‘LITTLE SHOP’S’ MEAN GREEN MOTHER

Someone once said that great actors are made up of equal parts talent, perseverance, presence and ham. For my money, the best performer of 1986--at least, in film--was made out of rubber, cables, hydraulic pumps and silk. And maybe a little ham, too.

Its name is Audrey II, the genderless man-eating plant with the basso profundo voice in “Little Shop of Horrors.” If the academy voters aren’t willing to rank this mean green mother from outer space with the work of real actors, some of whom appear to have been beamed here from equally distant galaxies, maybe it’s time to create an Oscar category for best monster.

If there were one, Audrey II would set the new standard. As the creature sings in one of its three show-stopping numbers in the movie, you can forget about King Kong, Frankenstein, the Creature from the Black Lagoon and It because next to Audrey II, they don’t mean spit.

Before “Little Shop” opened last month, director Frank Oz was adamant in refusing to discuss how Audrey II was put through its paces. The longtime Muppet performer said he felt that if audiences were aware of the mechanical nuances, that is all they would think about.

I disagree with Oz and other film makers who believe that knowing how things are done destroys the illusion. It depends on how well the illusion is achieved. If you’ve got “Howard the Duck,” which provoked about as much curiosity as Howdy Doody, sure, hide the foul. But if you’ve got Audrey II, flaunt it.

We’ll never know whether the strategy has hurt or helped the film. “Little Shop” has not done as well as many people thought it would, given the high marks it received from preview audiences and the sanguine reviews that accompanied its release. At the midpoint of the busy two-week holiday season, “Little Shop” was trailing along in seventh place on the box office Top 10 list.

Anyway, now that “Little Shop” has been open for a few weeks, the door to the back room where Audrey II designer Lyle Conway conducted its performance has been opened a crack, too.

Conway, who worked with Oz on both “The Dark Crystal” and “The Great Muppet Caper,” said there were seven stages to Audrey II, which is first seen in the movie as an innocuous little plant with a Ping-Pong-size bud in a pint-size pot. By the end of the movie, the bud is six feet across and seven feet deep. It has a bigger mouth than Joan Rivers and long cable-operated vines that stretch and twist into every corner of the flower-shop set.

“Working (the big one) was like turning mattresses with toothpicks,” said Conway, in a telephone interview from his home in Chicago. “When Frank came in with that last song (“Mean Green Mother From Outer Space”), I thought he was joking. I didn’t think there was any way we could pull that off.”

The “Mean Green Mother” number is the finale for Audrey II. It is a wild blues-rock song, sung by Levi Stubbs of the Four Tops, and requires the singing and dancing of not only Audrey II in its largest form, but of its chorus of budding offspring as well. The scene takes four minutes in the movie; it took five weeks to shoot.

“You can’t see it moving on the screen,” Conway said, “but in fact it was moving from one side of the room to the other. Every time we moved it a few feet, we had to take it apart and reassemble it. It took three days to shift it.”

The final credits for “Little Shop” include the names of about 150 people who were involved with either Audrey II or the visual effects surrounding it. Conway said that during the actual filming, there were as few as four and as many as 50 people operating the plants.

The simplest scene was one where baby Audrey II begins smacking its lips at the scent of blood coming from a fresh cut on the finger of flower-shop attendant Seymour (Rick Moranis.) When Seymour moves his bleeding finger near the bud, it suddenly snaps at him, giving us our first look at its colorfully weird mouth.

Conway said that the first effects were accomplished with simple cables and radio controls. Later versions of Audrey II--when the plant’s big lips move in uncanny synchronization with Stubbs’ lyrics, while its stem, vines and leaves all boogie to the beat--involved a combination of hydraulic pumps and cables.

There was not one scene, Conway said, using stop-motion photography, animation or blue-screen process (a means of shooting two scenes separately and putting them together on the negative).

“Everything that you see on the screen was happening right there on the set,” he said.

Audrey II’s lip-syncing is the most marvelous effect among many in “Little Shop,” and Conway says it was the thing he worried most about when he was building the models.

“I thought lip-syncing was going to be a nightmare,” he said. “We played with it in our shop, trying to form words and things, and we didn’t have much success with it. Finally, we brought in three (Muppet) performers to work on it. I told the guys in the shop not to tell (the performers) how hard it was until they signed their contracts.”

The four performers weren’t overwhelmed, Conway said. By the end of the first day, they were doing it well enough for him to be confident that they would get it on the screen. But it still took three months of rehearsals for the four puppeteers, each responsible for eight cables, to synchronize Audrey II’s lip movements to Stubbs’ three pre-recorded songs.

While all that was going on, more than 40 other people were operating the various cables and hydraulic levers controlling the plant’s “body” movements, which were also synchronized with the music.

The scenes with Audrey II were simultaneously recorded on videotape so Conway and Oz could review them. With all the rehearsing done and the remarkable efficiency of the mechanical elements (he said the plant was never down for repairs for longer than 15 minutes), Oz shot as many as 30 takes for every 10 seconds of usable film.

Conway said that the first thing he did after accepting Oz’s offer to design Audrey II was to visit flower shops and botanical gardens looking for inspiration. He settled on a cactus that he said struck him as being both exotic and delicate.

“I wanted (Audrey II) to be a cross between that cactus and those Ukrainian eggs,” he said. “Something very precious that he (Seymour) would like to take home with him.”

In the film, Seymour is a collector of exotic plants and buys Audrey II, following a strange solar eclipse, at a Mandarin market.

Conway said that he and Oz had different ideas as to how the plant should look. He said Oz wanted to go with something soft-looking, while he originally thought it should be more horrific. They eventually compromised. The plant is innocuous enough in its dormant state, but with its mouth open and its shark-like teeth set in front of a quivering gullet, it is definitely horrific.

The plant exteriors were made from a variety of materials, Conway said, including silk, latex and plastic. For the largest model, they came up with a new formula of wrinkle-free foam rubber. The inanimate creature required more human care, he said, than the character Audrey II does in the movie. They had to wash it down and take its temperature every night to prevent it from drying out or losing its shape.

Although it is the head of Audrey II that audiences will remember, it is the work of the vines that Conway is most proud of. As the plant grows and becomes more menacing, he begins using his vines for everything from dialing a phone to spearing a wall.

“It is the first time anything like them have been done,” Conway said. “The vines were 7 1/2 feet long and they went from about an inch and a half at the base to an inch at the tip. As thin as they were, we had very positive control operating them with cables. . . . We didn’t have to use any marionetting or strings, which we thought we might have to use.”

As for his favorite of the seven phases of Audrey II, Conway said the choice is easy.

“The little plant in the Mandarin shop is the one I liked most,” he said. “It didn’t move.”