by Wilson Barbers
Lana Adrienne met Martin Beckler on their first feature-length movie, a low-budget schlocker shot in the woods of North Dakota. It was a fateful meeting, one that would change the course of both their lives and careers. She had the role as the sexy-but-virginally-plucky heroine; he was the blood-and-guts man, makeup effects artist on a less-than-basic budget. As the only actress on the set who didn't grouse about the grueling process of makeup application - and a fan of the horror genre even at its cheesiest - the young actress quickly hit it off with Martin. She'd arrive on the set before she needed to just to watch him applying wounds to the other actors and actresses; after shooting, they'd stay up and discuss their favorite Italian zombie flicks over coffee and donuts. By picture's end, the two of them had become an item, one that would last through a series of increasingly successful horror projects.
Placed alongside each other, they made a visually incongruous couple: Lana, tall, blond, stacked and dressed to show it; Martin, bespectacled, portly and rumpled. But Lana was able to look beyond her lover's pudgy frame to the artist within. In doing so, she made her career. An adequate actress with a more-than-adequate pair of camera-ready breasts, Lana could have been any one of a number of B-movie bimbos populating the realm of independent filmdom. With Martin overseeing his lover's personal makeup in addition to the FX, the young actress was given the best visual presentation possible. Her still from 1983's Grue Academy, (oversized protractor planted neatly between her 44DDs) was a favorite with adolescent gorehounds everywhere. Three years after their professional and personal relationship started, Lana Adrienne had become a big draw at the horror fan conventions, a name to contend with in the sleazy shocks section of your local video store.
Perhaps if Lana hadn't started to take it all so seriously, things would have turned out differently. But it's hard to keep a level head in the face of rooms filled with drooling teenage movie freaks. Halfway into the wrap party for Black and Decker Massacre, she bluntly bid adieu to her portly lover, leaving the party with the producer of two successfully syndicated teevee series, while Martin felt the rage of the suddenly dumped. Lana's exit was not the most tactful of acts - everybody at the party knew what had happened when it happened - nor was it the most merciful. When the downcast makeup man asked in the way of all stunned dumpees if there was anything he could do to keep the relationship together, Lana drunkenly answered in a voice loud enough for all to hear: "Sure Marty! Lose about half a ton!"
Not the kind of remark that's easily dismissed, especially by Marty.
The makeup man was sensitive about his weight, something Lana knew, having seen him through about a half dozen unsuccessful diets. Forever conscious of the shapely beauty that was his girlfriend, Martin had struggled to make himself slender but was markedly unsuccessful. Three years of effort, and all the makeup man had to show for it was fifty extra pounds. With Lana leaving, he felt doomed to a life of solitary obesity.
Martin brooded in solitude, caught between his anger and an overwhelming need to have her back. He immersed himself in his work with an increasingly angry eye. It made his efforts even more noticeable. Already recognized throughout the field as a detail man (no shadows or slimy obfuscation for him!), Beckler's fame among the cognoscenti grew to rival his former sweetie's. His creature puppets from Creepycrawlies (1987) sold almost as many posters as Lana's mams. It was small consolation, but he accepted it.
Until the day he discovered Dick Eastling's book.
Martin was pawing through the used bookstores, doing research for an upcoming witchcraft comedy (Sorority Girl Sorceresses), when he discovered the out-of-print Living Makeup. Misshelved next to several "majicke" books, the discovery was a wonderful surprise. Beckler had been a fan of Eastling since he'd been old enough to pay attention to movie credits; the makeup artist had a history back to the old Universal days, starting as an assistant under Jack Pierce, building a name for himself in the glory days of drive-in teenage monster movies. One of the last projects that Eastling had his name on was a sixties splatter film in the style of goremeister H.G. Lewis: clearly, the man had seen it all in the world of horror. As a young fan, Beckler remembered seeing ads for Living Makeup in the pages of the monster mags, but he'd been too young to order it. Delighted by his discovery, the adult Martin bought the book and spent the weekend poring through it.
As it turned out, the book hadn't been improperly shelved at all. In addition to his unparalleled skill as a makeup artisan, Eastling apparently had dabbled in some other arts. Living Makeup was rife with incantations and questionable techniques for "enhancing makeup reality" through the use of mystic rituals. Good thing he'd never ordered the book when he was young, Martin thought: it would've devastated him to realize how nutty his idol was.
Still, the text had some good material in it, long-forgotten techniques that Beckler thought he could adapt to more modern materials. Eastling was a strong advocate for his craft: "Change the character's appearance, however subtly, and you change the character in a way that mere acting can't achieve." Martin returned to Living Makeup over the next year whenever he was in a bind on a project, and in growing familiar with the book, he began to take its more outre passages seriously. Before long, the fat makeup man was experimenting with some of Eastling's more arcane artistic tricks and achieving some truly fabulous results.
Two years later, he got the chance to work with Lana Adrienne again.
The project was latest in Toxin Pictures' HalluciNation series (HalluciNation VI: The Revenge of Charlie Orb), a profitable clump of movies featuring the aforementioned Charlie, a gaunt-faced madman who'd been mysteriously granted the power to alter reality to his own twisted purposes. Primarily written as a showcase for the latest in make FX (Charlie's victims always undergoing some flashy transmogrifications), it was inevitable that Martin would be asked to lend his talents to the Orb oeuvre. The makeup man agreed on two conditions: he be allowed to direct and have a hand in the script. The higher-ups at Toxin readily agreed.
As did Lana when the folks at Toxin approached her agent about the female lead in the picture. The past year hadn't been a banner one for the starlet. Her last two films (Cannibal High, Don't Look in the Dumpster) had been such dogs that they'd gone straight to video, while an up-and-coming set of boobs named Deni Sybil had even more recently beat her out of two juicy cameos. The HalluciNation pictures were guaranteed moneymakers, and besides the chance to work with Martin sounded strangely appealing to her. Lana's personal life hadn't been doing all that hot either; perhaps a renewed relationship with Marty was the change she needed.
Once on the set, though, her old lover was all bizness. He hustled his heavy frame between set and makeup shop constantly, overseeing the filming with a Spartan efficiency that genuinely impressed Lana even as it frustrated her attempts to get close to him. Marty'd gotten fatter since she'd seen him last, looking vaguely like a beardless Orson Welles. The image suited him; he was as inventive a director as he was a makeup man. They finished all the basic filming within a month, leaving only the ticket-selling FX sequences.
At last Lana saw a chance to spend some time with her old lover. The sequence surrounding her character was a complex one, involving several days of shooting. In it, villain Charlie was supposed to play with the heroine's confidence by making her age rapidly on-screen, a makeup effect that Martin intended to do entirely by himself. The morning that she went in for her first bout with the chair, though, her ex-lover sprung his script change on her. "I've been thinking," he began, "that this aging thing doesn't have the oomph that the character deserves. There's a better way for Charlie to mess with Leslie, one that's hinted at in the script."
"And that is?"
"Charlie is going to make you fantastically obese!" the fat makeup man said with a grin. "Remember that scene in the school lunchroom where Leslie says she's too full to move. We're gonna make that concept reality!"
The actress knew what was going on: this was the scene that Marty'd planned all along for her, which explained that dopey bit of cafeteria dialog. After all those years, the corpulent makeup man was going to wreak his revenge on her by making her massive on-screen. Well, perhaps she deserved it, Lana thought with a wry mental smile. She was pretty cruel to Marty the night of their break-up; perhaps she needed to serve some kind of penance. "Sounds like a good idea," she said, leaping onto his makeup chair. "Let's knock their eyes out!"
The sequence took place in a studio set stylization of the real-life school lunchroom used earlier in the filming. Lana/Leslie was seated at the end of a long cafeteria table with a single tray of food (that looked better than anything she remembered from high school) before her. The first series of shots were devoted to the unchanged Leslie character as she found herself mysteriously transported to this quasi-familiar setting. "As the scene starts out," Martin set up, "you're surprised to find yourself here. You look around the empty room, absently nibbling on what's in front of you. After an inserted cut to the tray, you find yourself ravenously digging into your lunch. Don't worry about doing any damage to the food; we've got plenty of fresh plates made up."
Lana nodded and went at her scene with vigor. Marty wanted her to make a spectacle of herself; she'd show him one! She stuffed herself through five takes until the director pronounced himself satisfied. While the crew broke for lunch, Lana returned to her trailer to lie down, unable to face the thought of the studio commissary. She felt bloated and uncomfortable, filled with second thoughts. If she wanted to make it through the next two days' shooting, she was gong to have hold back more.
That afternoon, she was in Marty's makeup trailer for a relatively short period. "This 'un won't take long," he promised. "A little bit of heightening and the right kind of lighting will make you look thirty pounds heavier." He deftly applied a layer of makeup to her face and neck, all the while muttering to himself, rotund paunch pressing around the arm of her chair. Finally, they returned to the set, and Lana found herself once more in front of the table, two trays brimming with food. Amazingly, after a short time in the chair, her appetite had returned, her discomfort vanished. She dug at the offerings through six retakes and still felt hungry afterwards.
"Good day's work," Marty told her at the end of the day. He offered her a rag to get a dab of frosting that had lingered on her rounded cheek. Lana nodded agreeably, the start of a second chin grown more obvious with her nodding. "Tomorrow we've got much farther to go, though!"
"I'll be ready," she replied, standing from the table and pulling her newly tightened jeans loose on her wider rear. Her stomach rumbled hungrily. All she wanted to do was leave and get something substantial to eat.
The following day she got to the studio an hour earlier; Marty was the sole person around, but Lana forgot all about her earlier plans to use the opportunity to re-ingratiate herself with her ex-lover. The makeup man had brought a box of cinnamon donuts, and they smelled heavenly. She finished the full dozen off in the chair while he worked on thickening her arms and ankles. "The rest'll be padding under your clothes," he said, "but we won't get away with that for long. Your school clothes are close to ripping at the seams, Leslie!"
"This feels less rubbery than the usual stuff," she noted, poking her right upper arm with a cinnamon-flecked finger. "Feels close to real skin, in fact."
"A special mixture of mine," Martin answered. "No rubbery fake suit looks for me; with this, you'll be real." He went to work on her face and neck, puffing up the former, obscuring the latter behind a dangling second chin.
To prolong the effect, they upped Lana's wardrobe four sizes. But with all that padding pushing at the fabric, the actress found it hard to walk onto the set. She felt like a little kid stuck in an overstuffed winter coat as she plodded down the hall, slowly moving her entire body with each step. Once seated, her padded belly swelling before her and pushing her widened legs apart, the actress started to feel more comfortable. The entire table's end was filled with food for this stage, plates piled on top of each other. Stretching past her prominent forefront to grab the offerings before her, Lana chewed her way through another a.m. shooting. This time, when Marty called for lunch, she slowly followed the crew to the commissary.
"If you're hungry, don't worry about ruining my makeup by eating," he told her, after calling it a wrap. "It's built to last." She smiled at her reflection as she puffed past the commissary door. Made up at least twice her old weight, her clothes straining her, midriff rolls peaking between her jeans and blouse, she looked like the stereotypical fat girl from a teen sex comedy. She was almost as big as Marty.
"You're really getting into this," Marty told her as they prepped for the afternoon.
"Anything for the picture," Lana laughed, though a part of her really was getting off on it. As an actress who traded on her looks and shape, Lana had been through so many years of self-denial that these eating binges felt almost liberating!
"Just don't chew up the scenery too much," the makeup man joked. She stripped to a pair of bikini coverings, and he prepared to make her torso fleshy. The session took close to three hours, Martin talking to himself the entire time, and when she was clothed in some strategically ripped versions of her old wardrobe, Lana looked about quadruple her old size. Her celebrated cleavage was dwarfed by a globular belly that hung before her and dominated the camera frame. Her top's sleeves were burst open, mammoth upper arms spilling over her elbows; her jeans had split nearly all the way up their seams. Lana's legs were barely able to bend from the thickness of her thighs; they stretched out to both sides of the table as she strained to reach past her paunch to the foodstuff tantalizingly in front of her. Fortunately for Lana, this part of the scene called for tables equally laden with luscious items to appear on both sides of her. The hardest part was waiting for Martin to announce them ready to actually shoot.
That evening, Lana left the set without even stopping to get her makeup removed. Wearing a loose sleeveless sun dress that Marty'd given her to wear between set-ups, she went home and spent the night calling in pizza orders. If she ever remembered she was supposed to be this statuesque starlet swaddled in padding, the thought quickly vanished with her hunger and scent of pizzas. All the delivery boys saw was this massive lady answering the door at Lana Adrienne's house, hunger in her fat-bordered eyes.
Next morning, Lana waddled into the studio ready for the final day of FX shooting. The sequence finale was set for the afternoon, but first was the penultimate transition shot. As before, Marty handled the makeup chores himself, adding the realistic detail for which he was acclaimed. His flesh tones were marvelous, a textbook of convincingly rendered stretch marks, dimples and pallid cellulite. Where most makeup men would have added to the effect, putting in extraneous wattles or warts, Martin maintained Lana's fleshy integrity. The effect was to somehow enhance the starlet's camera friendliness even through her tonnage, a much more subtle and ultimately disquieting effect. She looked pretty good as a fat chick, Lana thought.
He built the actress up to the point where she had to be helped onto the set by two complaining technicians holding onto each billowy arm. Her dangling belly came close to dragging the carpet; when Lana sat back down on her reinforced chair, her massive apron settled on the floor against her obscured ankles. She went through her final morning shooting gormandizing. When lunch came, she didn't even get off her chair: there was plenty of food left, she said, so she'd work on lunch there if Marty didn't mind. Marty didn't. "Just save some room for the last shot," he said. "It's an important one."
"The way I feel today. . ." Lana gasped between chomps, "I don't think. . . I could ever get full!"
Martin Beckler walked over to his lover, looked her in the eyes and kissed her on the right jowl. Though she shouldn't have through her makeup, it felt just like he'd bussed her flesh. "See you after lunch," he said.
Preparation for the final shoot took the entire afternoon: it was a biggy in more ways than one. In it, the character Leslie had grown so enormous that she was unable to get up. A giant ball of obesity pinned to the lunchroom floor by her weight, she in turn is stalked by the menacing Charlie Orb who sardonically parrots her earlier remark about being too full to move. Before he pounces on the swollen heroine, though, the picture hero disrupts the hallucination by stepping onto the scene and tackling Orb, a sequence that was already lensed.
Martin went at his final makeup effect with fervor. "This'll make the fat man in that Money Python film look bulimic," he said at one point. When he finished, Lana felt totally surrounded by her made-up self, head perched atop an inflated mound of flesh swelling to all sides of her. All she could see when she looked down was jiggling skin; when she lifted her arms, the hang of fake fat was so heavy that she could barely hold them up. Her legs, which Martin had spent over an hour layering, were almost totally hidden by overflowing fat in both front and back. As Martin showed off his handiwork with a pair of mirrors, Lana felt herself sinking into this final living makeup incarnation.
They had to roll her onto the set with a dolly underneath; it took six burly techs and a studio guard to move her. Once pushed in place, they surrounded the dolly with junk food, cakes and pastries, piling edibles on all sides of her. When they'd finished, Lana was perched on her back in the middle of a mountain of goodies, half her corpulent body obscured, nether regions carefully covered with tatters of silk and denim. It was typical of Martin to go to so much effort when so much of his work wasn't even going to be seen by the camera (even her nipples were lifelike!), she thought, but this thought was chased away by the sweet scent of chocolate cupcake by her right jowl. Lana grabbed a piece of something in her right hand and started to lift her arm. She felt starving, but to her dismay she was unable to bend her arm sufficiently past her ponderous breasts to get the food to her mouth.
"Great!" she heard the director shouting. "Go with the scene, Lana!" Near tears, she finally let the pastry drop onto her mam, only to feel it bounce out of reach atop her mountainous gut. With a groan of frustration, she rocked her ballooning torso from side to side, dislodging food all around her, until she felt the dolly roll out from under her. Stranded on her side, the actress continued to rock until she was facing the floor, massive belly spreading and flattening against the cool hard wood, tops of her breasts mashed around both sides of her face. An inch away from her mouth was a half-smashed angel food cake; Lana happily plunged her fat face into it.
"Beautiful!" Martin shouted, as a crew member ran in off-camera to make sure that everything was covered within R-rating boundaries.
She ate everything in front of her, until she felt a tapping on her right shoulder. There, standing in a threatening pose, was the actor playing Charlie Orb, trademark stiletto pinching into her blubbery right arm. Watch it, asshole, she almost barked - then she remembered that they were on a movie set. What was it she was supposed to do? Look frightened? Try to move? That sounded right, so she gasped dramatically and went about the futile task of trying to lift her poundage off the floor, limbs flailing uselessly on both sides of her. Naturally, she was unsuccessful.
"What's the matter, sweetie?" "Charlie" chortled. "Too full to move?" He waved his knife dramatically and looked hammily towards the camera.
"Cut!" Marty yelled, rushing to Lana's side. "How you doing?" he asked, leaning under to face the weight-stranded actress.
It was an effort to speak, pinned inside of so much, but she panted out an answer. "I'm just. . . fine," she said, and, in truth, she felt better than she had in months.
"Terrific," he said, patting her back, sending waves through roll upon roll of avoirdupois. "What I want to do is leave you in this position, get some more food out, and shoot the confrontation one more time. You up to it?"
"Are you. . . kidding?" the fat woman puffed. "I'm famished!"
They re-shot the scene three more times, and Martin called it a wrap. While the rest of the cast and crew left for the day, he sat by his fattened creation and watched her finish off everything he placed before her mouth. Though Martin had dreamed of this moment, the actuality of the new Lana was close to overwhelming. A gelatinous mound of folds and flabbiness, she greedily ate what he gave her, stopping occasionally to smile lovingly at him. In changing both body and character, he'd made her his, but in a very real way the makeup man had also become firmly tied to Lana.
Finally, piling the last remnants of food in front of her face, Marty turned towards the grounded fat woman's sexual center. It took some work probing through the layers stretched around her vagina, but the director pulled up his shirt sleeve and went at it. He was almost in up to his shoulder, face resting against pillowy thigh folds, when her reached her clitoris. Lana came just as she was biting into a Hostess Cup Cake. "God!" she panted, between swallows. "I never knew. . . it could be like this!"
"It can be," Martin answered, pulling off his jeans and preparing to penetrate his love. "All the time, if you wish."
"I wish," the fat woman exclaimed, and with that moment of spoken acceptance and sexual congress, Martin Beckler's labors became set and permanent. He shot inside her folds and sighed happily, mounds of Lana Adrienne jiggling beneath him.
He backed off and asked if she was ready to have her makeup removed. It barely took a minute to clean the Max Factor off her eyes and lips. "All done," he said, kissing her multiply chinned face. "Think you can roll back on?" Martin asked, as he retrieved the dolly.
"I'll try. . . if you promise. . . to help," she said flirtatiously. With much effort, his hands sinking into her body like he was pushing against a waterbed mattress, she flowed back onto the cart. Martin covered her with a robe made out of the same fabric as her considerably smaller muumuu. It would suffice until they got back to his place.
Commandeering a studio vehicle used to haul set backdrops, he pulled Lana into the back of his van. From there, it was a short trip home.
"It's been a long day, darling," he said to the blubbery beauty resting on her back behind him. "I'm glad to be almost done with shooting: directing's not all it's cracked up to be."
Lana didn't answer right away. The mundane world of fame and moviemaking no longer seemed quite real to her. Staring up at the ceiling, her hungry body wavering with every bump in the road, she wondered what she'd ever seen in it. All she knew now was: she felt like a new person.
She was fortunate to be back with Martin, Lana thought; nobody else knew how to satisfy her considerable appetites.
"Had the cook working overtime in celebration of your last day of shooting," Marty was saying as they hit the driveway of his house. Great, Lana thought. Though she vaguely knew otherwise, she felt like she hadn't eaten all day.
He backed into the garage, up against the lift that was waiting for them. Thanks to a series of hydraulics and padded platforms worked up by a friend in set design, it was short work getting Lana into the house. Once inside, she knew she was home: the entire interior had been renovated to accommodate her; her platform even raised to an angle that allowed her to get a better view of Martin and the mega-course meal that was waiting for her. The whole house smelled like a busy restaurant. "Hope you like your dinner," he said.
"I know I will," Lana Adrienne said.
Revised version: Copyright 1997 - Oakhaus Designs
