One. She did so much more. She was one of disneys first female animators. She was an actress. She was an illustrator. Everything about her was larger than life. It has been the greatest honor of my life so far to tell her story. If youve read the hard core version you know there are pictures in there. She lived a very visual, cinematic life. I have a treat. I have photos that have never been seen before. I have hundreds and hundreds of them i was not allowed by my publish tower put in because we could not fit 700 photos in the book. I would like to sort of take you through it while telling you about milicent and why she is a trail blazing artist and one of the most important women weve ever had in the Film Industry and also why we dont know her any longer. Id like to take you through her life for a little bit with some awesome photos. So see if i can remember how to do that. Yes, that is still me. Sorry. Here is my girl. Milicent patrick began life growing up in a place called Hearst Castle. If cribs was a tv show in the 1920s, Hearst Castle would have been on it. Not kidding you. This was the summer home one of many of a man named William Randolph hearst americas first media mogul. Not only did he have this incredible amazing home one of many but people like charlie chaplain would go and hang out at the ranch as they say. Then milicent patrick grew up. Her father was the superintendent of construction here for ten years. This is where she started life. Like i said, everything in milicents life was bigger, more bombastic than anyone could dream. This is where she grew up, where she and her siblings hung out, they used to play here while her dad was getting into fights and trying to figure out how to make this thing. Milicent was always a great artist, an amazing pianist. When she got into Community College she decided she really wanted to make a go of art so she decided to apply for a scholarship to go to the shunard institute. This one right here, ive been told i am allowed to swear, make sure there are no children. She was a complete bad ass. Just a year after women were allowed to vote in this country she opened an art school in Southern California about to change the face of art schools. She was incredible and ran the school with an iron fist and artistic flair. I want to share unseen drawings of milicents. Thats her modeling. So the really cool thing about the institute is not just that it was created by a woman who was absolutely amazing but the thing she was really good at was working with students and teachers and lecturers and trying to get more cool people in for her school. One day an artist came to her, from an up and coming movie studio and he wanted to make animated films and really get his artists trained in a special way because he had a vision for how to change how animated films were made and how they looked. The man was called walt disney. Youve probably heard of him. The problem is this was the early days in the world of disney. He didnt have money to train these animators but knew they needed to be trained differently. This was not a time period where you could take an animation course at school. So he is going to all these art schools around Southern California and he asked them, hey, i cant pay you but i really want to bring my students here. They all said no except for our lady. She said you know what . Walt, bring your students on down. Well figure something out. So a pipeline formed between the shunard institute and disney. Disney would in his buick drive his students down to shunard and wait for them while they were in class and hang out around the school so this pipeline got formed because he got to see the best talent at the institute and that included milicent patrick. So he started hiring animators and artists from shunard and while his animators were hanging out and learning things there and sometimes the instructors would come up and help him work on his films. There was a really close connection. He met milicent. He was looking at her art. Milicents art was very, very special in the way that she was able to really convey a lot of movement in just a few lines. That is perfect for animation. He said, please, come work for me. He hired her originally to work in a place called the ink and paint department. If you are interested in womens history at disney i really suggest you buy a book by Mindy Johnson called ink and paint because a lot of people dont realize in the early days of disney there are a lot of different steps to animation. You dont just take a drawing and wave it in front of a camera. You have a lot things you have to do and the animators were all men at that time but the people taking the drawings and inking them on to the clear cells so they could be shot with a camera and then painted, they were 100 women. This was a massive building on the Disney Studio lot staffed 100 by women. Men werent even allowed to go in the building for a multitude of reasons. Interoffice dating was really discouraged at Disney Studios. That is where milicent started. She was so talented she started as a painter then became an inker. People noticed her skill at conveying all this movement. She became one of the very, very first female animators at disney along with a woman named marsha james and another woman named loretta scott. Here she is doing a drawing of somebody you might know. Pretty cool. You can see the style of these rabbits is from snow white. And so the first thing milicent worked on was a very, very ambitious new film that disney wanted to do. Even by todays standards if you pitched this film some executive would go this is a stupid idea. Were not going to do this. It is basically a giant music video. They wanted to do all these different short films set to classical pieces of music. And everyone thought it was a stupid idea. Hes like, no. He really wanted to. This was the early days of animation still. People really still didnt understand it. He wanted to elevate the art form. Thats how the movie called fantasia was born. Milicent was hired on to be in the special effects department because this was a totally different type of movie. People had never done anything like this before. And so they needed new ways of animating. What disney wanted was he wanted the look of pastel in a lot of these shots. How many people in this audience have seen fantasia . Lots of people. Amazing. If you havent seen it great film. Totally holds up. He wanted the look of pastel but you cant animate with pastel because it is chunky and chalky and will melt all over the place. So he needed to figure out how to paint in a way that looked like pastel and that is what is called, tada, the pastel effect. That is what milicent patrick did. If you learn to look for the sort of like soft pastel effect you can see it throughout fantasia. It was used a lot. Milicent and marsha james were hired to do that in the studio. There were a bunch of different sequences they worked on. Before i show you this next slide, this is sort of a big reveal in the book but i want to tell you. When i was a kid, i watched a lot of movies, read a lot of books, and a lot of people now i am a huge horror fan and i have been for a long time and people always want to know, you look like a nice lady. Why are you into all this weird stuff . Besides the fact i look very weird. I tell them, when i was a kid my grandfather showed me fantasia. And i loved it. Its a fun kids movie and like, you know, dancing brooms. Awesome. Fun. Cool. Until it got to the night on Bald Mountain sequence. All of a sudden, game changer. It was the very first time art made me feel something that powerful. Even though it was terror. It really affected me. And i knew something was different and it was the very, very first time art affected me in such a way that i thought about it afterwards. And i have really bad anxiety. Ive always had anxiety. It was the very first time i was afraid of something that wasnt real which if you have anxiety you know, what a vacation that is. I was hooked. I fell in love. When i found out milicent also animated my favorite animated monster it blew my mind and made me feel like i was on the right path to try to find this incredible woman. Also, fun halloween october fact. One of the models was none other than bella lugosi and if you rewatch it and see the hand and arm movements you can totally see. I have gotten to see that picture. I couldnt print it in the book even though i tried but him modeling is absolutely incredible. This is the first film milicent worked on as an animator. This is a picture of her at Disney Studios with a woman named rene scott the blond woman. She was the first credited female animator. As youll see in the book or you know if you already read it credits back then in movies were really difficult. And with animated films, even more difficult because there are hundreds of people who work on animated films and a lot of different people are working on things at the same time. When you talk about who the first female animator is you have to decide was it the first person who drew a drawing that was going to be animated, the first person who saw a drawing of hers animated on the big screen, a film that was completed . It is a weird, gray area. It is not like a big lever you pull on and say milicent was the first woman to ever do that but she was definitely one of the first. Until some secret behindthescenes footage of something comes out of something that is where im going to stand. Rhetta was the first woman who was credited on screen as being an animator for bambi. A lot of amazing female power houses back then in the disney world. There was a lot of turmoil happening at disney. Milicent only worked there a couple years before a union strike and milicents own struggle with migraines caused her to quit disney and she never worked in animation again. She did take advantage of those good looks and become a model. She was very good at it. She lived in los angeles at this time which is a great place if you want to get into this industry. A lot of pipelines already in place for taking Beautiful People and putting them in front of various cameras and she was very, very good at it. She had the looks. She was a very gregarious person. She had a very charming personality. She really loved being in this world. So that is sort of how she segued into modeling. The thing is while she was modeling she was still working on her art. She loved being an artist. She would sketch all the time, do portraits for friends. And one day while she was waiting after a trade show she had just modeled at literally waiting on the corner just sort of waiting for the bus, a hollywood producer came up to her and i mean, i cant make a lot of the stuff about milicents story, oh, did you make that up for the book . No. You cant make this stuff up. He asked her if she wanted to be in the pictures and she said yes. She started a lot of work on the universal columbia paramount back lot as a background actress. She always stood out whatever scene she was in because she was very, very beautiful. And that is how she got back into the Film Industry. So even while she was doing all of this she was still modeling which she really loved being in front of the camera. She actually got her first taste of this while she was still working at disney. How many people have heard or seen a film called the reluctant dragon . Awesome. The reluctant dragon is sort of a big commercial for Disney Studios. It is disguised as a movie. It just shows him the whole plot of the film is him trying to go to disney to pitch walt disney. What a nightmare now. Could you imagine . Hed have to dig a hole under Disney Studio lots to get in. He is on the studio lot trying to find disney and pitch them his idea for a film but as he goes through the studio you see various clips of short films and you see him moving around on the studio lot and in the background of one of those scenes where there is a group of animators sketching an elephant is milicent patrick. She just loved being on camera. As she got into the world of background acting and acting in general she just fell in love. She loved the life of it. She was a really big personality. While she was on set if you were an actor yourself or youve made a film you know there is a lot of down time. The phrase hurry up and wait was probably invented on a film set. While she was doing that, she was doing a lot of sketching. She was still doing a lot of art. It was her biggest passion. One day she was waiting in the makeup chair. One of her favorite things to do was sketch portraits of her costars. She absolutely loved doing it. She had it was a Universal Studios film. She had all these great sketches and she showed them to the man who ran the Makeup Studio there a man named bud westmore. I want to take a moment. If you know you know if you dont you dont. Bud westmore, im always surprised theres never been a film or tv series made about the westmore family. Bud westmore ran the universal Makeup Studio, the monster shop. When i say makeup i mean beauty makeup but also scary aliens. Anything that put on a face was makeup. He came from the westmore dynasty of makeup. Think the mob but with lip stick. This was a true dynasty. His father george was quite literally the man who invented the idea of a Makeup Department. Back when george came to hollywood from the uk they didnt have that. Early black and white films that came from a theater traditional of the actors and actresses put on their makeup themselves. Didnt always work because there was no quality control. He came on, literally barged on to studio sets and said, hey. What if i did this . That way it would look consistent from scene to scene. They said oh, that sounds like a good idea. So he said all right. Ill do it and got hired and started the idea of a Makeup Department. He had a bunch of sons. And all of them went into makeup. It became a dynasty. There was a certain point in the 1940s and 1950s when a westmore brother was heading almost every major studio Makeup Department. You did not want to tick off the westmores. They all ran the Makeup Studios. So catching the eye of a westmore was a big deal. Milicent showed him the sketches and he was completely blown away and wanted to hire her. The thing about bud and the westmores is they were beauty people. Milicent illustrated this though they didnt credit her. Well get back to it later. They had their own book called the westmore book of beauty. Have you ever taken a quiz in a magazine that said, like ooh what eyebrow should you have for your face shape . They invented that stuff. If youve ever despaired because you have a round face like me oh, god i cant have the eyebrows i want. Blame the westmores. They were beauty people. They had a massive salon on sunset boulevard that was called the house of westmore of course and everyone rich and famous went tlchlt they werent monster people or alien people or creature people. Bud really needed somebody on set who could do character stuff and could do more art stuff because he as the head of a big Makeup Studio he wasnt doing a lot of the designing. He was doing a lot of the admin work. He needed someone whose creative talents were very different from his own. He saw milicent and was like absolutely im going to hire you. She became the first woman to ever be hired by a Makeup Studio at a Makeup Department at a big studio. Very, very first woman to do this. These are her amazing just so good. She was incredible. The very, very first one. This was a very interesting time in hollywood, the mid 50s. We went from being afraid of europe to being afraid of space. We were starting to be afraid of the russians, afraid of nuclear war, afrafd the skies, afraid of space ships and aliens. We had this new thing called Science Fiction. All of the classic monster movies that universal had built as its back bone for the company back in the 30s were dwrracula frankenstein. But all of a sudden the kids wanted scifi. They had to figure out how to make a scifi movie. All of a sudden they had a new audience that they had never had to cater to before. Very terrifying. Still terrifying audience. Teenagers. They had this Massive Group of teenagers who had pocket money, who had time. They wanted to get these kids out of the house. The parents wanted them out of the house. The best place to be was the movies. They wanted to make scifi movies for kids to go see. They started cooking something up. Milicent went from designing beauty makeups which she had been doing for a while at universal and they were really happy with her work. They wanted her to design an alien. They took this very, very beautiful woman. At this time she was still doing background work. She was still doing acting. But she was doing and more and more work on the universal lot. It was more pay. I dont know if it was more fulfilling for her. But it was a lot less waiting around. They came up with this idea for a movie called it came from outer space and the treatment was written by an author i love very much and many of you might know and it was actually very thinly veiled antimccarthyism movie. If youve ever read any bradberry you know he is very verbose and not always detailed. He gave milicent essentially this block of text that even had the word nebulous in it and milicent had to design it. But she did design the alien for it. It did well for universal, their very first Science Fiction movie, and it became a classic. It is still cheesy. As many 1950 scifi movies are. I would describe it as sort of like an eyeball thats been left in a bag. Add legs. Back in the 1950s that was really scary. It was really intense. A lot of people were frightened by it. Milicent was very milicent was y creative and innovative with her design. She would come up with all these different ways to figure it out. She came up with this of designs which but west more saved and years later. Well get back to that leader i have a lot to say about him bud westmore but he says this is great we want you to continue doing this monster thing. We have this new movie we want to do its gonna be bigger better and higher budget. You dont have to read the book but its not called creature in the black moon it had a stupid her name, creatures from the black lagoon. But this monster that she had to design was good to be completely different theres a reason why creature from the black lagoon is wellknown and still iconic. Now hes the only universal monster that has not been renamed its not from universal even though i do in my heart. He wouldnt exist without creature in the. Black hes the only muster who had to go under water. Hes the only universal monster played by two different actors. Hes the only one out in daylight. So milicent really had to a per game with this one. This must not to be complete, he had to be very detailed. This love technical elements to the design. She nailed it. She really, really did. Its still one of the most famous monsters today. Even people who havent seen the movie see a picture of the creature and they know this is pick creature from the black lagoon. The reason why i think militants design has to the past of time is one she had the disney training so just a few lines just a few lines milicent could convey a lot of movement, she could convey a lot of emotion. Theres a lot of people today that are used to high tech music and cci and they see the design and they say is this a makeup or articulated design, no its just a piece of rubber. One piece of rubber, because of the way that milicent designed it the two actors were in a suit moving head it looks like makeup. The other thing i think both sides that the disney training was her incredible empathy. Milicent designed this monster wanting people to feel for him so when you look at him you are scared. Youre scared by him, this a lot of kids that read out of the theater including alice cooper when he was a kid. But if you want to understand him he looks just human like enough, and if youve watched a lot of cheesy scifi movies if you are aware its very difficult to make a monster like this that does not look silly. But nobody was laughing at creature, except for bud westmore. Bud westmore did not like this design. He didnt think it would hold up. He thought it was a ridiculous idea, to put a monster like that out in daylight. He thought it was going to be, no pun intended but a flop. But they still went through the movie. Everybody, the producers a loved. It everyone else that it was going to be great. So the film was shot, and people sort of taking some notice. These are doing test screenings and didnt have to edit anything. People absolutely loved the film and they love the creature. That was a big thing. Absolutely love the creature, heres bud westmore himself displaying milicents designs and milicents drawings. Its the weight well, no one knows what happened to them. Im hoping that theres a collector in the middle of nowhere somewhere who has them and he will fall into a volcano and it will be released into the world but nobody knows where those drawings are. No one knows if they still exist. Fortunately, i would give my toes, any mouth toast even to see them. But this is milicent and bud working in the monster shop and universal realistic had hit in this film. This is where milicent would work every day, and she walked in there every day in her heels and pearls and her beautiful dresses because milicent like to dress up every day. She was totally cool with only woman there. She was unapologetically feminine, she was unapologetically herself. She loved the work, she loved working with this team, she loved the designing. She even loved bud westmore. Apparently from the beginning they got along very very well. Here she is adding paint to the suit, they had to test it under water, so this is from a shoot called the infamous tea test when they were testing it underwater in a universal lot. So this film, they came up with ideas to promote it, just like today. Milkshakes at mcdonalds. Realty illicit ploys. No social media. Since the dawn of time Universal Studios and other big movie studios have come up with ways to come up with movies. And Universal Studios is a camera gonna get people to like these, movies one of the less lucky ideas with somebody on the universal Publicity Team thought hey we have this beautiful woman, and shes very you know charming, shes very gracious, shes very well spoken. And she designed this thing, why dont we send her out on tour . Shes the beauty who created the beast. So the perfect platform. Everyone was like this is fantastic in the wheels started turning on this tour. This is when the problems with bud westmore come in, because back then when you saw a movie, a couple of title carts you saw at the beginning of the film thats when you said the credits. Especially when you see a movie now the marvel theories as a ten minute and crawl at the end of the movie every Single Person who has even thought about the movie has been credited. To be fair, movies are really hard to make and thats great. But thats not how things were back then, and bud westmore is the head of the universal Makeup Department and he got sole credit for everything, everyone in the department did on every single film and back then there was no imdb, no twitter or nothing to check so people werent thinking about that. The public wasnt going hey the on this wasnt given any credit people didnt even know. Even though he wasnt doing the designing. He wasnt doing the sculpting, he wasnt doing the molding, he got credit for everything in that suited him just fine. Thats the kind of person he was. When they found out that all of sudden they were gonna take this woman, and let everyone know that he did not do the design for a design that he didnt even like, he got really mad. Really really mad. Youre sitting there and youre thinking wow this woman is amazing, shes this trail blazing woman why dont we have a star of her on the hawk halloffamer so he picked up a huge fuss in universal and they said we have some of the plans of police will rebrand the tour. Instead of the beauty he created the beast should be the beauty who lives with the beast and will pitcher as someone who takes care of all the universal monsters. So she got to go from creatures creator, creatures roommate, babysitter i guess. Somewhere in there, she got demoted to a motherly role, which is not a bad thing i guess if she was the creatures actual mom but she designed him. And i dont know whether or not she knew what the tour was supposed to be but when they pitched that to her she agreed and so what theyre going to do was after years of trying to from their most from the background they brought out frankenstein they brought all the mustard mass out of the ball and they said they want to show off their monster pedigree here. So milicent was slated to go all over the country, with all of these masks, what shes wearing on her head is one of the masks from dr. Jekyll and mr. Hyde. She did other monster movies as well while this was happening. Shes going to display this and be like oh this time to be the media takes care of. Them i guess brushing out the wolf man. Spritzing creature with missed, i dont know what she needs to do their. So you slated, she was going to go in this massive promotional tour all over the country, and the movie came out while this was happening. And before she left she had a meeting with bud, and the people at universal and shipped to swear, ship to promise she would like everybody and tell them that she did not designed this. She had a script that she had to read, from she had a chaperone to help her make sure she stuck to the script. Everything that she, did every interview she did that bud westmore takes credit, other people that worked on it, she was not allowed to take credit for her own. Work she agreed because this was the 19 fifties and thats what was expected, and they were quick to the her very well. She did negotiate for a higher salary which good on you. So she went, off she went on the tour and it all sorts of radio interviews, tv, spots ive been trying to find them i wasnt able to. People were dazzled, the movie was out in theaters people were loving it, people were love in with a creature and started getting fan mail because she was so friendly, smart, interesting and passionate in the way that she talked about her, work in the way she talked about creature. You can tell because she absolutely loved him. The problem was people start to figure out really quick that maybe it wasnt that bud westmore design this, maybe it was this woman who was a designer was the designer i dont know why bud thought he could sweep this under the rug people start to figure this out, people started to do pieces not on the movie but on her. At back then there was a huge economy between this beautiful woman and this pot monster. People really isnt it crazy that this beautiful woman designed this monster. People were like oh isnt it crazy she started to eclipse some of the creature buzz, back home in universal bud is mad, so mad that he followed her progress across the country and he would find out which newspapers and magazines and reduced oceans she spoke to and demand to ask what she said, what theyre going to print. He was furious. This was all happening without her consent. She was still sticking to the script. She was still being chaperone. But people were so interested in her and quickly figuring out that she designed this and they were predict stuff without her say. Completely not her fault but in his mind as soon as militant had gone on on her own even though she was chaperones she was off taking all the credit even though it was her credit to take. So while she was off having the absolute peak of her career bud westmore fired milicent patrick, and she never worked behind the scenes on a film ever again. She came back from her tour. She came back to los angeles and the film that she was working on. Another classic scifi film called the silent earth she was pulled from, she was pulled from all of her projects and she never worked on universal movie in that way ever again. Thats why you dont know anything about milicent patrick, because there is no internet, there was no imdb. And after that, after all of this bud westmore quickly realizing that he has this opportunity to take credit for this monster steps and hes like this creature my best friend that i designed all by myself. Yes, wonderful. And that was it, there was no way to check. Even though she still received fan mail for years because people remembered her and were said by her, and there were girls and women all over the country who were so inspired by her, she disappeared. For six decades nobody knew anything. They dont even know she was still alive, and because of that nobody could follow in her footsteps. That includes me. When i first saw milicent patrick when i was 17 years old its a really interesting thing happened in the nineties is imdb and the internet started up so all of a sudden all of these photos that have never been seen before and this cool but on the scenes fact that no one had ever been able to share the internet you could yell at people on Message Boards and do all these things that we love to do now, so stuffed started to come out and hardcore film fans started to share this and creature became a beloved film, people want to do more about how she was created to all of a sudden of these pictures started to show up and the pitcher that i had showed you with milicent creating the creature not a post publicity shot just a picture of her onset working on her work, that started floating around. People knew her name but didnt know anything more about her. Im sort of the black sheep of my family and not just because im got. I didnt have any siblings who are into her. I dont have anyone to show me the way after i saw i had to teach myself, so when i was a teenager it was a great im a revamp law so i did all my research. And i shut out to the raven clause. I minute or even claw heavy space right now because were in a library. I wanted to do research, i was like ok ive got to start with all the universal classics so i watched all of them, i fell in love with the wolf man, watched with my husband, then i got to the creature which was the last one and i fell in love with him, the same way a lot of people did, but i fell in love with him i mean i love julie adams and i love that bathing suit but i fell in love with the movie because i felt like creature. I felt like that walking through the house when i was a teenager like the way that he swims underneath julie adams in the and thats how i feel with hot people on updating a hot person and i empathize with him so strongly and i want to know everything about him so i went online and i want to get more even claw and i wanted to know who made him who designed him and it was scrolling through google image search and found this photo of a Woman Working on the monster suit and up until that point all of my heroes were men. Jack peters, rick peters, dick smith, all of these masters of monster movies theyre all dudes but thats fine. But there were no woman. I never even thought that i could be in that world. I was super down to be a monster fan, read the books read a scary things but i never thought that i could do this because i dont see the way that entire world all the directors that i knew and it was all populate with people who didnt look like me, until i saw milicent. And here was this woman not getting coffee, not being anyones assistant, she was just doing her job. And under the picture theres a caption that said milicent patrick animator and designer, and that was it. There was no wikipedia page, there was nothing about her online just scattered photos, and some very unprofessional blogs. But thats all it took, and was just like a Little Salmon poked a hole in this wall and all of sudden i can see through the other side. She can begin for me and several years later she became a horror she was the only real model i hadnt a clung to her even though i knew nothing about her, some covered in tattoos as you can see. I decided to get the tattoo of milicent patrick termite me that i belong to the horror industry no matter how long people tried to make me feel that i dont belong and i knew i did belong because milicent did so i got this tattoo of her and a few weeks later i was at a birdie and a literary agent friend of mine was like who is this woman have tattooed on you and she said its milicent patrick the creature from the black lagoon and i said nobody knows anything about her and he was like oh what a great book and he was like yes a great book. And i said but im not a writer and he said i will send you stuff for a nonfiction proposal and you can figure it out. And so i thought well why not . I want to know so badly about what happened to her. Nobody knew anything, even all the blocks right about her were written by men. Nobody knew anything so i just started, and now if you are holding the book and you have in your hand i ended up finding everything. I found most of the details of her life, her death. Her personal, life she remained my hero throughout all of it. Youre probably wondering, this is great, this wonderful woman she blazed the trail. But this is 60 years ago, but is this matter . I have friends of mine who were not muster people loves working on this imploring why would you do all this, time move to los angeles, why would you do this for this moment you dont know anything about back in the 19 fifties what is a matter . It matters because what happens to milicent patrick still happens and it happens as we speak right now. It has happened to me. It has happened every single woman i know in the Film Industry it has happened to every single woman i know in every industry whether youre a plumber or chef or a taylor. Whatever you do the system and the problems that caused milicent patrick to lose her career are in place right now 60 years later. Its 60 years and we still havent had another woman design a another monster for a major motion picture. Think about that. 60 years have gone by and we still dont have a monster designed by a woman we just have a ton of coal monster movies that come up. A new prayer, movie new godzilla movie, still none of them ever designed by women because milicent was hidden for so long and girls like me didnt have a role model. We just went through another oscar season for 2018 and they couldnt cough up a single woman to nominate for best director, little on all the other things. And milicent was white. She had all the advantages that any white lady could ever have and she still got crushed. So if you are sad for milicent be sater for all the other women out there who are black who are gay, who are transact fat couldnt get their foot in the door thats why milicents story matters so much thats why we have to remember the stories and remember these people and show women that its a great that were living in this metoo era. I started writing this book before me to happen and then it happened and my editor was like how fast can you right . I was like i dont know. And then ship of water happened and i was really like oh bleep. Thats great thats wonderful im so happy about two of those. Surrey i get really excited inaudible laughs i love that film. The end of the war of nation happened and its really changed the landscape and im happy that it. Is were not really far from where we need to be bad things are changing the conversation. Things are changing but what i want women and girls at everyone to know is that yes right now we are pushing that more female directors and directors and comic book writers and painters and writers, and any type of field that you can imagine but we really want to know is that its not a new thing for girls to be interested in comics and art and film with always been interested in it. We may not have always felt safe enough to say that we work and we may not have always been safe enough to work in the spaces and talking about it but weve always always been here and milicent patrick is living proof of that. She shows that we have alexei here. You know, girls are the most important part of horror because horror happens to girls. In real life girls are the ones fighting horror so girls should be the ones designing those monsters making those Things Writing those comments coming books theyre the ones that have to grapple with them every single day and if we dont let them make these movies and designed these monsters and be on screen and behind the camera we can show people how to fight the monsters, we cant show them how to win. That is why milicent patrick its so important and its by my honor to tell you all about her today. Now we will open it up to questions. applause oh i get to pick the questions. I didnt have some was coming to the microphone. inaudible okay. I was just wondering if youd heard anything from the westmores. If ive heard anything from the westmores . No response. Until i finished the book, and im a huge cocktail nerd. Big bourbon drinker, and i was going to meet my exboyfriend, we were driving down to a los angeles liquor chain and i was driving and i was buying my usual buffalo trees bourbon, i probably should have dedicated my book to my briefing gets excited because he loves those conversations there hilarious and i go oh yeah im a big creature fan and hes like my great uncle design that monster. And it was like one of those freeze frame moments were i was like there are several ways that i could respond to this but the book wasnt out yet. We were still like i had a chance to put stuff into the book so i thought ok, suck down the volcano of hatred. Try to get information out of the sky so i tweak out im like oh really . Who is your uncle . Is your great uncle . Is he by the name of bud westmore. He was like oh youre a creature fan you know bud westmore. My boyfriend is like this is gonna be good. I was like yes he i know who he is and he designed to creature and he was like yes hes the one. And i was like i you know im writing a book about the creature from the black lagoon and i would love to talk to you because i havent been able to talk to any of the westmores and hes like yes sure absolutely. I gave him my email address and he must have let me up because he never emailed me. Now every time i see him at hes always like oh something is down here. But i think it is poetic justice that the guy who the air of the bud westmore serves me bourbon. That one is for you milicent, but to this day i still havent heard from them. But i will say michael would westmore i have heard is a very nice person he works in makeup but he still hasnt tried to get in touch with me. I thought of shape of water as you were talking and it sounds like the error of the creature from the black lagoon. Its basically creature from the black lagoon fan fiction because when youre watching horror he always wondered why creature did end up with the lilly adams which fair question. So he always wanted to write a world where that happened and thats sort of worship of water came from and if youre interested in that i have a great quote in fact the only man that i quoted in my book mill mike hill could that and i have great quote from him about milicents design work and how it affected him. But what is your opinion of hereditary inaudible fantastic movie. The laughs any other questions yes. At one point in the book you suggest as a flawed human being. Looking back is there anything that you regret . No i didnt leave anything out of this book. When i started writing this book i wrote shes my hero. Ive never met her, but she means a lot to me, so when i started uncovering things about milicent that were not flattering and were not nice and made her look like a bad person i really struggled with putting those in the book. Because i really wanted to protect her. I was working so hard to have the world know about her. I wanted everyone to love her and except her, and i feel like for the past three years of my life ive been carrying the banner of milicent patrick and get people to accept that she credit the picture because there are still people who believed that she didnt i love talking to those people and i hope they fall in a manhole. Milicent credit the creature no question people ask me that in interviews, signings, so i was very protective of her and didnt want to show any bad sides to her because i didnt want people to like her not like her and i did want to give them ammunition and i realized that i was judging her just like. Women are worth writing about even if they mess, up even if they make bad choices, none of those bad choices ever took away from what she did in the world of art and film another none of them touched them. She still important human being and so then it became important for me to talk about her as a flood person. It made me ok to talk about her it made me stop judging her and getting myself and i realized that among other woman that she knew or some of that she looked up to or you know look down to. So ultimately identical thing out i left everything in their even the bad parts of her life. That kind of brings up an idea though. Why is this a question . About what do you think were about critters being separated from their work . inaudible whats your idea . The other thing is that milicent is dead, sorry spoiler alert. Actually there was a period of time where i wasnt sure if she was dead or not, i think would be a very different world. One i dont think milicent did anything in her life. Milicent never assaulted anyone, spoiler alert, milicent never did anything bad in that way but if she did we would be having a different conversation right now, but i do think that we need to be responsible as consumers. We are living in this metoo era and people are like what did we do, what do we do with these people . You dont have to give the money. Its very very complicated, theres a lot of gray areas but ultimately, know these people we cant separate the art from the artist. We really truly cant, and if there is somebody that you dont believe in, stop giving the money. If you find out that a comic book artist assaulted a woman dont buy his comic book because youre not giving him any money in your showing the publisher that they should hire people like that. I really truly believe that we need to, start we cant say oh we can do this on thing that we can all do hold them in the positive and negative space putting money where you want this to happen. If youre like living in a space where there is a director or someone living on such that you dont feel comfortable with dont give them your money. Dont talk about them, dont give them space on your social media. On the flip side if youre like oh i wish there were more directors go online find out what movies in your area are directed by women and give them your money instead. We have so many power so much power as consumers that people dont realize and we cant live in this world where, were like oh its art. What you make reflects who you are, and so i really really think that we should be like oh guys like woody allen, its find their classic artists. How many women out there werent allowed to be artist because of men like that . So that is my take. Thats my very lukewarm take clearly. Lots of feelings. Two quick questions. Favorite horror movie. Oh jeez, thats a harder question because i have to pantheon. s werewolf and everything else. I will match them together for your benefit. If i had to pick five favorite movies. Horror movies. Texas chainsaw massacre, exercised, the thing, american werewolf in london, and its a tossup between the original wolf man, and the shining. I will make them fight it out. Your version of the thing . Which version of the thing . inaudible oh commanders only one. I wore movie that can scare me . That can secure you . Its an impossible question because horror is so objective its like putting your underpants for you. Someone can try but horror is the most subjective thing we have and thats truly whats the most important genre and i think its very important funny that its looked down upon as a juvenile art form, the most popular author in this country in surprise folks hes a horror author. If you ever want to see a reflection of a societys fears watch the horror movies its last bastion where we can explore really extreme ideas and be really really political and people are like oh its just a horror movie. So whats scary to you, might not be like im very afraid of snakes. Terrified of snakes. For me a horror movie is like the discovery channel. Whereas i can watch some other horror movies and im totally fine and its a trick question and calling you had on it. inaudible yes. I have no idea what time it is. inaudible mary shelley, frankenstein. What are your thoughts on their first adaptation . I dont know what that is. Is that like brats dolls . Is it barbie mixed with universal monsters . I was gonna be like oh we dont have that when i was a kid. Barbies are already like monsters, why do we need to make them scarier . Have you seen that sculpture of what barbie would look like in real life, shes like six foot seven, terrifying limbs. We dont need to make barbie scarier. I dont feel comfortable talking about that because ive never seen them i will see right now were living in a embarrassment of riches for young girls for horror stuff. Theres so many great novels and comics and movies that are monster high, i dont know. I will look them up later. One of the most enduring parts of the book i always already what say thank, you thank you for calling my book enduring. Thank you for phone my entire book. I think its interesting, im curious if you could talk at all about what it feels like to have invested so much in a person that youve never met, and then to meet the people who are blood relatives . Are you varied . Take what you met when you met her family and amplify by 1 million. Thats what i felt, because not only was i trying to get them to like me so they would tell me about milicent looking like i do. A strange lady walking into their home. It was so much pressure. I was very nervous i wanted them to like me i dont even show them the tattoo i had of her. Im assuming they must have seen it at some point. Were still in contact but weve never talked about it just like i never talk about my tattoos with my own family. Im estranged. I didnt want them to think that i was weird or obsessive. It was very nerveracking, there is a lot of pressure, theres a lot of pressure. Even now, i do have another unknown, unsung women who worked on a very, very, maybe bigger than creature monster movie and im very hesitant to do it because im not ready to do another biography. Basically, when you do a project like this youre an external hard drive front of the person. Im the world expert on milicent patrick right now, and it was so much pressure to convince them of the sincerity of the project, and to hope that they would open their hearts, and their home. In the archives to me. I dont know if they had anything. It was like a really fraught experience for me. I was very nervous. I covered up my tattoos, i tried to make myself look as normal as i could when you look like i do. I was lucky, theyre incredibly kind. There were so sweet, fun fact, i changed all of their names in the book to characters in the wolf man. No one has picked that up which i find funny but they are all renamed. But yeah, it was tough. I get really emotional about it because i miss her. Ever since i stopped writing the book shes not in my head every day anymore. That was very hard, it was weird because shes like my buddy. I have framed i have this photo and this one above my desk which i had to move because im working on a new project. Milicent were going to do it today, saying goodbye to her was really tough. When i started working on when you project i was like sorry i have to move on. I have to feed myself. So everything in this book was very emotional. Youre cheating. You had lunch with me today. Were gonna close with this last question, do you think theres any more new information about milicent that will learn about . Funny question, when i facetimed into the Library Book Club thing, one of milicents husbands daughters contacted me on facebook stuff to email him because ive been touring and stuff like that. Weirdly enough i thought this movie was going to come out but was going to come out and people would come out of the woodworks, milicents would come knocking on my door and not that much actually, and one of milicents the best friends agents was there and he was very excited he knew milicent i gave him my email address and he didnt email me. I dont know why people dont like emailing, me talk to me people. Ive had people who thought they had new information about her that wasnt near formation about her. Every sunning i do some guy tries to tell me facts from the black lagoon as if i dont know. Pretty weird. So far nothing but i am hopeful when i talk to this woman who really wants to talk to me that i will be able to get some new information but so far nothing. If you read the book you know theres a couple of places where i couldnt fill in everything i wanted to but im never gonna stop looking for information about her, just because im done writing this book doesnt mean shes not stomach hero and i still want to find out everything about her and im still hoping again that someones going to come out with this Massive Treasure trove original creature drawings, or some creature out there, some guy who wants to share with the world, objected by aliens and we can all benefit from his basement collection but so far that has not yet happened. I am crossing my fingers for it every day and i want to thank you all for coming out and listening to me speak and listening to me talk about milicent and what i take out of this empty affects your life in some way and if you are hoping to do something in your life and you dont think that you belong there you know that you are wrong. Thank you. Youre watching American History tv, covering history cspan style. Eyewitness accounts, archival films, lectures and College Classrooms and visits to museums and historical places. All weekend, every weekend on cspan 3. August mark the 75th anniversary of the atomic bombings of hiroshima and nagasaki. Monday at 8 pm eastern time, we look back with author ian toll. Heres a preview. That point, japanese strength was kind of down to its last draw. But it is true as the caller says that the japanese were essentially pouring all of the remaining strength and military strength into their civilian population who are preparing to meet the invasion to fight us, as she says tooth and nail. Women and children even being organized into militias, being trained how to fight with bamboo spears, being told to use kitchen knives if necessary. So i think avoiding an invasion of japan was very critical. I think it was so critical that if it was true that really if you could say the choice was bomb two cities with an atomic bomb or launch a bloody invasion, is one of the other one door a or derby, i think that was true, using the bombs exactly the way we did, that is hitting cities without prior source of warning, i think you can defend. The traditional way in which americans have understood the up telecoms sets up this kind of forced gloria either have to choose either, hit the cities without warning or launch an invasion. I personally dont think that is right. I think that there were many other options other than just those two. And i think that you can make a pretty good case, although its counterfactual that invasion would not have been necessary with or without the atomic bombs. Keep in mind that the invasion of q shut, the first stage planned invasion, the target date for that was november 1st. Thats almost three months after the bombing of hiroshima. So the idea that the bombs were a last resort to an invasion that was just about to happen, thats not quite right. But as i say, veterans of that war had their own very, very strongly be held beliefs about what had happened at the end of the war. And as a historian as someone who is talk to literally hundreds of world war ii veterans, ive never wanted to argue with world war ii veterans. Over the cypress that my views and i think its important to recognize and to honor the feelings, the very strong feelings of veterans. Half learn more about the atomic bombings and the end of monday eastern five peace and specific here in a hit American History tv. American history tv is on social media. Follow us at cspan history. , externalized and author frederik murder and historian stage matthew discuss what is known as the red summer of 1919, a period of racial and rest and violence against African Americans including world war i veterans in multiple cities and states. The national war War One Museum provided the video. At 8 pm eastern, 5 pm pacific, august mark the 75th anniversary of the atomic borrowings of not hiroshima and nagasaki. We look back at this strategic situation in the wars Pacific Theater leading up to the bottoms and the decision to use them and the end of world war ii. At 10 05 eastern, seven five pacific, army veteran eugene disappear tina talks about his assignment to the Manhattan Project being station at los alamos and drop working on the bomb dropped over nagasaki. And this evening, we are pleased to have to distinguish speakers scholars with us and dialog about the red summer of 1919. We will have a discussion between our guests followed by a brief q and a should there be time for us to do that. And so pleased tonight to introduce two of our friends and colleagues the first being doctor sage matt foul. Doctor mouth i wasn