as the source of the costume, bob heironimus as the guy in the bigfoot suit, and roger patterson as producer, director, and whatever else of this film. just as patterson stood by his story, so too does morris. rick baker, who is an academy award winner eight times, said to me one time, he said, phil, that was the worst gorilla suit i ve ever seen in my life. and i said, yes, it s true. but think about this, that there were over 10 million, 20 million, 30 million people who saw that film of bigfoot walking through the forest, and they thought it was a real suit. that s absolutely amazing. at the end of the day when you ve watched this figure stride and you ve looked at it, i m inclined to agree with the late john napier from the smithsonian who remarked famously, i can t see the
according to morris, he had specific requirements for the suit. did it look like a gorilla? what about the eyes, where you see the eyes? i said, you get the makeup. put it around the person s eyes wearing the suit, it will blend into the mask itself. they also wanted to know how to make it large and massive. and he wanted some extra material. he s going to have to change the head. he s going to have to put these and this is brilliant on roger s part pendulous female breasts which everybody thought, wow, that s the kind of detail nobody could make that up. it s so credible and believable. well, the check arrived, and i sent the suit out to him. he called me back and said, listen, you can see the zipper in the back of the suit. i said, well, that s easy to overcome. just get a hairbrush, brush it back and forth across the top of the zipper and it will disappear. that was the last i heard from him.
about this, in retrospect, seeing how entrenched this film has become, he feels he probably should have come forward. we set out to verify morris story and found bob heironimus who says he is the man in the bigfoot costume. they have since become friends. he said patterson told him to walk like a gorilla. bob was a rodeo cowboy. he had no idea what a gorilla should walk like. so he walked like a normal person walking down the street, kind of waved his arms back and forth and thought that was real show business. bob has the size, the gait to be bigfoot, to give it life. and i think this is important. there are people still living who remember seeing a bigfoot suit in the trunk of bob s mother s car. when it comes down to it, it s hard to improve upon phil morris
until the end that the film is genuine. in 2002, more than three decades after he first saw the film, morris goes public with his story. i started announcing, that s our gorilla suit. another 10 or 20 magicians across the country have the very same suit. that s our suit. it s not a real bigfoot. but morris revelations come too late for many of the film s believers. people are so taken by the things they fall for. they re hugely invested now. now they re fools if they were wrong. and as soon as you come in and rain on their parade, you find utter hostility. the first reaction was, no, you re lying. that is a real bigfoot. i m trying to think, how is it possible that this thing could fool people? the suit was all right. it wasn t the very best gorilla suit ever made. but it was okay. but in broad daylight, it did not look like a real animal. i talked with phil morris
until he sees his suit on tv. i told my wife, come here, you ll want to see this. she walks in and said, oh, look, there s our gorilla suit. morris keeps quiet about his involvement, believing that patterson would admit to making the film. i didn t say anything to anybody because i thought our market was for magicians. it would be unethical to sell the costume and then tell the audience it s not a real gorilla, but it s a fella in a gorilla suit. but patterson earns thousands of dollars selling the rights to the film. and, yes, we too pay for the rights to use it in this episode. he went on television shows, radio shows all the way across the country. and i realized at a point that he was not going to tell anybody that it was a hoax. and i just set back and was watching what he was going to do. and i think that his intentions were that he would get someone to produce a motion picture of bigfoot and he would literally make a fortune out of it. five years after his footage