Category: Misc.

Film #19: Conan the Destroyer (First posted July 2, 2021)
Film #20: Conan and the Eye of Death (First posted July 29, 2021)
Film #21: Dune (First posted July 25, 2021)
Film #22: Clan of the Cave Bear (First posted July 30, 2021)
Film #23: The Return of the Living Dead (First posted August 1, 2021)
Film #24: Spawn of the Dead (First posted August 27, 2021)

Film #18: Godzilla – King of the Monsters (First posted September 10, 2019; also, see April 8, 2020 and June 27, 2021)
Produced & Directed by: Steve Miner
Written by: Fred Dekker
Production Designed by: William Stout

Godzilla – King of the Monsters was originally going to be a 3D movie. Here’s the color version of my first piece of presentation art for Steve Miner‘s Godzilla – King of the Monsters film. Compare that with the charcoal drawing posted on September 10, 2019 (Untold Tales of Hollywood #44).

Fred Dekker‘s screenplay was brilliant, one of the best I have ever read. Given another chance, I would make this film in a heartbeat. I had put together a dream art department: I had Dave (The Rocketeer) Stevens (see Untold Tales of Hollywood #49 – June 2021 for some of Dave’s Godzilla work) and Doug (Jonny Quest) Wildey on storyboards; Rick (American Werewolf in London) Baker was going to build me a gigantic robotic Godzilla head; Stephen(Planet of the Dinosaurs) Czerkas made the stop motion puppet of Godzilla for the film; and David (Willow) Allen was scheduled to do the stop motion animation. I even selected temp music to go with the storyboards.

What went wrong? Right project, wrong time. Our version had effects in almost every scene, so it was going to be an expensive movie. At that time, four big-budget films (Heaven’s Gate being one of them) had just bombed at the box office, so, the studios were extremely wary when it came to greenlighting another big-budget movie.

Read all about it in my earlier posts.

Film #16: THE DINOSAURS – A Fantastic New View of a Lost Era
Written, directed and designed by William Stout

This 1982 TV series project was set to be produced by the Hanna-Barbera animation studio. They bought the option, anyway. I doubt if they were serious about making my groundbreaking book into an animated series. I think in hindsight that it was probably optioned to keep it off the market. They probably already had a dinosaur series in their back pocket or had an agreement with another studio to kill it.

Presentation board (triptych):

Detail: Left Side

Detail: Center

Detail: Right Side

Film #17: Reanimator (First posted on September 10, 2019)

Film #13: First Blood (First posted on August 24, 2019)
Film #14: Monster in the Closet (First posted on August 23, 2019)
Film #15: The 7th Voyage of Howard

The 7th Voyage of Howard was a spoof of the great Ray Harryhausen film, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad. This was a 1982 project I was working up with my friend Bruce Kimmel. It didn’t get much further than this quick one-sheet thumbnail sketch of mine. Bruce would have written, produced, and starred (as Howard) in the movie. I would have been the production designer and, perhaps, Bruce’s co-writer.

Film #6: Nine Princes of Amber (1979; originally posted July 2, 2019)
Since my initial posting, while digging through my archives for my three-volume book set on all of my comics-related work, I found some Amber color pieces, including the color version of my Corwin, Prince of Amber comic book cover, as well as a finished page (I based the likeness of the fellow that Corwin meets using his trump card on the film’s director-producer, Robert K. Weiss):

Above: Proposed Amber merchandising.

Below: One of my collaborations with Boris Vallejo (he penciled, I painted):

Here’s a proposed one-sheet design that I designed and painted:

All of my Amber roughs and paintings will be included in the forthcoming book on all of my film designs.

Meanwhile…
Film #7: Conan the Barbarian (1979; originally posted July 3, 2019)
Film #8: Time Gate (1979; originally posted June 26, 2019)
Film #9: Raiders of the Lost Ark (1980; originally posted on July 26, 2019)
Film #10: Tanya’s Island (1980; originally posted on August 19, 2019)
Film #11: Galaxy of Terror (1981 originally posted June 27, 2019)
Film #12: Heavy Metal (1981 originally posted August 20, 2019)

Contuing my film involvement in chronological order:

#3 was Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (June 23, 2019 entry)

#4 was The Warrior and the Sorceress (June 25, 2019 entry)

#5 was Look Out for Number One (1979)

Directed by John Lange

Written and designed by William Stout

I met Dr. Richard MacKenzie at the Hollywood Sunset Free Clinic when he was treating my late 1960s/early 1970s STDs.

We became close friends, and I helped him out on a number of projects. I also invited CAPS (Comic Art Professional Society; I was the group’s President at the time) to come to the hospital to do drawings for the kids there. After no one else would, I volunteered to draw cartoons for the kids in the Terminal Ward.

That was when I became an atheist.

Here were these poor suffering kids, in enormous pain through no fault of their own. As Woody Allen once said, “If there is a God, he’s an underachiever.” When I talk to clergy, I present them with this issue. If there is a God, and he (or she) is omnipotent, then why does he force innocent children to painfully suffer before they die? Don’t give me that
God works in mysterious ways” bullshit. If He is responsible for all that is good — and He is omnipotent — then He must also be responsible for the bad stuff that happens to children and other humans as well. I like the way that Randy Newman put it in “God’s Song”, a song whose lyrics express God’s point of view (talking to all of mankind):

“I recoil in horror from the foulness of thee,
From the squalor and the filth and the misery.
How we laugh up here in heaven at the prayers you offer me —
That’s why I love mankind.”

“I burn down your cities — how blind you must be;
I take from you your children, and you say how blessed are we.
You all must be crazy to put your faith in me —
That’s why I love mankind.”

Dick called me one day, explaining that a huge project had been dropped in his lap. The United States Department of Health, Education and Welfare provided Dick with a grant to come up with a way to convince inner city teens to wear condoms while having sex. Dick thought I was just the right guy to solve this problem.

My solution was to create an animated cartoon and a comic book. The local animation scene got excited when John showed them a background I had painted for the cartoon.

It did it in an old 1930s style, a style long gone from animation for quite some time (I’m a big fan of mid-1930s Walt Disney animated short cartoons). The completed cartoon was submitted to the Film Exposition of Los Angeles (FilmEx), where it was accepted and shown to the public.

Unfortunately, I never got to finish the comic book (we ran out of grant money). Here is what I had done for the comic:

The producers of The Land Before Time misled Jim Henson, telling him that their film would be completed a year before ours (It turned out that our film would actually have been completed a year before theirs). Jim didn’t want to look like he was copying these powerful Hollywood icons, so he reluctantly killed our film.

I love irony — except when it happens to me. Ironically, I got hired to work on the ad campaign art for The Land Before Time. These are some (I think all) of the advertising title designs I did for that film:

I was also the advisor (I did a quick correction to the T. Rex’s anatomy) to my pal Dan Goozée, the artist hired to paint the movie poster for The Land Before Time. Dan was well-known for his James Bond movie posters. We collaborated on one of those: Octopussy. Dan did the poster art; I did the title lettering.

Years later, I was working for Walt Disney Imagineering (WDI). Jim Henson happened to be visiting that day and spotted me in a meeting. He pulled me out of the meeting, exhibiting great excitement.

“Bill! I’ve got really great news –– our dinosaur project is back on! I’ll call you in a few days.”

I’ll never know what Jim was alluding to, as Jim died three days later.

I want to be really thorough with my Untold Tales of Hollywood series. At this point, I am going to go back and carefully make sure I haven’t forgotten any of the work I have done on the 81 films and TV shows I have worked on. Eventually, all of these columns will be collected into a book on all of my designs for film.

My very first listing should have been the designs I did for the Lennox heating and cooling systems commercials. I did those for the animation studio Spungbuggy Works. I don’t think I kept any of the visuals for those commercials — but I’ll keep looking. They were so successful that another series of commercials was created using my designs.

So, that was #1. #2 is the Firesign Theater movie Everything You Know Is Wrong (entry on June 22, 2019).

Despite my efforts, it looked like my Henson dinosaur project was grinding to an unfortunate halt.

But not The Land Before Time…

I pressed on with my designs for the Henson dinosaur movie.

More to come…