project and to hope that they would open their heart into their home and their archives to me. I dont know if they had anything. It was a very fraught experience for me. I was very nervous. I covered up my tattoos. I tried to make myself look as normal as i could. It was tough. I am very lucky. They were incredibly kind. I changed all of their names in the book to characters from the wolfman. No one has ever picked that up, which i find funny, but they are all renamed. It was tough. I get really emotional about it because i miss her. Every ever since i stopped writing the book she is not in my head every day anymore and that was really hard. Just weird. She was like my buddy. I have this photo and this one above my desk, which i had to move because im working on a new project. Saying goodbye to her was really tough. When i started working on my new project i was like im sorry, i have to move on. I have to feed myself. It was a highly emotional experience. Your cheating. You had lunch with me today. I will close with this last question. Information new about millicent that has not come out . When i facetimed into the Library Book Club thing, one of millicents husbands daughters contacted me on facebook. I still have to email her back. I have been touring and stuff. Weirdly enough i thought the world buck was gonna come out and people would come out of the woodwork, knocking on my door but not that many actually. Reseda, california and one of millicents best friends agents was there and he was very excited. E had known millicent he never emails me. People whot of thought they had new information about here but it has not been information about her, but it has not been information about her. Every signing, some guy comes up to try and tell me facts about the creature from the black lagoon like i dont know. I am very hopeful when i talk to this woman who really wants to talk to me that i will be able to get some new information, but so far nothing. If you have read the book, you know there are a couple places where i could not fill in everything i wanted to but i will never stop looking for information about her. Just because i am done writing this book does not mean she is not still my hero. I am hoping that someone will come out with a Massive Treasure trove of her original creature drawings or some collector will some guy who does not want to share with the world will be abducted by aliens and we can all benefit from his basement collection. So far that has not yet happened. I am crossing my fingers for it every day. Thank you for coming out and listening to me speak and listening to me talk about millicent. I hope she affects your life in some way. I hope if you are hoping to do something in your life and you feel you do not belong there that you are wrong. Inc. You. Thank you. [applause] if you like American History tv, keep up with us during the week on youtube. Watch a preview clips of upcoming programs. Cspanhistory. In leopoldville, there is a theile crowd as panamerican conference gens. The keynote speech inside, as masked crowds outside clashed angrily with police