Martin Landau

Rick Baker

The transformation of Martin Landau into Bela Lugosi for the motion picture Ed Wood (1994).

Making Bela

Martin Landau begins this &quot;documentary&quot; by telling us, &quot;One of the things I said to Tim (Burton, director) was &apos;what you want me to play here is a 74-year-old morphine addict, an alcoholic and a guy who had violent mood swings? That would be hard enough, but the character happens to be Bela Lugosi, who everyone knows. This could be the worst thing that ever happened to me!&quot;

Well, Landau handled the assignment superbly, as anyone who has seen the movie would agree. In fact, he won the Oscar for &quot;best supporting actor&quot; for this role. So.....I guess it was far from the worst thing ever to happen to the veteran actor.

Special-effects guru Rick Baker contributed a number of things to this &quot;behind-the-scenes feature&quot; and said when he heard about this film being made &quot;I just HAD to do it. I would have done it for free, being a big fan of Burton, Lugosi and Boris Karloff.

Lugosi, as shown in the movie, certainly wasn&apos;t a fan of Karloff, but most people were. 

Attempts to help Landau with the strong Hungarian accent of Lugosi was not easy to do. They couldn&apos;t find dialect tapes. What Landau wound up doing was watching all 35 of Lugosi&apos;s films, and more, to get the accent down. He also went into drug and alcohol rehab places and noticed all small many of the people were, where the effects of the abuse and shrunken people. Thus, he tried to make Lugosi look small and frail in those &quot;institution&quot; scenes in the &quot;Ed Wood&quot; film. 

&quot;Lugosi was a sad, lonely figure,&quot; mused Landau.

Martin Landau begins this "documentary" by telling us, "One of the things I said to Tim (Burton, director) was 'what you want me to play here is a 74-year-old morphine addict, an alcoholic and a guy who had violent mood swings? That would be hard enough, but the character happens to be Bela Lugosi, who everyone knows. This could be the worst thing that ever happened to me!"

Well, Landau handled the assignment superbly, as anyone who has seen the movie would agree. In fact, he won the Oscar for "best supporting actor" for this role. So.....I guess it was far from the worst thing ever to happen to the veteran actor.

Special-effects guru Rick Baker contributed a number of things to this "behind-the-scenes feature" and said when he heard about this film being made "I just HAD to do it. I would have done it for free, being a big fan of Burton, Lugosi and Boris Karloff.

Lugosi, as shown in the movie, certainly wasn't a fan of Karloff, but most people were. 

Attempts to help Landau with the strong Hungarian accent of Lugosi was not easy to do. They couldn't find dialect tapes. What Landau wound up doing was watching all 35 of Lugosi's films, and more, to get the accent down. He also went into drug and alcohol rehab places and noticed all small many of the people were, where the effects of the abuse and shrunken people. Thus, he tried to make Lugosi look small and frail in those "institution" scenes in the "Ed Wood" film. 

"Lugosi was a sad, lonely figure," mused Landau.

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