No Longer Just Spectacle Hair

If a movie were made about this year’s nomination procedure for the Academy Award for best makeup, it might be titled “The Hairdressers Strike Back.”

Over the category’s 20-year history, voters have leaned toward spectacle--creature work, fantasy or horror effects, and aging jobs. The nomination for “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring” follows that tradition, as does the one for the meticulous aging of Russell Crowe for “A Beautiful Mind.”

Several other seemingly obvious contenders, such as “Planet of the Apes,” “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” “A.I.” and “Hannibal” have been ignored in favor of “Moulin Rouge.”

The difference seems to turn on hair.

“It used to be there weren’t that many makeup and hair people in the academy,” says “A Beautiful Mind” nominee Greg Cannom. “The meeting for the final nominations, it used to be made up of directors, art directors, actors, all different people. Now ... only the makeup and hair artists vote, and more of the subtler, artsy films are getting nominated.”

A recent change also limits nominees to two per film. Whereas in previous years makeup nominees would likely include the makeup designer, the key applicator of the makeup and possibly the hairdresser, hairstylists are now on equal footing.

The nominating committee “will ask, ‘Would you have considered nominating this film without hair?’” says hairstylist Colleen Callaghan, who is nominated for “A Beautiful Mind.” “If they say yes, then the hairdresser is not included, and it is the top makeup people. If they say no, the hairdresser is included.”

Hairdressers welcome the inclusion.

“It’s about time,” says hairstylist Aldo Signoretti, nominated for “Moulin Rouge.” “I’m very proud that people have started to notice the wigs and that we are part of the game.”

Cannom, who has seven previous nominations and two wins (“Bram Stoker’s Dracula” [1992] and “Bicentennial Man” [1999]) has become known as an aging specialist, primarily through his improvements on silicone-filled prosthetic appliances, which are glued to an actor’s face.

Traditionally, appliances have been molded in foam rubber, which Cannom says looks less realistic and breaks down faster than silicone, but baked silicone gel is ordinarily too slippery to hold makeup. Working with makeup technician Wes Wofford, Cannom developed his own formula for an outer skin for his silicone pieces that takes the makeup.

Crowe’s makeup covered nine stages of middle and old age, and in each Cannom tried to include touches of the real John Forbes Nash Jr. “I used very small appliances on Russell’s face,” he says. “I didn’t want to widen his face at all, because the real Nash has a very long, narrow face.” Cannom also took care not to duplicate his work on Crowe for “The Insider.”

Cannom may have turned Crowe into a senior citizen, but Callaghan, a former Broadway actress and nominee for 1995’s “Roommates,” was responsible for taking the actor back to his 20s, with a short, 1940s hairstyle.

The challenge of having the principal characters’ hair reflect the proper time period was aided by director Ron Howard’s decision to shoot the film largely in sequence, Callaghan says. Having cut Crowe’s hair short for the start of filming, she let nature take its course, using wigs only in “that 15-year montage where he went into the bald cap.”

For Connelly, who declined to cut her long hair for the film, Callaghan styled it for the era. “In the ‘50s they didn’t have blow dryers and rollers,” she says. “I told Ron and Todd [Hallowell, the executive producer] that, if you really want a ‘50s look, it has to be done the way we did it then, with a wet set and reversed rows of pin curls. When they saw it, they said, ‘That’s it, do it!’ And sometimes, they wanted to eat their words when it went on for hours” in additional makeup time.

“Moulin Rouge” was an even bigger hair show, with Signoretti--nominated with makeup artist Maurizio Silvi--providing wigs for practically the entire cast, including best actress nominee Nicole Kidman. Signoretti, who is based in Italy, is amused to hear that most people thought Kidman’s flowing red hair was her own. “That’s the whole trick,” he chuckles.

Signoretti, also a first-time nominee, adopted a painterly color scheme. “I don’t want to say that everything is based on Toulouse-Lautrec, but most of it is, yes,” he says. In particular, he exploited the color of the film’s title. “Baz [Luhrmann] said, ‘What, another red?’ I kept saying, ‘This is Moulin Rouge.’”

Silvi also looked to the Impressionist painters for inspiration in creating the makeup (which, save for a discreet prosthetic nose on John Leguizamo, playing Toulouse-Lautrec, were more theatrical), and did not worry about staying slavishly devoted to time period.

“The anachronistic nature of this film allowed me to go beyond the time, so that I imagined Satine [Kidman’s character] as a ‘Gilda’ fin de siecle,” Silvi says, referring to the 1946 film with Rita Hayworth.

The “Moulin Rouge” team also took a time-consuming, if not old-fashioned, approach to the facial hair, from Ewan McGregor’s beard to the luxurious orange moustache worn by Jim Broadbent.

“It was laid on hair-by-hair, and was painstaking in its perfection,” Broadbent says. “But I was prepared to go through the hour to hour-and-a-half it took, for without it I wouldn’t have had a character.”

Usually a false mustache or beard is created by tying hairs individually onto thin, loose netting called lace, then glued onto the face in large pieces. But Broadbent declares, “There is no lace with the Italians!”

For “The Lord of the Rings,” nominee Peter Owen and a staff of 10 spent 31/2 years just creating wigs. Makeup designer Richard Taylor notes “there were only two people in the film that were out of wigs, and those were the two children listening to Bilbo’s story at the Hobbit party.” The kids, incidentally, are the children of co-writer/director/co-producer Peter Jackson.

Taylor and Jackson are partners in Weta, a New Zealand-based film services company that not only provided the makeup for “Rings” but also the digital and creature work, props, armor and costumes. As a result, Taylor is nominated in three separate categories--makeup, costume and visual effects--the first time a craft or technical artist has garnered three nominations for a single film. (Jackson is similarly nominated in three above-the-line categories--producing, directing and writing--but there are precedents for that.)

A list of makeup statistics for the film is similarly impressive: 10,000 separate facial appliances, 1,800 sets of full body prosthetics and 1,800 pairs of Hobbit feet were created over the course of the 15-month shoot on the three films depicting the entire “Rings” saga. Beyond the spectacle, Taylor hopes people appreciate the more subtle makeup effects.

“The aging makeup on Bilbo, who ages from 45 to 170 over the three films, is very beautiful and subtle,” he says. “And there was very subtle silicone and gelatin work done to augment the faces of the lead actors every single day of the shoot.”

Gelatin appliances were used for the pointy ear tips on all the Hobbit characters and for the false noses worn by Ian McKellen and Christopher Lee, which kept the actors’ features from disappearing beneath voluminous beards.

One of “Ring’s” biggest makeup challenges was the oversized, hairy Hobbit feet. After much experimentation, the problem of creating realistic looking feet that would adhere to the actors own and would withstand being walked in for hours, was solved by injecting different densities of foam rubber it into the molds.

The first several sets, Taylor says, were trashed when the actors staged soccer games in between shots.

“But when we showed them the tens of hours of work and the trouble it took to make just one pair, never mind 1,800 pair,” he says. “The guys totally understood and took it upon themselves to look after them.”