The Wax Man : Museum’s Sculptor Has a Soft Touch for Saints, Sinners

As he carefully removed the tiny pieces of wax from around Jimmy Stewart’s lips, eerie music wafted through the artist’s studio.

Bette Davis, dressed as Baby Jane, stood motionless, her piercing blue eyes scanning every corner of the room. Nearly completed clay busts of Oliver North and George Reeves watched the visitors from atop their pedestals.

Discarded legs, arms, torsos and a pair of thumbs were heaped in a corner. Elsewhere actors, saints and monsters stood frozen in their poses.

And in the midst of it all was David Robert Cellitti, resident sculptor at the Movieland Wax Museum in Buena Park and practitioner of a most unusual profession.

The eerie music is not there for Cellitti’s entertainment; it rises from the chamber of horrors downstairs, where the Phantom of the Opera, Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster and Freddy Krueger reside.

To Cellitti, it is the chamber of delights. From an early age, Cellitti said, he has identified with the monsters of the silver screen, seeing them more as outcasts to be understood than evildoers to be feared. They were his earliest heroes.

When 13-year-old David was vacationing with his parents in Southern California 23 years ago, he begged them to take him to the wax museum in Buena Park. When they got there, the rest of his family gravitated to the statues of Hollywood stars. David hung out with the monsters.

He recalled his amazement at the realism of their features. It was then, he said, that he decided on his career.

When the family returned home to Palo Alto, David began making papier-mache monsters in his garage. It soon became an obsession, he said. He read every monster magazine and watched every monster movie and TV show he could find.

A few years later, when he was in high school, David wrote to the Hollywood wax modeling studio of Katherine Stubergh and was amazed by the reply: an offer of a summer apprenticeship. He lived at the Glendale YMCA while he learned the basics of the business. He learned the whole technique, and then some.

After he graduated from high school, he set out on his own. Over the years he worked for Mattel Toys sculpting the clay molds for swim fins for Barbie, the Creepy Crawlers line of toy insects, toy hamburgers, a cowboy hat for a doll.

He next worked briefly creating monsters and other characters for a movie production company, then made figures for a wax museum in San Francisco.

About a year ago he set up shop in the second-story studio at the Movieland Wax Museum in Buena Park, where he now practices as one of the very few wax modelers in the world.

Cellitti considers his work a craft, not art. But the goal of his craft--to amaze and amuse--is no less difficult to achieve, he says.

With the necessary attention to detail, an average figure can take 2 to 3 months to complete, Cellitti said. If the subject is a public figure who is still alive, he or she is measured and photographed. For movie stars, Cellitti studies film clips, publicity stills and any other images available.

Still, for all its satisfactions, the work can be frustrating. “You could take the audiences now and send them to the moon and back in 3 minutes,” he said, “and they’d probably walk away and say, ‘OK, what’s next?’ ”