A Rotten Way to Make a Living

Welcome to Superior, Ariz., where apparently they don’t have a dentist.

While moviegoers are accustomed to seeing bad teeth presented as a British stereotype--consider the collective choppers of the male-stripping mates in the Fox Searchlight hit comedy “The Full Monty”--bad dental work is taken to an entirely different low in the Phoenix Pictures film “U-Turn,” the darkly comic neo-noir directed by Oliver Stone.

In “U-Turn,” teeth make the men.

Principally, there’s Billy Bob Thornton as Darrell, a dimwitted auto mechanic who actually turns out to be quite conniving in holding Sean Penn’s car hostage at his rundown gas station.

Penn stars in “U-Turn” as Bobby Cooper, a small-time gambler on his way to Las Vegas to pay off a debt, only to have his car break down in the parched, eerie hell that is Superior.

Thornton, last seen tinkering with engines in his Oscar-winning film “Sling Blade,” appears early on in “U-Turn.” He’s covered in grease from head to toe, with horned-rim glasses, a bit of a gut and teeth that would make the locals in “Deliverance” blush. Sure, he tells Bobby, I can fix your car for you, and his smile reveals teeth that are mostly black and brown--and maybe even a shade of green. The effect is at once sinister and comic, setting the tone for the rest of the film.

“We just used colored teeth enamel,” says John Blake, principal makeup artist on the film, explaining Thornton’s look. “We colored them brown and black. I think the glasses were Billy Bob’s touch.”

Thornton, Blake adds, had a definite image in mind for his character. The rest was relatively simple.

“That’s the great thing about makeup, it’s so sophisticated now you don’t have to do too much out of the hardware store. I remember when I was working on ‘Fargo,’ people wanted to know what I used to create the effect of ice on these two dead bodies. And I was like, ‘Well, it’s called makeup ice.’

“None of this is hard,” he adds. “It’s all just film tricks.”

In addition to makeup work on “Fargo,” last year’s dark comedy from filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen, Blake’s credits include “Showgirls,” “The Crow: City of Angels,” the upcoming “Starship Troopers” and another Stone film, “Nixon.”

For that film, Blake used veneers to enlarge Anthony Hopkins’ teeth so they would look more like the former president’s.

Shot in a relatively quick 42 days, “U-Turn” presented Blake, 38, with several challenges. As in “Fargo,” the violence had to look realistic, not stylized. “U-Turn” is a film where characters are missing fingers and fights end with someone getting an ax through the heart. The trick for Blake, who broke into movies doing makeup for horror films, came in hiding his own handiwork.

“We wanted the film to look realistic, like the actors weren’t wearing makeup,” Blake says. “We wanted them to be kind of rough and raw looking. And I wanted to let everyone’s skin show through.”

There were also several familiar faces to transform.

Jon Voight is virtually unrecognizable as a blind man and resident sage who serves as another comedic counterpoint to the tension in the film.

For Nick Nolte’s Jake McKenna, Blake again turned to teeth as a defining characteristic, putting pearly white, oversized incisors (veneers) over the actor’s front teeth. Again, says Blake, it was a relatively simple process, but it went a long way toward giving Nolte a demonic look.

“He’s such a handsome guy, so we cut off all of his hair and gave him these goofy teeth,” Blake says. “I think it might have been Oliver’s idea. We wanted to change him from the handsome leading man people are used to seeing, like he was in ‘Mulholland Falls’ [the 1996 period detective drama]. In this film, he wasn’t supposed to be a good-looking guy.”