Special Effects Behind the Scenes with Rubberhead

Before special effects were done with CGI, movie creatures were built out of rubber and imagination. And Rubberhead is the first of a projected five-volume sex, drugs, and movies series from Steve Johnson, the guy behind such iconic movie creatures as Slimer from “Ghostbusters” and the glowy underwater guys in “Abyss.” Johnson takes us behind the scenes with anecdotes about how the movies were made.

Entertainment Weekly wrote:

Johnson recalls disguising Jackson so the King of Pop could mingle with the public unrecognized or fleeing to Costa Rica in the mid-aughts after the rise of computer-generated trickery knee-capped a career built on practical effects. “I really enjoyed working with Michael,” he says. “Michael was very unassuming, very child-like. Not intimidating at all. Just a really really really sweet man.”

Johnson is also open about his onetime drug usage and how, for example, he sculpted the character of Slimer in the original Ghostbusters movie high on cocaine. “I’m not glamorizing anything,” he says. “I’m basically screaming to the universe, ‘Look, here’s what happened to me, don’t make these same mistakes!’”